Hello and welcome to another episode of Pop Culture Sociologist! I’m Marina Berlin, I’ve been a professional media and culture critic since 2011, and today I’m going to tell you about the one minor character from Game of Thrones who could have transformed the entire show, and what any of that has to do with women in the real world being written out of history. Or, in other words, I’ll tell you about the one weird trick Game of Thrones could have used to bring the best parts of the original books into the adaptation.
Today we’ll talk about A Song of Ice and Fire book series by George R. R. Martin, and the TV series based on those books, a little known, esoteric show called Game of Thrones. I know the show ran for a long time, and plenty of people have criticized it, especially the way it ended, but what I want to talk about today is a systemic, narrative issue that wasn’t visible until the show ended. I’m going to tell you about everything that I think was truly revolutionary about A Song of Ice and Fire, something the show could have pulled off even in its final season and just never did, and for me it’s the reason the entire thing fell flat.
If you read the books, I hope you’ll enjoy my thoughts about them, and if you haven’t, don’t worry I’ll explain everything as I go.
So, A song of ice and fire is a huge massive work, the books currently have a total of about 4000 pages. There are hundreds if not thousands of characters, families, continents, so much is going on.
I’m sure if you asked fans of the books what their favorite part is, what they think is the most innovative part of those stories, they’d all give you a different answer. So, here’s mine: what I think made those books really interesting and worthwhile, the thing about them that very few other fantasy series were doing, was the way it showed how misogyny worked across generations. How history is rewritten, how extraordinary women are erased, and what a huge impact that makes on future generations.
In a way, it shows us why every generation of women has to feel like they’re creating the revolution, as if it didn’t exist before them. Why people today are surprised or even why they claim it’s anachronistic that women thought they deserved equal rights and freedoms and worked to achieve them before the 19th century. The books demonstrate the social mechanism through which individual or small gains of freedom and equality are deliberately written out of history, and the costs of that.
You may have guessed by now who I’m going to spend a lot of time talking about in this episode: Lyanna Stark, Ned Stark’s sister and the dead aunt of all of the Stark children.
Lyanna haunts the show like a ghost, appearing at various places where she did and didn’t appear in the books, always on the verge of becoming important, but never allowed to actually fulfill the function that she fulfilled in the books.
Alright, let’s back up for a second, so I can give you a little context. I first read the books when I was 19 and they had a huge impact on me. They really transformed my understanding of storytelling, they made me read epic fantasy again after I’d given up on it years earlier. I personally don’t think the series will ever be completed, at least not by George R R Martin.
I hope I’m wrong, but I wanted to let you know where I stand for the purposes of this episode. When I analyze the existing story, I assume that what we have of the books right now is more or less all we’re going to get, and we can and should engage with it, and not wait to make comments or analyze things until it’s finished. In terms of how the show ends things, based on interviews with Martin and the creators, I think the broad strokes of what the show did are roughly where Martin’s story was going, even if the show took enormous shortcuts to get there.
I could talk about a lot of really interesting things these books do. Maybe because I hadn’t read a lot of epic fantasy, they felt to me to be in direct conversation with Tolkien’s LOTR. Ned Stark was so clearly a parody of Aragorn, the one decent, honorable man who was in fact a massive idiot, who let his pride and privilege blind him to the political realities more marginalized and less fortunate people had no choice but to see. I loved how much the books deconstructed the idea of the noble knight in fantasy, with a pure heart and noble intention. Ned Stark makes SO many dumb decisions in the first book that a savvier man would have avoided, and his good intentions and rightness for the throne mean nothing.
I also loved how much Brianne in the books was a play on Eowyn. Where Eowyn’s life was basically unaffected by her desire to go to war, meaning she still lived a very comfortable life, was adored and admired by people around her, Brianne showed a more realistic version of what going against the entire massive weight of patriarchy meant, what a heavy heavy price it extracted, and how absolutely hell bent you had to be on the one thing you want to achieve to give up on everything else and deal with the kind of ridicule and disrespect and abuse that Brianne deals with.
