Syddansk Universitet. Women of Ice and Fire Gender, Game of Thrones, and Multiple Media Engagements Schubart, Rikke; Gjelsvik, Anne

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1 Syddansk Universitet Women of Ice and Fire Gender, Game of Thrones, and Multiple Media Engagements Schubart, Rikke; Gjelsvik, Anne Publication date: 2016 Document version Publisher's PDF, also known as Version of record Document license Unspecified Citation for pulished version (APA): Schubart, R., & Gjelsvik, A. (Eds.) (2016). Women of Ice and Fire: Gender, Game of Thrones, and Multiple Media Engagements. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research. You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal? Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 18. Mar. 2018

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3 WOMEN OF ICE AND FIRE

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5 WOMEN OF ICE AND FIRE Gender, Game of Thrones, and Multiple Media Engagements Edited by Anne Gjelsvik and Rikke Schubart Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

6 Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway 50 Bedford Square New York London NY WC1B 3DP USA UK BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2016 Anne Gjelsvik, Rikke Schubart and Contributors, 2016 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Gjelsvik, Anne, editor. Schubart, Rikke, editor. Title: Women of ice and fire : gender, Game of thrones and multiple media engagements / edited by Anne Gjelsvik, Rikke Schubart. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN ISBN (hardback) ISBN (paperback) Subjects: LCSH: Game of thrones (Television program) Women heroes in mass media. Women in mass media. BISAC: PERFORMING ARTS / Television / History & Criticism. SOCIAL SCIENCE / Gender Studies. Classification: LCC PN G35 W DDC /72--dc23 LC record available at ISBN: HB: PB: epub: epdf: Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN

7 CONTENTS INTRODUCTION Rikke Schubart and Anne Gjelsvik 1 Chapter 1 ADAPTING SEX: CULTURAL CONCEPTIONS OF SEXUALITY IN WORDS AND IMAGES Mariah Larsson 17 Chapter 2 ADAPTING DESIRE: WIVES, PROSTITUTES, AND SMALLFOLK Shannon Wells-Lassagne 39 Chapter 3 UNSPEAKABLE ACTS OF (SEXUAL) TERROR AS/IN QUALITY TELEVISION Anne Gjelsvik 57 Chapter 4 SWORN SWORDS AND NOBLE LADIES: FEMALE CHARACTERS IN GAME OF THRONES VIDEO GAMES Felix Schröter 79 Chapter 5 WOMAN WITH DRAGONS: DAENERYS, PRIDE, AND POSTFEMINIST POSSIBILITIES Rikke Schubart 105 Chapter 6 POWER PLAY AND FAMILY TIES: HYBRID FANTASY, NETWORK NARRATIVE, AND FEMALE CHARACTERS Helle Kannik Haastrup 131 Chapter 7 MAIDEN, MOTHER, AND CRONE : MOTHERHOOD IN THE WORLD OF ICE AND FIRE Marta Eidsvåg 151

8 vi Contents Chapter 8 WOMEN WARRIORS FROM CHIVALRY TO VENGEANCE Yvonne Tasker and Lindsay Steenberg 171 Chapter 9 FEMALE MACHIAVELLIANS IN WESTEROS Elizabeth Beaton 193 Chapter 10 THE EXPERT FEMALE FAN RECAP ON YOUTUBE Susana Tosca and Lisbeth Klastrup 219 Chapter 11 I M NOT GOING TO FIGHT THEM, I M GOING TO FUCK THEM : SEXIST LIBERALISM AND GENDER (A)POLITICS IN GAME OF THRONES Stéphanie Genz 243 About the Contributors 267 Index 271

9 I NTRODUCTION Rikke Schubart and Anne Gjelsvik George Stroumboulopoulos: There s one thing that s interesting about your books. I noticed that you write women really well and really different. Where does that come from? George R. R. Martin: You know, I ve always considered women to be people. 1 Key Questions With his bestselling book series, A Song of Ice and Fire (1996 ), George R. R. Martin has been credited with changing the status of fantasy from geek culture to mainstream box office, from a light and utopian genre to a grim, dark, and dystopian place, and from attracting not only men, but also women. His book series grew into a transglobal media, what we, here, refer to as the transmedia GoT universe. This includes the books and their adaptation into the HBO TV series Game of Thrones (2011 ), wikis, various online fan activities, and computer games. 2 While there are, surely, many explanations for this success, in Women of Ice and Fire we focus on Martin s female characters who have generated praise, intense attention and fascination, heated debate, controversy, and have been read as both feminist and antifeminist, as subversive and repressive, and, coined in the discussion of the TV series, as tools for sexploitation. Female characters are, we think, key to the originality and, thus, to the appeal and popularity of the GoT universe. Our anthology lays out two tracks that are intertwined: We examine the female characters in GoT, and we focus on how women operate in the transmedial GoT universe. Thus, our anthology explores the female characters of GoT, and how a transmedial GoT is inhabited and used by women, both fictional characters and real women. As mentioned, there are many ways in which Martin s book series is unique, one being that it offers more than thirty first-person narrators, of which half are women, and several of those are central protagonists and potential candidates for the fought-over Iron Throne. Women are everywhere as

