Women never looked so good

14 April 2014 - 02:00 By Charlotte Runcie, The Daily Telegraph
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DRAGON GIRL: Emilia Clarke as Daenerys Targaryen. Her character begins as a frail, abused woman, but soon metamorphoses into one of the show's most fiery characters
DRAGON GIRL: Emilia Clarke as Daenerys Targaryen. Her character begins as a frail, abused woman, but soon metamorphoses into one of the show's most fiery characters
Image: WWW.NERDIST.COM

There was a scene in Game of Thrones' first season that will become one of this generation's defining TV moments.

The exiled queen Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke), exhausted from wandering the desert, walked from the night into the centre of a huge, blazing pyre. By dawn everything had burnt to dust, but among the ashes we could just make out the outline of her body. She stood up, naked and charred, but alive and unharmed. On her shoulders were three baby dragons. Her followers fell to their knees.

The HBO series, based on George RR Martin's books, is low on subtlety and high on pretty much everything else, in particular explicit sex (rape and incest absolutely not off-limits) and nightmarish violence ( mutilation and casual murder included). But this show also boasts the most magnificent female characters ever committed to the small screen. It's a feminist tract that on first viewing appears brutally misogynist.

The fantasy genre is often a very male fantasy.

Looking back, I can count the number of memorable women in Lord of the Rings on one hand and have fingers left over. Galadriel and Eowyn have their moments, and Shelob is female, but then she is also a horrifying giant spider. I was keen on Arwen the elf, whose character was souped up in the films and played by Liv Tyler, but in the end she still didn't do much apart from inspire heroic boys and dole out magical necklaces.

Compare that to Game of Thrones, where the distinctive and important female characters are a match in numbers and increasingly in power to the men.

Admittedly, to start with the TV series didn't look promising: the first season pioneered the art of "sexposition", in which the men talk strategy and plot while half a dozen young women drape breasts and legs across their faces. It's very distracting.

Further, brothel life is consistently glorified. Prostitution may be the oldest profession, but in Westeros, it shares a birthday with the Brazilian wax.

In medieval fantasy, women are typically tarts or royalty. They are rarely heroes. In Game of Thrones, it's possible for them to be all three at the same time.

Take Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey), the queen-regent of Westeros. She is a cast-iron villain, committing mariticide and incest with equal enthusiasm. She also has real humanity, and will go to enormous lengths to fight for what she thinks her children deserve.

Despite hating the young Sansa Stark, she offers well-meant advice to her about how women can survive in their brutal patriarchal world. One of the series' best lines - "When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die" - is given to her.

Then there's Daenerys the mother of dragons, who was born in a storm and can never be harmed by fire. She begins the first season at the bottom of the sexual food chain, sold by her brother into marriage and raped on her wedding night. She survives the devastation of her adopted community, the death of her husband and her unborn child. Season three has her on the up and up, sweeping in glory towards Westeros with thousands of trained killers under her command. And she owns three terrifying dragons. Surely in season four the most coveted seat of all, the Iron Throne, has her name on it?

Daenerys and Cersei are both queens but Brienne of Tarth (Gwendoline Christie) is a tall and muscular warrior knight. She saves the life of the golden-haired Jaime Lannister and tells him: "All my life men like you've sneered at me, and all my life I've been knocking men like you into the dust."

There's also the young Arya Stark (Maisie Williams), a teenage tomboy with prodigious swordsmanship and a knack for survival despite the steady destruction of her male relatives.

In the capital city, King's Landing, the double act of Margaery Tyrell and her swaggering grandmother Lady Olenna (Natalie Dormer and Diana Rigg) immediately get the measure of the current incumbent of the Iron Throne King Joffrey, working out how to exploit his recklessness to bring power to the Tyrell family. They guided the storylines of season three with a refreshing mix of generosity, wit and ruthlessness.

In the world of fantasy fiction, Game of Thrones stands apart. On TV it has a little more competition.

We are in the midst of a small revolution in female TV characters, with some of the most popular and critically acclaimed series in recent years featuring intricately detailed women painted with plenty of light and shade.

The Killing's Sarah Lund, Girls' Hannah Horvath, Borgen's Birgitte Nyborg and Line of Duty's Lindsay Denton are leading ladies with power and panache. But elsewhere there are disappointments: for all of Breaking Bad's brilliance, the main female character, Skylar, was annoying for four of the five seasons, and True Detective's women are lazily written.

Nowhere else on TV is there a whole world full of women this good. Westeros may be a society that treats women badly, but it's bursting with female characters who come out fighting and look like winners. Why has it taken a fantasy series to create women who feel so real?

  • Season 4 starts on DStv on Friday
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