Angela
Elite member
- Messages
- 21,823
- Reaction score
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- Ethnic group
- Italian
I love this series, as I loved the books, and one of the reasons is that the author knows how to write women who are believable and as varied in terms of personality as men.
"[FONT="]Like [/FONT]The Handmaid’s Tale[FONT="], and unlike [/FONT]Wonder Woman[FONT="], [/FONT]Game of Thrones[FONT="] also explores women’s relationship to institutional power in a variety of ways – while acknowledging that whatever this relationship might be, it is always categorically gendered. If [/FONT]Wonder Woman[FONT="] is a celebratory story of warrior queens, and [/FONT]The Handmaid’s Tale[FONT="] is a cautionary tale of female enslavement, [/FONT]Game of Thrones[FONT="] offers women who are emperors, slaves and everything in between. It is a world in which women who seem to be pawns have a way of turning out to be queens; but it is also a world that knows queens can always be taken.[/FONT][FONT="]
Each of the women in Game of Thrones might be said to embody a certain archetypal female experience in relation to power. They cover the spectrum: from the initially conventional femininity of Sansa Stark, submissively learning needlepoint and manipulated by those around her; to her sister Arya, who rejects this sort of femininity in favour of a sword she ironically names “Needle”; to the knight Brienne of Tarth, who is mocked for her lack of femininity but lives like a man in a male-dominated world; to the priestess Melisandre, a fanatic who uses sexual power in the name of religious power; to the heroine Daenerys, whose story arc takes her from rape victim to conquering ruler; to the queen regent Cersei, whose evil is contextualised, if not justified, within a story of rage and thwarted ambition. Yara Greyjoy is a daughter trying to be like a man to please her ferociously misogynist father; Margaery Tyrell is a post-feminist pragmatist, using whatever power she can find to achieve her ends, while her grandmother Olenna (played to the hilt by Diana Rigg) is a cross between Catherine de Medici and the Mother Superior from The Sound of Music, wimple and all. And as the story has evolved, even the most submissive women, like Sansa, are emerging from their violent experiences with a survivor’s sense of strength – and vengeance."
They forgot Catelyn Stark, one of my favorite characters except for her treatment of John Snow: the strong, proud, loyal wife and loving, protective mother, with a firm grasp of the politics of her world, but like her son perhaps not the best judge of character.
I don't agree on the author's take on Cersei. Hey, a lot of people have terrible fathers...it doesn't excuse how evil she becomes.
Still, she does have some great one-liners from a woman's point of view:
" In season one, she tells Sansa Stark that when her brother “was taught to fight, I was taught to smile. He was heir to Casterly Rock, I was sold like a horse.” When Margaery coos that they will be just like sisters, Cersei snaps: “If you ever call me sister again, I’ll have you strangled in your sleep.” When a warrior from another land informs her that in his kingdom, “We don’t hurt little girls”, she replies: “Everywhere in the world, they hurt little girls.”
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2...ones-handmaids-tale-wonder-woman-female-power[/FONT]
"[FONT="]Like [/FONT]The Handmaid’s Tale[FONT="], and unlike [/FONT]Wonder Woman[FONT="], [/FONT]Game of Thrones[FONT="] also explores women’s relationship to institutional power in a variety of ways – while acknowledging that whatever this relationship might be, it is always categorically gendered. If [/FONT]Wonder Woman[FONT="] is a celebratory story of warrior queens, and [/FONT]The Handmaid’s Tale[FONT="] is a cautionary tale of female enslavement, [/FONT]Game of Thrones[FONT="] offers women who are emperors, slaves and everything in between. It is a world in which women who seem to be pawns have a way of turning out to be queens; but it is also a world that knows queens can always be taken.[/FONT][FONT="]
Each of the women in Game of Thrones might be said to embody a certain archetypal female experience in relation to power. They cover the spectrum: from the initially conventional femininity of Sansa Stark, submissively learning needlepoint and manipulated by those around her; to her sister Arya, who rejects this sort of femininity in favour of a sword she ironically names “Needle”; to the knight Brienne of Tarth, who is mocked for her lack of femininity but lives like a man in a male-dominated world; to the priestess Melisandre, a fanatic who uses sexual power in the name of religious power; to the heroine Daenerys, whose story arc takes her from rape victim to conquering ruler; to the queen regent Cersei, whose evil is contextualised, if not justified, within a story of rage and thwarted ambition. Yara Greyjoy is a daughter trying to be like a man to please her ferociously misogynist father; Margaery Tyrell is a post-feminist pragmatist, using whatever power she can find to achieve her ends, while her grandmother Olenna (played to the hilt by Diana Rigg) is a cross between Catherine de Medici and the Mother Superior from The Sound of Music, wimple and all. And as the story has evolved, even the most submissive women, like Sansa, are emerging from their violent experiences with a survivor’s sense of strength – and vengeance."
They forgot Catelyn Stark, one of my favorite characters except for her treatment of John Snow: the strong, proud, loyal wife and loving, protective mother, with a firm grasp of the politics of her world, but like her son perhaps not the best judge of character.
I don't agree on the author's take on Cersei. Hey, a lot of people have terrible fathers...it doesn't excuse how evil she becomes.
Still, she does have some great one-liners from a woman's point of view:
" In season one, she tells Sansa Stark that when her brother “was taught to fight, I was taught to smile. He was heir to Casterly Rock, I was sold like a horse.” When Margaery coos that they will be just like sisters, Cersei snaps: “If you ever call me sister again, I’ll have you strangled in your sleep.” When a warrior from another land informs her that in his kingdom, “We don’t hurt little girls”, she replies: “Everywhere in the world, they hurt little girls.”
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2...ones-handmaids-tale-wonder-woman-female-power[/FONT]