10 2 Women of Ice and Fire protagonists, side characters, and smallfolk (Martin s term for peasantry and common folk) and we find all kinds of stereotypes. Here are the fair Princess Daenerys, who can survive fire and has three dragons, the scheming and evil Queen Cersei, a passionate Lady Catelyn, the ambitious Red Witch Melisandre, vengeful tomboy Arya, romantic teen Sansa, chivalric knight Brienne, clever prostitute Ros, and many others who are not run-of-the-mill fantasy women, but rather complex, multi-faceted, intriguing, and highly engaging characters. The overall plot in GoT is a battle for the Iron Throne. Here, female characters are as ambitious, active, and able as men. However, how they navigate their world is a matter of narrative, of author decisions, of television producers calculation in audiences and commercial strategies, of game producers choice of design, and of users and fans interactions with the various media forms. In the transmedial GoT especially, representations of sex and violence and sexualized violence have proven both provocative and problematic. In Season 1, one scene which raised a cacophony of protests was when Drogo had sex with his teenage bride, Daenerys, on their wedding night. It led a feminist blogger to comment: The beautiful setting and soft music is a subliminal cue you give when the romantic leads are about to kiss and fully recognize their passion for one another. In this scene, those cues are perverted with a message that rape is romantic, rape is love. 3 On the other hand, author and editor Caroline Spector, writing about the same events in the TV series and books, states, the canard of the woman who falls in love with her rapist is extremely difficult to overcome [yet] by creating such diverse and fully rendered female characters and thrusting them into this grim and bitter world, Martin has created a subversively feminist tale. 4 The contributors to the present volume disagree, as do audiences, about how to see women in GoT. Are they feminist characters, or a perversion of feminism? Is this postfeminist entertainment for a neoliberal age? Is it a backlash dressed up in prefeminist medieval clothes (which often has naked women in the background of exposition or dramatic action)? Or is Martin a feminist, as he claims, 5 and these women, then, the role models in a complex and conflicted contemporary world that has abandoned utopian illusions and in which fantasy is transformed from light to dark and from the ethically simple to conflicted? Whether you find the women in GoT subversive, repressive, or ambiguously mixed, they are more than mere spectacle. In the episode You Win or You Die (1.07), Queen Cersei (Lena Headey) warns Lord Ned Stark (Sean Bean) that, when you play the game of thrones, you win or you die. And Daenerys (Emilia Clarke) warns an abusive brother that, the next time you raise a hand to me will be the last time you have hands (1.04). These are not empty threats. Cersei and Daenerys s passionate approach to men and politics is shared by other female characters and by audiences (and here we include fans, critics, and academics). Women of Ice and Fire explores this passionate engagement in the hope of both carving out new roads in the gendered terrain of GoT, and also mapping new territory in women s engagement with transmedial fantasy.

11 Introduction 3 Figure 1: Mother of Dragons. Original artwork of Daenerys and her three dragons in A Song of Ice and Fire by Uruguayan artist Yama Orce. Context Today, the size and appeal of GoT is overwhelming. Thus, when Season 5 premiered, in April 2015, and four episodes were leaked onto the Internet, these counted for eight out of the ten most popular torrents for illegal downloads. 6 Through HBO s adaptation, active websites like Westeros.org, Winteriscoming. net, and Watchersonthewall.com, comic book adaptations, computer games, memes and wikis, and a growing body of fan fiction, Martin s book series has become probably the most popular transmedial fantasy world yet seen. However, to begin with the series, A Song of Ice and Fire, was no bestseller. It started as a single book, A Game of Thrones (1996), which, as Martin has written, he decided should be a trilogy. After finishing the second book, A Clash of Kings (1998), he decided that the trilogy should become a quintet A Storm of Swords (2000), A Feast for Crows (2005), and A Dance with Dragons (2011). Along the way, the quintet evolved into the now awaited seven-book series, with The Winds of Winter and A Dream of Spring ending it. At the time of writing (September 2015) the saga nears 6,000 pages and has 1,000 named characters. The first book, A Game of Thrones, was published in only a few thousand copies in the US, and UK publisher HarperCollins edition a mere 1,500 copies. 7 Not until the fourth book, A Feast for Crows, did the series reach the New York Times bestseller list in 2005, and, in 2011, the fifth (and latest) book, A Dance with Dragons, sold 298,000 copies on its first day of publication. Today, Martin s saga has sold more than 58 million copies across the five titles globally. In 2007, HBO started developing the fantasy television series Game of Thrones, which premiered in It is planned to run for eight seasons. Game

