#watch her get slaughtered by their games but she refuses to make a spectacle she refuses to fight back and maybe there are a few people who

[lvebug]

guys i lied yesterday i actually have so so many thoughts about hunger games andie bite chomp

[danyllura]

Be cautious child, the Queens are at war.

Word Count: 1791

Chapters: 1/1

Relationship: Sansa Stark/Daenerys Targaryen

Fandoms: Game of Thrones

Notes: Implied death/sexual content

They are deranged, sick, twisted; they are out to destroy the world. They fight, fuck, then forgive; they are out to ruin one another.

Read on Ao3

Together they are unstoppable. A marriage between darkness and devastation that sways together in a unified dance. Weaving across the floor in a flurry of steps and twirls, uncaring of the blood and bone that lingers behind them.

They are a storm of chaos, an immovable object and an unstoppable force. Wreaking havoc with not a lick of consideration for those unfortunate enough to land themselves beneath their feet.

The Mad Queen and her Cruel Lady. The Dragon and the Wolf. Fire and Ice. They had many names and even more tales of their endeavours- all sealed within history, a future story to frighten daughters into obedience for fear of becoming heartless creatures.

Both of them had once been good people, kind, just, honourable; women that had been beloved. But they were beaten down- again and again- disrespected and undermined until that virtue that had once had the strength to brighten a room, flickered into darkness.

All that pain, and cruelty, and misery- it couldn't have been expected for their innocence to have endured, for their kindness to remain unfailing.

They took the seven kingdoms with fire and blood- they took it with the wrath of a never-ending winter storm.

A lover-turned-kin burned, a burst of flames under the eye of a sister-turned-cousin; was all it took. A simple command to an attentive beast and their only threat died encompassed by fire and calling for their mercy.

They were Queens of the ashes, the monsters who had won.

The Mad Queen and her Cruel Lady. The Dragon and the Wolf. Fire and Ice. Targaryen and Stark. Daenerys and Sansa.

A girl with a heart shrivelled and burnt from the blaze of betrayal. The other with a heart hard and frozen from the cold of loneliness. Kissed by ice and fire.

It is Daenerys violet eyes filled with venom like that of a serpent and her burning touch that makes Sansa weak. She’s suffocated in those eyes and melted at that touch more times then she can count. Those moments she is weak, she will beg and whine like a spoiled little lady, and then mewl and smile when she gets her way. After she always resents it, behaving like a fool too desperate to restrain herself, but the thought of never experiencing the sensation of pleasure at Daenerys call is a thought far more repulsing to her.

It is Sansa's auburn hair that trails down her head like a river of blood and her chilled touch that can bring Daenerys to her knees. She’s drowned in the red of the blood and has trembled at her touch in the darkness of their chambers more than once. Sometimes she wonders if it’s killing her, for nothing good as ever come to her without consequence. The risk is one she is prepared to take, for death is a price worth every penny, if not just for another taste of Sansa.

Lips crashing together bites dirtying their body’s and scratches marking their backs. They are out to destroy one another to consume the others mind body and soul. But it is a losing battle.

The muffled screams and whimpers are not cries of victory.

They are destroying one another all the while losing themselves in the process.

Rebellion is futile- you cannot kill chaos. Destruction cannot be slain. They rule without question- on their own grounds, it would take a madman or just an idiot to challenge that.

They test each other though. Quarrels that sizzle with tension and leave the court clutching those closest to them in despair, as they pray to the old gods and the new that they live to see another day. Their battles send the keep into silence as the people wait with bated breath for an eruption to rip them from their beds or for the Keep to once again be engulfed by flames.

The clashes between them never end in an explosion, never result in their palace crumbling. It brings them to their chambers- in a flurry of ripped clothes and loosened braids.

They are toxic, a lethal poison that is slowly killing them both. Sansa may have once referred to the toxin as love but she is no longer the stupid little girl that believed in songs. They continue this way for what seems like forever; executions, disputes, tangled sheets. It becomes a cycle that they cannot break- a routine as reliable as the rising of the sun.

Some days Sansa wonders if this will kill her- if Daenerys will ruin her- and most days she doesn’t have an answer. This doesn’t change anything- for she is destroying Daenerys in turn, and they are destined to share their deathbed.

