How Game of Thrones Handled (and Mishandled) Its Female Characters

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.