Game of Thrones is many things: a political thriller, a fantasy epic, a character drama, and a showcase for some truly stunning cinematography. But if there’s one thing it isn’t particularly concerned with, it’s historical accuracy about medieval warfare. And honestly? That’s completely fine. Game of Thrones was never trying to be a documentary. It was trying to tell an entertaining story set in a fantasy world that borrowed heavily from medieval aesthetics. But for those of us interested in how actual medieval warfare worked, the show provides an absolutely fascinating study in how historical accuracy takes a backseat to narrative drama and spectacle.

The Problem with Siege Warfare

One of the most glaring inaccuracies in Game of Thrones is how the show depicts siege warfare. Sieges in the show tend to be relatively quick affairs, with armies arriving at a castle, perhaps doing some battering, and then either breaching the walls quickly or being fought off. In reality, medieval sieges were often grotesquely long, boring, and about as unglamorous as warfare gets.

Consider the historical Siege of Jerusalem during the First Crusade. The crusaders sat outside the city for months, suffering from dysentery, starvation, and disease. The actual breaking of the siege came about after a lucky combination of circumstances and the crusaders’ ability to build siege towers, which took weeks of labor to construct. It wasn’t quick, it wasn’t clean, and it involved far more people dying from disease than from actual combat.

Game of Thrones glosses over this entirely. When we see Stannis Baratheon’s army outside King’s Landing, or when Daenerys sieges various cities, the show implies that these are relatively brief affairs. But in reality, a properly fortified city with adequate supplies could hold out for months or even years. The show needs to move its narrative forward, so sieges become essentially skipped over or compressed into single episodes.

A more realistic depiction would involve armies sitting outside cities for extended periods, their supplies running low, disease spreading through the camps, morale deteriorating, and the eventual decision to either abandon the siege or stage a final desperate assault. That’s not very dramatic television, which is why the show skips over those details.

The Inaccuracy of Giant Siege Weapons

The show depicts siege weaponry that’s often anachronistic or simply impossible. The massive trebuchets and catapults that we see deployed in various battles might look impressive, but they often don’t match historical siege weapon specifications. Medieval siege weapons were complex, fragile, and required sophisticated engineering to build and maintain.

The Trebuchet shown destroying the walls of various castles in Game of Thrones appears almost magical in its destructive capability. In reality, trebuchets had to be aimed carefully, required enormous crews to operate, and were unreliable at best. They could potentially breach walls, but it took many attempts, and they were as likely to malfunction as to succeed. The show treats siege weapons as reliable tools of destruction, when in reality, they were temperamental, difficult to maintain, and often produced disappointing results.

Furthermore, the show often depicts castles being breached far too easily by siege weapons. Real medieval fortifications were designed specifically to withstand exactly this kind of assault. Castle walls were made of stone in a way that, while certainly not impenetrable, was far more resilient than the show suggests. A well-designed castle might require months of battering before its walls came down, not the hours or days that the show implies.

Hand-to-Hand Combat Gets Romanticized

Perhaps the most cinematic inaccuracy in Game of Thrones is in depictions of actual hand-to-hand combat. The show loves its duels—Jaime versus multiple enemies, Jon versus the wildlings, countless other one-on-one or one-on-few battles. These are entertaining television, but they’re historically inaccurate in several important ways.

First, most medieval combat wasn’t about duels. Battles were chaotic, confusing affairs where large groups of men fought in formation, trying to break the enemy’s line. The individualistic “warrior versus warriors” combat that the show loves is largely a fantasy element. Medieval soldiers fought in groups, relied on their neighbors for protection, and depended on formation discipline to survive. The idea of one skilled swordsman taking on multiple opponents at once and surviving through skill is mostly fantasy.

Second, medieval armor was much better than the show often depicts. A properly armored knight in full plate armor was nearly impossible to kill with a sword unless you struck in one of the few vulnerable areas—the joints, the neck, the face. The show often depicts swords cleaving through armor and bone with ease, which is simply not how it worked. A sword, no matter how sharp, can’t cut through steel plate armor. You’d need either a specialized weapon like a war hammer or pike, or you’d need to strike at one of the vulnerable points.

In reality, medieval combat would look far less graceful and more like brutal grappling matches, often ending with one man pinning another to the ground and either stabbing him in a vulnerable spot or slowly choking the life out of him. It’s not as visually interesting as what Game of Thrones shows, which is why the show opts for more cinematic sword duels instead.

The Cavalry Charge Problem

Game of Thrones is obsessed with cavalry charges, and they’re almost always depicted as devastatingly effective. The moment where the Vale’s knights charge into battle at the Battle of the Bastards is thrilling television, but it’s not particularly historically accurate as a decisive military maneuver.

Cavalry charges did happen in medieval warfare, and they could be effective, but they had to meet specific conditions. Cavalry worked best against already-broken infantry who were fleeing or disorganized. Cavalry charging into a disciplined, formed-up infantry line with pike and spear would actually be suicide. That’s why, as military technology advanced, cavalry became less effective—formation discipline and polearm weapons (pikes, spears, halberds) could absolutely devastate a cavalry charge.

In Game of Thrones, cavalry appears to charge into all manner of situations and emerge victorious. In reality, the infantry that had the best response to cavalry charges was infantry armed with long spears or pikes, arranged in a formation where their weapons extended beyond the horses’ reach. A cavalry charge against such a formation would result in the horses being impaled, the riders thrown, and the cavalry unit suffering significant losses.

The show’s love of the cavalry charge is purely for narrative and visual reasons—horses and armored men charging are inherently exciting to watch. But militarily, they were far more limited in their application than the show suggests.

Armor and Movement

Game of Thrones often depicts its characters moving in full plate armor with remarkable agility. Characters perform acrobatic moves, climb, jump, and fight with extensive mobility while fully armored. This is somewhat inaccurate, though not entirely unrealistic. A man in full plate armor was heavy and restricted in mobility, but he wasn’t immobilized—medieval knights trained their entire lives to fight in armor.

However, the show sometimes makes it look easier than it was. Full plate armor, while permitting significant movement compared to popular perception, did require specific training and strength to move in effectively. A person in plate armor couldn’t move as quickly or as agilely as the show sometimes suggests. They would tire more quickly from the exertion. And their ability to perform complex movements while fighting would be significantly limited compared to an unarmored opponent.

This is one of those cases where the show’s depiction isn’t entirely wrong, but it’s optimized for cinematic effect rather than realistic accuracy. A fight scene where the armored character was noticeably slower and tireder than the unarmored opponent wouldn’t be as visually exciting as what we get in the show.

Formation and Discipline

Perhaps the biggest systematic inaccuracy in Game of Thrones’ depiction of warfare is the relative lack of emphasis on formation discipline. Medieval armies won battles by maintaining formation, protecting their neighbors, and applying coordinated pressure. Individual heroics, while they happened, were far less important than the collective action of the army as a whole.

In the show, battles tend to become melees where individuals fight one another, and the outcome depends largely on the number of troops and the presence of heroes who can single-handedly turn the tide. In reality, battles were decided by which side could maintain discipline, keep their formation, and systematically push forward or hold the line. A general who could keep his troops in formation and move them effectively as a unit would beat a general with superior individual fighters almost every time.

Game of Thrones shows us some of this—the show isn’t entirely ignorant of formation warfare—but it tends to emphasize individual combat more than historical accuracy would suggest. This is partly because individual combat is more cinematic and partly because following the experience of individual characters is more dramatically satisfying than showing us abstract formations maneuver.

The Reality of Logistics

One absolutely crucial aspect of medieval warfare that Game of Thrones almost completely ignores is logistics. Armies can’t just march around the countryside indefinitely—they need food, water, shelter, and rest. A marching army loses effectiveness the longer it marches without rest. Foraging for supplies as you move destroys the surrounding countryside and slows your movement. Supply lines become vulnerable to enemy action. These logistical concerns are why many medieval campaigns failed despite having superior forces—the logistical challenges simply became insurmountable.

Game of Thrones occasionally acknowledges logistics—Tyrion mentions the cost of feeding an army, there are references to supply lines being cut—but mostly the show ignores it. Armies simply appear where they need to be, fight their battles, and we don’t think too hard about how they got there or how they sustained themselves. In reality, half the effort of medieval warfare was figuring out how to supply your army while denying supplies to your enemy’s army.

A more historically accurate Game of Thrones would show far more time spent on logistics, movement, and preparation, and far less time on actual combat. But that would be a very different show—one that spent more time on strategy meetings and supply management than on spectacle.

Why These Inaccuracies Exist

The important thing to understand is that these inaccuracies aren’t failures of the show. They’re conscious creative choices. Game of Thrones was always trying to be entertaining television first and historically accurate second. The producers knew that actual medieval siege warfare is mostly about sitting around, waiting, and dealing with dysentery. They chose to skip to the exciting parts.

The show also knew that formation warfare and logistics, while historically accurate, aren’t as cinematically exciting as individual duels and cavalry charges. So it emphasized those elements instead. A show that was perfectly historically accurate would be far less entertaining, because medieval warfare wasn’t conducted the way Hollywood typically portrays warfare.

This is why discussing the historical inaccuracies of Game of Thrones isn’t about criticizing the show—it’s about appreciating how the show made different choices than history would have suggested, and those choices made for better television. The show understood its medium and optimized for spectacle, drama, and individual character moments rather than historical verisimilitude. That’s the right choice for a fantasy television show, even if it means that anyone with knowledge of medieval history has to suspend their disbelief about how warfare actually worked.

Game of Thrones created a fantasy world that feels grounded and real, but it did so by selectively choosing which details of medieval warfare to emphasize and which to downplay. The result is a show that feels authentic without being historically accurate, which is exactly what a fantasy show should aspire to be.

Here’s one of the most frustrating things about Game of Thrones: the show introduced these absolutely magnificent creatures—direwolves, massive wolf-like beasts that were supposed to be spiritually connected to the Stark children and represent the family’s power and connection to the old ways of the North. They were in the opening scene of the entire series, they had a massive symbolic weight, and then… the show basically forgot about them for six seasons. The direwolves were one of Game of Thrones’ most significant running failures, a perfect example of how the show made grand promises about its mythology that it eventually couldn’t be bothered to keep.

The Promise That Started It All

The opening of Game of Thrones Season 1 introduces the direwolves when Bran and his brothers find the dead direwolf and her five pups beyond the Wall. This is not a random occurrence in the show’s own logic—these creatures are spiritually connected to House Stark. In the books, George R.R. Martin invests tremendous time in the bond between the Stark children and their direwolves. Each wolf has its own personality, its own arc, and serves as both a literal companion and a metaphorical extension of each Stark child’s journey.

