‘The Old Gods and the New’ is the sixth episode of the second season of HBO’s medieval fantasy television series Game of Thrones. In the image we see the warrior nicknamed Hound carrying Lady Sansa as if she were a doll, when in the episode he saved Sansa from the rabid mob that wanted to rape her. (The image evokes the rape of the Sabine women that I have talked so much about on this site.)
The Spice King, one of Qarth’s ruling Thirteen, tells Dany a great truth: ‘The silver hair of a Targaryen’, addressing the black man who wants to marry her, another member of the Thirteen, ‘she is far too lovely for a glorified dockworker like yourself’. But the feminist messages continue in this episode. Feminism isn’t only what we have been seeing, putting women as capable as men in physical and intellectual matters, but hiding some historical facts.
In the gloomy castle Harrenhal, feudal lord Tywin Lannister chooses the adolescent Arya, a prisoner, as his cup maid (or cup server): a poetic euphemism since Homer for acquiring a loving ephebe (Zeus with Ganymede) or a girl as a sexual servant. But despite the soft porn that we have seen in the first seasons, so often of very bad taste (like Littlefinger’s brothel or the homo scenes I’ve already talked about), in a situation that really lent itself to sexually use the ‘cup server of my study’, the feudal lord doesn’t do it. And he fails to do it because of the plot armour for Arya not only in the following seasons when blood runs, but because the feminist figure par excellence of the series, the one destined to kill the Night King in the last season, cannot be erotically touched without her consent.
Many fans believe that the series is realistic because of the deaths of three of its main characters, Ned Stark, and his wife and son in the Red Wedding, but nothing is further from the truth. You just have to understand the motivation of the screenwriters to realise that this girl was, on HBO, what on Netflix recently was Beth in The Queen’s Gambit. In both cases the reversal of reality was absolute (in real life the woman cannot surpass the man in physical—Arya—or intellectual—Beth—combat).
Robb Stark returns to see Lady Talisa in the military camp, in Westerlands. From here a relationship starts between them. That means that all the scenes in this and subsequent episodes with Robb and Talisa piss off the viewer that is a priest of holy words. If Robb had kept his word to marry the one hundred percent white girl from House Frey, he wouldn’t have lost the war as he lost it by the end of the next season.
But at least this fictional relationship between Robb and Talisa leaves a moral for us priests: we should never let ourselves be carried away by the needs of our cock, but by the head.