12 4 Women of Ice and Fire of Thrones fits well with HBO s other series, known for fascinating and complex characters within a frame that now is usually referred to as the new golden age of television. HBO has been an important player in the development of critically acclaimed quality television series since the 1970s. Notable benchmarks of influential drama series are The Sopranos ( ) and The Wire (2002 8). However, HBO has received a lot of criticism for the portrayal of women in its shows, in particular when it comes to nudity, sex scenes, and prostitution. It has also been hard to find female protagonists as complex and interesting as male figures such as Tony Soprano or Jimmy McNulty. This has led television scholars Kim Akass and Jan McCabe to ask the question: What has HBO ever done for women? 8 Their answer, however, is: quite a lot. In an age of cultural ambivalence when it comes to emancipation, female identity, feminism, and postfeminism, HBO has created individual characters reflecting the contradictions we all live with each and every day, Akass and McCabe argue. 9 The controversies surrounding Game of Thrones, as well as its success, is, to a large degree, the result of HBO s position in popular media culture. Albeit a fantasy series for adults, Game of Thrones became an instant prize-winning success, as shown by U.S. audience figures, which have grown from 2.2 million at the premiere of first season to reach 3 million in Season 1, 4 million at the end of Season 2, 5 million in mid-season 3, and 5.39 million at the end of the season. At the end of Season 4, audience figures were more than 7 million and more than 8 million people watched the premiere of Season 5 in 2015, 10 and the Season 5 finale had 8.11 million viewers and generated no less than 437,000 Tweets. As numbers indicate, the GoT phenomenon is unique in its popularity. As such, it is influential and is especially interesting, in our opinion, when it comes to the question of gender. Both the television and book series, Game of Thrones and A Song of Ice and Fire, respectively, have passionate fans. Also, individual characters have dedicated followers who love some characters and love to hate others. Queen mother Cercei, a favorite character for fans to despise, has, for instance, received a lot of attention on different Internet forums. 11 GoT fans are numerous and dedicated: some fans even have names, such as those who complain that Martin can t ever finish his novels soon enough, who are nicknamed GRRuMblers. Different fan groups have created wikis, forums, podcasts, and review practices that count a large number of followers and fans in their own right, and the topic of gender is central to many of the debates and reviews on these platforms (see Tosca and Klastrup, Chapter 10). And since GoT is typical of our current media environment in transcending borders between media, we investigate gender in GoT from multiple media perspectives that include asking questions of adaptation and fan reception. 12

13 Introduction 5 Genre George R. R. Martin has been called an American J. R. R. Tolkien, and A Song of Ice and Fire has been proclaimed fantasy on a par with Tolkien s Lord of the Rings trilogy. Martin s story takes place in an alternate world in which the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros are ruled from the Iron Throne in the city of King s Landing. In the beginning, the ruling king, Robert Baratheon, is murdered, and war breaks out in Westeros, spreading to neighbor realms and continents. Families fight each other in the so-called game of thrones, employing Machiavellian politics, and methods of torture, murder, and massacre. The Lannister family which includes Queen Cersei, her twin brother, Jaime, their father, Tywin, and dwarf brother, Tyrion are cast as villains, and the Stark family Ned and Catelyn, and their children, Robb, Sansa, Arya, Brandon, Rickon, and the bastard Jon Snow are the good guys. However, nothing is simple in Martin s world. Magical beings, previously thought long extinct, now return, and among them are old gods, and dragons, white walkers (a race of undead warriors), and wights (reanimated dead humans) from beyond the Wall in the North. Black magic is rife. The popularity of Martin s (and subsequently HBO s) epic has been explained by his original take on high fantasy, a genre traditionally set in a secondary world full of adventure, supernatural elements (such as magic, monsters, witches, and wizards), a hero s quest, or coming-of-age story, and, perhaps most importantly, a utopian spirit shared with the fairy tale. In The Fantasy Film (2010), Katherine Fowkes writes that, as a rule, fantasy tends to favor happy endings, and eschews not only tragedy, but cynicism, providing solace and redemption in a world of evil and violence. 13 It is this naive quality of fantasy that Marxist Ernst Bloch (1930) saw as enlightening: [C]onsider yourself as born free and entitled to be totally happy, dare to make use of your power of reasoning, look upon the outcome of things as friendly. 14 Bloch found social hope in fantasy, where the little guy could become a king. It was the same hope that Tolkien expressed in his famous essay On Fairy-Stories ( ) as central to the fantasy genre, where death and disaster is avoided by the sudden joyous turn which jolts the narrative from dyscatastrophe to eucatastrophe, the latter being Tolkien s coinage of the joy of deliverance. 15 We experience this joy when an evil world, against all the odds, turns out to become good after all. For the Catholic Tolkien, writing during the Second World War, fantasy was an evangelium that delivered escape, consolation, and recovery from a world where the human imagination was entrapped. 16 Finally, in the fantasy genre characters are often stereotypes in the sense that they do not change very much. Thus, Aragon in Lord of the Rings may turn out to be king, a timid hobbit may even prove heroic, however, orcs do not become brave men, and men, elves, and hobbits do not become evil orcs (except, perhaps, for Gollum ). 17