The show’s opening visual of dead direwolf and her pups was supposed to establish this connection immediately. Winter was coming, the Starks were in for a hard time, and their wolves would be part of their journey through it. The direwolves became the symbol of the Stark house in a way that went beyond just heraldry—they were meant to be part of the family’s narrative identity. Yet almost immediately, the show started treating them as problems rather than story elements.

The first casualty was Sansa’s direwolf, Lady. The death happened in Season 1 and was supposed to be emotionally significant, showing how even getting your own mythical creature wasn’t enough to protect you in this world. Ned executing Lady was meant to be a moment of hard justice and broken faith, a sign that the world of Game of Thrones wasn’t kind to those who played by the rules. The show got that moment right, and it was devastating. But then everything after it was a downhill slide.

The Problem of Budget and Practical Effects

Let’s be honest about why the direwolves got sidelined: they were expensive to portray convincingly, and the show had limited resources. CGI direwolves were costly and time-consuming to create. As the show went on and budgets tightened (or rather, as the show’s priorities shifted), the direwolves became victims of production reality. They couldn’t be in every scene. They couldn’t be featured prominently in every episode. So instead of integrating them meaningfully into the narrative, the show just… pushed them to the background.

By Season 2, the direwolves had largely disappeared from the show. Jon Snow’s wolf, Ghost, would occasionally appear in the background or in brief scenes, but the connection that had been established in Season 1 was gone. Grey Wind, Robb Stark’s direwolf, was also sidelined despite being one of the most important elements of Robb’s storyline in the books. The show moved the Starks away from their wolves rather than figuring out how to make the wolves work within its narrative constraints.

This wasn’t an insurmountable problem. The show demonstrated that it could feature the direwolves effectively when it wanted to—Ghost had some genuinely good moments in later seasons, and Summer’s appearance in Season 6 was impactful. But what the show did instead was treat the direwolves as optional background elements rather than integral parts of the Stark children’s stories.

The Squandered Symbolic Potential

Here’s what makes the direwolves’ neglect so frustrating: they had enormous symbolic potential that the show never tapped into. In the books, each direwolf represents something about its corresponding Stark child. Lady’s death was supposed to represent Sansa’s connection to the harsh realities of the North being severed. Robb’s death in battle was supposed to be paralleled with Grey Wind’s death at the same moment (the Red Wedding, which brutally paralleled the direwolf’s murder). Bran’s connection to Summer was supposed to be tied to his greensight and his role as the heir to the North.

The show had all of this mythology built into the story, but it seemed increasingly unwilling to spend the time developing it. Ghost could have been a constant visual reminder of Jon Snow’s connection to the Starks and the North, a physical manifestation of his identity conflict. Instead, Ghost showed up occasionally and then disappeared. Arya’s direwolf, Nymeria, was killed early on, which was meant to be tragic, but because the show hadn’t invested enough in their relationship, it didn’t have the emotional resonance it was supposed to.

By moving the Stark children away from their direwolves, the show removed a visual and symbolic anchor that could have been used throughout the series to remind viewers of the Starks’ connection to each other, to their homeland, and to the magic and old power of the North. Without the direwolves, the Starks became just another family. With them, they were something more.

The Ghost of What Could Have Been

Ghost’s treatment in the show is particularly galling because it had potential until the very end. For most of the series, Ghost was Jon Snow’s faithful companion, a visual link to Jon’s Stark heritage and his place in the world. But as the show went on, Ghost appeared less and less frequently. In the final season, after Jon’s entire arc culminates in him joining the Free Folk and the Night’s Watch, Ghost gets a moment where he walks away from Jon without a goodbye. This scene is either heartbreaking or completely nonsensical depending on whether you think Ghost should have been more present throughout Jon’s journey.

The fact that this moment with Ghost in the final season generated so much fan discussion is actually a perfect example of the problem: fans had to debate whether the moment was meaningful because the direwolves had been so sidelined that we couldn’t be sure what the show’s actual intention was. If Ghost had been a constant presence throughout Jon’s arc, that final goodbye would have been earth-shattering. Instead, it felt like a moment the show was throwing in because it remembered Ghost existed.

What the Books Do Right

George R.R. Martin’s novels demonstrate repeatedly what the show left on the table. In the books, the direwolves are more present, more distinctive, and more integrated into their respective characters’ storylines. Each wolf has a name, a personality, and a connection to their human that’s constantly reinforced. Arya’s connection to Nymeria is particularly strong in the books and includes some genuinely mystical elements that the show never explored.

The books use the direwolves to explore themes of identity, legacy, and the connection between the people of the North and the magic of the land itself. The direwolves are not just cool creatures—they’re a fundamental part of what makes the Starks the Starks. By benching them, the show lost that entire thematic thread.

A Wasted Opportunity for Spectacle

Here’s another frustrating aspect: the show loved spectacle. It spent money on dragons, on elaborate battle scenes, on massive crowds and incredible cinematography. A direwolf doesn’t have to be present in every scene or even every episode, but it could have been featured more prominently in key moments. The show could have invested in showing the direwolves’ growth and character development. It could have used them as visual reminders of each Stark’s journey and development.

Instead, the direwolves became an afterthought, something the show acknowledged occasionally when fans complained about their absence. The show had proven it could do practical effects and CGI well—the dragons were excellent, the White Walkers were terrifying, the creatures beyond the Wall were convincing. A better prioritization of the show’s resources could have kept the direwolves as central to the Stark narrative as they were supposed to be.

The Legacy of Neglect

When you finish Game of Thrones and look back on it, the direwolves stand out as one of the show’s biggest missed opportunities. They represented a connection to the books’ mythology that the show seemed increasingly willing to abandon. They were supposed to be symbols of Stark power and heritage, but instead they became symbols of the show’s declining interest in exploring the deeper, more mythical elements of its world.

The direwolves deserved better. They deserved to be woven into their respective characters’ storylines. They deserved to grow and change as the Stark children grew and changed. They deserved to be present at crucial moments, not just background elements. And most importantly, they deserved to be treated as what they were supposed to be from the very beginning: an essential, integral part of what it means to be a Stark.

The fact that fans still talk about the direwolves, still wish the show had done more with them, still feel that absence keenly—that’s the real measure of this failure. The show introduced us to something magical and meaningful, and then gradually convinced us to care less about it. That’s not a small narrative misstep. That’s one of the show’s biggest running disappointments, a constant visual reminder of what Game of Thrones could have been if it had cared enough to follow through on its own mythology.

Let’s be real: Game of Thrones had an absolutely wild ride, and not all of it was good. For eight seasons, HBO’s fantasy behemoth captivated millions of viewers around the world, but the quality wasn’t consistent. Some seasons were absolutely masterful television that redefined what fantasy could be on screen. Other seasons… well, let’s just say that the show didn’t always stick the landing. Whether you’re a die-hard fan trying to defend the later seasons or someone who tapped out after Season 5, I think we can all acknowledge that the show had some phenomenal highs and some genuinely frustrating lows. So let’s go through this season by season, grade each one, and talk about what actually worked and what absolutely didn’t.

Season 1: The Beginning (A+)

Season 1 is untouchable. This is where everything started, and honestly, you could make an argument that this single season might be the best first season of any television series ever made. The show introduced us to a sprawling cast of characters across an enormous world, and remarkably, we actually cared about all of them. The writing was tight, the acting was phenomenal, and the adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s source material was respectful without being slavish. We met the Stark family and actually felt invested in their journey. We watched Daenerys transform from a frightened girl into someone with actual agency. We saw Tyrion become our favorite character. The political intrigue was dense but not incomprehensible, the world-building was clear, and every episode built toward something.

The decision to kill Ned Stark in the final episode was absolutely revolutionary. Nobody did that. Main characters didn’t die in the middle of the season and stay dead. The show established itself as genuinely unpredictable, which made everyone pay attention. The acting was excellent across the board, from Sean Bean’s noble Ned to Peter Dinklage’s charming Tyrion, from Lena Headey’s calculating Cersei to Emilia Clarke’s awakening Daenerys. The dialogue felt natural even when characters were discussing complex political situations. This season was a masterclass in adaptation and television writing.

Season 2: Deeper into the Game (A)

Season 2 took everything that worked in Season 1 and expanded it. The War of the Five Kings was a complex, multi-faceted conflict, and the show handled it beautifully, jumping between different perspectives and showing how the war looked from different regions of Westeros. We were introduced to Stannis and Davos, who became incredibly compelling characters. The political maneuvering in King’s Landing became even more intricate. We watched Tyrion actually govern as Hand of the King, and his scenes were some of the best the show ever produced.

The direction, cinematography, and production values continued to be excellent. Cersei and Tyrion’s dynamic was absolutely electric. The Stark storyline was heartbreaking and compelling. The show was still making smart decisions about character and narrative, trusting its audience to follow complex webs of politics and motivation. We were two seasons in and the show felt like it could sustain itself at this quality level indefinitely. That was obviously not the case, but at the time, Season 2 seemed to promise everything.

Season 3: The Rains of Castamere (A)

Season 3 gave us the Red Wedding, one of the most shocking moments in television history. The show had earned enough goodwill and trust that when it did something that dark—killing off the protagonist’s entire army in a shocking betrayal—audiences felt it in their bones. The political landscape shifted dramatically. Every alliance mattered. Every betrayal had consequences that you could actually see play out on screen.

The problem with Season 3 is that it was still doing one thing primarily: setting up dominoes so it could knock them down in later seasons. It’s a good season, genuinely excellent in many ways, but it’s also the first season where you could start to see the show beginning to prioritize shock value over narrative coherence. The Red Wedding didn’t just happen because it made perfect narrative sense; it happened because Martin wrote it that way in the books, and the show wanted to replicate that moment. This is when the show started to show the first cracks in its narrative foundation, though the cracks were small enough that most viewers didn’t notice yet.

Season 4: The Mountain and the Viper (A)

Season 4 is legitimately one of the best seasons of television ever made. It had the trial of Tyrion, which featured exceptional acting and writing. It had the Mountain versus the Viper, one of the most emotionally devastating episodes of television. It had Littlefinger explaining his motivations in one of the show’s most monologues-heavy moments, and it was riveting. The show was still making confident choices about character and narrative. Joffrey’s death in the second episode meant that the show was willing to remove major obstacles early and force characters to adapt to new circumstances. The writing was intricate, the character work was exceptional, and the show felt like it was hurtling toward something significant.

