Margaery Tyrell Deserves Better Than What Happened in Last Night's "Game of Thrones" Finale
I'm not even pretending to be impartial here, I've long pledged my loyalty to House Tyrell and their sweet Arbor wines. But let's be clear, Margaery Tyrell deserved better - SO MUCH BETTER - than the fate that befell her in last night's Game of Thrones finale.
In a season filled with female characters finally scheming their way to success, that perhaps the biggest/best schemer in Westeros - give Lyanna Mormont a few years and I'll reconsider this, perhaps - is literally left to DIAF along with the rest of Kings Landing society thanks to Cersei's big bang moment is not cool, HBO. (Cersei gets a pass because she's Cersei Lannister, but just barely.)
As a player in the titular game, Margaery's strategies have been consistently portrayed as the closest of the flawless of all the major Westerosi contenders. Groomed by her grandmother, Olenna "Queen of Thorns" Tyrell (who, incidentally, I'm now left to root for even as she's stuck dealing with those pointless Sand Snakes), Margaery proved herself to be masterful at all types of the politics necessary to succeed in King's Landing - court politics, warroom politics, bedroom politics, and the greater sociocultural politics which saw her as beloved by (most of) her noble peers as she was by the peasantry. Also, Tommen's cat Ser Pounce, don't forget him! While I also love the development of her character in the books, she's not a POV character there so you're left to fill in the gaps; the greater insight provided into Margaery's machinations on TV fleshed her out just right. In another world, she's the perfect Bachelor contestant. Her manipulations were never not on point - she pivots flawlessly from getting the hot Joffrey gossip from poor traumatized Sansa to taming her wild hubby thanks to some crossbow foreplay; she played the long game even while locked in the cells under Baelor's Sept and it was just about to work out for her, urgh. In a show that has often fetishized girl-on-girl sex scenes while taking ye olde grossed-out Medieval approach to m/m relationships, she was also refreshingly nonplussed by Loras loving Renly.
And she rolled with the punches like no other could either. Speaking of my sweet Prince Renly -Margaery's first husband - he dies, womp, womp, and in the blink of an eye she's remarried to King Joffrey. Then Joffrey dies, and she's remarried to King Tommen faster still. Like Elizabeth Taylor, she had more husbands left in her, I'm sure. Though it was rarely the case, when the deck was stacked against her, she played a damn good hand with the cards she'd been dealt. Which is why it makes no goddamn sense to just cut her off before her grand plans had even the chance come to pass.
Perhaps her only error - and I say perhaps because you can never sell Cersei short but also, come on, she's literally drunk with power at this point - was crowing a little too much after she'd worked her ~feminine wiles~ on King Tommen. Don't bait Cersei, it never works out well. Really though, she could have legitimately been as sweet as fruit pie baked from fresh apples bought from Highgarden as a gift and Cersei's hateboner would have remained at full mast, because while she's a Lannister lion, she's also a prototypical mama bear. And Margaery even saw the big vengeance moment coming in the end, so she did have a good read on Cersei's potential if not her intentions. I refuse to hear arguments her "alliance" with the High Septon justifies her demise because you really can't work with, or even work around, boundless religious fanaticism, let alone a man wearing burlap without underwear underneath.
Look, I get that people have to die all the time on Game of Thrones. It's part of the show's twisted charm. But even though you often don't see the knife coming (that's how backstabbing works, after all), there's usually the somewhat calming knowledge that, well, there wasn't much more they could give to the overarching dragon narrative - not since poor Ygritte's has a death been so #TooReal #TooSoon. Margaery's story wasn't even close to finished! She had so much untapped HBIC potential, not to mention a few cute tiaras. She, Danaerys, and Yara Greyjoy coulda woulda shoulda gotten together and ruled the Seven Kingdoms like Destiny's Child, I just know it - yes, that means someone has to be Michelle, but whatever, it's Yara. (Sansa might be allowed to join the group also, if we're going old-school as in when there were four members.)
In a new interview with Entertainment Weekly, Natalie Dormer (who played Margaery on the show) explained she had actually told the show's creators to write her out back in season five, so she could explore other projects. This is not a very Margaery thing to do, incidentally, but if she had to peace out to shoot movies or whatever, why not play her storyline so that the faith actually broke her!? It would have been a damp squib ending, but one brought to pass at least with a modicum of predestined closure. Don't have her sneak grandma Olenna the Tyrell rose as a coded confirmation that she's still plotting like no other, only to be like, "Nah, that didn't pan out" two episodes later. That's a party foul plot point. It's not even that Cersei outplayed her in the end, because, sure, that could happen, but give her a proper fucking face-off, and a send-off too. We all know Cersei's classic "when you play the game of thrones, you win or you die" line, but when you play as well as Margaery did, you deserve a damn good death scene to finish things out.
Anyway, now I have to go write some fan fic in which Margaery is somehow also of Targaryan descent and so the wildfire didn't hurt her, because I just cannot with this. I JUST CAN'T.
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