Game of Thrones has always had a gay problem

Loras and Renly walked so Joffrey and Laenor could run!

Like many things that happen on Twitter, Game of Thrones discourse is quite tedious. When the first episode of House of the Dragon debuted in August, boring discussions about the show’s “misogynistic” flaws collided with peoples puritan views on violence on screen, making it clear that the discourse that surrounded Game of Thrones over a decade ago, was still alive and well. While these views of the show and George R.R. Martin’s original work tend to bore me to tears, I do find myself increasingly worried with the adaptations treatment of gay characters.

Like many gay teen’s, I started watching Game of Thrones after seeing a gifset of Loras Tyrell and Renly Baratheon on Tumblr when I was thirteen. I watched the first episode alone, and then realizing there were books, read those first. Now, I wasn’t surprised by the lack of gay text in these books, but rather, the compassion that is shown to these characters from Martin. So, colour me surprised when I watched the first two seasons of the show and found the adaptation lacking in it’s queer department.

Loras and Renly are not point of view characters in any of the “Song of Ice and Fire” novels, and Renly dies early on in the second novel, “A Clash of Kings.” I wasn’t expecting the television adaptation to make either of them main characters, but I was expecting that they would be treated as they were in Martin’s novels: like people. In Martin’s work (which first published in the 1990’s) Loras and Renly exist outside of their homosexuality, yet their television counterparts are unable to move past their Token Gay status. Renly is given the grace of being able to have conversations with main characters like Catelyn Stark, but Loras remains in the background frowning like a piece of aged Ikea furniture. 

In “A Clash of Kings,” an unknown army confronts Stannis Baratheon’s siege of King’s Landing, aiding in his defeat. Loras later reveals that his brother Garlan (who does not appear in the show) wore Renly’s armor to scare off their opponents, who would be convinced Renly had come back from the dead as vengeance against his kinslaying brother. In Season 2 of Game of Thrones, it’s actually Loras who wore Renly’s armor. While this is a fantastic change of direction (one that surprises me to this day that D&D came up with), we barely spent enough time with Renly to know what his armor looked like, and we spend even less time with Loras, which makes the reveal even more unfortunate.

The fact that audiences only saw Renly wearing his armor for a handful of episodes, paired with the fact that every shot of Loras wearing his dead lover's armor is cloaked in darkness, doesn’t help non-book readers establish who is defeating Stannis’ army. Later, Loras and Tywin Lannister walk into the throne room, claiming victory. Loras rips Renly’s helmet off his head and grimaces, revealing the identity of the masked hero, and then the episode ends. What could have been a stellar reveal mirroring Achilles and Patroclus in “The Iliad,” begins and ends in a haste. 

In “A Song of Ice and Fire” Loras is a young man who fell in love with the king’s brother, and when that king died, joined his lover's kingsguard and fought for his place on the iron throne. After Renly’s death, Loras follows his sister into the lion's den, serving in Joffrey Lannister’s kingsguard, a position where he can never marry, despite being the youngest Tyrell, ripe for courtship. Later, when Tommen Lannister is crowned, Loras tells Jaime Lannister, “I buried [Renly] with mine own hands, in a place he showed me once when I was a squire at Storm’s End. No one shall ever find him there to disturb his rest.” Then he says, “I will defend King Tommen with all my strength, I swear it. I will give my life for him if need be. But I will never betray Renly, by word or deed. He was the king that should have been. He was the best of them.”

In the television adaptation, Jaime and Loras only speak once, despite serving as each other's parallels in the books. In this discussion, they trade insults instead of wisdom, with Loras serving Jaime with a quippy goodbye typical of the show's later seasons. There is no talk of Renly, and Loras begins this scene eyeing Oberyn Martell, one of Game of Thrones’ only other queer characters, because clearly queer men are meaningless to the plot if they’re not displaying their sexuality at every turn. Loras spends most of his time on the show after Renly dies in two ways: fucking men who work in Littlefinger’s brothel, and giving people side eyes. Yas queen!

In “A Storm of Swords'' after Loras has been made a part of Tommen's kingsguard, Tyrion asks him “...why would anyone choose to join the Kingsguard at seventeen? [...] To guard the king's life, you surrender your own. You give up your lands and titles, give up hope of marriage, children . . .” to which Loras replies that his house can continue on with his brothers. Tyrion jests that marriage is “Not necessary, but some find it pleasant. What of love?" to which Loras replies “When the sun has set, no candle can replace it.” It’s one of the standout lines from Martin’s long writing career, and it’s heavy weight is delivered by one of the series’ sole gay characters. This line is the thesis to the core of many of the characters in ASOIAF, and it’s not said by someone like Daenerys or Jon, but Loras Tyrell.