This is probably where the show was at its creative peak in terms of balancing complex narrative with character development. Every storyline felt like it mattered. Every character death felt tragic or earned. The show was expanding its cast in meaningful ways while keeping established characters engaging and surprising.

Season 5: The Problem Begins (B+)

Season 5 is where things start to slip, though it’s not immediately obvious. The show is still very good here, but this is where you can start to see some fundamental problems with the narrative structure beginning to emerge. The problem is that the show had largely caught up to where the books were, and the source material wasn’t there to guide the showrunners anymore. Some characters, particularly Tyrion and Sansa, start to feel like they’re moving through plots rather than living through consequences.

Sansa’s storyline in Season 5 was particularly rough—her arc at the Vale with Littlefinger didn’t feel earned or natural, and it felt like the show was putting her through trauma for its own sake rather than because it made narrative sense. The show was also starting to get a bit too clever for its own good, with Varys’s exit and some of the Daenerys storylines in Essos feeling like they were just spinning wheels before the real plot happened elsewhere.

The season had great moments—Harrenhal had some exceptional scenes, and the show was still producing excellent acting performances. But for the first time, you could feel the show starting to strain under the weight of its own narrative complexity. The bones of great television were still there, but you could start to see the seams showing.

Season 6: Things Fall Apart (B)

Season 6 is wildly uneven. It has some of the best television the show ever produced—the Battle of the Bastards is a technical marvel, the Winds of Winter episode is phenomenal, and Jon Snow’s resurrection was handled brilliantly. But it also has some of the worst dialogue the show ever produced, some character decisions that feel unmotivated, and a general sense that the show was losing sight of what made it great in the first place.

The problem with Season 6 is that it often felt like the show was hitting plot points because those were plot points that needed to be hit, rather than because they grew organically from character and circumstance. Daenerys’s liberation of the Unsullied, her acquisition of the Dothraki, her getting a dragon—these happened because they needed to happen for her to be powerful enough to eventually come to Westeros. But they sometimes felt less like character choices and more like items on a checklist.

The show was also starting to simplify its character dynamics. Cersei became more villainous and less complex. Daenerys became more obviously destined for power. The moral ambiguity that had defined the show’s early seasons was being stripped away in favor of a clearer good-versus-evil narrative. This wasn’t inherently bad, but it was a significant shift in the show’s identity.

Season 7: The Endgame Approaches (C+)

Season 7 is where things really started to fall apart for many viewers, though it still had passionate defenders. The show had been shortened to just seven episodes for this season, and the pacing became absolutely breakneck. Characters teleported across the map. Strategies that would have taken seasons to unfold were compressed into single episodes. The show stopped caring about the logic of its own world and started caring almost exclusively about spectacle and shock.

That said, Season 7 had some genuinely incredible moments. The Battle of Blackwater was phenomenal. The introduction of the dragon glass as a weapon against White Walkers was clever. And there was a sense that the show was finally, actually heading toward a conclusion after dancing around the endgame for so long. But the shortcuts the show took to get there were increasingly visible. Dragons could suddenly move at supersonic speed. Armies could traverse thousands of miles between episodes. Character arcs that had been building for years were resolved in a single scene or two.

Season 7 is fun in a roller coaster kind of way, but it’s not emotionally resonant the way the best seasons of the show were. You’re watching a machine powering toward its conclusion rather than watching characters live through a story. For some viewers, that was enough. For others, it was when they realized the show had lost something essential.

Season 8: The Final Disappointment (C-)

Season 8 is the season everyone wants to talk about, and unfortunately, it’s also the season that broke a significant portion of the fandom’s trust in the show. Six episodes to wrap up eight seasons of narrative, and those six episodes frequently felt rushed, illogical, and frustrating. Characters made decisions that seemed unmotivated by anything except the need to get them to the next plot point. The show had spent years suggesting one ending and then seemingly abandoned it in favor of something completely different.

The destruction of King’s Landing happened in a way that felt shocking rather than inevitable. Daenerys’s descent into madness happened in an episode rather than over a season. Bran becoming king was presented as a surprise when it could have been foreshadowed and built toward if the show had the time. The Cleganebowl happened because fans wanted it, not because it made sense narratively. The show had become focused on satisfying fan theories and providing spectacle rather than telling a coherent story.

This is not to say Season 8 was without merit. There were genuinely good moments. Jaime’s arc should have landed better than it did, but the intention was there. The dialogue in the final episode between characters had some really nice character beats. But the season as a whole felt like the show had lost the thread of what it was doing and was just hitting story beats because they needed to be hit.

The Bigger Picture

When you look at Game of Thrones as a whole, what you’re seeing is a show that was at its absolute peak around Season 3 or 4, started showing problems around Season 5, and then increasingly compromised its own narrative integrity in service of getting to an ending. The show remained technically excellent throughout—the cinematography, the acting, the production design never faltered. But the writing, the pacing, and the character motivations increasingly felt like they were working against each other rather than in concert.

The core problem was structural: the show was adapting books that weren’t finished, and at a certain point, it ran out of book material to adapt. From that point on, the showrunners were working from George R.R. Martin’s general outline of where the story was going, but without the intermediate steps that would make that ending feel inevitable. They compressed seasons of character development into episodes. They made choices that prioritized spectacle over sense. They lost the moral ambiguity that had defined the show’s identity.

Would a different showrunning team have done better? Probably. Would finishing the books have helped? Definitely. But Game of Thrones is what it is: a genuinely brilliant first four to five seasons that slowly lost its way before crashing and burning in its final stretch. It’s still worth watching, but know that you’re signing up for a journey that doesn’t quite stick the landing.

When you think about the masterminds of Game of Thrones, two figures immediately come to mind: Petyr Baelish, the scheming Lord of the Vale with his dagger and his ambitions, and Varys, the eunuch spymaster with his little birds and his mysterious agenda. Both men operated in the shadows, manipulating kings and queens, toppling houses, and reshaping the political landscape of Westeros. But here’s the thing that makes their comparison so fascinating—they weren’t just playing the game differently, they were playing entirely different games altogether. One was motivated by personal ambition and the thirst for power, while the other claimed to serve the realm itself. So who was actually better at the Game of Thrones? The answer is way more complicated than you might think, and honestly, it depends on what metrics you’re measuring.

Let’s start with Littlefinger, because his rise from nothing is genuinely one of the most impressive political climbs in the entire series. Petyr Baelish came from the Vale, from a minor house with barely a castle to its name, and through nothing but cunning and manipulation, he worked his way into positions of immense power. The guy became Master of Coin, one of the most important offices in the Seven Kingdoms, and managed to keep that position through multiple regime changes. Think about that for a second. He survived Robert Baratheon’s reign, he survived Joffrey’s, and he was working on surviving everyone else when his plans fell apart. His financial manipulations—secretly going into debt to finance wars, buying loyalty through clever fiscal policy—these were the moves of someone who understood that power flows through money just as much as it flows through swords.

What made Littlefinger truly dangerous was his willingness to get personally involved in his schemes. He orchestrated the death of Jon Arryn, manipulated Catelyn Stark through a lie about a dagger, set the entire Stark family against the Lannisters, and then positioned himself to take advantage of the chaos. He didn’t just predict that things would fall apart—he actively made them fall apart, then strategically positioned himself to benefit. The man married Lysa Arryn, took control of the Vale, and by the time of the later seasons, he was playing both sides of a war while sitting safely away from the action. His endgame was crystal clear: he wanted the Iron Throne, and he was willing to manipulate anyone to get there, including the people he claimed to care about.

But here’s where Littlefinger’s strategy had a fundamental weakness. His ambitions were always about him. Every move was calculated to increase his power, his wealth, his status. That kind of singular focus can be incredibly effective in the short term, but it also makes you vulnerable. You accumulate enemies. You rely on people staying predictable and staying loyal, but loyalty in the Game of Thrones is as sturdy as a castle made of sand. Littlefinger’s fall came partly because he underestimated the Stark children he’d been manipulating, because he assumed they would remain as naive and desperate as he’d made them. That assumption cost him everything.

Now let’s talk about Varys, because this is where things get really interesting. Varys operated on an entirely different scale. Where Littlefinger was always looking at the next piece of the board he could control, Varys appeared to be thinking about the whole game. His official job was as Master of Whisperers, meaning he had spies everywhere—his “little birds,” a network of children and informants scattered throughout the kingdom. Unlike Littlefinger, who relied on specific people and specific schemes, Varys had information. He knew secrets. He saw patterns. And crucially, his spymaster position meant he could justify having information about absolutely everything without it seeming suspicious. It was just his job.

What’s remarkable about Varys’s approach is how it operated on faith and institutional power rather than personal ambition in the traditional sense. He claimed—repeatedly—that he served the realm. He said he wanted stability, good governance, peace. Whether you believe that or not probably depends on how cynical you are feeling that particular day, but the point is that his publicly stated motivations were different from Littlefinger’s. While Littlefinger wanted the throne, Varys seemed willing to serve almost anyone if it meant achieving his vision of stability. He served Robert Baratheon, then Joffrey, then Daenerys. That’s flexibility, sure, but it’s also something else: it’s an ability to work within any system because his ambitions were about structures and outcomes, not personal glory.

Varys’s major plays in the game were subtler than Littlefinger’s. He didn’t orchestrate wars directly; instead, he operated through counsel, through information control, through making sure the right people knew the right things at the right times. He was involved in the planning of the Mad King’s assassination through Jaime Lannister, he supported various candidates for the throne, and he was constantly working—though the show and books sometimes differ on exactly what he was working toward. His big weakness, if we’re being honest, is that the show never quite let us understand what his endgame actually was. In the books, there are hints that Varys has been working toward bringing Daenerys to the throne from the beginning, that he’s been a piece on her side of the board all along. The show muddied this considerably.

So who was better? If we’re talking about pure effectiveness and results, Littlefinger has a stronger case in the early seasons. He achieves concrete, observable goals. He gets rich, he gains territory, he eliminates rivals. He’s tactical, aggressive, and direct—in his own covert way. You can see his moves, even if you don’t see them coming. That makes him satisfying to watch and relatively easy to evaluate. He tried to turn Sansa Stark into a puppet, and while it didn’t work long-term, it sure seemed like it was working for a while.

But if we’re talking about the bigger picture, about who understood the game at a higher level, the answer might be Varys. A truly brilliant strategist doesn’t just win individual battles; they win by understanding trends, predicting human behavior on a mass scale, and positioning themselves so that multiple outcomes work in their favor. Varys seemed to understand that the real game wasn’t just about who sat on the throne—it was about what kind of realm would survive, about which dynasty had the best chance of actually bringing stability rather than just trading one tyrant for another. Whether he achieved that goal is another question entirely, but the scale of his thinking was different.

