Where is my favorite seafarer, Yara Greyjoy?
I’ve asked myself this same question several times during each of these last three episodes of Game of Thrones. After the Queen of Salt and Rock spontaneously took off back to her Iron Islands hometown during the season eight premiere, I kept hoping that we would get to check back in with her. After all, she had become quite a valuable player in the titular Game of Thrones — especially after the series’ sixth season, when she pledged fealty to Daenerys Targaryen and swore to aid the Breaker of Chains in her pursuit of the title of Ruler of the Seven Kingdoms.
After eight seasons and over 75 hours of story, HBO’s needs-no-introduction hit will take its final bow this Sunday. Unfortunately, judging by the overall trajectory of this season, I have no reason to believe that we’ll ever find out what Yara was up to while Arya Stark was defeating the Night King and Daenerys was lighting King’s Landing on fire. But perhaps that was an inevitability. See, Yara was a queer character — and Game of Thrones has a way of undervaluing its queer characters.
The first sign that queer people even existed in the Thrones’ central setting of Westeros came in the series’ fifth episode, “The Wolf and the Lion,” when Ser Loras Tyrell (the self-appointed “Knight of the Flowers”) is seen shaving Renly Baratheon’s chest. As Renly laments the ways his older brothers — Westeros’ ruler at the time, King Robert, and Lord Stannis — constantly underestimate him, Loras comforts him with words of reassurance, even suggesting that Renly would make a better king than either of his brothers (even if he is fourth in the line of succession). “I’ve never fought in a war,” Loras tells him. “But I’d fight for you.” As he cites Renly’s naturally kind and gentle nature as proof, Loras begins undoing Renly’s pants; soon, he’s descending into a squat, placing his face directly in front of Renly’s crotch. The scene concludes with an abrupt cutaway, but it’s obvious where things were leading.
The relationship between Renly and Loras initially seemed promising, particularly during the show’s second season, when Renly begins to pursue the Iron Throne. Though that requires marrying Loras’ sister, Margaery, Renly continues to see Loras in private — which doesn’t bother Margaery so long as Renly figures out a way to impregnate her with an heir. But before he even gets the chance, Renly is abruptly murdered by a shadow monster conceived by his brother, Stannis, and Stannis’ advisor/lover, the “Red Priestess” Melisandre.
Loras survives, but after his lover’s untimely death, his character is largely relegated to the sides. Robbed of much of his agency, he spends large swaths of the third and fourth season as a pawn in his grandmother’s continued efforts to forge alliances between noble houses; he’s first pledged to marry Sansa, and then, later, Cersei. Even the new male lover he’s given in the third season, Olyvar, turns out to be a spy working for Petyr “Littlefinger” Baelish. A few seasons later, when Olyvar sells Loras out to radical religious group The Faith Militant for “breaking the laws of Gods and Men” with “buggery” — “We engaged in intimate relations,” he admits — it’s hardly surprising, though it does pave the way for Loras’ final storyline: as a prisoner. For the remainder of his time on the show (another season and a half), Loras was kept locked up in a dungeon. Every subsequent check-in with the Knight of Flowers concerned his gradual deterioration and his decision to eventually confess his “sins” only comes as a result of the Faith Militant stripping him of every remaining morsel of self-respect. Of course, even then, he isn’t allowed any sense of real redemption. Before his trial has even finished, Loras is blown up in the Sept of Baelor, just another casualty of Cersei’s wildfire master plan.