14 6 Women of Ice and Fire In contrast, Martin s high fantasy comes with multiple twists, taking traditional genre conventions and tropes, and expanding, playing with, and subverting them. Thus, Martin draws on both social realism and historical fiction, turning his genre writing into pitch-black fantasy, which holds torture, terror, sexual abuse, murder, and suffering; elements that are accentuated and expanded in the HBO adaptation, as our contributors point out. Dark fantasy is commonly understood as fantasy with a horror-like atmosphere, or horror with supernatural elements. Here, however, darkness is in excruciating realism, in the numerous, overwhelming facts and details, and the undeterred focus on pain, pathological behavior, and death. Also, rather than solely focusing on noble lords and ladies, Martin includes smallfolks and numerous prostitutes, and pursues the long-term effect of war on a people. 18 Daenerys may free slaves, but when she is a ruling queen she learns that it is impossible to force freedom on a people, and even more impossible to rule with her heart in a time of war. Martin has criticized fellow fantasy writers for creating a sort of Disneyland middle ages, where they had castles and princesses and all that. The trappings of a class system, but they didn t seem to understand what a class system actually meant. 19 To Martin, clearly, a class system means violence, war, and death. Embedded in Martin s fantasy are also the genres and styles of the fairy tale, adventure, Arthurian legends, and the medieval romance, and the melodrama with its heightened emotional feeling that every character and every element build-up the sense of a whole world bearing out the audience s traditional patterns of right and wrong, good and evil. 20 Just as melodrama can have tragic ends, so can Martin s epic. Especially since yet another genre thread in his literary carpet is historical fiction inspired by the English War of the Roses, fought from 1421 to Thus, the Lannisters have been read for the Lancasters, the Starks for the Yorks, and the Tyrells for the Tudors; 21 and Daenerys has been seen as a victorious Henry VII. Speculations abound among fans as to how Martin s characters will fare and who might end on the Iron Throne. With the darker genres of melodrama and historical fiction come characters with psychological depth. Thus, although few characters are pure evil (such as torturer Ramsay Bolton), and fewer still pure good (Ned Stark tried to rule with the people in mind), most are flawed, mixing good and bad traits into scales of grey. Queen Cersei may be incestuous and vengeful, but she is also a devoted mother, and Catelyn Stark may be a devoted mother, but she is also a hateful stepmother to Jon Snow, and a fallible political advisor to her son Robb, when he is King of the North. 22 A Song of Ice and Fire is, essentially, a grand and global war narrative, and Martin s story takes surprising turns, leaving every character vulnerable to the dyscatastrophe of death and disaster. By book five, there is still no joyous end in sight, no simple Manichean morality, but rather an ambiguous blend of good and bad deeds, choices, and acts. Daenerys s freed slaves become murderers. The morally just are executed. Children become victims of war. Women are

15 Introduction 7 beaten, abused, and raped, including the innocent, young, and beautiful. Men are mutilated, tortured, and castrated. This, then, is the pitch-black fantasy world that women inhabit, too. Gender, Sex, and Politics Caroline Spector, in Power and Feminism in Westeros, draws attention to the fact that a powerful point about the dangers inherent in fantasy [is] how fanciful myths hide and perpetuate a fundamentally oppressive social structure. 23 A female fantasy hero was once considered female exceptionalism, 24 and female autonomy seen as the real fantasy of fantasy. 25 Today, however, the centrality of the female fantasy hero is not questioned. 26 The real fantasy in GoT is not female autonomy, but any autonomy, be it male or female. No, the heated debate is not over female characters visibility or agency, but instead over how these factors are interwoven with sex, sexualized violence, and nudity. Thus, female characters are visible, yet embedded in carnal politics, or as Stéphanie Genz, one of our contributors, calls it, fuck politics. Oppressive social structures are made explicit but are they still perpetuated? When Martin created his female characters, he took inspiration from the European medieval age, during which royal marriages were political, and women used as pawns. 27 However, they could be political players too. Thus, Lucrezia Borgia was married strategically for the third time in 1502, and became known for her Machiavellian scheming. She survived the fall of the dynastically important Borgias, and Anne Boleyn, a member of the Norfolk family, convinced Henry VIII of England to divorce his first wife, Katherine of Aragon, so that he could marry her, causing a break with Rome and setting off events that led to the establishment of the Church of England. These historical women have inspired Westerosi politics: Queen Cersei rules behind her sons Joffrey and Tommen, and Lady Catelyn promises her son, Robb, in marriage to the Freys, in exchange for their martial help. When the latter promise is broken it leads to Robb s death at the infamous Red Wedding, a fact that left audiences in tears and made headline news. To be a noble woman means to have a stake in the game of thrones. I don t want to be a Lady, says Arya in Season 1, before she becomes an orphan. I could never understand why they treated us differently, Cersei complains about her and her brother. Jaime was taught to fight with sword and lance and mace, and I was taught to smile and sing and please. He was heir to Casterly Rock and I was sold to some stranger like a horse to be ridden whenever he desired (2.09). Similarly, when Daenerys sees Drogo, she protests, I don t want to be his queen. Yet, her brother Viserys doesn t care: I d let his whole khalasar fuck you if need be, sweet sister, all 40,000 men, and their horses,