I also love Littlefinger and how he’s a play on Grima Wormtongue, a character who’s the ultimate villain in LOTR but in A Song of Ice and Fire represents all the skills one needs to survive in the world. In LOTR the clever, selfish, political manipulator who whispers in the king’s ear must be rooted out for the kingdom to flourish, while in A Song of Ice and Fire Littlefinger, at least in the version we get in the books, is the reason the kingdom even functions. It’s everyone else around him who are disasters ruining the realm.
I find all of these to be really interesting aspects of the books, and honestly I could wax poetic about most of the characters and how interesting their stories are, to me, even all these years later.
But there’s one story that really stands out as something that epic fantasy so, so, so rarely deals with and that A Song of Ice and Fire handles really well, and that’s the portrayal of generational oppression, through the character of Lyanna Stark.
So, for those who haven’t read or might not remember the books well enough, Lyanna Stark is the sister of Ned, Brandon and Benjen Stark. What we know of Lyanna in the books is revealed to us slowly, in bits and pieces, through the perspectives of different characters, and is thus a kind of puzzle the readers are invited to put together themselves.
So, we know that as a girl Lyanna wanted to learn sword fighting, that she was good at riding a horse, and that she was generally interested in things boys were meant to be interested in, rather than girls.
I’ll pause here and say that A Song of Ice and Fire is a fictional, fantasy universe with its own rules, not something that’s reflective of the Middle Ages in our reality, or any other period. For example, if A Song of Ice and Fire was more historically accurate, it would have many more female characters, as the percentage of girls to boys born in the noble families of Westeros is extremely skewed in favor of boys. There would be consequences for having a major war during what should be the primary harvesting season of an agrarian society that we just don’t see in the books. I could go on, but let’s just remember this is a fantasy series, the rules of the world work the way they do because the author chose for those rules to exist, not because any kind of historical reality dictated it.
So, Lyanna is interested in boy things, which in this world means weapons, riding horses, and basically doing the sorts of things knights do, including participating in tournaments for sport. It’s heavily hinted to us that Lyanna’s father was very accommodating and lenient with her education. As the head of the household, he could have forbidden her from learning any of those things, but he didn’t. He allowed and perhaps even encouraged her to pursue her interests.
In this way, Lyanna’s father was a kind of rulebreaker, an enlightened innovator who was acting against patriarchy by letting his daughter acquire skills she wasn’t supposed to have. It went so far that it’s hinted to us that Lyanna was a very skilled knight, as an adult, and even participated in tournaments and did very well in them, of course without revealing her true identity.
When Lyanna was old enough, she was betrothed to one of her brother’s friends, another nobleman, Robert Baratheon. She wasn’t very thrilled by this pairing, but it was considered an appropriate match.
Secretly, Lyanna had an affair with a married man – crown prince Rhaegar, who was also in a political marriage that was a crucial alliance for his family, and at that time already had 2 children.
One day, Lyanna’s family finds out that Lyanna has disappeared, abducted by the crown prince. We don’t know this for certain, but I think it’s reasonable to assume that Lyanna’s father at least knows that Lyanna has basically run off with her boyfriend, and while this is a disaster, it’s more about Lyanna being young and foolish and in love, and the prince being irresponsible and selfish, than about Lyanna being dragged somewhere by force.
Lyanna’s older brother immediately goes to the king and demands that the crown prince return his sister, and also that the prince is punished for kidnapping a noblewoman, especially one who’s already promised to a fiance.
The king, unfortunately, isn’t of very sound mind, and instead of granting this request he imprisons Lyanna’s brother. This prompts Lyanna’s dad to come up to the capital and try to sort this all out. At which point the king has both Lyanna’s father and older brother killed publicly.
This is essentially the start of a civil war that changes the face of the country for generations, and brings up a long period of instability. Robert, Lyanna’s fiance, leads a rebellion that successfully ends a dynasty of hundreds of years.
At the end of the war, Lyanna’s brother Ned Stark finally manages to find her. At this point the crown prince is dead, Ned’s father and older brother is dead, and when he finds Lyanna she’s dying too. In the books we get very little information on this scene, but we know the room Ned finds her in is covered in blood, and that she demands that Ned promise her something – presumably to protect the baby she just had.
