Grinding My Gears: GoT has an issue with female characters

Daenerys. Brienne. Cersei. Three major characters with different backgrounds and different perspectives, but all defined by the same thing: they are women.

 To be clear; I like Game of Thrones, both the books and the TV show (although in the interest of the audience I will only be discussing the TV series, don't read anything if you're not completely up to date though, spoilers may be discussed) but both seem to have an issue writing for female characters, with the exception of only a few.

Take Daenerys as an example; she's undoubtedly strong, willful and capable, however despite being, or desiring to be, depending on the point in the narrative, queen she seems to spend the majority of her time in traditionally female roles; she is wife to Khal Drogo and a literal bargaining chip for her brother, when she achieves power she is naive and kind; a typical character trait for a young woman, while not such an issue by itself, when paired with the role she assumes as 'mysha' later in the plot this trend becomes a little more odious. Here she fills an even bigger stereotype; that of the mother; a role she is obsessed with, labeling herself mother of dragons and referring to those she presides over as her children. Although it is perhaps understandable, or perhaps natural, for her character arc after losing her child, it seems at the least clumsily done, and at worst a terrible amalgamation of cliched notions of femininity; notions that certainly crop up again in the character of Cersei.

Cersei is about as black and white as it gets; all she cares about is her children, herself and her identity as a woman in a  man's world. Cersei, as the instigator of the plot on King Roberts life is framed from the beginning from Ned's eyes,and as such is portrayed in an extremely negative light. This is completely understandable, she did, after all, arrest the "main character" (as many saw him) at the time; Ned Stark after he, out of compassion or a sense of honour, warned her that she and her children would likely be killed once it became known they were fathered by Jaime. So if it is expected that that she is to be hated, why do I have such an issue with the way she is portrayed? Well, to illustrate my point look at Jaime; he pushed a kid out of a window to ensure the continued secrecy of his relations with Cersei and for a time I despised him; the golden child who has everything that everyone is either annoyed by or jealous of. Yet when the plot spends more time with him (it is worth noting in the books these chapters are from his point of view) one begins to understand and sympathise to an extent with his motivations. He goes from one of the most morally reprehensible characters to one that has made some major moral decisions and suffered for doing so. I personally even went some way towards forgiving his crime for his motivation; one stranger's life against the lives of his own three children; a choice that is far easier to understand and accept than it first appears. Cersei on the other hand, while having the same motivations is still reviled and despised even after more of her history and back story is revealed; a fault that, in my view, does not lie in the eyes of the audience, but in the hands of the show's (and book's) creators as she is consistently framed as the jealous step-mother, the queen who wants only to be the most beautiful; a woman who loves herself so much that when her twin brother isn't around she wants to sleep with her cousin in stead. Where Jaime's character branches out from the way in which we first view him, Cersei's character only becomes more entrenched in the negative light she is initially portrayed in. This shallowness is an affliction that impacts almost every female character in my eyes and Brienne, the conceited effort to subvert the expected roles of a woman tragically conforms to them more than any other character.

Brienne is defined by her appearence; she is tall, ugly, freakish before she is described as strong; she wanted to be pretty, wanted to be loved and married before she came to practice swordsmanship and is as obsessed with sex as the majority of her fellow female characters, albeit in another way to most others. Once again, all of these traits are not causative of a bad character, but they succumb to the traditionally female roles that Brienne is seemingly meant to subvert. As a strong, capable woman it seems an awful shame to me that she is portrayed as equally naive as Daenerys or Cersei are, and totally submissive to every other strong character she comes across. She loves Renly, admires Catelyn, seemingly loves and admires Jaime after a time but she never seems to follow her own goals; she doesn't have any other ambition but to keep promises she makes, with little other pretext for making these promises beyond her respect for these characters.

 This leads in to one of the female characters that I think is a strong and well fleshed out character; Catelyn. As a character who not only cares for her Children and for people in general, who has a deep seated resentment for Jon Snow as the product of Ned's infidelity (I am well aware of the theories regarding this subject, but being from Catelyn's perspective this is fact in her eyes). Catelyn Loves Ned Stark, but not only him, her children, but not only them, her siblings and family as well, but she's not merely a compassionate or kind person to everyone; she mistrusts and dislikes as many people as she likes and she loves people in more than the binary ways of these are my children or this is my partner, she has complex relations with everyone of her family members and she is weak in some areas and strong in others. At the core of it; she's human, and feels like it. Unfortunately Catelyn, as well as Arya, Olena Tyrell, and (to a lesser extent) Sansa are the exceptions to what largely feels to be the rule. Almost every other female character spends large amounts of time talking about, engaging in or fearing sexual activity in a way that only Tyrion seems to be able to match; yet what is the purpose for all the time he spent with Shae? To shed light on his previous relationship with Tysha and his hatred for his father. Seeing Shae in this light is perhaps a little unfair; she wasn't a main character, and the importance she seemed to have stemmed from Tyrion's feelings toward her, and despite being fairly unimportant to the plot I actually thought she was one of the better female characters.

The time spent with female characters (from their perspective) and their partners however feels much emptier; Cersei has sex with Jaime, and while he's away, her cousin which only seems to tell us that she is narcissistic in the extreme, Dany is on top of Drogo; all this seems to tell us is that she is more comfortable taking agency and control in what previously seemed an opressive relationship (admittedly this has larger implications for her character arc, but a lot of time was spent leading up to this scene that could have been spent in many other ways and in my opinion more effectively), Brienne nearly gets raped, proving through her frightened reaction that she is completely normal, reacting the way anyone would in such an abhorrent circumstance. Sex seems to be a cheap way to make us care for, fear for or loath a character and for whatever reason GoT can't seem to go for more than an episode without using an innocent woman to prove that a man is evil; one of their favourite short-hand techniques to manipulate us to hate a character (see most recently Meryn Trant who we are reminded is a bad guy by his insistence on an underage, seemingly unwilling prostitute while in Braavos, or the wildling mother in Hardhome who exists only to orphan her children and give a face to the victims of the others). The rest of what seems to constitute a female character's motivations tends to boil down to on/off switches of [feelings for children or subjects (y/n)] [feelings for partner (y/n)] [desire for sex (y/n)] with the exceptions I mentioned earlier. Of course the motivations for the male characters could be boiled down to a similar set of criteria, but the male characters are never defined by their gender or the cliched notions associated with it; while the women frequently are; I don't even want to mention the sand snakes as represented by the TV series.

To re-iterate; I think GoT is an incredible TV (and book) series, but the way the female characters are dealt with often doesn't do the rest of the narrative (in both the books and TV series) justice. I certainly hope I'm wrong, and what I'm seeing is only a temporary glut in the character development of most of GoT's leading ladies, but I worry that might not be the case. This post also is obviously not an attempt to cash in on the internet traffic in the lead up to the finale. Obviously.