16 8 Women of Ice and Fire too, if that was what it took to get my army. 28 (See Chapter 5, Schubart, for further discussion of this.) Later, when she needs allies and is queen, Danerys sells herself in marriage. And Sansa, in Season 5, accepts Petyr s advice to marry torturer Ramsay Bolton, who will soon be killed, predicts Petyr, and Sansa, then, will become the Warden of the North. Thus, women learn to trade themselves (but men too, we must keep in mind, are sold like horses, and Robb pays with his life). In GoT s transmedial perspective, sex is controversial in more ways than its use in medieval politics. A Song of Ice and Fire takes place in a world with brothels, rapes, incest, and sexual torture, where girls and women, noble, peasant, and prostitute, are rapable. Abuse and violence are, thus, an integrated part of the sexual politics of A Song of Ice and Fire. And, when the book series was adapted into HBO s Game of Thrones, the carnal sex politics became, some critics argue, the fuck politics and strategy to gain audience appeal. HBO s staging of naked women having sex (if not in the foreground, then in the background), while male characters offer information (exposition) was coined as sexposition, in 2011, by blogger Myles McNutt, a neologism instantly picked up by the media and applied in retrospect to other HBO shows, and to its gender politics in general. 29 Neil Marshall, the director of the episode Blackwater (2.09) was urged by producers to make his characters go full-frontal, which Marshall described as a pretty surreal experience. 30 Adapting sex and sexual politics from words to images has proven both controversial and problematic in several ways. One issue was to do with who exactly was allowed to be naked: thus, some female characters are shown with full-frontal nudity, while there is no full-frontal male nudity. 31 Also, in the books, some female characters are described as naked in certain scenes, but when converting words into images were changed into dressed women, thus altering the various functions that nudity serves in the books. For example, Eidsvåg discusses how mothers Cersei and Catelyn are described as naked during certain events in the books, but are portrayed dressed in corresponding scenes in the show. Another issue concerns changes in the representation of sex, violence, and politics, which finds different expressions; one is that nudity and sex are inserted into scenes of violence and torture (an issue Gjelsvik explores in her examination of Theon s sufferings at the hands of Ramsay). And, in other cases, consensual sex is changed into rape, such as on Daenerys s wedding night with Drogo in Season 1, or Jaime having sex with his sister next to their son s coffin in Season 4. And then, of course, age is a concern when adapting any story from books to mainstream television, because the children and the teenage protagonists are considered too young to act on the small screen in the same way that they can do in books. Thus, Daenerys is thirteen years old in the books at time of marriage, but fifteen in the HBO adaptation (and, in fact, is played by twentyfour-year old Emilia Clarke). Similarly, eleven-year old Sansa is made thirteen

17 Introduction 9 in the HBO version, when she is King Joffrey s fiancée, and he has her beaten in public. Arya is aged from nine to eleven, when she watches her father, Ned Stark, being publicly beheaded; and Daenerys s scribe, Missandei, changes from being ten in the books to a young woman on screen (played by twenty-three-year old Nathalie Emmanuel). Thus, children become tweens or teens, and teens are themselves played by young women, so the provocative and problematic elements of sex and violence can be made more palatable to television audiences. GoT s sexposition and fuck politics have been received in various ways. The recurring use of nudity is often gratuitous and titillating, and when coupled with torture and murder, appears both highly provocative and also is seen by audiences as too much. Case in point, when child-king Joffrey Baratheon sexually tortures and kills prostitutes. The differing receptions and evaluations of the gender politics of GoT have several explanations, which involve not just the above mentioned complexity and genre hybridity, weaving together historical fiction, fantasy, and social realism, but also questions of adaptation, and of audiences transmedial knowledge. Thus, as the contribution in this book by Tosca and Klastrup shows, audiences who have read the books were not troubled by the rape scenes in the HBO show, but rather saw the HBO show as having altered the scenes in the books. Martin has said of his gender politics: I try to reflect a whole spectrum of humanity as best I can. 32 And the actors of Game of Thrones have, in interviews, underlined the story s feminist potential, rather than its possible sexploitation aspects. When you put it into perspective and look at what these women have accomplished and what they are capable of doing against all odds, I definitely think it s empowering, says actress Emilia Clarke, who plays Daenerys. 33 Opinions differ as to whether GoT exposes or exploits women, and many (among them some of our contributors), remain conflicted in their engagement with the female characters. We take this conflict as a sign that the women in GoT are psychologically complex, sexually transgressive, ideologically ambiguous, and intimately grounded in human emotions. And we have not seen it as our aim here to solve such disputes by providing clear cut or singular readings but, conversely, we hope to open up the contested terrain of women in GoT and our engagement with them. Women of Ice and Fire Our anthology explores women in a transmedia GoT universe that includes Martin s book series, the HBO show, computer games, and online activities. Drawing from studies in gender, film and television, and new media, the contributors investigate gender in relation to female characters; genre;

18 10 Women of Ice and Fire representations of sex, violence, and politics; choices of adaptation; and female audience engagement. We address representations of female characters as types and stereotypes and ask what is altered when storytelling moves between media, and how these alterations affect gender, and the representations of female characters. Sex creates engagement and, in her contribution, Swedish film scholar Mariah Larsson discusses both historical perspectives on, and contemporary ideas about sex, love, and marriage, and how these all influence the adaptation of sex from word to image. Larsson analyzes the marriages of some of the primary contenders for the Iron Throne: Sansa Stark and Tyrion Lannister, Daenerys Targaryen and Khal Drogo, and Robb Stark and Talisa Maegyr. In Western culture, sexuality is a social and cultural construct which determines how, why, when, and with whom we have sex. Larsson elaborates on how sexual positions reflect different ideas about true love, virginity, and innocence. The adaptation, she argues, extrapolates the binary between the modern, equal, and recognizable and the fantasy historical, horrific, and alien, making for an ambiguous entertainment that may influence how we think about sex and marriage. George R. R. Martin has been recognized for his attention to smallfolk, and the impact of the political maneuverings of the ruling classes on their lives. French literature and adaptation scholar Shannon Wells-Lassagne examines the female characters Ros and Talisa who were specifically created by showrunners and writers David Benioff and D. B. Weiss for HBO, in order to give recurring faces to some of the hundreds of minor female characters described in the books. These women function in different ways: where Ros condenses the books many prostitutes into a single character, Talisa replaces and expands the book character Jeyne, who marries Robb, only to disappear after his death. Wells-Lassagne argues that these two characters become proxies for smallfolk women in the HBO series, making the latter not just more commercial, but also more political. By adding these two characters, the show heightens our engagement with smallfolk, and also strengthens our empathy with the powerless. Sex and violence are central in the game for power in both the book series and the HBO show. However, in the HBO adaptation, several alterations and additions are quite remarkable. Norwegian film and television scholar Anne Gjelsvik discusses how certain changes between the book and the TV series alter perspectives on gender and power on a narrative and discursive level to create sexual victimization. She bases her discussion on, first, the reception of the series, and, second, on close readings of three episodes (two directed by the only female director on the production, Michelle MacLaren), with scenes featuring rape or torture: the torture of Theon (3.07), the threat of rape against Meera Reed (4.05), and Jaime s rape of his sister, Queen Cersei (4.03). In the latter scene, the alterations from book to show were so fundamental that Martin apologized if people found the scene disturbing for the wrong