The thing that ultimately separates them is that Littlefinger’s game was transparent in its selfishness. He wanted power, and he was honest about it with himself, even if he lied to everyone else. Varys’s game was allegedly about something bigger than himself, which made him either more noble or more dangerous depending on your perspective. And here’s the wild part: we still don’t entirely know if Varys was telling the truth about his motivations. Was he genuinely interested in the realm’s welfare, or was he just a really good liar? The show left that question hanging, which is kind of perfect for a character whose whole identity is wrapped up in secrets.

In the early seasons, Littlefinger was the better player—more directly effective, more clearly ambitious, more willing to take risks. But by the later seasons, as the game became increasingly chaotic and unpredictable, Varys’s information network and his apparent ability to work with almost anyone gave him an edge. Of course, Littlefinger got killed by Sansa Stark’s declaration, and Varys got burned alive by Daenerys for speaking inconvenient truths. Neither of them actually won the Game of Thrones, which probably tells you everything you need to know about playing the game while everyone around you is playing a different game altogether.

The real answer to who was better is that they were both brilliant in different ways, and both ultimately undone by circumstances they couldn’t fully control. Littlefinger was the better strategist for power acquisition; Varys was the better strategist for long-term influence. But in the actual game, where the rules kept changing and the players kept dying in unexpected ways, being brilliant wasn’t always enough.

There’s something uniquely satisfying about the opening of a Game of Thrones episode. Before we get into the credits, before we remember where we are in the story and what all the various plot threads are, we usually get a cold open—a scene or sequence that immediately pulls us into the world and often delivers something memorable before the title sequence even rolls. These cold opens were one of the show’s most consistent strengths, and they deserve to be appreciated for what they accomplished: grabbing your attention immediately, setting the tone for the entire episode, and often delivering some of the most compelling dramatic moments the show had to offer.

The cold open as a storytelling device is deceptively simple, but it’s incredibly difficult to execute well. You have maybe five to ten minutes to make an impression before the credits roll. You have to establish location, introduce stakes, and usually tell a complete micro-story, all while introducing the episode’s thematic concerns and emotional baseline. When Game of Thrones got this right, it was magical. When it got it wrong, the entire episode could feel off-balance. Over eight seasons, the show became increasingly sophisticated at using the cold open to shape the viewer’s experience, and understanding why these openings work is key to understanding what made Game of Thrones compelling.

The Original Formula: Setting the Scene

In the earliest seasons, the cold open often served primarily as a world-building tool. The show would open on a location we hadn’t seen before, or on a scene that didn’t involve the main characters, just to establish the physical geography of Westeros and show us the daily texture of life in this world. We’d see what King’s Landing looked like in the morning before the main plot began. We’d see people in the North going about their business. We’d see the small, human moments that gave the world weight and reality.

These early openings were effective because they trusted the audience to stay engaged with pure storytelling and world-building, without the comfort of familiar characters or obvious stakes. The very first scene of the entire series—the prologue with the White Walkers—works this way. We don’t know these characters. We don’t understand what we’re looking at. But the scene’s atmosphere, the design, the performance, and the music make us lean forward in our seats, paying attention. Something bad is coming. We don’t know what, but we know it matters.

This formula wasn’t unique to Game of Thrones, of course. But the show demonstrated a real mastery of pacing in these early openings. The scenes gave us time to settle in, to appreciate details, to let tension build gradually rather than being thrown immediately into the loudest, most obvious dramatic moment. That restraint was actually remarkably effective.

Escalation: The Big Spectacle Opens

As the show progressed, the cold opens started to escalate. By the middle seasons, cold opens weren’t just about setting the scene anymore—they were about delivering shocking moments or major plot developments right at the top of the episode. The opening of Season Three had Robb Stark getting married, which seemed like a normal scene until suddenly it wasn’t, and we realized we were watching the setup for the Red Wedding. The cold open didn’t show us the wedding itself; it showed us the moment before, building tension and dread without explaining why we should feel that way.

This escalation worked because the show had earned our investment in these moments. By the time we got to Season Three, we understood that a seemingly normal scene could become devastating. The show had demonstrated that trust the audience wouldn’t betray us arbitrarily—if we were seeing something that felt ominous, it was probably for a reason.

Some of the most spectacular cold opens came later in the series. The opening of the season premiere after Daenerys had arrived in Westeros—showing her massive army and her approach to Dragonstone—was a cold open that said, “Everything is about to change.” The opening with the Loot Train battle, showing Daenerys and her dragons actually engaging in warfare, was a cold open that demonstrated the stakes of the show had escalated. These weren’t stories; they were moments of spectacle designed to make you sit up and pay attention.

The Master Class: Character-Driven Opens

Some of the most effective cold opens, though, weren’t spectacle. They were character moments that revealed something essential about who people were and what they wanted. The episode that opens with Arya Stark preparing for what she thinks will be her death, steeling herself with a Stark motto and then learning she’s free—that’s a cold open that’s entirely character work, and it’s devastating precisely because it’s so intimate.

The opening with Theon getting his head cut off—not Theon himself, but his betrayal becoming real in a way that seems to take his own story away from him—is a cold open that uses a shocking moment not for its own sake but to tell us something about how this world works and what cruelty looks like. The shock isn’t the point; the character revelation is.

Cersei’s trial and her walk of atonement opening an episode is a cold open that’s entirely focused on one character’s internal experience. We watch her pride break, we watch her humiliation, and we understand that something fundamental has shifted in her. That’s not spectacle; that’s acting, cinematography, and emotional storytelling combining to create something that stays with you.

The Problem Openings: When It Didn’t Work

Of course, not every cold open landed. Some of the later season openings felt more like they were just hurrying to get through setup material so the show could get to the scenes the writers actually cared about. When cold opens stopped being organic moments in the story and started feeling like obligation, they lost their power.

The show also occasionally made the mistake of thinking that shock value alone was enough to make a cold open work. There are a few openings that rely on a sudden revelation or a gruesome image without that revelation or image having earned its emotional weight. Those moments tend to feel exploitative rather than narratively necessary.

There’s also the danger of cold opens that try too hard to be clever or mysterious, that spend the first ten minutes showing us something we don’t understand and then never quite connect it to the rest of the episode in a way that satisfies. The best cold opens are usually the ones where you understand immediately why you’re watching what you’re watching and what it means for the episode to come.

The Architecture of Tension

What unites the best Game of Thrones cold opens is that they understand how to architect tension over the course of a few minutes. They don’t just start at maximum intensity and stay there—they build. They give you moments of calm that make the tense moments work harder. They use music and cinematography to shift your emotional state. They trust silence and stillness to be just as powerful as action.

The opening that cuts between Theon’s torture and the Stark children’s daily life, showing the contrast between his suffering and their ordinary existence, is a master class in this kind of montage work. It’s not spectacular in the traditional sense, but it’s remarkably effective because it’s rhythmic. It builds understanding through repetition and contrast.

The opening that shows various characters reacting to a major event—a death, a betrayal, a revelation—is a cold open structure that the show used effectively several times. By showing multiple perspectives, by giving each character a moment to respond, the show escalated the emotional impact. You see the news hitting one person, and your emotional response amplifies when you see how it hits someone else.

The Final Seasons: Losing the Thread

In the final season, the cold opens felt like they lost some of their purpose. They became more functional—we need to establish where everyone is and what they’re doing—rather than artful. There were still moments, certainly, but the opening of the final season premiere, with its focus on establishing the lineup of characters and showing the military preparations, felt more like exposition than story. It did its job, but it didn’t do more than its job.

This is emblematic of what happened to the show’s pacing in general. As the writers hurried toward the ending, they lost some of the patience that had made the show distinctive in the first place. The cold opens, which had been such an effective tool for making viewers lean in and trust the show, started to feel like boxes being checked.

Why Cold Opens Matter

The cold open might seem like a small thing, a minor element of how an episode is structured. But when you think about what it actually does—immediately establishing the show’s tone, introducing stakes, demonstrating craft and control—you realize it’s actually a barometer for how well the show is functioning overall. The shows with the best cold opens are usually the shows with the best overall control of pacing and audience engagement.

Game of Thrones in its best form understood that television is pacing and tone and rhythm just as much as it is plot and character. The cold open was where the show could demonstrate that it understood those things. A perfectly constructed cold open says, “We know what we’re doing. We know how to tell a story. Sit back and trust us.”

The cold opens that work best are often the ones that seem simple in retrospect. They’re not trying to be clever for the sake of cleverness. They’re not piling on effects or twists. They’re just doing the work of storytelling—establishing a place, introducing a conflict, making you care about what happens next. When Game of Thrones did that work well, everything that followed felt earned and necessary. When it stopped doing that work, the whole episode felt like it was playing catch-up.

The Legacy of the Cold Open

Looking back on Game of Thrones now, the cold opens are some of the most rewatchable moments from the series. They’re the sequences you’d show someone to explain why the show was effective, why people stayed invested, why the craft mattered. They’re moments where the show demonstrated that it understood television as a medium and knew how to use that medium to tell stories effectively.

The best cold opens from Game of Thrones will probably become textbook examples in writing and directing classes—not because they’re the most spectacular moments, but because they’re expertly constructed pieces of storytelling. They open a door, bring you through, and leave you ready for what comes next. They make you feel like you’ve just settled in for a story told by people who know what they’re doing.

That might sound like a small thing to celebrate, but it’s not. In a show as sprawling and complex as Game of Thrones, the ability to grab attention quickly and focus it sharply was one of the show’s greatest assets. The cold opens delivered on that promise, and when the show was working, these five or ten minutes of perfect storytelling set up everything that came after. They’re one of the reasons the first few seasons feel so tight, so controlled, and so utterly rewatchable.

For eight seasons, the White Walkers represented the ultimate threat in Game of Thrones. They were the existential danger that made the political scheming of humanity feel small and petty. They were the darkness beyond the Wall, the cold that would consume everything if given the chance. Entire character arcs were defined by the question of whether people would set aside their conflicts to fight this greater threat. The whole premise of the series seemed to hinge on the idea that at some point, all the fighting and backstabbing would have to stop because something worse was coming. And then, in the third episode of the final season, the White Walkers were defeated in a single night, killed by a girl with a knife, and that was essentially it. The story that had been building for eight seasons ended not with a bang or a whimper, but with a kind of narrative indifference that left many viewers feeling frustrated and short-changed.

