Week-to-Week: Death, Queerness, and the Discourse of the Dragon
How an important dialogue burns out when it spreads like wildfire
In this past week’s episode, House of the Dragon explicitly introduced queerness into its world, revealing that the King Consort-to-be Laenor Velaryon was gay, and in a romantic partnership with his sworn protector, Joffrey Monmouth.
It also—spoiler alert—had Joffrey brutally murdered at the hands of Ser Criston Cole, a traumatic event that sends Laenor into his marriage to Rhaenyra with a broken heart and a broken spirit.
When I watched this unfold watching a screener of the episode, I knew it would become part of a larger conversation about the deaths of queer characters on television, colloquially known as “Bury Your Gays,” and wrote a brief stray observation noting its place within the pattern. But when the discourse emerged (in The L.A. Times, in British GQ, at Jezebel), it was…well, the simplest way to say it is that the discourse seems disconnected from the context of both the series itself and television as a whole.
This is a difficult conversation to have because when you read this commentary around the internet, the comment sections and Twitter replies of these writers is filled with exactly what you’d expect: outright rejections of the very idea of criticism on the grounds of representation, either because it’s “woke bullshit” or because it’s irrelevant to a “historical” series. As such, it’s important to note that I’m glad we’re at a point where these criticisms are being raised, and that at no point should what I’m about to say be a suggestion that the writers in question should have just stuck to writing about the show on “neutral” grounds. I would much rather be having a dialogue about how to nuance these conversations than to be defending our right to have them at all, and those people in your replies/comments can kindly eat dirt.
That having been said, the discourse around Joffrey Monmouth’s fate speaks to a lack of shared understanding of the burden facing a given text as it relates to queer representation. For a long time, and with good reason, we have been hyper-sensitive to the fate of queer characters because of how few of them there were. The symbolic weight of a queer character dying in order to serve the storyline of a non-queer character was significant in this environment, as it implies—as the TV Tropes page for “Bury Your Gays” outlines—queer characters “have less purpose compared to straight characters, or that the supposed natural conclusion of their story is an early death.” When that is seen as a pattern, and it is seen as a dominant window into queer experience, the context of each individual instance is less important than its connection to the larger whole.
But the fact is that the burden on any one individual text is lesser than it was even a decade ago—there is more queer representation, both within movies and television shows but also importantly within social media, where we are exposed to a broader spectrum of queer experience. This doesn’t mean that it’s suddenly okay to kill queer characters with impunity, or that we shouldn’t be critical of how individual queer representations function, but rather that we are more free to consider the context of those characters and their deaths. The TV Tropes page for “Bury Your Gays” acknowledges that “barring explicit differences in the treatments of the gay and straight deaths in these, it's not necessarily odd that the gay characters are dying” in certain contexts, particularly in what it identifies as “Anyone Can Die” stories.
Which is to say that the stakes of how queer characters are treated in House of the Dragon, or Game of Thrones before it, are not as high as they would have been a decade ago. Compared to its source material, Thrones was far more interested in understanding the dynamics of queerness within this universe, fleshing out Renly and Loras’ romance, connecting sexual fluidity to Oberyn’s worldview, and using it as Yara Greyjoy’s defining characteristic. None of these are central characters, and all but one meets a grisly end, but none of them are explicitly killed due to their queerness, and the violence Loras experiences because of his sexuality is part-and-parcel with the Church’s treatment of Cersei’s sins. The show does not disproportionately use queer people to demonstrate the violence of this world, queer deaths but one spoke in the wheel of trauma and torture which powers Westeros as a society.
This is why I was a bit surprised to see, well, surprise that the same would be true in House of the Dragon. It’s the same wheel—this is the same world, and a prequel would be no friendlier to queer individuals than the show it’s based on. Joffrey is introduced as a paramour to a would-be royal, who thought he was going to be cast aside, but whose circumstances changed when Rhaenyra and Leanor came to an unexpected understanding. He dies not because his own queerness is uncovered, but rather because he became embroiled in the affairs of the powerful, where he was subject to the violent outburst of a knight of the Kingsguard gripped with guilt and shame over his own brush with royalty. To suggest the lesson here is that queer people can never be happy implies that anyone is likely to find happiness in this scenario—no one escapes the wheel unscathed, and the fact this is especially true for queer people is reflective of the repressive period of history George R.R. Martin based his story.
