whole house super duper crazy

I don’t hate the idea of Gwayne Hightower being gay, but I really dislike it. To be entirely clear upfront, this isn’t coming from a place of homophobia - I’m a bisexual woman with a solid group of queer friends, including a gay best friend who actually agrees with me on this exact take. I’ve thought about this specific trope in other fandoms, and I just think the writers made a bad call here.

First off, there’s pretty much a universal agreement across the fandom that Gwayne is one of the very few men in House of the Dragon and honestly, the broader ASOIAF universe who actually treats women with basic respect and behaves like a decent human being. By turning around and writing him as gay, it almost feels like falling into that stereotypical trap where a man can only be kind, gentle, and respectful toward women if he has zero romantic or sexual interest in them. It subtly reinforces this weird narrative that straight (or women-attracted) men in Westeros are inherently toxic, and that respect from a man only comes with a lack of attraction.

Second, I’m genuinely dreading what this is going to do to the online fandom culture. We all know how toxic certain spaces can get and this decision feels like it's going to awaken a very annoying corner of the internet with new reasons to be misogynistic. It won't be long before people start gatekeeping him with comments like, "He’s for the men only now," or "Women need to stop thirsting over him." It’s going to lead to endless discourse and fandom policing over whether women are even "allowed" to make edits, write fanfiction, or crush on him anymore.

And at the risk of sounding like "that friend that's too woke", it honestly feels misogynistic on a smaller level. Why is it that whenever the writers manage to create a likable, non-threatening, respectful male character, he gets removed from the table for women entirely? It feels like a slap in the face to female fans who just wanted one good guy who is actually attracted to women. We deserve to have decent male characters who like women too, even if it’s just in a fictional fantasy setting.

If the writers were determined to give him queer representation, making him bisexual would have made so much more sense. It would have preserved his appeal, fit the world naturally, and avoided handing toxic fans a weapon to police women, something that women in this fandom already have to deal with plenty enough. At the end of the day, it just feels like a lazy choice to make Ormund seem worse and make Gwayne a sterotype.

@/tullbennett on tiktok