For a show that gave us dragons, ice zombies, and a Starbucks cup on set, Game of Thrones had a surprisingly consistent blind spot: the gays. Or more accurately, the way the gays kept ending up dead, erased, or sidelined.

Let’s roll the receipts.

Early on, Renly felt like a game-changer. Not just a side character but a king contender, lover of Loras Tyrell, and someone whose queerness was treated as fact rather than subtext. In the books, it’s implied. On the show, they went there. Finally, a queer power player. And then? Poof. Murdered by a shadow baby conjured by Melisandre. Gone before his arc really began.

Poor, golden Loras. At first, he seemed like another breakthrough: not just the sidekick, but a knight whose relationship with Renly was explicit, loving, and politically significant. But as the show went on, Loras became little more than shorthand for “the gay one.” By season six, he was tortured, broken down, and finally blown up in Cersei’s wildfire massacre.

Oberyn swaggered into Westeros bisexual, unapologetic, magnetic. He and Ellaria Sand made queerness look like liberation — desire as power, not shame. For one glorious season, it felt like the show might finally give us something different. And then: head popped like a grape by the Mountain.

And then there’s Arya. From the jump, Arya read queer-coded: the girl who rejected dresses, knights, and ladylike roles, who chose swords over suitors. She dressed in boy’s clothes, passed as male for survival, and forged bonds with women (Yoren’s recruits, Lady Crane, even the Stark women she butted heads with) that carried a heat the show never quite acknowledged. In a more daring version of GoT, Arya could have been the queer survivor — the one who lived, who proved that queerness didn’t have to be tragic.

Instead, in the final season, they paired her with Gendry in a sudden, blink-and-you-miss-it attempt to tick the heterosexual romance box. It wasn’t that Arya couldn’t have loved him; it was that the writing felt like erasure. A character whose queerness had thrummed under the surface was straightened out just enough to fit the mold. And then she was sent sailing west, her queer potential folded into the horizon.

Yes, everyone dies on GoT. But not everyone dies like this. Straight men got redemption arcs, political legacies, bittersweet send-offs. Queer characters got humiliation, torture, obliteration. And when one finally survived — Arya — her queerness was pushed back into subtext.

This isn’t just a Game of Thrones issue. Fantasy as a genre has long had a queer problem. Desire is coded as forbidden or doomed. Queer characters are side plots, villains, tragic lovers. The logic goes: dragons are fine, but two women falling in love and ruling together? Unthinkable.

That’s why Wheel of Time (RIP) felt like such a revelation. Moiraine and Siuan’s love wasn’t a whisper; it was a foundation. Alanna’s polyamory wasn’t played for laughs; it was treated with respect. Queerness wasn’t spectacle — it was woven into the world. For once, fantasy remembered that magic can be everywhere, including in queer relationships.

Imagine if Westeros had dared to follow that lead. Renly surviving to rival Stannis. Loras scarred but unbroken. Oberyn bisexual and alive long enough to shake King’s Landing. Ellaria leading Dorne as more than a side note. Arya sailing west not as a lone wolf, but as a queer icon claiming her own story.

The raw material was all there. The show just didn’t know what to do with it beyond titillation, tragedy, or denial.

By the end, Game of Thrones left us with a handful of iconic queer moments but no lasting queer legacy. The problem wasn’t just that queer characters died — everyone dies in Westeros. The problem was that they were never allowed to live.

And maybe that’s the real tragedy: fantasy, a genre built on endless possibility, too often imagines magic but not queerness.

Don’t let this be the last scroll. Follow @glitchesinthegaydar.