Originally aired on May 13, 2012, ‘A Man Without Honor’ is the seventh episode of the second season of HBO’s medieval fantasy television series Game of Thrones. In the image we see Tyrion and Cersei in the only moment I remember from the series with compassion and empathy between the two siblings (I know from my own experience that it’s very difficult to have such a moment with most of our siblings).
Another feminist line began, already from the previous episode, with the relationship between Jon Snow and the captive wildling Ygritte, who in real life became married with ‘Jon’ while filming Game of Thrones (although Kit Harington, who played the role of Jon, fell into depression when he finished filming the last season). Being held captive by Jon in a desolate landscape across from the Wall, Ygritte tells Jon: ‘I’m a free woman’.
Wildlings are enemies of the members of the Night’s Watch, which Jon belongs to, and Ygritte speaks insolently although Jon could kill her at any moment. In fact, killing Ygritte had been the order that Jon’s superior entrusted to him before Jon parted ways with his group seeking wildlings. After some scenes south of the Wall, Ygritte continues lecturing her captor even though she is tied to a rope.
These scenes are completely unreal but they sell us is the image of a liberated woman, retro-projected to a fantastic medieval world even north of the Wall, where supposedly human societies were more primitive and nomadic than those of the south.
The last straw is that Ygritte tells Jon, still held captive by the rope, that she can initiate him sexually as apparently Jon is a virgin. All of this contrasts with the scenes from Beowulf and Grendel, a 2005 fantasy adventure film directed by the Icelandic Sturla Gunnarsson (loosely based on the Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf) where Beowulf also ties Selma with a rope. But in this film the alpha male thus controls the beautiful redhead. In Game of Thrones, however, after a scene in Qarth with Jorah serving Dany, Ygritte continues to openly mock the one who’s holding her captive, even making sexual allusions between the two.
South of the Wall, in the military camp, the prisoner of the Starks, Jaime Lannister, provisionally escaped. When they catch him Rickard Karstark, an important northern lord whose ancestors were also Stark, says something about King Robb that is worth picking up: ‘He brought that foreign bitch [Talisa] with him!’
Apparently, terrible blunders are being committed in various parts of the world—in the icy north with Jon and Ygritte, in the city at the middle of the desert (Qarth), and at the green military camp because of the infatuation we feel towards women: Jorah swearing to the mysterious Quaithe that he will never again betray the blonde Dany, with whom he is in love; Jon letting his red-haired prisoner escape with whom he had spent a night out in the open, and Robb was about to lose his precious prisoner, Jaime Lannister, by following another woman’s non-white buttocks, away from the military duties of his camp.
But all of this is never overtly suggested in the episode. I am drawing my own conclusions. The episode simply continues the feminist propaganda so ubiquitous throughout the series.