When I think of “A Song of Ice and Fire,” I think of that quote. Such a profound admission of love, coming from a man who is speaking about another man, was integral to my queer coming of age. The Loras who exists on the screen in Season 3 and 4 of Game of Thrones is the antithesis to this quote. I am all for writers changing the works that they’re adapting, and I’m all for sex on screen, but having one of your only gay characters spend his time eyefucking (or actually fucking) the only other two queer men on the show, when his book-self spoke of his unwavering dedication to his dead lover, feels like slap in the face to his character, and Martin’s introspection.

It’s shocking, and albeit concerning, that George R.R. Martin had more grace in handling gay characters in the 1990’s than the writers of Game of Thrones did in the 2010’s. While the reader only see’s Loras and Renly through the eyes of ASOIAF’s main characters, the way in which these characters interpret the messages they lay down are more meaningful than any of the scenes they shared in the television show. It’s a shame really, as Finn Jones and Gethin Anthony had great chemistry, and seemed to truly care about the characters they were portraying.

Loras and Renly have become a blip in the history of what is the most popular fantasy series of all time, but with last week’s episode of House of the Dragon, it’s clear that queer tragedy doesn’t (and won’t) end with them. The most recent adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s work focuses on a world where the Targaryen family ruled over Westeros. The show is filled with stellar acting, lots of dragons, and Matt Smith with a platinum blonde wig. It also features some good ol’ homophobia.

Again, queer people are not a central part of the story that’s being told in this show, but they are present in this world. In fact, the story’s main character Rhaenyra Targaryen marries a gay man (who is also her cousin), Laenor Velaryon. In the show she’s as perfect of an ally as Margaery Tyrell was in Game of Thrones, allowing her husband to exist outside of their marriage, acknowledging that their desires differ. As long as she can do what she wants, Rhaenyra doesn’t care about what, or who, Laenor does in his free time. 

While watching the fifth episode of the show, I was struck at how well the queer aspects in House of the Dragon seemed to be going. Laenor’s sexuality was revealed after he rode a dragon and helped Daemon win the war against the Crabfeeder, so he was initially allowed to exist outside of his gayness. After he agrees to Rhaenyra’s proposition, Laenor is seen frolicking by the sea with his lover, Joffrey Lonmouth. Later in the episode, during his lover's wedding, Joffrey tells the incel-lite Criston Cole (Rhaenyra’s current lover) about the agreement between Laenor and Rhaenyra, which Criston takes offense to. He then decides to attack Joffrey in a fit of rage, until all that remains of the younger man is gore that resembles a decimated animal.

In “Fire and Blood,” six days after Criston knocks his helmet off during a tourney, Joffrey succumbs to his wounds and dies with Laenor by his side. It’s a testament to the love between them, with Laenor allowing rumors about the consummation of his and Rhaenyra’s marriage flow without abandon. Instead, in the show, Joffrey is brutally murdered by Criston at Laenor and Rhaenyra’s wedding feast. Thank god he gets to speak with the typical Westerosi-sassy-gay cadence, before this though.

Both Joffrey and Loras’ fates in the book versus the television adaptation are eerily similar. Joffrey originally dies after receiving a mortal wound during a tourney, and instead is beaten until his face is unrecognizable. As for Loras, he is still technically alive in the books, body burnt apon Dragonstone, but holding on. In the show, he’s sent to prison for disobeying “the law of god’s and men,” tortured for his sins, and then dies in the midst of Cersei blowing up the Great Sept. Both of these men either die or become gravely injured doing something people would regard as “noble” in the novels, but in the television adaptation, they are murdered. 

It’s clear that the people working on both adaptations of George R.R Martin’s work don’t understand how or why Martin wrote these characters into his story. Joffrey is barely in “Fire and Blood,” but Martin wrote him into the novel regardless, and allows his legacy to live on in Laenor and Rhaenyra’s youngest son Joffrey Velaryon. On the other hand, Loras was written as a mirror of Jaime Lannister, and his relationship with Renly is a direct inspiration of the Achilles and Patroclus myth. Unfortunately, George R.R Martin’s work and portrayal of queerness is too compassionate for the showrunners of Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon. Instead, the writers of these adaptations chew their gay characters up and spit them out, leaving them discarded and ultimately, forgotten.