The Game of Thrones finale cast aside its objectified women, just like classical literature taught us to

Game of Thrones is finally over, complete with an unexpected victor and a viewership divided in frustration over the ending. Part of what drives this frustration is, I suspect, the identity of the winner.

Bran the Broken might be the first elected monarch in Westeros’ history, but he is also a uniquely odd contestant in this competition, primarily because his participation has been so marginal. Bran represents the series’ interest in storytelling, sure, but his elevation snubs all the characters who played out the action so faithfully for eight long seasons: characters who have schemed and betrayed, suffered and died, all for the vague promises of a power that was only ever wielded by the show’s writers and showrunners.

And indeed, if there were any losers in the finale, it was the set of female characters who might have made it, not least Cersei Lannister and Daenerys Targaryen, who have flirted with madness, the supernatural and incest on their march to power, only to fall at the last hurdle.

This might well be seen as typical of the show’s long and problematic treatment of women, which has showcased a horrific casualness about the objectification, violation, and traffic in women throughout – but it is an attitude with long roots that reach back to classical storytelling traditions, and ones that themselves demand the masculinisation of women to achieve any sort of success in a man’s world.

Women in ancient literature tend to exist in the background, emerging to the fore only when they are violated or used as objects around which men can organise their pursuit of fame.

Helen of Troy is a good example: famed for her beauty (and in some cases her witch-like ability with poisons), she is nevertheless reducible to the wife of a wronged husband, the excuse for the cataclysm that was the Trojan war, and, according to Herodotus, an item in an exchange of mutual rapes that structures the antagonism between East and West.

Lyanna Stark plays much the same role for Game of Thrones: a faceless beauty whose main role is to launch the war and enable the domestic drama of the Starks. So too, on first appearance, does Cersei Lannister: the most beautiful woman in the land, a prize for the new king to celebrate his victory and console him for the loss of his true love, and a vehicle for securing her family’s advancement in court.

However, as power shifts in King’s Landing and Cersei struggles out from under the power of her male relatives, so too does she begin to act in more masculine ways: she wields her power in the open rather than through the competitive beauty standards of the court, she drinks to excess, and does not listen to reason, until she comes to resemble (whether deliberately or not) her own son the tyrannical conduct of her son Joffrey.

This is the story pattern of ancient drama: self-involved, dark and claustrophobic, and one where women preside over the destruction of their families and the fortunes of their men.

There is also some critical irony here: Cersei’s development requires she behave in increasingly masculine – but also increasingly childish – ways, and in the course of doing so she is also responsible for some of the greatest atrocities in Game of Thrones, including her own demise. Like Joffrey, she beheads her enemies where the more prudent course would be to pardon them, and she pays a steep price for that mistake.

On the other side of that misstep is the last women to fall in this saga, Daenerys Targaryen, a living paradox of epic proportions: capable of great destruction while championing mercy, the daughter of the ruling dynasty but also an outsider with no real clue as to the workings of Westeros.

While Cersei is all drama, Daenerys is all epic: her voyage is a physical march to a pre-ordained end, one from which she cannot turn away.

Perhaps the best ancient analogy to Dany’s story is that of Vergil’s Aeneid, the foundational story of Rome and the Romans. Like Aeneas, Daenerys crosses the seas in search of her homeland, and like Aeneas, she goes through a period of wandering before finally reaching Westeros, where she wreaks considerable havoc even before arriving at King’s Landing.

But it is her final decision that comes to define her: the realisation of a potential for madness that has always lurked within Daenerys and which has likewise taken critics of the Aeneid by surprise.

Aeneas’ final act in the epic that bears his name, which is also the very end of the poem, is to kill his enemy Turnus, who has just offered him unconditional surrender. Daenerys, whose potential for madness and cruelty has been an ongoing subject of discussion in Game of Thrones, decides to raze King’s Landing even as the city’s bells are ringing out to signal its own surrender to the dragon queen, driven not least in part by Cersei’s execution of Missandei and her increasing loneliness.

If Cersei’s pattern of behaviour is masculinising, Dany’s is outright masculine: she behaves as heroic male heroes have always done, and with the same results.

Part of the secret to Game of Thrones’ popularity was its invitation to revisit our fundamental assumptions about what is good and what is bad, what is moral and what is expedient, and above all, what we expected to happen all along.

These assumptions were often borrowed, however unknowingly, on classical paradigms that train us to put men at the centre of the plot at the expense of women. Game of Thrones has shown another option, putting women and their suffering front and centre, even as it inflicted even more damage on them to promote its rating or shock value.

But what it has also shown is that inherited masculine patterns prove destructive to the women who inhabit them – for women, as for everyone else in Game of Thrones there is no good answer, however good the story.

Ayelet H. Lushkov is an associate professor in the department of classics at the University of Texas at Austin. She is also the author of You Win or You Die: The Ancient World of Game of Thrones (I. B. Tauris)