Lyanna dies, and Ned is left the only person alive who knew the truth of her life. Technically Ned and Lyanna have a younger brother who survives, but he was much younger than the other siblings and it makes sense that he wasn’t privy what really went on.
But Ned knows the truth – that Lyanna was allowed to do things girls weren’t supposed to do, that she was clever, that she knew how to defend herself, and that she was in love with a man and ran away with him, by her own choice. That Lyanna chose to sleep with the prince and then had his baby.
That’s the truth of the war, that Ned Stark keeps secret. You might say he does it to protect Lyanna and Rhaegar’s son Jon, but the question of Lyanna’s consent in her relationship with Rhaegar is irrelevant to protecting Jon. Whether Lyanna was kidnapped or eloped with her lover, Jon could be her son either way.
And yet, Ned doesn’t tell his wife Catelyn, who he loves and trusts completely, and who would never share a compromising secret that could damage their family, that Lyanna was not abducted by Rhaegar but went with him willingly. He similarly doesn’t tell his daughters, Sansa and Arya, that their aunt wasn’t abducted and raped, even though it might comfort them to know it and wouldn’t reveal anything about Jon’s parentage. The only reason Ned has of hiding the truth about Lyanna, then, is cultural misogyny.
Lyanna’s love life was tied to her family’s honor and status, so to admit that Lyanna had an affair with a married man and a child out of wedlock was inconceivable for the Starks, which is why Ned continues to keep it secret for his entire life.
Perhaps the difference here is best illustrated through the fact that Ned himself does the exact thing Lyanna does. He claims to have had an extramarital affair during the war, he claims he then had a child as a result of that affair, while already married to Catelyn.
But for Ned, this is an inconvenience, a blemish on his record, soemthing people tease him about, something that creates tension in his relationship with his wife. It’s not something that ruins his reputation, or destroys his family. Even when Ned raises his bastard son alongside his other children, it’s still seen as broadly acceptable.
So, the truth of the war is this: misogyny and patriarchy killed Lyanna. If Lyanna could be open and honest about having an affair with her father and brothers, if her family didn’t think admitting that Lyanna ran off with a boyfriend was the end of the world, the war wouldn’t have happened. Lyanna would have made an embarrassing youthful mistake, like Ned did, or perhaps even become the new crown princess, and things would have ended there.
So, let’s talk about how all of this affects other characters in this world. Probably the most obvious example here is Arya, Ned Stark’s youngest daughter.
Arya, like Lyanna, is interested in swordfighting, in having adventures, and things that are considered “for boys” in this world. She’s not interested in having an arranged marriage to the nobleman with the highest status, or running a noble house one day.
From Arya’s perspective, she has the most extraordinary father, who lets her study these things, pursue these interests, but ultimately does expect her to grow up eventually and marry the right kind of man and have children and so on.
All Arya knows of her aunt Lyanna is that she was chaste and pure and young and she was abducted by an evil prince and then killed by him. Ned kind of hints to Arya that something about her reminds him of Lyanna, but he never really elaborates. But of course, Arya’s life is following the same pattern as Lyanna’s. Ned saw his own father do this with Lyana, allow her her interests, let her study whatever she wanted, be her full self, and then expect her to marry Robert and have a “normal” life. And that’s exactly what Ned is doing with Arya.
You’d think Ned would be more careful considering how things ended for Lyanna, but I guess you can’t predict a civil war happening twice.
The interesting thing here is that if Arya knew the truth about Lyanna, she probably wouldn’t be so grateful to her father. She might feel like her father should go even further, learn from Lyanna’s example, give Arya even more tools to live a different sort of life. But because Arya is ignorant of the truth she feels unique, special, the first girl she knows of whose father was so kind and generous and let her be who she is.
I can talk about Lyanna’s influence on the other characters on two levels, the immediate, practical level, and the more psychological or philosophical level, but any way you slice it, Lyanna’s story affects every single major character in A Song of Ice and Fire and in Game of Thrones.