19 Introduction 11 reasons. Drawing on adaptation and medium specificity theories, on recent discussions of quality television, and on both fans and critics reactions, Gjelsvik shows why these specific scenes were seen as too much. In the contribution of German computer game scholar Felix Schröter, the use of GoT s female characters in the medium of computer games is explored. At the time of writing, there are four licensed games: the adventure Game Of Thrones (Telltale 2014/15), the real-time strategy A Game of Thrones: Genesis (Cyanide/Focus Home Interactive 2011), the action/role-playing Game of Thrones (Atlus/Focus Home Interactive 2012), and the Facebook Game of Thrones Ascent (Disruptor Beam 2013). Using the concepts of mythos (story), ethos (morals), and topos (world), Schröter shows how the last three games differ in their integration of female characters into game mechanics. Thus, in the role-playing Game of Thrones there are no playable female characters; in the strategy game, women become de-individualized commodities, and in the Facebook game, they are gender-neutral game pieces (since male and female game pieces have exactly the same qualities). Thus, the computer games retain little of the original complexity in their use of female GoT characters, but, conversely, adhere to a conservative gender logic where action-games are designed with male players in mind and social games with female players in mind. Danish film scholar Rikke Schubart starts from the point of her own excitement at watching teenager Daenerys rise from the ashes and become a mother of dragons. Fiction can serve as an arena for experimentation and play, Schubart argues, and she shows how Daenerys transforms into a subversive fantasy hero both in Martin s novel A Game of Thrones and in Season 1 of HBO s series. Drawing on cognitive theory, emotions studies, postfeminism, and fairy tale studies, Schubart demonstrates how the emotion of pride is central to making Daenerys a strong contender for the Iron Throne. Fantasy, says Schubart, unites myth, melodrama, and the fairy tale, and Daenerys combines traits from Campbell s universal hero (coming-of-age), the fairy tale hero (adventure and magical helpers) and the fairy tale heroine (marriage). Daenerys faces three trials in her confrontations with her brother, Viserys, her husband, Drogo, and the witch, Mirri Maz Duur. But where women in fairy tales are usually victimized and domesticated, Daenerys ends up with magical powers, queenhood, and dragons. How does narrative structure and genre then influence how we engage with female protagonists? In Power Play and Family Ties: Hybrid Fantasy, Network Narrative, and Female characters, Danish film and television scholar Helle Kannik Haastrup situates the HBO series in the present golden age of complex quality television drama, and draws on theories of network narratives, televisual storytelling, and genre to investigate how different genre formulae are twisted and interwoven in Martin s epic saga about power and family. Using the eventful episode The Children (4.10) as her primary example, Haastrup investigates the parallels and differences of male and female power

20 12 Women of Ice and Fire in a universe in which men and women alike can be seen as both flawed heroes and complex characters. A story without a hero has more room for the mother, argues Norwegian writer Marta Eidsvåg in her article Maiden, Mother, and Crone: Motherhood in the World of Ice and Fire, taking her departure from literary studies. This is the case in Martin s novels, where both mothers Catelyn Stark and Cersei Lannister are important point-of-view characters and, accordingly, make for interesting exceptions to the rule in fantasy literature that mothers are few and far between. However, the transfer from literature to television radically changes the depiction of motherhood, Eidsvåg argues. In portraying these mothers, HBO has chosen, unlike in most other aspects of their adaptation, to downplay controversial content, and taboos such as sex and abortion. The Cersei on television is more maternal and less monstrous, while Catelyn is transformed from a wise and strong woman into a more passive character. While violent women have become increasingly visible in contemporary popular culture, they are still an exception to the rule. Women warriors usually have limited powers at their disposal, for instance either masculinity or sexuality, but in Game of Thrones, the range of possibilities seems more wide. In Women Warriors From Chivalry to Vengeance, British film and television scholars Yvonne Tasker and Lindsay Steenberg explore three types of female fighters in the television series: warriors, cross-dressers, and military leaders, as represented by the characters Arya, Brienne, Yara, and Daenerys. While these female characters defy easy categorization within popular genre, the television series still falls back on stereotypes that the authors find problematic, hybrid, and troubling, such as the vengeful tomboy, the anachronistic female knight, and the messianic leader. Our last three articles shift focus from the fictional GoT universe to look at gender in relation to politics and audiences. Politics is understood as cultural and real, and contributors use postfeminist theory, political theory, and new media theory. Australian literary scholar Elizabeth Beaton examines Machiavellian strategies used by female characters in the book series and the HBO show. Machiavelli s The Prince (1532), a Renaissance treatise providing advice on governing a principality, is infamous for its pragmatic instruction. With its turbulent political and dynastic struggles, Westeros mirrors Machiavelli s Renaissance Italy, and the Westerosi women employ Machiavellian strategies. Beaton examines Machiavellian moments on Game of Thrones, featuring Cersei, Daenerys, and Yara (who in the novel is called Asha) Greyjoy. Exploring the idea that Machiavellian strategies empower female characters, she examines their military forays and political maneuvers. How does the show s visuals demonstrate the success of female Machiavellian princes (the term prince meaning any ruler of a state)? And do Cersei, Yara, and Daenerys leave themselves open to difficulties in later political endeavors by exhibiting bold and ruthless behavior? Beaton combines close analysis of select scenes