The White Walker arc doesn’t just represent bad storytelling—it represents a fundamental failure of nerve on the show’s part. It was a story the writers didn’t know how to finish, so they finished it quickly and moved on to the supposedly more important matter of which man would end up on the Iron Throne. But in doing so, they squandered years of setup, eliminated what should have been the central conflict of the series, and basically admitted that the existential threat was less interesting to them than political intrigue. That’s a failure of narrative priority, and it’s worth examining honestly.

The Setup That Promised Everything

The White Walkers were introduced to us in the very first scene of the series. Before we even got to the Stark family, before we met any of the major characters, we saw these inhuman creatures moving through the snow, and we understood immediately that this was serious. The White Walkers represented the unknown, the uncaring force of nature, the thing that made humanity’s conflicts look petty. They were death itself, moving south.

Throughout the early seasons, the White Walkers were mostly absent, but their threat was ever-present. We got glimpses of them, warnings about them, and various characters took the threat seriously even when most of the political players treated it as a joke. The Night’s Watch existed to fight them. The Wildlings were terrified of them. Even characters like Daenerys, who had dragons and ambitions, eventually had to acknowledge that the White Walkers were the real threat.

The show took its time with the White Walkers, building them up as a slow-moving, patient threat. They weren’t trying to conquer the Seven Kingdoms in the traditional sense; they were trying to extinguish all human life. They had their own mythology, their own history. They were created by the Children of the Forest as a weapon against the First Men, which meant there was a whole backstory to explore. The show was laying groundwork for what should have been the culminating conflict of the entire series.

And then, in Season Five, we got a major revelation: the concept of the Night King, a leader figure for the White Walkers. He was the one who was raising the army of the dead, who was driving the invasion south. The Night King became the personal face of the threat, the one person you could point to as responsible for the existential danger facing all of humanity.

The Middle Seasons: Building the Tension

Seasons Six and Seven kept the White Walker threat alive. The Battle of the Bastards happened because of the threat of the White Walkers. Daenerys flying north and losing a dragon to the Night King was a major plot point that demonstrated the danger was real and escalating. The show spent an entire season basically saying, “Hey, everyone’s got to work together now, or we’re all going to die.” Characters that had been enemies agreed to temporary truces. The Night King became something like a proper villain with motivations and goals.

But here’s where the narrative started to fray a little. The show spent a lot of time building up the threat of the White Walkers without really exploring what they were, what they wanted, or what kind of story their ultimate defeat would tell. Were they mindless automatons, or were they intelligent and capable of strategy? Were they unstoppable, or was there a way to beat them? What would happen when they reached the Wall? What would happen if they reached King’s Landing?

These are the kinds of questions that would normally be answered as a story unfolds. Instead, the show seemed to treat the White Walkers as a force to be reckoned with until it was time to stop reckoning with them. And that time came in Season Eight, Episode Three, in a way that felt almost arbitrary.

The Battle of Winterfell: The Problem Revealed

The Battle of Winterfell was supposed to be the moment of truth. This was the battle against the White Walkers that would determine the fate of humanity. It should have been the climax of everything the show had been building toward. Instead, it was a confusing, visually murky episode where it was hard to tell what was happening, characters made inexplicable decisions, and ultimately the threat was resolved by a single person making a surprise knife move.

The problem with the Battle of Winterfell isn’t just that it was hard to see or that it had some tactical inconsistencies, though those things are true. The problem is that the battle didn’t tell us anything new about the White Walkers, didn’t explore their motivations or their capabilities, and didn’t climax with a satisfying confrontation. The Night King just kind of got stabbed, and suddenly all the White Walkers fell down dead. The entire army that had been marching south for eight seasons was defeated in a single night.

This isn’t how epic stories work. When you’ve been building toward a confrontation for years, when you’ve given characters entire arc about preparing for this moment, when you’ve made the stakes feel cosmic and world-ending, you don’t resolve it with a quick kill in the dark. The audience needed to understand why the Night King could be killed this way. We needed to understand what motivated him. We needed a confrontation that actually meant something.

The Wasted Mythology

One of the most frustrating things about the White Walker arc is how much of the mythology was just… left on the table. The books (and earlier seasons of the show) hinted at a huge history with these creatures. They were created as weapons by the Children of the Forest. They had their own intelligence and their own goals. There were hints that they might communicate in ways humans don’t understand, that they might have their own civilization and language beyond just killing.

The show had a chance to make the White Walkers something truly alien, truly threatening in ways that went beyond just being strong fighters with swords. They could have been a meditation on what humanity is, what separates us from nature, what the cost of civilization is. They could have been a force so fundamentally different from humanity that defeating them would require something more than just understanding them—it would require a fundamental change in how humans think about war and conflict.

Instead, the show essentially said, “They’re bad, they’re coming, and oh, there’s a specific way to kill them if you know the magic word.” The Night King had no meaningful dialogue with any human character. He never explained his goals or his motivations. The White Walkers never communicated anything beyond aggression. They were threats, pure and simple, and then they were dead.

The Thematic Failure

What’s perhaps most frustrating about the White Walker arc is that it represents a thematic failure. Game of Thrones was supposed to be a show about how the petty conflicts of human beings, the fighting for power and thrones, mattered very little in the face of larger natural forces. The White Walkers represented that larger force. The whole point was that all of this scheming and backstabbing was meaningless if nobody survived to enjoy it.

But by having the White Walkers be defeated so quickly and so easily, the show basically said, “Actually, the scheming and backstabbing was the important part. The existential threat was just a distraction.” The rest of the final season was people fighting over the throne, and that became the real story. The White Walkers became the MacGuffin, the problem that needed solving so the real drama could continue.

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of what the show’s own thematic structure demanded. If the White Walkers were as dangerous as we were told they were, if they really did represent an existential threat to all of humanity, then their defeat should have mattered more than it did. The characters who won that battle should have been transformed by it. The victory should have changed things in a way that echoed through the rest of the story.

Instead, people were like, “Okay, the White Walkers are dead, now let’s get back to fighting each other.” Which is… not a great message, and also not a particularly interesting one.

What Could Have Been

There are any number of ways the White Walker arc could have been more satisfying. The Night King could have actually been a character with complexity and motivation. Perhaps he had a reason for wanting to kill all of humanity beyond just “because I was created as a weapon.” Perhaps there was a way to negotiate or find peace, and that’s what the series was really about—not defeating the threat but understanding it.

Or the war against the White Walkers could have been the climax of the entire series, not a plot point to be resolved before the real finale. Maybe the show should have committed fully to the idea that the political conflict was the petty sideshow and the existential threat was the real drama. If you’re going to spend eight seasons building up an existential threat, have the courage to make that threat the actual climax of your story.

Or the White Walkers could have been genuinely unstoppable, or nearly so. Maybe the best humanity could do was contain them, hold them back, and the cost of that victory would be enormous. The ultimate lesson of the series could have been about sacrifice and the price of survival, rather than about who got to sit on the throne.

The Lasting Disappointment

Looking back on the series, the White Walker arc stands out as one of the most disappointing narrative failures. Not because the execution of the Battle of Winterfell was flawed (though it was), and not because the Night King didn’t get a big climactic duel (though fans wanted that). It’s disappointing because it represents a failure to commit to the story’s own internal logic. The show spent eight seasons telling us that the White Walkers were important, and then it revealed that they weren’t, really. They were just a plot device to get us to a story about politics and thrones that the writers cared about more.

That’s not to say the political story isn’t interesting—it is, in parts. But the White Walkers deserved better. The Night King deserved better. The fans who invested eight seasons in this supposedly existential threat deserved better. The show set up a premise and then decided the premise was less important than it thought. That’s the real failure at the heart of the White Walker arc.

Game of Thrones has one of the most complicated legacies when it comes to female representation in television. On one hand, the show featured some genuinely complex, compelling, and powerful female characters who felt three-dimensional and fully realized. On the other hand, the show also fell into problematic patterns, sometimes using female characters as props for male character development, sometimes trafficking in unnecessary sexual violence, and sometimes fumbling the ball when it came to actually letting women have agency in their own stories. It’s not a simple conversation, which is probably fitting for a show that dealt with most things in shades of gray rather than clear moral absolutes.

The truth is that Game of Thrones’ treatment of female characters was never consistently good or consistently bad—it was a constant negotiation between the show’s ambitions and its limitations, between progressive storytelling and regressive impulses, between developing women as full characters and reducing them to archetypal functions in other people’s narratives. Understanding this complexity is important if you want to have an honest conversation about the show’s actual legacy when it comes to gender.

The Strongest Female Characters

Let’s start with what the show did well, because it’s important to acknowledge that Game of Thrones did create some genuinely excellent female characters. Cersei Lannister is a masterclass in character writing. She’s ambitious, intelligent, ruthless, and deeply flawed. She makes terrible decisions, but they’re her decisions, made based on her character and her worldview. Lena Headey’s performance brought incredible depth to the character, making Cersei simultaneously sympathetic and repellent, a woman you could understand even when you were horrified by her choices.

Daenerys Targaryen evolved throughout the show from a victim forced into marriage to a powerful leader commanding armies and dragons. Emilia Clarke played her with a nuance that sometimes the writing didn’t deserve—there’s real vulnerability under the dragon queen exterior, real struggle between her desire to be just and her capacity for cruelty. By the final season, the show’s decision to make her villainous might have felt rushed, but the potential for that darkness was there all along if you were paying attention.

Then there’s Arya Stark, arguably the show’s most beloved female character. Arya got to have an actual character arc that wasn’t defined by her relationships to men—she had her own agency, her own goals, her own story. She trained, she survived, she became a killer and an assassin on her own terms. She wasn’t fighting for a man or a kingdom; she was fighting for herself. The show generally allowed Arya to be the protagonist of her own story, which is more than it did for many of its female characters.

Brienne of Tarth deserves mention as well, a woman who fought her way into a traditionally male role and did it on her own terms, without needing to compromise her principles or her identity. Gwendoline Christie brought a quiet strength to Brienne that made her compelling even in seasons where the writing did less with the character. Brienne wanted to be a knight, and eventually she became one—that arc feels earned and real.

Margaery Tyrell was a character who understood how to play the game of thrones better than almost anyone. She presented a softer facade than she deserved, she leveraged every advantage she had, and she never revealed her full hand. That Margaery was younger and more ambitious than the show let on, operating several moves ahead of everyone else, is one of the more regrettable cuts from the books that the show made.

