ATTENTION: THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS SPOILERS (AND SHADE)
Of all the epic moments – and there were many – in the penultimate season of Game Of Thrones, only one has real consequences for popular culture: the death of Lady Olenna Tyrell.
It happened in episode three of the hit HBO fantasy series’ seventh season, but it will reverberate for years to come, because the death of the tart-tongued Queen of Thorns – as she was once crowned by the equally acerbic Cersei Lannister – also marks the death of “throwing shade” as it has come to be appropriated in the mainstream.
If I can get regal for a second: Shade is dead. Long live shade.
Shade died at precisely the moment when the New York Times decided it needed to write an article explaining it to everyone. Shade died in May of this year when Cosmopolitan announced that the Pope threw some at Donald Trump. With each of the mainstream’s enthusiastic yet erroneous detections of shady behaviour, it became clear that it never understood shade.
Except Game Of Thrones. The show, which wraps up season seven on August 27, is the only example of mainstream media that consistently threw shade and got it right. With the passing of Lady Olenna and the real, political power the Queens of GOT have amassed since season six, I suspect we’ll never witness shade like this again. So, let’s take a moment to “bend the knee” – so crucial for vassals to do on this show – and pay homage to the achievement.
Lady Olenna’s death is itself legendary shade. Instead of conveying her final words, Olenna felt it necessary to have the last word.
After Jaime Lannister promises that her execution by poison (punishment for joining the faction to overthrow Cersei) would be painless, Olenna responds by point-blank telling him she murdered his son.
“Must have been horrible for you… as a father. It was horrible enough for me,” she said of Joffrey’s gruesome death (also by poison, in season four). “A shocking scene. Not at all what I intended.”
Pretending to care about the well-being of the person you’re currently eviscerating is shade. A sidelong look that casts doubt on either your sincerity or the validity of someone else’s entire existence is shade (in this area, Cersei is the reigning queen). Indirectly commenting on others’ flaws and faux pas, especially when you know they’re acutely aware of them, is shade.
See season five, when Cersei, a lush, is cheerily greeted by the duplicitous Margaery Tyrell: “Can we bring you anything to eat or drink? I wish we had some wine for you, [but] it’s a bit early in the day for us.”
As these examples make clear, shade is about evading detection. At its most masterful, its recipient is left unsure as to what just transpired. Ideally, they will have gone home, drank a glass of warm milk and only then realized the shade of it all. This point is crucial and it’s the reason the mainstream gets is so wrong. To understand why, let’s turn to the history of shade.
Courtesy of HBO Canada/Bell Media
Lena Headey as Cersi Lannister on Game Of Thrones
When talking about shade’s roots, it’s a must to name check the 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning, one of the first elucidations of shade for a film-festival going audience.
Paris Is Burning chronicled New York’s ball culture, extravagant catwalk-style competitions where gay, transgender, Black and Latino queens would vie for status. Madonna lifted voguing from this underground culture. RuPaul’s Drag Race wouldn’t exist without it. But shade’s origins go back further.
As a style of implicit exchange, it forms part of a Black vernacular stretching back to slavery. When what came out of your mouth could get you killed, couching your words and actions in ambiguity was your strongest ally. So it made sense that these ostracized communities of 1980s New York would adapt and coin shade, particularly when you consider that criteria for winning at a ball included how well one’s drag would render them undetectable (read: not harassed not attacked) in the outside (read: heteronormative) world.
The mainstream has never been able to recognize shade, because the whole structure of shade is meant to subvert it. And when it is not doing that, it is simply queens breathing spite like dragons breathe fire which brings us back to Game Of Thrones.
For GOT’s first five seasons, it became pretty clear that Westeros hates women. Its prominent characters – Cersei, Sansa Stark and Daenerys Targaryen – were simply pawns for the men, the real power brokers, to trade. Even when Margaery, a secondary character, made a power play, it was through traditional means: marriage.
The women of GOT were oppressed and often their only outlet to assert power in a dangerous game in which they had none was shade. This is what made them so well-suited for it, and so damn good at it. As drag queen Dorian Corey explains in Paris Is Burning: “When you are all of the same thing,” she said, referring to the same rung of the social ladder, “then you have to go to the fine point.”
The finer points of shade were overwhelmingly absent in season seven, which coincides with women finally gaining real power: Cersei sits on the Iron Throne, Sansa runs the North and Daenerys’ nine titles include Queen of Meereen and Lady Regnant of the Seven Kingdoms.
When you can throw real ammo, you don’t need to throw shade. So, I expect that as the stakes get higher, shady encounters will disappear entirely from the show’s final season, slated for fall 2018, and the mainstream will have lost its one passable example.
Lady Olenna’s final scene should serve as a symbol for the death of shade in the mainstream. It’s a lingering shot of her, alone in her widow’s weeds, poisoned and waiting to die. It marks the bitter end of a grand matriarch. The extent of her machinations were never fully grasped, her complexity never quite appreciated, yet she tickled us weekly with her witty barbs.
Her shade stretched across the Seven Kingdoms. From her assessment of her valiant, gay knight of a grandson Loras (“[He’s] young and very good at knocking men off horses with his stick”) to the lesson in genealogy she served to the incestuous Cersei and Jaime (“You are not the queen, because you’re not married to the king. I do appreciate these things can get a bit confusing in your family”), to her wilfully forgetting and then Anglicizing the name of Obara Sand, member of a proud desert clan (“What is your name again? Barbara?”)
Now it’s time to just let the old queen go.
movies@nowtoronto.com | @missrattan
