(DON’T read; GoT spoilers ahead.)
To live without hypocrisy.
This line written by Dolores Stephens Feria writing about early Filipina writers came to mind when I was viewing for the nth time one of the YouTube videos featuring the knighting of Ser Brienne of Tarth in the “Game of Thrones” series. I lost count of the times the videos blurred before I finally kicked myself in the head: who in that room was the equal or better of Brienne?
In the honor department: no one, at least in my books or the five published ones written so far by George R. R. Martin in the “A Song of Ice and Fire” series. In the television series, which has outpaced the books, Brienne “finally” receives what she deserves, according to a plot written and directed by men, kneeling before a man invoking a medieval code of honor he has broken beyond count and she has never, and applauded by men who have schemed, deceived, and compromised beyond count.
So why did I binge on the “fireside scene” of episode 2 of season 8? Ah, thanks to being an avid subscriber of the patriarchy, I expect that if the episode writer had set Brienne in a room full of women, I would have felt disoriented: are they knitting the secret weapon to defeat the armies of the undead?
The power of archetypes lies beyond the spinner of tales or the audience. Feria implies in her essay studying women writers who wrote against the tradition of patriarchy controlling not just literature or journalism but human history that the freedom to write and express had to be done within the confines of how women of a certain period were permitted to live out their lives.
It galls to watch Brienne bend her knee in front of a man with two swords and one swordhand—for in a patriarchy, one cannot have too many phallic symbols for conferring and symbolizing power, specially over a woman, positioned in an appropriately submissive position—when in the narrative arc of five books or eight television seasons, this character has never slipped in choosing the path of honor, at great cost to her life or her happiness.
Shouldn’t Brienne be the one patting the shoulders of these men with her Valyrian sword Oathkeeper and exhorting them to keep to the path of honor? Ah, but until that night, she cannot knight because she is not a knight. She is not a knight because she is not a man. She cannot become a man. How can she be a knight?
She can benefit from the generosity of men. Directed to rise, by men.
The archetypes are fixed. That is not just storytelling but tradition.
The acts a woman must do for validation.
Or for love. Amounts to the same thing, yes?