The Problematic Uses of Female Characters

But alongside these strong female characters, the show had some real problems in how it handled women. The most glaring issue is the treatment of sexual violence. Game of Thrones used rape and sexual assault as narrative devices more times than it should have, and often to less effect than the show seemed to think. Sansa’s rape in season five—a scene that didn’t happen in the books and that the show seemed to justify as character development for a male character—remains one of the show’s most controversial choices. The impulse to subject female characters to sexual violence as a shorthand for showing how harsh the world is, or as a catalyst for male character development, is something the show indulged in repeatedly, and it’s genuinely problematic.

The show also sometimes fell into the trap of using female characters as objects of desire or conquest rather than as full agents in their own right. Daenerys and Jon Snow’s relationship is the prime example here—by the end of the series, Daenerys’s entire story arc seems to depend on her romantic involvement with a man, and when that romance fails to resolve the way she wants, she burns down a city. That’s… not a great message about female agency and ambition. It suggests that a woman’s downfall is ultimately rooted in her romantic disappointment, which is a pretty old and pretty tired narrative.

There’s also the issue of how the show used female characters as plot devices for male character development. Sansa’s trauma was sometimes used less to explore her own journey and more to show how broken the world was for Littlefinger and others to exploit. Daenerys’s decisions were sometimes framed in terms of how they affected the men around her rather than her own motivations. Even strong female characters sometimes got subsumed into narratives that were ultimately about men.

The Problem of Female Victimhood

One recurring issue is that the show sometimes seemed to believe that making female characters suffer was the same as making them complex. There’s a difference between showing that the world is harsh for women and actually exploring how women navigate and survive that world with agency intact. Game of Thrones sometimes conflated the two, suggesting that victimization equals depth. That’s not true. Victimization can be a part of a character’s journey, but it shouldn’t be the entire journey.

Theon’s story is instructive here because it actually used trauma and violation as a way to fundamentally change a character, and it did so with psychological depth. The show showed us how the trauma changed him, what that change meant for his arc, how he had to reckon with what had happened to him. But with female characters, the show sometimes showed trauma without that same level of psychological follow-through, as if the trauma itself was sufficient to prove the character was complex.

Sansa’s character arc, in retrospect, is the most interesting case study in this. Her early seasons could read as the show using her naivety and vulnerability as objects of mockery—the stupid girl learning harsh lessons the hard way. But by the end, Sansa had become genuinely political, genuinely savvy, and genuinely powerful. The question is whether the show earned that transformation or whether it just assumed that enough suffering would automatically result in growth.

The Strong Female Character Trap

It’s also worth noting that Game of Thrones sometimes fell into the trap of confusing “strong” with “masculine.” Characters like Arya and Brienne were powerful partly because they rejected traditionally feminine roles and took on traditionally masculine ones. That’s fine—those are valid character choices—but the show sometimes implied that this rejection of femininity was necessary for power, that to be strong you had to be like a man. That’s a subtle but persistent bias. The show was better with female characters who found power in different ways, who used traditionally feminine tools and strategies, who didn’t have to become men to be taken seriously.

Cersei actually represents the show at its best here, because Cersei is powerful in part because she understands how to manipulate her femininity, how to use her sexuality, how to work within constraints to find power. She’s not powerful despite being a woman; she’s powerful as a woman, using the tools available to her. That’s more interesting and more honest about how power actually works.

The Final Seasons’ Treatment

The final seasons of the show saw some backsliding in female character development, partly because the show was moving at a breakneck pace and partly because the writers seemed to lose interest in the complexity that had defined earlier seasons. Daenerys’s descent into villainy happened too fast and felt reactive rather than inevitable. Sansa ended up in a position of power, which is good, but the path to get there was muddled. Arya got one of the most important moments in the series, killing the Night King, which was great, but then had to mostly step aside for the male characters to finish their stories.

Brienne’s character arc seemed to reverse—she got elevated to Lord Commander of the Kingsguard but also seemed to lose some of the depth and complexity she’d had earlier. The show’s final seasons were so focused on spectacle and male-driven narratives that the female characters often felt like they were orbiting around the main action rather than being the main action.

What Game of Thrones Got Right

Despite these criticisms, it’s important to acknowledge what the show did accomplish with female characters. For years, having this many complex, powerful female characters on a prestige drama was genuinely rare. The show gave these women real power, real agency, real consequences. When Cersei blew up the Sept, that was her choice and her responsibility. When Daenerys made decisions, they had massive consequences. When Arya chose her own path, she had to live with that choice.

The show also featured women in positions of genuine authority—as queens, as leaders, as military commanders. That might seem basic, but it wasn’t always the norm in fantasy television. The fact that Game of Thrones featured women wielding real power, making real decisions, and facing real consequences for those decisions was actually progressive for its time.

The Honest Assessment

Game of Thrones’ relationship with its female characters is ultimately complicated because the show itself was complicated. It had creators with different sensibilities, different seasons with different priorities, and characters who evolved as the show went on. The show didn’t fail across the board with female characters, but it also didn’t succeed perfectly. It created some of the best female characters in television while also engaging in some genuinely problematic storytelling choices.

For fans looking back on the show, the honest assessment is that you can appreciate the strength of Cersei, Arya, and Daenerys while also acknowledging that the show sometimes used female characters poorly. You can celebrate how the show expanded possibilities for complex female characters in genre television while also wishing it had done better, been more consistent, and been more thoughtful about how it deployed trauma and sexual violence. The show was flawed in how it treated women, but it was also better than a lot of what came before it, and worse than what it could have been.

There are few positions in Game of Thrones more thankless than serving as the Hand of the King. You’re the second most powerful person in the realm, theoretically, yet you’re constantly undermined, overruled, and blamed for problems that aren’t actually your fault. The Hand answers to a king who may be brilliant or may be a complete moron. The Hand must navigate council politics, manage the kingdom’s finances, oversee justice, and generally keep things from falling apart—all while the actual monarch might be off hunting, drinking, or making catastrophic decisions. Over the course of the show, we saw several different people take on this impossible role, and each brought their own style, strengths, and failures to the job. Let’s rank them by how well they actually did the work, setting aside how much we liked them as characters and judging them purely on competence.

The Rankings

1. Tyrion Lannister: The Political Genius

Here’s the thing about Tyrion as Hand—he actually accomplished things. During the War of the Five Kings, with the realm falling apart, the crown on the verge of bankruptcy, and internal enemies at every level, Tyrion managed to keep King’s Landing running, prevent multiple coups, fund the war effort, and come up with strategies that saved the city from invasion. He didn’t have a huge standing army at his back. He didn’t have unlimited resources. What he had was intelligence, the ability to think several moves ahead, and a willingness to make hard, pragmatic decisions.

Tyrion’s achievements as Hand are genuinely staggering when you really think about them. He sourced wildfire and used it effectively in defense of the city. He outwitted and outmaneuvered Littlefinger and Cersei, managing to consolidate power despite both of them actively working against him. He negotiated with the Tyrells to secure their alliance, which probably saved the Lannister position. He managed the Small Council with a mixture of authority and careful manipulation. Most impressively, he did all of this while dealing with a Small Council deliberately trying to undermine him, a queen who wanted him dead, and a crown that often didn’t understand or appreciate his strategies.

The fact that Tyrion eventually left the position wasn’t really a failure on his part—it was because he was betrayed, because the system he was fighting to preserve actually destroyed him anyway. His tenure ended in tragedy, but it didn’t end in failure. The city remained standing. The crown remained solvent, more or less. Tyrion proved that genuine intelligence and competence matter in governance, even in a fundamentally broken system. He’s the high watermark for competence in this particular role.

2. Ned Stark: Honorable But Overwhelmed

Ned Stark was an honorable man in a position that required more than honor. As Hand to Robert Baratheon, Ned inherited a kingdom in debt, with enemies at every border, and a king increasingly uninterested in the actual work of ruling. Ned didn’t have Tyrion’s political instincts or his willingness to play the game with ruthless pragmatism, but he was intelligent, experienced, and genuinely tried to do right by the kingdom.

The problem with Ned’s tenure was that he was dealing with a fundamentally corrupt system and didn’t quite understand how corrupt or how deep the rot went. He discovered the truth about Joffrey’s legitimacy and tried to handle it with honor, which was a catastrophic mistake. He believed that telling people the truth and appealing to their sense of duty would work, even when dealing with people like Cersei and Littlefinger who had neither honor nor duty. Ned’s failure was essentially one of reading the room—he didn’t understand that the game he was trying to play by different rules than everyone else, and his rivals were exploiting that.

Still, Ned wasn’t a bad Hand by any practical measure. He was trying to clean up Robert’s mess, he was investigating real corruption, and he was attempting to prevent war. His mistake was being honest in a den of vipers, not being incompetent at the actual job. If he’d been a bit more Machiavellian, if he’d been willing to compromise his principles, he might have been quite effective. Instead, he was honest, and honesty got him killed and destroyed the realm.

3. Davos Seaworth: The Honest Pragmatist

Davos served as an advisor and Hand of sorts to Stannis Baratheon, and while his tenure was relatively brief, he demonstrated real competence in the role. Davos was intelligent, practical, and genuinely believed in doing right by the people he governed. He had experience with logistics, trade, and the actual mechanics of keeping a kingdom functioning. He wasn’t dealing with as complex a political landscape as Tyrion or Ned, partly because Stannis’s court was smaller and more loyal, but Davos made the best of his position.

The main issue with Davos was that he was serving Stannis, a man whose legitimacy was questionable and whose reliance on magic and prophecy made him increasingly unstable. Davos tried to counsel pragmatism and actual governance, but he was constantly fighting against Stannis’s obsession with prophecy and his willingness to sacrifice anything in the name of destiny. Davos wasn’t a failure; rather, he was competent and realistic in a situation that was inherently doomed by his king’s character. If Davos had served a stable, reasonable monarch, he probably would have been an excellent Hand.

4. Jon Snow: Reluctant and Unprepared

Jon Snow never served as Hand in the traditional sense, but as Lord Commander and later as King in the North, he held positions of authority requiring similar governance skills. Jon’s record as a leader was mixed at best. He made some good decisions and some catastrophic ones. His insistence on taking the fight to the White Walkers was probably correct in hindsight, but his inability to manage his own people, his tendency to see issues in black and white terms, and his occasional bouts of indecision made him a middling leader at best.

Jon’s main problem was that he didn’t have the political sophistication or the ruthlessness that the job actually requires. He tried to lead with honor, which is admirable, but he also got himself killed for it, which rather proves the point that honor alone isn’t enough. When he was resurrected and took charge of the North again, he showed some improvement, but he was still fundamentally someone who trusted people more readily than circumstances warranted and who sometimes made decisions based on what he felt was right rather than what was strategically sound.