Occasionally their fights linger- even after they’d lost themselves to the sensation of the other's skin- the piercing words from earlier can still be felt profoundly cut into the skin.

Daenerys is like wildfire after those fights. Irritable, uncontrollable and utterly crazed. Anything has the potential to set the Mad Queen off and the palace knows to stifle their coughs and not to shuffle in the halls.

A squire, no older than eight, had once stumbled during a court session and a coin had escaped his pocket- it hit the floor with a soft ting no harsher than a whisper- but deafening throughout the throne room.

He hadn’t even managed to sputter out an apology and beg for forgiveness before a guard had been ordered to silence him for good.

The Dragon Queen was easy to anger and wore her wrath like a fine string of pearls- displayed proudly on her breast for all to see. In comparison her beloved she-wolf kept her fury tucked neatly within her pocket like a handkerchief, hidden from view.

Her demeanour was as cold as the land she hailed from and her mask of indifference rested on her face securely- as steady and unbreakable as the wall had once been.

The thing about the she-wolf was she was just as quickly angered- just as likely to be consumed by rage at the wrong move, no matter how minor. Where Daenerys would call the guards and end it before it barely began- Sansa would wait.

A smile, sweet and sickly that did not reach her eyes. A tilt of the head and the thrumming of her claws against her seat. Those were the warning signs and when she spoke light and melodic almost lyrical- your fate was sealed.

“You are excused, sir.” Or an “I must retire my lady”

And they would be dead by morning. Often it was poison, seldom a proper execution. Many tried to escape, or to plea- but it always ended the same. The sun rising to the shuffle of guards removing a body. It was unclear if she too were mad like her lover, but her calculating gaze and controlled actions were too logical to call her entirely unhinged.

Dragons and wolves were not creatures to trifle with.

The tenth body in a sennight was carried through the servants quarters as the Kingswood was scorched with dragon fire. The Dragon and the Wolf had been at each other’s throats once again- neither willing to yield as the screams from their chambers ceased as Lady Stark refused to warm her Queens bed.

It had been a battle of words and tongue lashings at every meeting. Shouts of rage and spiteful silence that came to its climax when their hands wrapped around each other's throats within the throne room. Amongst the nobility and the members of the court, they strived to finally consume one another. For a fleeting moment, it had seemed as though they would kill each other- hold the other tightly until breath escaped them both and sent them tumbling down the steps of the throne and landing at the feet of the Lords and Ladies who fearfully watched the spectacle.

They growl and hiss, nails breaking the skin and leaving bruises. The air had crackled with electricity, the tension was suffocating. For a moment it seems another mad ruler is to turn purple and suffocate- this time accompanied by her cunning bride.

As quickly as it began it is over. Releasing one another they gasp for breath, easing the stiffness of their hands with the cracking of their knuckles. The court is dismissed and the Dragon and the Wolf are left to finish their battle.

It was a dance of sort, they circle one another- eyes locked with the promise of destruction. Teeth bared- they really do resemble monsters- like dragons and dire wolves. They howl and roar in turn and future tales would recount how the Queen and her Lady morphed into monstrous renditions of their houses sigils.

It’s a whirlwind of skirts and skin as they collide on the battlefield.

Like any battle, blood is shed and cries are let out. The blood comes from scratches and bites, and the screams- almost animalistic- come from pleasure. On the very floor of the throne room where they’d slaughtered so many- they destroy each other with the movements of their skin against one another and the collision of their lips. It’s violent and determined. They are out to consume one another.

They belong to one another and are doomed to die together. It’s a sweet poison- but it is not love.

The Red Keep burns and the court is left a pile of ash by the time the sun rises the next day. The common people rush for shelter and seek refuge in their homes- for the Queens are at war. And whether that war shall rage beyond the Red Keep has yet to be decided- but the burn marks that litter Kingslanding from flea bottom to the burning castle had not faded, and the people know to hide.

They watch the fires from the Blackwater, savouring the breeze. The wind is chilly and is refreshing against the heat radiating off the blazing keep. They stand together on one of the few ships left in the Targaryen fleet, a modest vessel that once carried less influential nobles who did not have the ranking to spend the journey on the Queen's voyager. The sea is the only noise above the loud crackles emitted from the burning castle. They say nothing as their hands intertwine, an apology, for they come to forgive each other once again. A new court will need to be created and the keep will need heavy repairs once again- but those are trivial matters. The Mad Queen and her Cruel Lady have reconciled and blood on their hands will not be what keeps them up at night. Ash rains down and like a Phoenix they are reborn, returning to routine- awaiting their next battle.

