Desideratum

In recent days, production stills for HBO’s fantasy series Game of Thrones have been circulating that include our first look at Brienne of Tarth. For folks not familiar with the franchise at all, or who haven’t read the books but have seen the first season, Brienne is a female knight. And not just any female knight: she’s an exceptionally clever and strong warrior. But she’s also the rare female character in popular culture who is unambiguously plain. I’m not talking about the standard Hollywood construction of the pretty-ugly girl who just needs to lose her glasses a la Rachel Leigh Cook in She’s All That or her unfortunate presentation like Ally Sheedy in The Breakfast Club. She’s not a character who is “unconventionally pretty” but who retains a certain core attractiveness that just needs to be recognized by the right, unsnobby people. Brienne isn’t someone who doesn’t know she’s pretty and requires a makeover to see herself clearly. She’s just not attractive. George R.R. Martin leaves essentially no wiggle room in the text for Hollywood to magically transform Brienne into a supermodel, and I appreciate that HBO didn’t try. As Brienne, Gwendoline Christie may not be quite as unattractive as Martin makes her out to be, but she looks powerful and dignified in a way that’s authentic to the book. It’ll be very interesting to see how much HBO’s adaptation includes the constant degradation, including persistent threats of rape, that Brienne faces both because she’s a female knight who is better than men at what she does, and because she’s an unattractive woman who has sexual desires.