Kissed by fire

‘Kissed by Fire’ is the fifth episode of the third season of HBO’s fantasy television series Game of Thrones, and the 25th episode of the series. The title of the episode refers to the red-haired wildlings, like Ygritte, who are said to be ‘kissed by fire’.

The first stupid scene of the episode is the love scene in a cave between Jon and Ygritte. In real life, a foreigner could never fuck a beautiful woman from a tribe, as the wildlings apparently allowed Jon north of the Wall. However, unlike the crap they filmed in Littlefinger’s brothel in other episodes, the director failed once again in not showing the redhead’s pubic hair, just her breasts and then her buttocks. A pubic hair of the colour of her hair would have lived up to the episode’s title as it’s implied that Jon kisses the redhead there.

But even after making love you can see the feminist follies of the screenwriters. Jon was a virgin and has just popped his cherry. Ygritte, on the other hand, tells him a couple of anecdotes of her sexual adventures from which she apparently didn’t get pregnant (remember that a semi-wild tribe doesn’t practice birth control). Here we see once again the reversal of the sexual roles, especially since in the intimate chat after the kiss of fire Ygritte is over Jon in front of the cameras, both talking lying down.

South of the Wall, before Robb sentenced Lord Karstark to death for having killed two Lannister captives without approval, Karstark tells a great truth to he who had married non-white buttocks: ‘the King who lost the North’. And sure enough: because Robb publicly beheaded him, Karstark’s soldiers abandon Robb, which means that the boy lost almost half his army (in Martin’s novel Robb is younger than the actor we see in the HBO interpretation).

What can be gathered from this story, although it is fictitious, is that a lad-king commits blunders. In A Song of Ice and Fire Martin seems to philosophise around the idea of who should rule, although the moral he arrives at doesn’t appear until the finale that would premiere on television six years after this episode.

Away from the green and rainy Riverrun, in the desert Slaver’s Bay the two seasoned knights who serve as Dany’s advisers have a conversation. Barristan asks: ‘Do you believe in her?’ To which Jorah replies: ‘With all my heart’.

Curiously, this scene follows a very interesting dialogue between Jaime and Brienne, both of whom are naked. (The scene isn’t erotic, as they were cleaning their mud at the baths after Roose Bolton freed them from Locke’s captivity.) Jaime confesses to the naked Valkyrie that King Aerys Targaryen, the father of Dany, had wanted to incinerate King’s Landing in a fit of madness and that Jaime prevented it by killing him. In the previous episode to the finale we’ll see that Dany did in King’s Landing what her father had wanted to do. But this pair of naïve watchdogs of Dany trust the last Targaryen with all their heart.

Although the last two novels of A Song of Ice and Fire are yet to be published, inadvertently to viewers Martin is gradually weaving a platonic fabric, although unlike The Republic he does so in novel format. Fans, even those with exclusive channels on Game of Thrones, never smelled a deeper message than the superficial one of castles and a social justice warrior Targaryen who wants to regain the throne for her House, or the right to the throne of Jon Snow that we shall see a few seasons later. Normies see this series as they see other TV series. I’ve already talked about it when they premiered the grand finale, although I’ll revisit it when we get to that season.