[nonameinanytongue]

The Flower & the Serpent: The Violent Women of Game of Thrones

“Here's the smell of the blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. Oh, oh, oh!”

-Lady Macbeth, Macbeth, Act V, Scene I

DC’s Wonder Woman opened this summer to critical acclaim. Pop culture outlets made much of its empowered protagonist and progressive themes, lauding everything from its feminist fight scenes to Wonder Woman’s thigh jiggle. In approaching the first superhero flick of the modern big-budget tentpole era both helmed by and starring a woman with such intense and specific scrutiny, much is overlooked and more repurposed to suit a flexible, almost reactive set of ideals held by fans and critics alike. If a woman does something in art that shows her to be powerful, it is interpreted as inherently feminist no matter its context in the work of art or the world beyond.

Perhaps in a world where women, homosexuals, and transsexuals lobby vigorously for the right to serve in active combat zones a conflation of ability to do violence and the possession of feminist power is understandable. Surely there are many women who, for reasons understandable or awful, crave invincible bodies and the power and grace to crush the people who hurt them. Many more are happy to acclaim any media in which a woman emerges victorious as another mile marker driven into the roadside on the highway of equality. Especially beloved are movies, shows, comics, and novels in which such victories are portrayed as straightforwardly virtuous and good. 

Think of Sansa Stark condemning her rapist and tormentor, Ramsay Bolton, to a grisly death at the jaws of his own hounds. How many fans and critics expressed unbridled joy at that, as though Sansa had won some kind of symbolic victory for all women? Her sister Arya’s rampage, which has taken her across the Narrow Sea and back again and claimed the lives of dozens, has likewise been applauded as a meaningful triumph in the way we tell women’s stories. For the record, I think both of these plots are intensely compelling and reveal volumes both about the characters themselves and the world they inhabit. Game of Thrones is a show nearly singular in its refusal to make violence joyous or cathartic, no matter the whoops and cheers of many of its fans.

Still, no matter how many times the show delivers searing anti-war images or explores the corrosive influence of violence on those who commit it, viewers remain hungry for the spectacle of women overpowering their enemies and turning back on them the weapons of their own oppression. In a culture where Redpill misogynists hold elected office and our president is a serial rapist, a desire to see women take power with a dash of fire and blood feels all too understandable, but celebrating the destruction of their personalities and lives is a reductive way to understand their stories.

In order to understand what Game of Thrones has to say about violent women, it’s necessary to set aside the thrill that seeing them materially ascendant brings and focus on the images, words, and larger context of the show’s particular examples. Where films like Wonder Woman thrive by repurposing a complex and horrifying conflict (World War I in the first film, the Cold War in the upcoming second) into a heroic battle between good and evil, Game of Thrones, rooted in a genre where conflict is often artificially cleansed of moral ambiguity through devices like entire species of evil-doers, makes no attempt to sand the edges off of its depictions of war or violence. 

Nearly every woman on the show, with the possible exceptions of Gilly and Myrcella, are directly involved in war, torture, and many other forms of brutality. From Catelyn and Lysa’s ugly mess of a trial for Tyrion, an act they surely must have known would cost many smallfolk their lives once Tywin Lannister caught wind of it, to Ygritte fighting to save her people by sticking the innocent farmers in the shadow of the Wall full of arrows, the actions of women with power both physical and political are shown to bear fruit just as ugly as any their husbands, sons, and brothers can cultivate. There’s an uncomfortable truth lurking there, an admission that some modes of action and ways of being may not intersect meaningfully with many of modern feminism’s tenets.

In this essay I will dissect scenes and story to illustrate the show’s deeply antipathetic stance on violence and the ways in which it is misunderstood both by those who enjoy the show and by those who detest it or object to it.

I. ARYA

If a man is getting his eyes stabbed out by a child he intended to beat and rape, does the child’s gender matter when determining what the scene is meant to convey? Is it somehow triumphant for a girl to do that to another living person, no matter how repugnant he might be? Isn’t it possible that what the scene communicates is not that Arya’s slow transformation into a butcher with scant regard for human life is something we ought to cheer for but that the fact she couldn’t survive in Westeros or Essos as anything else, much less as a little girl, is deeply sad?

