SPOILER ALERT! This article contains a spoiler for 'Game of Thrones' Season 7
Before she was shuffled off the bloodstained, backstabbing, unforgiving board that is Westeros in Game of Thrones, Lady Olenna Tyrell had some advice for Daenerys Targaryen.
"I've known a great many clever men. I've outlived them all. You know why? I ignored them. The lords of Westeros are sheep. Are you a sheep? No. You're a dragon. Be a dragon."
Now while the rise of the female characters as the arbiters of the destiny of the seven kingdoms may have struck commentators of the world's most-watched show as evidence of an attempt to bring feminism to the fore and balance out some of the show's more violent, expendable-woman tendencies, Olenna's advice is probably another example of what Atlantic writer Megan Garber has belittled as "tagline-friendly feminism".
That said, Lady Olenna may well have had the television universe in mind when imparting her final piece of lady-power sloganeering.
SEX AND THE CITY OF CHOICES
Our series universe is flooded with shows that take women out of the shadows of "complicated men" and put them front and centre in an array of expressions of female identity in the modern world.
No longer are Lena Dunham's Girls restricted to deciding their approach to the world based on which character from Sex and the City they're most similar to. There are now hundreds of women on television who they could choose from and whose idiosyncrasies, fears, loves, hopes and challenges offer new ways of thinking about everything from sexuality to gender identity and politics, race and motherhood.Elizabeth Moss, who shone as the ambitiously independent Peggy in Mad Men, has risen to the status of something close to a feminist icon with her roles in The Handmaid's Tale and Jane Campion's Top of the Lake.
MEN ARE FROM PLANET SHEEP
And it's not just white women who are changing the landscape - Ava DuVernay and Oprah Winfrey's Queen Sugar addresses a range of issues from queer identity to black history and the struggles of women against patriarchal arrogance in a tightly wound and engrossing narrative.
Web series star Issa Rae, with a little help from Lemonade director Melina Matsoukas, has turned her rough and raw original series into Insecure, a glossy, offbeat and smart reflection of black 30-something life in Black Lives Matter-era America.
Even the traditionally geeky, predominantly male world of the superhero is seeing the rise of female characters such as Supergirl and The Incredible Jessica Jones.
If you're an older woman trying to deal with life after the kids have left, and your husband decides he's gay, then there's always Grace and Frankie to help you along.
So to return to Lady Olenna - there are plenty of reasons to ignore the idiocies of sheepish men in the television universe, a world where increasingly there be many dragons of all sorts, lighting fires under those Lords of Westeros still complacent enough to believe that it's a man's world...