5. Qyburn: Competent But Morally Bankrupt

Qyburn is an interesting case because he was technically competent in many ways. He showed innovation, problem-solving skills, and a willingness to think outside conventional boundaries. As Master of Whispers and later as Hand to Cersei, he demonstrated an understanding of how to gather intelligence and consolidate power. His creation of the Mountain zombie was grotesque, certainly, but it was also effective.

The issue with Qyburn is that his competence was entirely in service of a genuinely terrible woman’s genuinely terrible goals. He helped Cersei blow up the Sept, he raised the dead, he built weapons of mass destruction. He had the skills and intelligence to be an excellent Hand under the right circumstances, but under Cersei’s rule, he was essentially an enabler of tyranny and destruction. You can be technically competent at governance while being morally catastrophic, and Qyburn is the perfect example of that contradiction.

6. Kevan Lannister: The Competent Placeholder

Kevan Lannister served briefly as Hand to Tommen after the chaos of Cersei’s rule and before Cersei seized power again. He demonstrated genuine competence—he was organized, pragmatic, and focused on actually rebuilding the kingdom rather than pursuing personal vendettas. His brief tenure showed that stability and competence could be restored relatively quickly if someone just tried to govern responsibly.

The reason Kevan ranks below the others isn’t because he was incompetent; it’s because his tenure was so brief and so interrupted. He didn’t have time to accomplish much or to be tested by genuine crisis. But everything he did do suggested he would have been a solid, workmanlike Hand—not brilliant like Tyrion, not as honorable as Ned, but competent and focused on the kingdom’s actual needs.

7. Cersei Lannister: Smart But Destructive

Cersei was intelligent and politically savvy, but as Hand she was a disaster. She was so focused on consolidating personal power, punishing perceived enemies, and protecting her children that she completely lost sight of what was actually good for the kingdom. She made decisions based on pride rather than pragmatism, she alienated allies unnecessarily, and she consistently chose the option that would hurt her enemies at the expense of the realm’s stability.

Cersei could have been an effective political operator if she’d been willing to separate personal grievances from governmental policy. Instead, she used the position almost entirely for personal vendetta. Her handling of the Faith, her relationship with the Tyrells, her approach to the Dornish conflict—all of these were driven more by her personal emotions than by any actual strategy. She’s an example of someone with political intelligence but lacking the discipline and perspective required to actually govern effectively.

8. Robert Baratheon: Not Actually a Hand, But Worth Mentioning

Robert wasn’t technically a Hand, but it’s worth noting that he delegated the actual running of the kingdom to other people while he pursued pleasure, which is perhaps the most honest acknowledgment that he had no business being king. As far as the position of king goes, he was catastrophically incompetent, which is why we get Hands trying to clean up his messes.

Lessons From the Hands

Looking across all these different people in the position, a few patterns emerge. The most effective Hands were the ones who understood that the job required pragmatism and political intelligence, not just honor or ambition. Tyrion succeeded because he was willing to make hard choices and manipulate people if necessary. Ned failed partly because he wasn’t willing to do those things. Jon Snow struggled because he wanted to lead by example and principle rather than by necessity and strategy.

It’s also worth noting that being Hand of the King is nearly impossible when your king is incompetent or unstable. Tyrion was dealing with a child king and a queen who actively undermined him, and he still found ways to be effective. But the structural problems with monarchy itself meant that even the most competent Hand was always limited by the whims of a single person. Davos knew this. Ned didn’t. Cersei certainly didn’t care.

The position revealed something fundamental about the show’s central themes—that individual competence and virtue matter, but they’re also constrained by systems that don’t value those things. The best Hands in Westeros couldn’t overcome the fundamental instability of absolute monarchy, the corruption of the realm’s institutions, or the simple fact that they had to answer to kings who were often their moral and intellectual inferiors. They did what they could with an impossible job, and history will judge them accordingly.

There’s something genuinely magical about watching a room full of Westeros’s most powerful people bicker, scheme, and occasionally agree on something. The Small Council scenes in Game of Thrones represent some of the show’s finest moments, yet they’re often overshadowed by the flashier spectacle of battles, dragons, and shocking deaths. But if you’re someone who found yourself leaning forward in your seat whenever the Small Council convened, pressing the rewind button to catch every delivered line and meaningful glance, you already know what I’m talking about. These chamber drama sequences were where the show truly sang, where political intrigue unfolded with surgical precision, and where some of the sharpest writing in television happened.

The beauty of the Small Council scenes is that they required no dragons, no mystical threats, and no CGI budgets. They required only smart writing, fantastic actors, and the willingness to trust your audience enough to hold on a conversation about policy, power, and personality for several minutes straight. In a show that often felt compelled to remind you of its own importance through spectacle, these quieter moments represented the beating heart of what Game of Thrones could be at its absolute best.

The Foundation: Politics as Drama

Game of Thrones borrowed liberally from historical dramas and George R.R. Martin’s own literary inspirations, but the Small Council scenes were where it most closely resembled something like The Crown or the intricate political maneuverings of historical fiction. These scenes took seriously the idea that power isn’t just about armies and proclamations—it’s about persuasion, leverage, and the ability to read a room. The Small Council table became a microcosm of Westeros itself, where alliances formed, fractured, and reformed again with each passing season.

What made these scenes work so effectively was the understanding that dialogue can be action. When Tyrion sits at that table as Hand and methodically outmaneuvers his rivals through wit and intelligence, he’s not less dramatic than someone swinging a sword. When Cersei lobbies for a particular policy while barely disguising her contempt for those around her, she’s just as compelling as any battle sequence. The show understood that the audience would stay engaged if the writing was sharp enough and the stakes were clear enough. And for most of the show’s run, that faith was justified.

The Small Council chamber became a crucible where different ideologies clashed. You had the military-minded, honorable figures butting heads against the pragmatic, sometimes ruthless political operators. You had ambitious younger council members testing their ideas against the entrenched wisdom of older hands. You had representatives of different kingdoms and factions trying to leverage their positions for advantage. Every council scene was a negotiation, and that’s inherently dramatic if you’re paying attention.

The Tyrion Years: When Competence Met Chaos

Tyrion Lannister’s time as Hand of the King, particularly during the War of the Five Kings, represents perhaps the finest sequence of Small Council scenes the show ever delivered. Peter Dinklage’s performance as Tyrion was already winning him accolades for his dramatic work in other scenes, but something about the Small Council table brought out a different flavor of his talents. Here, Tyrion was forced to work within systems rather than outside them. He couldn’t just talk his way out of problems with charm and wit alone—he had to actually convince these people to follow his lead, even when they resented him, distrusted him, or actively opposed him.

The scenes between Tyrion and Cersei in the Small Council are particularly masterful. Their dynamic shifts and evolves throughout his tenure, but what makes these scenes sing is that both characters are intelligent enough to understand what’s happening. They’re not fooling each other about their motivations or capabilities. They’re engaged in a kind of cold war conducted in front of subordinates, each trying to establish dominance and control. When Tyrion slowly realizes that his sister is undermining him at every turn, when he begins to understand that his clever plans keep getting sabotaged by forces within the very council chamber itself, the tension becomes almost unbearable. And it all happens through dialogue, through strategic pauses, through the way these actors use their eyes and posture.

What’s particularly brilliant about Tyrion’s Small Council tenure is how it illustrated the impossibility of the Hand’s job. Tyrion is intelligent, experienced, and willing to make hard choices. Yet even with all these advantages, even with the confidence of the King, he’s hampered at every turn by council members protecting their own interests, by the institutional resistance to change, by simple factual limitations on what one person can accomplish in a corrupt system. The Small Council scenes showed us that brilliance alone can’t overcome these obstacles. They showed us politics in its most brutal, honest form.

The Ensemble Chemistry That Made It Work

The Small Council wasn’t carried by any single character, though. What made these scenes truly exceptional was the ensemble nature of the group. When you had Tyrion, Cersei, Varys, Littlefinger, Pycelle, and others in that room together, you were watching people with genuinely conflicting interests, different agendas, and real reasons to distrust one another. The chamber became a chess match played out in real time.

Conleth Hill’s Varys deserves special mention here. In Small Council scenes, Varys was often playing a longer game than everyone else, protecting information, manipulating events from the shadows, and generally acting like he knew something no one else did. The interplay between Varys and Littlefinger was electric—two men playing the same game of manipulation but with completely different styles and objectives. Those scenes crackled with tension because you never quite knew what either of them was actually thinking.

The supporting characters also elevated these scenes immeasurably. Even relatively minor council members brought credibility to the room. The maesters, the military advisors, the lesser lords and officials—they all felt like they belonged there, like they had real authority and real opinions worth considering. The show respected these characters enough to give them moments, to let them voice their concerns, to occasionally win an argument. This made the Small Council feel like an actual body of governance rather than a staging ground for the main characters to deliver exposition.

Watching Incompetence and Corruption Unfold

Of course, not every Small Council scene showcased competence and intelligence. Some of the most devastating scenes showed the council descending into chaos, incompetence, and moral bankruptcy. The scenes under Joffrey’s reign, where the boy king would make disastrous decisions while the council scrambled to mitigate the damage, had a different kind of tension. These were scenes where intelligence and experience meant nothing because they had to defer to a spoiled, cruel adolescent with absolute power.

These scenes were effective because they showed us the fundamental instability of the system the show was built around. Monarchy, the Small Council scenes suggested, is only as effective as the person holding the crown. When that person is a man like Robert Baratheon, more interested in whores and wine than governance, the council has to carry the load. When that person is a boy like Joffrey, genuinely dangerous in his incompetence, the council becomes a body desperately trying to prevent total catastrophe. When that person is a woman like Cersei, motivated primarily by pride and paranoia, the council becomes a tool of personal ambition rather than the kingdom’s needs.

The Decline: When Politics Got Sidelined

As the show progressed into its final seasons, the Small Council scenes became noticeably less frequent and less central to the narrative. The show was moving toward spectacle, toward its endgame of dragons and battle sequences and shocking character deaths. The careful political maneuvering that had defined earlier seasons felt increasingly irrelevant to the grand destiny the show seemed to be working toward. Fewer scenes meant less opportunity for the kind of sharp ensemble work that had made these moments sing.

When we did get Small Council scenes in the later seasons, they often felt perfunctory, less interested in the actual work of governing and more interested in checking boxes—establishing alliances, delivering exposition, or moving plot pieces into position. The room that had once felt like the true center of power in Westeros started to feel like just another set piece the show occasionally visited. This was a loss, though perhaps an inevitable one as the show scaled up its ambitions and shifted its focus toward the larger, more mythic elements of the story.

