Dark wings, dark words

‘Dark Wings, Dark Words’ is the second episode of the third season of HBO’s fantasy television series Game of Thrones, and the 22nd episode of the series. In King’s Landing the messages that put men as silly continue. In the castle gardens we hear this conversation:

Olenna Tyrell: ‘Do you know my son, the Lord of Highgarden?’

Sansa: ‘I haven’t had the pleasure’.

Olenna Tyrell laughs: ‘No great pleasure, believe me: a ponderous oaf. His father was an oaf as well, my husband, the late Lord Luthor’.

But in the Riverlands, Rickard Karstark tells King Robb a great truth: ‘I think you lost the war the day you married her’, referring to non-white buttocks.

In the North, while heading to the Wall, Bran Stark has a dream, where he tries to kill the three-eyed raven, but a boy tells him that this is impossible because the raven is Bran himself. When he wakes up and they continue with the march, Osha suspects that someone is following them and goes out to investigate. At this moment the boy from Bran’s dream arrives and reveals that his name is Jojen Reed. Another message in which the male-female roles are reversed is seen when Jojen, who is accompanied by his sister Meera, tells Bran’s caregiver Osha: ‘I’m unarmed. My sister carries the weapons’.

But the writers were still unsatisfied with those two scenes and included one more scene that reverses the male-female roles. Travelling North, Arya, Gendry, and a fat boy nicknamed Hot Pie are discovered by a small group called The Brotherhood Without Banners led by Thoros of Myr, who suspect the three of them have escaped from Harrenhall. Arya draws her sword to face alone the group that has found them while her two friends, Gendry and Hot Pie, hide behind the rocks. We can already imagine in the real medieval period a girl doing that, in the context of crossing a dangerous forest where there could be highway robbers!

Back at King’s Landing, the erotic scene between Tyrion and Shae is disgusting. Those scenes, and many other erotic scenes of Game of Thrones would never have been shot in a healthy West.

En route to the Wall, Bran receives from Jojen the first revelation about what has been happening to him since Jaime threw him from the tower of his home. Jojen says that, like Bran, he is also a greenseer: as those gifted with clairvoyant powers (out-of-body experiences, also known as astral projection) were called in the ancient religion. Greenseers also have retrocognitive powers (seeing the past paranormally) and precognitive powers (glimpses of the future). Jojen explains that the three-eyed raven that appears in Bran’s dreams means someone who ‘brings the sight’.

Bran still ignores it but the old man in a hiding cave under a huge weirwood tree on the other side of the Wall, who has been sending him those dreams under the image of the raven, is the most powerful man in Westeros even though he can no longer move (in Martin’s novels Bloodraven’s power in Westeros affairs is more conspicuous than in the HBO series). Jojen, another gifted psychic who tries to guide Bran, tells him that he too has had the same dream and that he has followed Bran believing that the boy will play an important role in the future. But even during that conversation between two gifted thanks to the old religion, the reversals of roles arise between the women who follow Hodor, Bran and Jojen from behind:

Osha: Isn’t he [Jojen] ashamed, your brother, needing you to protect him?

Meera: Where’s the shame in that?

Osha: Any boy his age who needs his sister to protect him is gonna find himself needing lots of protection.