On the immediate, practical level, every character we know was deeply affected by the civil war that Lyanna’s disappearance ignited. And for all of these characters, the war was based on a lie.
Consider Jaime and Cersei, who in the books were teenagers when the war happened and were deeply scarred by its consequences. Consider Robert, who ended up becoming a pretty terrible king. Consider Daenerys who lost her entire family and ended up being raised in exile by her abusive brother.
All of these characters owe their heaviest burdens in life to the lie about who Lyanna was and what she chose to do.
But that’s just the most immediately, physical level.
If we look at the psychological or philosophical level, Lyanna is central to life in Westeros. She’s a myth, a cautionary tale, the justification for a new world order. And yet, even though Lyanna had the extraordinary fortune to have a father who supported her in pursuing typically masculine hobbies and interests, even though Lyanna made her own choice about who to love and who to sleep with, all the women we meet in the story are certain nothing like that has ever happened to anyone before.
None of these women have a model for a single important woman who wasn’t traditionally feminine. Because the books take us inside the heads of these characters, we get an intimate portrait of how this works.
If Arya doesn’t realize she’s not the first or only girl even in her own family to be interested in the things she’s interested in, then Sansa, who loves sewing and romance and does aspire to be a wife and a mother, has no model for a woman doing that on her own terms, and not within the restrictions set for her by society. Sansa doesn’t think there’s any other way to BE other than the way she was raised.
If we look at Cersei, someone who was very ambitious from an early age and who wanted to be taken seriously by her father, she doesn’t know what that would even look like. She has to reinvent the wheel, carve out a place for herself while feeling like no one has ever done it before. If we look at Daenerys, again she has no model for a woman who came before her and who wanted to do things her own way, who chose her own lover, for a woman who did things men were not supposed to do.
Which is amazing, considering all of these women know Lyanna’s story extremely well. They all grew up hearing about her, and yet everything they’ve heard affirms the social status quo and hides the truth of Lyanna’s life. And of course, with all of them there were other circumstances that affected how they viewed themselves and the world – Sansa’s parents understood the world to be more complex than their daughters believed, cersei in the books had an aunt who could have been more involved in raising her, but ultimately there’s power in the people we know and power in the myths we grow up on. And Lyanna was the ultimate myth that impacted the way women in this world saw themselves.
Consider the vast difference between saying – I’m the first person who’s ever been like this, the first person to want the things I want, the first to create this kind of bath. And between saying – there have been people who’ve done this before me, but they’ve failed. I’ll learn from their mistakes, see where they went wrong and try to do things differently.
The reason this aspect of things is my favorite thing about A Song of Ice and Fire is that I think it’s both really unusual in the landscape of epic fantasy to show these kind of multigenerational dynamics of how social oppression works, of how even extraordinary women are written out of history, show the intimate, psychological effects of it, because of the way the books give us deep dives into each characters’ thoughts.
I’m going to give you a real world example to demonstrate why I think Lyanna’s story is so cool.
If I ask you to name famous artists of the Italian renaissance you might come up with a few names – which may or not be the names of famous ninja turtles – like raphael, michelangelo, da vinci. If you’re interested in that period of history, or art, or if you’ve been dragged through various european museums on guided tours as a kid like I was, you might know a few more names. Botticelli, Titian. But unless you have a huge interest in this field, or a degree in art history, you’ll probably not be able to name a single woman painter or sculptor from that period off the top of your head.
Which makes sense! The renaissance was about 500 years ago, women could barely own property or have a trade, universities didn’t admit them.
You might think to yourself, well, maybe here and there, on the fringes, some women were able to become professional artists. Maybe they painted in disguise or signed their work with men’s names. Maybe a few of them managed to get the proper training and apprenticeship, maybe through their fathers or brothers or something like that.
And maybe there were women painters or sculptors, but they were fringe artists, they couldn’t secure contracts, and weren’t allowed to become true masters of the craft. And even those that were very good, and managed to get training, and commissions, were probably never acknowledged in their own time.