21 Introduction 13 from Seasons 1, 3, and 4 with text sections of A Song of Ice and Fire, and draws on Machiavelli s The Prince, as well as on interviews (including her own) with author Martin. Next is the contribution by Spanish Susana Tosca and Danish Lisbeth Klastrup, both new media scholars, on female fan expert reviews on YouTube. The review genre is popular on YouTube, where fans and users of all kinds of products comment on their experiences. In the GoT review, the fan reviewer comments on the latest episode of the show. Some review channels have a huge following, with single episodes viewed by over a million fans (for example, the channel of Comicbookgirl 19). These fan experts become YouTube stars who breach the professional and amateur divide. Tosca and Klastrup characterize the fan review, a genre previously unnoticed by academics, and relate it to older media reviews in television and newspapers, before discussing how female fan reviewers perform and stage themselves as experts on GoT. They analyze whether women are more or less active than men, if female fan reviewers comment on different themes than men, and they examine the relation between gender and the fan s knowledge of the GoT universe. How do other fans respond to a female expert? And which forms of authority come into play in the reception of these reviews? Klastrup and Tosca combine content analysis of a select number of YouTube fan reviews, with in-depth interviews with the fan experts. Ending the anthology on a more apprehensive key is British gender scholar Stéphanie Genz, who finds that the carnal and visceral gender politics of the HBO series belies gender equality and sexual freedom. She argues that the early twentieth-first century is both characterized by a sexualization of Western culture, and also a mainstreaming of pornography. Such sexualized aesthetics are linked to ideas of postfeminist empowerment and neoliberal agency; however, rhetoric of empowerment is problematized in a recession by social conflicts and political controversies. Today s cultural climate has a complex relation to gender, with fears about the end of men and the rise of women, as argued recently by journalist Hanna Rosin. 34 With its pseudo-medieval setting and patriarchal structure, Game of Thrones is in line with historical drama series like The Borgias and The Tudors which also use sexual licentiousness and aggressive physicality. This fictive past, argues Genz, has the immediacy of a time stripped of social coherence. Caught in contradictory political forces, women s principal resources are fertility and sexuality, and fucking becomes a survival strategy and a carnal tactic with which to negotiate the exploitation in Westeros. The liberal sexism and sexist liberalism reminds us that Winter is coming, and it may be a while before Daenerys, Cersei, Sansa, Arya, and the rest can change history. But where it comes to fiction, the women of Westeros have already changed history by making the transmedia GoT universe a uniquely popular and engaging fantasy world where women take the lead.

22 14 Women of Ice and Fire Notes 1. On George Stroumboulopoulos Tonight, March 13, 2012, available online: (accessed April 20, 2015). 2. See, for instance, Lisbeth Klastrup and Susana Tosca, Transmedial Worlds Rethinking Cyberworld Design. In Proceedings of the 2004 International Conference on Cyberworlds, 2004, Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Computer Society, available online: transworlds.pdf (accessed September 1, 2015). 3. Daenery s Wedding Night, or This is Not a Rape Scene, blog entry by ElegantPI, April 25, 2011, available online: (accessed February 15, 2013). 4. Caroline Spector, Power and Feminism in Westeros, in Beyond the Wall: Exploring George R. R. Martin s A Song of Ice and Fire, ed. James Lowder (Dallas: BenBella Books, 2012), first part of this quote is location 2715, second part of the quote is location Jessica Salter, Game of Thrones s George R. R. Martin: I m a Feminist at Heart, interview, available online: womens-life/ /game-of-throness-george-rr-martin-im-a-feminist.html (accessed April 18, 2015). 6. David Gilbert, Game of Thrones Season 5: Millions Download Pirated Copies of Opening 4 Episode. According to the torrent tracker service Demonii, of the top 10 most popular torrents online at the moment, eight of them are illegal copies of Game of Thrones episodes from Season 5, available online: co.uk/game-thrones-season-5-millions-download-pirated-copies-opening-fourepisodes (accessed April 15, 2015). 7. See John Jos. Miller, Collecting Ice and Fire in the Age of Nook and Kindle for a history of the book series print history, in Beyond the Wall: Exploring George R. R. Martin s A Song of Ice and Fire, From A Game of Thrones to A Dance With Dragons, ed. (Dallas: BenBella Books, 2012), Kindle edition. 8. When it comes to representation of women, few, if any, series have been as important as Sex and the City ( ) for which HBO was accused of killing feminism. Janet McCabe and Kim Akass, What Has HBO Ever Done for Women? in The Essensial HBO Reader, ed. Gary R. Edgerton and Jeffrey P. Jones (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008), , McCabe and Akass, What Has HBO Ever Done, The numbers for the five seasons are from Rick Kissell, Game of Thrones Finale Sets Ratings Record, Variety, June 16, 2015, available online: com/2015/tv/news/game-of-thrones-finale-ratings-jon-snow-cersei / (accessed August 28, 2015). The 6.8 million figure is from Paul Tassi, Game of Thrones Season 5 Premiere Sets Ratings Record, Despite Episode Leak, available online: (accessed April 16, 2015). Other sources say as high as 7.1 million viewers, see com/article/2014/06/16/us-television-gameofthrones-iduskbn0er2n (accessed April 15, 2015). For a discussion of numbers of earlier Game of Thrones

