Zizek – The independent UK

Game of Thrones tapped into fears of revolution and political women – and left us no better off than
before
So justice prevailed – but what kind of justice?
petition (signed by almost 1 million outraged viewers) to disqualify the entire season and re-shoot a
new one. The ferocity of the debate is in itself a proof that the ideological stakes must be high.

One of the few intelligent voices in the debate was that of the author Stephen King who noted that
dissatisfaction was not generated by the bad ending but the fact of the ending itself. In our epoch of
series which in principle could go on indefinitely, the idea of narrative closure becomes intolerable.

Season eight stages three consecutive struggles. The first one is between humanity and its inhuman
“Others” (the Night Army from the North led by the Night King); between the two main groups of
humans (the evil Lannisters and the coalition against them led by Daenerys and Starks); and the
inner conflict between Daenerys and the Starks.
This is why the battles in season eight follow a logical path from an external opposition to the inner
split: the defeat of the inhuman Night Army, the defeat of Lannisters and the destruction of King’s
Landing; the last struggle between the Starks and Daenerys – ultimately between traditional “good”
nobility (Starks) faithfully protecting their subjects from bad tyrants, and Daenerys as a new type of
a strong leader, a kind of progressive bonapartist acting on behalf of the underprivileged.

The stakes in the final conflict are thus: should the revolt against tyranny be just a fight for the
return of the old kinder version of the same hierarchical order, or should it develop into the search
for a new order that is needed?

The finale combines the rejection of a radical change with an old anti-feminist motif at work in
Wagner. For Wagner, there is nothing more disgusting than a woman who intervenes in political life,
driven by the desire for power. In contrast to male ambition, a woman wants power in order to
promote her own narrow family interests or, even worse, her personal caprice, incapable as she is of
perceiving the universal dimension of state politics.
The same femininity which, within the close circle of family life, is the power of protective love,
turns into obscene frenzy when displayed at the level of public and state affairs. Recall the lowest
point in the dialogue of Game of Thrones when Daenerys tells Jon that if he cannot love her as a
queen then fear should reign – the embarrassing, vulgar motif of a sexually unsatisfied woman who
explodes into destructive fury.

But – let’s bite our sour apple now – what about Daenerys’ murderous outbursts? Can the ruthless
killing of the thousands of ordinary people in King’s Landing really be justified as a necessary step
to universal freedom? At this point, we should remember that the scenario was written by two men.

Daenerys as the Mad Queen is strictly a male fantasy, so the critics were right when they pointed
out that her descent into madness was psychologically not justified. The view of Daenerys with
mad-furious expression flying on a dragon and burning houses and people expresses patriarchal
ideology with its fear of a strong political woman.

The final destiny of the leading women in Game of Thrones fits these coordinates. Even if the good
Daenerys wins and destroys the bad Cersei, power corrupts her. Arya (who saved them all by single-
handedly killing the Night King) also disappears, sailing to the West of the West (as if to colonise
America).
The one who remains (as the queen of the autonomous kingdom of the North) is Sansa, a type of
women beloved by today’s capitalism: she combines feminine softness and understanding with a
good dose of intrigue, and thus fully fits the new power relations. This marginalisation of women is
a key moment of the general liberal-conservative lesson of the finale: revolutions have to go wrong,
they bring new tyranny, or, as Jon put it to Daenerys:

“The people who follow you know that you made something impossible happen. Maybe that helps
them believe that you can make other impossible things happen: build a world that’s different from
the shit one they’ve always known. But if you use dragons to melt castles and burn cities, you’re no
different.”
Consequently, Jon kills out of love (saving the cursed woman from herself, as the old male-
chauvinist formula says) the only social agent in the series who really fought for something new, for
a new world that would put an end to old injustices.

So justice prevailed – but what kind of justice? The new king is Bran: crippled, all-knowing, who
wants nothing – with the evocation of the insipid wisdom that the best rulers are those who do not
want power. A dismissive laughter that ensues when one of the new elite proposes a more
democratic selection of the king tells it all.

And one cannot help but note that those faithful to Daenerys to the end are more diverse – her
military commander is black – while the new rulers are clearly white Nordic. The radical queen
who wanted more freedom for everyone irrespective of their social standing and race is eliminated,
things are brought back to normal.