[...] Game of Thrones has always been interesting because it is determinedly a story without heroes; the one character who might have been described as a classic hero was killed off in the first season, and everyone who came after him is logically more villain than hero, no matter what cause they claim to be fighting for. Everyone is ruthless, and everyone has blood on their hands.

That this villains-only narrative currently centers on women perhaps says less about female empowerment, and more about the way women are allowed to be seen in mainstream narratives. We are more comfortable with female monsters, it seems, than female heroes. Being the supervillain has historically been a way for people with marginalized identities to come in from the margins, to enter action movies, comic books, and even the journey epics of the Western canon. Where the hero is alway a straight white dude, the person matching the demographic being courted by producers, the supervillain is often “the other,” playing on the expectation that anything outside of this traditionally dominant category will somehow inherently carry with it a whiff of fear and violence. [...] Villains’ origin stories are frequently darker, stranger, and more moving than those of heroes in stories—the trauma must pile up high enough to justify this person’s sadism and bloodlust, even if these traumas are only gestured at and never fully explained. Villainy becomes a sideways mechanism by which to examine the basically traumatic nature of living outside of the single dominantly approved identity in a racist and patriarchal society. Being the villain is a way into the central narrative without actually having to be granted centrality, to move in and assume power in the unmarked spaces while remaining a marked category. Villains are often far more compelling than heroes and are often the point of identification for many of us who, also, do not see ourselves in heroes. The villain is how we get into the story, how we recognize a person who has been warped by trauma and driven by desire, a human who wants and who fails and who lives outside of neat, upstanding categories.