Arya’s crimes nearly always echo those of her tormentors. Think of the first person she kills, a stable boy, not so different in age or appearance from her erstwhile playmate, Mycah, who was slaughtered by the Hound a bare few months before. Or else consider Polliver, the Lannister soldier who murdered her friend Lommy and whose own mocking words she spits back at him as she plunges her sword up through his jaw. More recently, her wholesale slaughter of House Frey recalls with a visual exactitude which can be nothing but intentional the massacre of her own family and their allies at the Red Wedding. In this last instance she literally dons their murderer’s skin in order to exact her revenge, pressing Walder Frey’s face against her own in an act that feels uncomfortably more like embodiment than disguise.

Arya’s long journey through peril and terror has hardened her, but there’s little reason to rejoice in her hard-won powers of stealth and bloodletting. Who, after all, does she resemble with her obsession over old scores and her penchant for cruelly ironic punishments if not the subject of this essay’s next section.

II. CERSEI

Cersei Lannister,  is distinguished from a hundred other interchangeable evil queens by the attention devoted to her own suffering. Sold by her father to a man who beat and raped her, denied the glory heaped on her twin by sole dint of her gender, humiliated and terrorized by the despicable son whose monstrosity she nurtured, and finally stripped, shaven, and marched barefoot through jeering crowds after being tortured for weeks or months in the dungeons of the church she armed and enabled, Cersei’s brutality serves only to deepen her misery and isolation.  

The aforementioned tyranny of the High Sparrow she put in power, the murder of her monstrous son by her political rivals after she groomed him to be the beast he was, her conflicted and good-hearted younger son’s suicide after his mother’s revenge on the High Sparrow and the Tyrells broke his spirit; Cersei’s litany of victories reads a lot like a list of agonizing losses when you look at it sidelong. Certainly her grasping, vindictive reign has brought her no joy. It’s true that audiences are expected to see Cersei as a horrible human being, which she is, but the time the show spends on giving viewers a chance to empathize with this badly damaged person trying to throttle happiness and security out of a recalcitrant world argues for a more complex interpretation of her character. Watching her need to dominate rip her family and sanity apart, ushering all three of her children into early graves, transforms her from a straightforward villain to a troubled and tragic figure.

III. DAENERYS

Sold into slavery after a life on the run with her unstable and abusive brother and raped on her wedding night by a foreign warlord, Daenerys’s relationship to violence after her ascent to power is complex and heavily ideological. Her crusade to end slavery, motivated as much or more by strength of character and an innate sense of justice than it is by personal suffering and an impulse toward vengeance, has engendered sweeping changes throughout Essos, but at times it has taken on shades of the ostentatiously symbolic punishments for which her family name is famous. The crucifixion of the Masters is a particularly gratuitous example as Daenerys allows her desire to change the world and her need to feel good about the justice she doles out combine to produce a dreadful and inhumane outcome.

This act of performative brutality finds its echo in the rogue execution of a Son of the Harpy, imprisoned and awaiting trial, by Daenerys’s fervent supporter Mossador. Dany may claim that she is not above the law when Mossador confronts her, but when butchery without trial suited her she was quick to embrace it. Her case is uniquely complicated by her enemy: the slavers. Nothing excuses violence like a civilization of rapists and flesh-peddlers beating and maiming their human chattel onscreen, and there is powerful catharsis in seeing their corrupt works shredded and their hateful and exploitative lives snuffed out, but in making them suffer and in choosing the easy way out through orgiastic episodes of violence, Dany betrays her own unwillingness to do the hard work of reform. In many ways, her long stay in Meereen functions as the tragic story of her decision to embrace the grandiose violence her ancestors partook of so freely. We may feel good watching her triumph over evil, but we’re reminded frequently of the horrors and miseries of her reign.

IV. BRIENNE

Brienne’s pursuit of knighthood and adherence to its practices and code is no warrior-girl fantasy about a scabby-kneed tomboy learning to swordfight. Trapped in a body unsuited to courtly life, mocked by suitors and competitors alike, and yearning for the right to live by the sword as men do, Brienne finds challenging refuge in a way of life intimately associated with violent acts. From her butchery of the guards in Renly’s tent to her honor-bound execution of her one-time king’s brother in a snowy forest, Brienne’s path has frequently led her into mortal conflict.

