Here’s the list of the Top 25 Game of Thrones Season Three characters by number of lines, complied by Walter_Eagle:
1. Tyrion – 185
2. Jaime – 119
3. Daenerys – 93
4. Sansa – 87
5. Arya – 86
6. Cersei – 84
7. Tywin – 81
8. Jon – 79
9. Robb – 73
10. Margaery – 72
11. Olenna – 71
12. Thoros – 67
13. Ygritte – 65
14. Theon – 64
15. Joffrey – 63
16. Brienne – 60
17. Missandei – 58
18. Shae – 54
19. Melisandre – 51
20. Davos – 48
20. Gendry – 48
22. Varys – 46
23. Bronn – 45
23. Stannis – 45
25. Jorah – 44
25. Sam – 44
Catelyn, we’re told, ranks 40th.1. Catelyn’s the line item that’s attracting the most attention, and rightly so, frankly. A POV character, and a Stark, and a major player in a pivotal Season Three storyline, with fewer lines than Bronn? It’s a bummer, for sure, and I say that as someone who’s both disappointed with how that character has been translated from book to screen — by far the weakest of all the main characters — and who tends not to be disappointed for the same reasons that the Catelyn stans are.
Personally, I’d have liked the Stark/Tully/Riverlands storyline this season to use her, not Robb, as its central character. For one thing this would map more closely to how the books handled it, not that that’s something I tend to care about overmuch. Mainly, she’s simply a more sympathetic character right now than Robb — certainly than show-Robb. Her internal struggle is more interesting to me than his is.
Granted, if you look at her material during this segment of the series, much of what she does in her chapters is internal. She tends to think about a lot of stuff for almost the entire chapter, until the final paragraphs arrive and someone tells her that something important has happened. That’s difficult to turn into compelling television. But the show’s obviously capable of concocting plot to keep a character at the forefront if they want, and I wish they’d done so here if that’s what it would have taken.
2. Look at the gender breakdown for this list. Women occupy five slots in the top 10 most prominent characters, and a majority of the top 20. I doubt that most of the top-shelf TV drams have anything even close to this level of gender parity. The Good Wife, I suspect, and maybe The Americans, and mmmmmmmaybe Homeland simply by virtue of its female lead, but as a sheer numbers game I think Game of Thrones comes out on top. And compared to Breaking Bad or Boardwalk Empire or Mad Men (however well Mad Men handles its core female characters)? Forget about it. Actually I suppose Downton Abbey has it beat, but even so. When we’re talking about how the show treats its women characters, this bears attention, and frankly praise.
Of course, screentime isn’t the only thing that matters when talking about how a show treats women. Theoretically you could have a show in which the female characters have as much screentime and as many lines as the male characters, but 90% of the time appear naked or scantily clad. Or 90% of the time they are talking about men or being used to set up male characters’ storylines. Or 90% of the time they’re being written as embarrassing stereotypes. A metric like this doesn’t mean that characters haven’t been added to the show primarily because they are female and hot and can be naked on screen. A metric like this doesn’t mean that female characters’ naked asses don’t get lingered upon by the camera for longer periods of time than male characters’ naked asses. A metric like this doesn’t even mean that when a female character does get shafted (like, oh I dunno, Cat) it has nothing to do with sexism.
And it certainly doesn’t mean that we should necessarily be grateful for what we get. Daytime soap operas probably have had high appearance #’s for female characters for a long time. Doesn’t mean they haven’t peddled romanticized rape, lookism, ageism, and whatnot for all that time. For me, stopping to praise a show because it’s not as bad as it could be is just not appealing. Especially when it’s based off source material that, although flawed, handled women better, and did so 15 years ago(!). I think it’s worth attention, but praise I’ll reserve for when the show stops denigrating traditional femininity especially through non-traditional female characters, when it stops blatantly subjecting female characters’ naked bodies to leery one-sided male gaze (when your own actors say they’re grateful that they’re one of the few women on the show who gets to wear pants and keep them on … come on), when it actually starts letting female characters other than Cersei and Arya air their legitimate grievances against the deep patriarchy in which they live in the ways that they know how, then I’ll offer some praise.
I’m not trying to start a fight, people will inevitably disagree and you can only say so much about it, but I can’t not respond, I guess. From my peon’s perspective I feel like the general reaction to complains about the show’s feminism (or whatever you want to call it that isn’t so egregiously PC if that bothers you) in mainstream coverage of the show is always to try and minimize the complaints, to mitigate them, to redirect attention, and I don’t want that to happen any more. Not that this helps that very much, except to make me feel better.
Especially when it’s based off source material that, although flawed, handled women better, and did so 15 years ago(!).
italicizing for emphasis — it’s not just that the show’s problematic, it’s that it’s more problematic than a problematic source material from ages ago. These are deliberate showrunner decisions to further marginalize and sideline characters, not unconscious mistakes. You wouldn’t really be able to guess looking at the show that the first book had a parity of male and female POV characters and that Cat and Sansa are much, MUCH more major characters than Robb. :\