23 Introduction 15 seasons, see James Hibberd, HBO talks Game of Thrones future: More than 7 seasons wanted, Entertainment Weekly, March 11, 2015, available online: (accessed April 10, 2015). 11. See for instance Erin Whitney, Cersei is officially the most hated character on Game of Thrones in The Huffington Post, available online: huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/07/game-of-thrones-cersei_n_ html (accessed August 28, 2015), and interview with Lena Headey at Conan (accessed September 1, 2015). 12. Henry Jenkins formulated transmedia storytelling as a process where integral elements of a fiction gets dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience. Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006), Katherine A. Fowkes, The Fantasy Film (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), Ernst Bloch, The Fairy Tale Moves on its Own in Time (1930), quoted in Jack Zipes, Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales (Lexington: University of Press of Kentucky, 2002 [1979]), Tolkien quoted in Zipes, Breaking the Magic Spell, 162, For a discussion of Tolkien s ideas on genre and monsters in relation to A Song of Ice and Fire see Susan Johnston, Grief Poignant as Joy: Dyscatastrophe and Eucatastrophe in A Song of Ice and Fire, Mythlore 31, no. 1/2 (2012): There are of course works by female fantasy writers such as Ursula K. Le Guin, Kat Wilhelm, Sarah Monette Mélusine, Anne Bishop, and Jacqueline Carey. However, fantasy is still dominated by male authors and male protagonists unless we include horror/paranormal romance (for instance The Vampire Diaries book and television series, books by L. J. Smith; and Twilight books and film series with books by Stephenie Meyer) and science fiction (for instance The Hunger Games book and film series, books by Suzanne Collins). See also Robin Anne Reid, ed., Women in Science Fiction and Fantasy, Volume One & Two (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2009). 18. See Wells-Lassagne in this volume, pages Quoted in Jes Battis and Susan Johnston, eds, Mastering the Game of Thrones: Essays on George R.R. Martin s A Song of Ice and Fire (Jefferson: McFarland, 2015), Kindle edition, location John G. Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), A reading supported by the fact that ambitious character Margaery Tyrell in HBO s version is played by actress Natalie Dormer, who played Anne Boleyn in the historical drama The Tudors (Showtime, ). 22. See Eidsvåg on moterhood in this volume. 23. Spector, Power and Feminism in Westeros, location Jane Tolmie, Medievalism and the Fantasy Heroine, Journal of Gender Studies 15, no. 2 (July 2006): Carol Clover, Maiden Warriors and Other Sons, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 85, no. 1 (January 1986): See Tasker and Steenberg in this volume. 27. See Larsson on sex and marriage in this volume.

24 16 Women of Ice and Fire 28. George R. R. Martin, A Song of Ice and Fire, Books One to Four: A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords, A Feast for Crows. Sydney: HarperVoyager, 2011, Kindle edition, Daenerys s first chapter, location See Wells- Lassagne in this volume for a different take on this, see pages See Gjelsvik in this volume for a discussion of sex added to violence, see pages For sexposition, see wikipedia, available online: wiki/sexposition (accessed April 18, 2015). 31. Generating a lot of attention on the Internet, such as Kevin Bacon s video campaign Free the Bacon. 32. Martin quoted in Battis and Johnston, Mastering, location Clarke quoted in Valerie Estelle Frankel, Women in Game of Thrones: Power, Conformity and Resistance (Jefferson: McFarland, 2014), Kindle edition, location See Hanna Rosin, The End of Men, available online: com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-end-of-men/308135/ (accessed April 20, 2015). Bibliography Battis, Jes and Susan Johnston, eds. Mastering the Game of Thrones: Essays on George R. R. Martin s A Song of Ice and Fire. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, Kindle edition. Frankel, Valerie Estelle. Women in Game of Thrones: Power, Conformity and Resistance. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, Kindle edition. Martin, George R. R. A Dance With Dragons (A Song of Ice and Fire, book 5). New York: Bantam Books, Kindle edition. McCabe, Janet, and Kim Akass. What Has HBO Ever Done for Women? In The Essensial HBO Reader, edited by Gary R. Edgerton and Jeffrey P. Jones. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008,