Now, in saying this I am veering dangerously close to the “it’s based on history, so homophobia is okay” people, and that’s not the point I’m making. Rather, I’m arguing that once we accept some fundamental facts about House of the Dragon—the historical period it’s connected to, the show it’s based on, the violence of the narrative as a whole—to hold the show to the standard implied by the reporting of the past few days is not a productive exercise. We can and should have a conversation about how the stories people choose to tell about history are rarely those that focus on the queerness on the margins of those periods, and what this says about industry perceptions of which types of queer narratives are valuable. And if people choose not to invest time in any show that fails to present complex, nuanced queer characters, then that is absolutely their right. But to suggest that a queer character being brutally murdered in House of the Dragon represents a specific harm to queer representation in television gives the show’s engagement with queerness far more power than it actually holds given how aware the audience is of the show’s context, and how much more representation of queerness is available to audiences across media.
In that same TV Tropes entry, though, it caveats the caveat about shows where characters often die, noting “it's often the case that killing one queer character is removing the only positive representation within the narrative.” This seems to be the trigger point for the suggestion that House of the Dragon is being “homophobic” like Game of Thrones before it, as the show fails to meet a suggested burden of presenting queerness in a positive context. But it is my view that we are past the point in the history of queer representation that it is reasonable to hold every text to this same burden, particularly one where there has been no signal that anything would have changed. This isn’t to suggest everyone has to like how the show treated Joffrey and Leanor, or even that I thought the story was effective: it was weird it hadn’t come up in previous episodes, and the use of queer death as shorthand speaks to the show’s larger issues at valuing expediency over depth due to its time jumps. But to suggest the show was being hompohobic in its violence, as opposed to clumsily engaging with queerness within its violence, is to inflate the degree to which any single show (and especially this one) fits into a broader cultural understanding of queer life in a contemporary context.
I’m not confused why this is happening on a broad level, though: queer critics lived and continue to live through violence, and there will never be collective agreement on what is or is not appropriate representation, particularly as we wrestle with the idea of “positive” and “negative” representation that is a carryover of a time where token queer characters carried more cultural power than they would today. And while it’s odd to me that anyone would expect a prequel to Game of Thrones to make any meaningful progress in this arena, given that it was clearly a shadow baby birthed from the same witch, on reflection I realized the obvious efforts behind-the-scenes to present a more visually diverse cast of characters may have raised expectations. The very fact that Corlys Velaryon is played by a dark-skinned actor of African descent has been touted as progress for a franchise that had previously had imagined its core families solely as white, perhaps creating the impression the show was looking to turn over a new leaf.
But the thing about that diversity is that it’s fundamentally hollow: it’s what Kristen Warner terms “plastic representation,” diversity on the surface with no effort of exploring how race inflects identity, or how it reshapes their relationships with others. It’s colorblind casting, an empty bit of inclusion that implies no deep reflection or insight into the role that identity plays within this story. The belief of the show’s writers is the same as it ever was: that issues like race, gender, and sexuality are but tools to be used in telling a broader portrait of violence and trauma, with the reality of “history” a check and balance on the show’s effort to include (but not center) those issues as part of their storytelling.
The spectrum of queer experience is too vast for us to ever come to an objective consensus on how to represent that experience, and such disagreements are inherently productive. It’s also important that people are aware of these tropes, which can and will still remain touchstones for the people making television in ways we must be cognizant of. But as we continue to see default pushback to such commentary even existing with the realm of cultural criticism, there comes a point where we need to embed into this criticism an assessment of whether violence against queer characters represents an intrinsic harm to queer representation or if it simply means that a show is either not for us or simply not good at telling its stories. And the death of Joffrey Monmouth feels like a good place to start.
Here's my take: Ser Criston was a wreck; he was clearly going to lash out somehow. I think the show played fair in setting that up. But why did that "somehow" turn out to be "beating Joffrey to death"? There were other folks at the banquet who were much more central to Ser Criston's pain. That's not to say that Joffrey was completely implausible as a target - he did unknowing poke at a sore spot - just that nothing about the situation made him feel inevitable. Which means the fact that he was the victim versus someone else was a conspicuous choice on the part of the writers. Which means I think that choice should be grappled with. Was this an according to Hoyle example of "bury your gays"? I don't know, but I think it's fair to observe that they took a gay character who could have an interesting role in the narrative going forward and made him disposable.
Tangentially, I also think it was a questionable choice to have the guard stand around doing nothing while one of their own beats a guy to death at a party thrown by the king, but I think that's more an issue of how GoT trades in violence in general than anything specific to Joffrey's sexuality.
I am but one queer, but this instance of the trope didn't particularly bother me. I agree with just about everything Myles said. This show never dangled the prospect of genuine happiness before snatching it away. I know it's not to everyone's taste, but there's no question that using a fantasy setting to explore real world problems is just what this franchise is about at this point. They told us the stakes of being gay in Westeros pretty much straight away and explored what it meant in this instance, even if it isn't the primary narrative of the show. I understand why people reflexively flinch at this stuff, but it feels like a case where surface knowledge of the trope itself is actually hurting some people's understanding of how to contextualise this storyline.