Why We Miss Them

The Small Council scenes represented the best version of Game of Thrones—intelligent, ambitious, trusting the audience to follow complex political maneuvering, and confident enough in its writing and cast to make dialogue feel like the highest stakes. These scenes proved that you don’t need massive production values or shocking moments to hold an audience. You just need smart characters, conflicting interests, good actors, and lines that crackle with meaning and subtext.

In hindsight, those Small Council scenes feel like they came from a different era of the show, one where the creators believed that watching smart people navigate impossible situations was compelling television. And they were right. Those scenes have aged better than most of what came after precisely because they weren’t dependent on shocking the audience or overwhelming them with spectacle. They were dependent on craft, and that craft remains evident every time you rewatch them.

For those of us who loved those scenes, there’s still plenty to appreciate in rewatches. The ensemble work, the layered performances, the way the dialogue conveys so much more than the words being spoken—it’s all still there. The Small Council at its peak was where Game of Thrones proved it could be the smartest show on television, and that excellence deserves to be celebrated and remembered.

You remember the lemon cakes, right? They’re mentioned exactly three times in the entire show, but they’ve somehow become one of the most iconic foods in Game of Thrones. Why? Because that throwaway line about Sansa loving lemon cakes from Dorne, a line that gets mentioned so casually you might miss it, encodes an entire character and her state of mind. When Sansa thinks about lemon cakes, she’s thinking about a memory of sweetness and safety and the time before everything went terrible. When Cersei orders them for Sansa to be nice to her, she’s attempting to buy loyalty and affection. When they’re not available, when Sansa realizes she’ll never have them again in King’s Landing, you understand a little more about her isolation and displacement.

That’s the genius of how Game of Thrones uses food. It’s not just about people eating. Food is a language, a way of communicating character and culture and history. It’s worldbuilding that happens at every meal. It’s a way of showing you how different the kingdoms are from each other, how much the show cares about the details of its world, and how intimately connected food is to memory, power, and the way people experience life.

Food as Character Development

One of the clearest examples of food as character development is the way the show uses feasts. When you see the Lannisters at a feast, you see their wealth, their confidence, their belief that the world is organized for their benefit. The food is extravagant, the wine is flowing, and everyone is performing for them. When you see the Starks at a feast, it’s more modest, more centered on actually feeding people rather than on demonstrating wealth. When the Freys throw a feast, there’s something off about it—the food is good, but the atmosphere is uneasy because you know the Freys are not operating in good faith.

The food tells you things about who these people are. It shows you their values, their priorities, their understanding of what matters. A feast can tell you more about a character’s beliefs and personality than pages of dialogue. And the show understands this so deeply that it uses food almost like a recurring motif. The food someone chooses to eat, or is forced to eat, tells you their story.

Theon’s journey back to himself is partially told through food. When he’s trapped in the Dreadfort, being tortured and broken down by Ramsay, the food becomes simpler and simpler. He’s being dehumanized, and part of that process is the reduction of his meals from the nourishing, complex food of a lord to the basic gruel of a prisoner. And when he finally starts to rebuild himself, when he starts becoming Theon again, part of that is having normal food again. The sustenance that lets you survive has to improve before the rest of you can improve.

Food as Cultural Identity

Each of the Seven Kingdoms has its own food culture, and the show uses this to ground the world and make it feel real and lived-in. The North eats hearty, warming food designed to sustain you through brutal winters. Dorne eats spiced food, influenced by its hotter climate and its connection to Essos. The Reach grows everything—it’s the breadbasket of the Seven Kingdoms, and the food reflects that abundance. The Riverlands have fish and fresh water and fertile soil. The Vale has mountain food, harder and less plentiful. King’s Landing has access to everything, which is part of what allows the ruling class to feel like they’re separate from and above everyone else.

This matters because it makes the world feel real. These aren’t just kingdoms; they’re places where food grows and people eat according to what’s available and what their culture values. Sansa’s homesickness for lemon cakes isn’t just about sweets; it’s about missing the specific culture of Dorne, about missing the sense of beauty and warmth and plenty that Dorne represents. When she’s in King’s Landing eating the North’s food or whatever’s available in the capital, she’s eating away from home. The lemon cakes are comfort, and King’s Landing doesn’t have room for comfort.

The show also uses food to show economic status and access. The poor people are eating bread, maybe some vegetables, occasionally meat if they’re lucky. The wealthy are eating roasted meat, fresh vegetables, fruits, wine, spices. Sansa’s comment about not being able to get lemon cakes isn’t just about missing Dorne; it’s about the reality that certain foods simply aren’t available to everyone. Food access is power. When you control what people can eat, you control their survival. This becomes increasingly relevant as the show goes on, as wars and droughts make food scarcer and more precious.

The Politics of Feasts

There’s a reason the show spends so much time on the feast scenes. Feasts are political events in Game of Thrones. They’re moments when enemies gather in the same room, when alliances are made and broken, when the social hierarchies of the kingdom are on display. Who sits where, who gets served what, who’s invited and who’s excluded—all of it means something. The food itself becomes almost secondary to the social dynamics happening around it.

The Red Wedding is the most obvious example of this. The feast is supposed to be a celebration and a peace-making event. Instead, it becomes the site of one of the show’s most shocking and horrific moments. And the fact that it happens during a feast, during a moment that’s supposed to be about communion and unity and breaking bread together, makes it worse. The violation of guest right, the breaking of the sacred duty to protect guests in your home, is connected directly to the food. Breaking bread together is supposed to be sacred. The Freys turn that sacred moment into a weapon.

But even less violent feasts show the political maneuvering. At Robert’s coronation feast, people are sizing each other up, trying to understand the new order, jockeying for position. At the feast after the Tournament of the Hand, people are celebrating Joffrey and also trying to figure out what comes next. Every feast is a moment where the social structure of Westeros is on display, where power dynamics are negotiable, where an astute observer (or a camera) can see the real relationships beneath the formal ones.

Starvation as a Weapon

As the show progresses, food becomes increasingly scarce, and that scarcity becomes a weapon. The War of the Five Kings disrupts the agricultural systems that keep the Seven Kingdoms fed. The Lannisters burn crops. The Boltons exploit the North. By the later seasons, food is genuinely hard to come by, and that impacts everything. It impacts how people think, how desperate they’re willing to become, what choices they’ll make.

Arya’s experience in Harrenhal shows this. She’s hungry constantly. She’s serving the Lannisters, watching them eat, knowing that some of that food could be hers but isn’t. Her hunger is part of her imprisonment, part of her vulnerability. When she finally escapes, her first concern is eating. The show uses food scarcity to make you feel Arya’s desperation and vulnerability. When she’s hungry, you understand how trapped she is.

The North, later in the series, is facing actual starvation because the Boltons have destroyed the agricultural base and the Lannisters have burned the crops. The scarcity of food is what drives the desperation, what makes people turn on each other, what makes Ramsay’s rule so brutal and so effective. He’s controlling people through fear, sure, but he’s also controlling them through access to food. When you’re starving, you’ll accept almost anything from the person who has food.

The Beauty of Simple Things

One of the most touching elements of how the show uses food is the way it portrays simple food as a source of comfort and joy. Not just in moments of plenty, but in moments where food is scarce and simple. Sam and Gilly sharing food is a moment of genuine tenderness. The wildlings and the Nights Watch sharing food after the Battle of the Blackwater, establishing a momentary peace, is a reminder that breaking bread together actually means something.

The show understands that food is more than just sustenance; it’s a way of showing care. When someone cooks for you, when someone ensures you’re fed, that’s an act of love. This becomes particularly clear when you look at how the show portrays motherhood and care through food. Catelyn Stark’s entire identity as a mother is partially expressed through her concern for her children’s wellbeing, which includes their nourishment. When she can’t feed them, when they’re on the run or in danger, the inadequacy of that care is devastating to her.

Sansa’s food preferences aren’t just character quirks; they’re a way of exploring what happens to you when you’re separated from home, from the foods of your childhood, from the nourishment that reminds you who you are. Growing up is partly about adapting to different kinds of food, different kinds of nourishment. The foods you grew up with are the foods that make you feel whole and safe. When you can’t have them, you’re displaced in a deeper way.

The Bowels of Brown and the Invisible Margins

And then there’s the flip side: the food that’s barely mentioned, the food of the poor and dispossessed. The “bowels of brown” that’s mentioned in passing, the food that Arya eats when she’s escaping King’s Landing, the bread and thin stews that make up the diet of most people in Westeros. The show acknowledges that this food exists but doesn’t dwell on it, doesn’t make it central. And that’s actually a kind of realism—most of the people in Westeros are eating basic, simple food, and most of the show isn’t about them.

But the contrast matters. The contrast between the lavish feasts of the lords and the thin stews of the smallfolk is part of how the show communicates the vast inequality of Westeros. When you see lords eating roasted meat and fresh vegetables while commoners are eating bread and gruel, you understand something fundamental about how the world is organized. The food difference is a visual representation of the power difference.

Food as Memory and Identity

Ultimately, what the show understands is that food is one of the most powerful ways we connect to memory, identity, and home. The foods you grow up with shape who you are. The way your culture prepares food tells you something about what that culture values. The feasts you attend are the moments when you understand your place in the world’s hierarchy. The meals you share are the moments when you build intimacy and trust.

Game of Thrones uses food to do more than just fill people’s bellies. It uses food to build worlds, to establish character, to show relationships, to display power dynamics, and to trigger emotion. That lemon cake that Sansa mentions? It’s not really about the cake. It’s about home, about safety, about a time before everything went wrong. And the fact that the show can communicate all of that with a casual reference to a dessert is a testament to how carefully it’s constructed this world.

The feast scenes might seem like set dressing, like background atmosphere. But they’re actually central to how Game of Thrones tells its story. Every meal, every feast, every casual reference to what people are eating tells you something about the world, the character, or the moment. The show lavishes attention on the details of food because it understands that these details matter. They’re not just about sustenance; they’re about life, about culture, about the small, intimate ways that people experience their world.

In the end, Game of Thrones is a show about power, about survival, about the struggle to maintain dignity and identity in a world that wants to strip both away. Food touches all of those themes. It’s the most basic requirement for survival, but it’s also deeply connected to beauty, to care, to the creation of culture and meaning. The show’s attention to food is part of what makes it such a fully realized world. And it’s part of why something as simple as a lemon cake can carry so much emotional weight.