But in reality, in the 16th century we have what is essentially the first non-fiction book about art history in Italy. It’s called “Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects”, and it has biographies of the most famous, most celebrated, most notable artists of that period. It covers Raphael, michelangelo, da vinci, and dozens of others. It also includes 4 women.
We have a text, from the 16th century, that’s widely available today, in which 4 women are recognized as extraordinary, celebrated, iconic artists of the period.
I’ve written a post with more information, including the names of these women, if you’d like to know more about them, the link is in the episode description.
And yet, today when we think of 16th century Italy, most of us think – well, there just weren’t women back then who could attain that level, whether because they weren’t good enough or because society wouldn’t acknowledge them. It’s only in the last 100 years, when we have voting rights and university degrees and financial freedom that women can truly become great artists who are celebrated.
So, even when women manage to be extraordinary, even when they have supportive men around them who help them, train them, promote them, even when they manage to break every ceiling and become so notable and amazing they can’t not be included to a survey of the greats, even then, within a few generations they will disappear from public memory and women artists will feel like they have to create something entirely new to be who they are.
I’ve described an example from art history, but really I could use a similar example from almost any field. Even when women are extraordinary, their history is rewritten, so the women who come after them don’t have any models, any history to build on. So each of us feels she’s the first of her kind.
And that’s exactly the mechanism Lyanna’s life and death exemplifies and so intimately portrays, on the fringes and in the backbone of A Song of Ice and Fire.
In conclusion, Lyanna is at once present in Game of Thrones, and we get most of the scenes we have with her from the books, but somehow it just never comes together.
On the show, We get the version of Lyanna that the books try to subvert. We see Lyanna as a girl riding her horse, we see her happy when she married Rhaegar, and then we get an extended scene of her dying, much more graphic and prolonged than what we get in the books, which emphasizes her frailty and weakness.
If the books present Lyanna’s journey from victim to someone who was actually in control of her life, and consciously made the choices that eventually led to her death, Game of Thrones never lets Lyanna be anything but the ultimate victim. Instead of being left with thoughts about the cultural misogyny that led Lyanna’s death, in the end we’re left mostly with the tragedy of her dying while giving birth, and a sense that her death was just a tragic accident of fate.
Lyanna is at the core of the world of Westeros, where every girl grows up knowing the current state of things started with a woman being kidnapped and raped by a powerful man, when that story isn’t true. There is no rape at the core of the Westerosi social order, instead there’s a story about how powerful people wouldn’t allow a woman to be herself openly, so she had to hide, and do everything in secret.
In a way, the show echoes the process we see happening in the real world, like in the example about artists during the renaissance. A Song of Ice and Fire was a book series that did really well, and had a large audience, but when it was adapted into an even more popular medium, and its audience grew enormously, the version we got toned down and erased the critic of structural, historical misogyny, and replaced it with personal tragedy. So, even when these stories about women get told and succeed, they’re slowly stripped of their subversive edge over time.
I know there are a lot of problems with Game of Thrones, but for me, this core issue, more than any particular character or plot point, is the vital thing you have to carry over into an adaptation, or the entire story just falls completely flat. Without Lyanna’s full impact, the entire point of telling a vast, multigenerational story is lost. Her short life reverberates across generations and continents, it sets the tone of a culture, It affects almost every character, and it’s pitch perfect, slowly unraveling social critique.
The show never uses Lyanna for her most powerful, most important purpose, as a symbol of the misogyny that’s at the heart of what’s wrong with Westeros. Lyanna is a cautionary tale because her life shows that controlling women’s romantic and sexual lives leads to avoidable civil wars.
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You can subscribe to Pop Culture Sociologist on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and every other platform, and if you want to talk to me about the episode I’m on twitter at berlin_marina or popsocpodcast. In addition to being a media critic I’m also a published author and poet of science fiction and fantasy, so if you’re interested in that you can read about it on my website, marinaberlin.org. Thank you for listening, thank you for letting me tell you my thoughts, I’m Marina Berlin and I’ll see you on the next episode of Pop Culture Sociologist.