At the climax of Wonder Woman, Diana kills a super-powered caricature of historical figure General Erich Ludendorff, a character who seems to exist solely to uncomplicate the moral landscape of World War I. A few minutes later she kills the man behind the man, her divine uncle Ares, and breaks his grasp on the people of war-torn Europe. The presentation of the act of killing as a triumph for human morality strips away much of what violent media can offer. Contrast Brienne’s desperate fight with three Stark soldiers as she attempts to spirit Jaime Lannister to safety on Catelyn’s orders. Screaming with every blow and leaving her opponents hacked to pieces, Brienne succeeds in her mission at an obvious human cost. Men, despicable men but men nonetheless, are dead. She and Catelyn are now in open rebellion against Robb’s authority. 

To kill is to sever a life and give birth to a living, growing tree of consequences. To explore it instead as a tidy way to resolve problems and make the world a better place is to misrepresent its essential nature. You can’t improve the world through butchery. You can’t heal by harming. What violence in media is meant to teach us is a capacity for empathy, a reflexive understanding that all people are as fully and completely human as ourselves. Loathsome or virtuous, kind or cruel, no human suffering should be a comfortable or affirming thing to witness. (The Republican Party’s elected officials and pundit corps certainly makes a strong case for an exception to this rule).

One might charitably assume that lionization of violent women and their specific acts of violence stems from a place of vulnerability, a desire to balance the scales and erase the danger and aggression with which almost all women must live on a daily basis. I would argue that while this may hold true in part, a deeper truth is that many people have not been taught to feel pain for others in a way that allows for true emotional vulnerability or complex feelings about morally ugly and confusing actions. It’s easier to cheer when the guy we hate gets his than it is feel sorrow for the former innocent who dished out justice, or empathy for the deceased whose life must surely have held its own miseries and secret hurts. 

Audiences would be well-served by taking a moment to step back from their reactions to violence in media and attempting to interpret what message the art is trying to convey. Is the violence slickly produced and bloodless, a parade of cool moments and heroic victories? Or is it focused on the humanity of victims and perpetrators and the cost of their actions? What is the camera telling us? The colors? The editing? Are we meant to agree with King Theoden’s speech about the glories of war in Return of the King when the very next cut brings us into the hellish, pointless confusion of the taking of Osgiliath? Are we meant to be happy when Sansa smiles at Ramsay’s death when the very last thing he told her was that she would carry him, his essence, with her forever? 

The most transcendent joy art brings is the opportunity to reach out of your own beliefs and feelings and into someone else’s dreaming mind, to parse the language of symbols and ideas with which they have addressed the world and make in the negative space between your consciousness and theirs a new understanding. Learn to relish the complex and sometimes hideous nature of humanity over the easy thrills and cheap moral lessons of crowd-pleasers made by billionaires. Understand that art that makes you uncomfortable could be helping you grow. 

A woman’s actions are not laudable just because she’s a woman, or just because she’s been wronged. In our rush to associate the violent triumph of women over the men who’ve hurt them with personal strength, healing, justice, and praiseworthiness we ignore what shows like Game of Thrones are saying in favor of what we want to hear. Violence should never be easy, and violence that assures us, or that we think assures us we’re good and rooting for the right people should always be suspect. 

In labeling anything that pleases us, that satisfies our own hunger for justice and supremacy “feminist,” we forget that feminism is first and foremost an attempt to remake the world. The structure of things as they are is brutish and oppressive, and to cry tears of joy as women, even fictional women, fall prey to the allure of those same structures is to fundamentally misunderstand the point of a life-or-death struggle in which at this moment in history we are perilously engaged. As assaults on our tattered reproductive rights continue, as women struggling with addiction, illness, and homelessness are thrown into prison en masse, as our political leaders openly contemplate sentencing the most vulnerable among us to death in order to pay off the corporate elite and the Left (justifiably, in my opinion) contemplates and utilizes resistance through force on a scale unheard of in this millennium in our country’s history, learning to see violence for what it is has become more imperative than ever before.