What's with all the staring on Game of Thrones?

Blink twice, Sansa, if you're mad at your sister

Sansa and Arya.
(Image credit: Helen Sloan/courtesy of HBO)

"The Spoils of War" was riddled with interesting tensions over how titles and relationships map onto identity. Take Bronn. The guy who makes fun of Dickon for going to "Fancy Lad School" wants what Dickon has: a castle. The sellsword hungers for respectability; he'd like to be a lord. When Jaime reminds him of who he is, Bronn bridles and sarcastically calls Jaime "my lord" as he rides away. But it turns out noble blood doesn't get you very far either: When Arya, who's played so many other people, finally arrives home in her own face and announces herself as herself, it doesn't go as planned. (It's interesting, too, that for someone whose List of Names matters as much as hers does, the names she recites to the guards to establish her authenticity — Maester Luwin, Ser Rodrik — fail to work.) Only after she pieces together that her sister is in charge does she gain admission to her own home. Names and titles just aren't what they were.

There's a startling number of these kinds of conversations. The Iron Bank's Tycho makes a point of telling Cersei that he's "neither kind, nor a lord" in order to drive home that arithmetic trumps all, and Ser Davos' effort to endow Jon with a little grandeur backfires — is it King Snow? King Jon? "It doesn't matter," Jon says, and this seems to be the episode's point: that Sansa is "Lady Stark" now is both true and irrelevant. Bran repeatedly denies that he's Lord Stark (neither, for that matter, is he Bran). And when Podrick tries to compliment Brienne with a milady, she bursts out in annoyance: "I'm not a … never mind." And thanks him. Titles are squaring so oddly with identity that it's not even worth squabbling over them.

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Lili Loofbourow

Lili Loofbourow is the culture critic at TheWeek.com. She's also a special correspondent for the Los Angeles Review of Books and an editor for Beyond Criticism, a Bloomsbury Academic series dedicated to formally experimental criticism. Her writing has appeared in a variety of venues including The Guardian, Salon, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, and Slate.