Fantasy is a tricky genre for television, easily blown out of proportion and easily dismissed as a juvenile art form when dragons or witches are involved. Though shows with big budgets for lavish fantasy sets haven’t historically been too common on the small screen, the “golden age of television” means that more people are willing to pay attention and pay the price for greater production value. Call it the Game of Thrones effect.
Outlander, a new series from small cable provider Starz, is a fortunate offshoot of this trend. Based on a bestselling series of novels I’ve never heard of, it’s about a 20th century English nurse, Claire, who gets accidentally transported through time to the 18th century Scottish highlands in the midst of a broiling conflict between the Scottish and the English. Leaving her historian husband behind in 1945, she is forced to navigate the tricky terrain of a war-ridden country in 1743, while also happening to meet a chiseled, sensitive, kilt-sporting Scotsman, not unlike many a romance novel cover.
I’m aware it’s a pitch that’s more likely to produce eye rolls than anything else, but it’s definitely worth looking past the fantasy–adventure-romance label that’s easily attached to the stigma of “chick lit.” Pulp fiction this is not. Outlander is a rarity––a show with a nuanced female perspective. Dismissing it as “chick lit” is plainly shortsighted, misogynist, and reductive. It’s skewed toward a female audience, yes, but that shouldn’t make it a guilty pleasure for anyone, gender aside.
Particularly interesting about the show is the online hype that often frames it as the feminist answer to Game of Thrones. It’s a claim I feel ambivalent about, since I’m such a diehard Game of Thrones fan and have found some of my absolute favorite female characters on that show.
The ambitious aspiring monarch Khaleesi, for example, steadily progresses from a place of victimhood in a forced arranged marriage to being a fierce, Beyonce-like queen—and reminding us that she’s the Mother of Dragons pretty much every chance she gets. Don’t even get me started on Arya Stark: she’s undeniably one of the greatest fictional badasses ever—female or male—and there is no limit to my fangirl love for her. Moreover, there are plenty of other women on the show who seem to always be manipulating their way into positions of power.
What I realized when watching Outlander, however, is what a different experience it is to see a fictional world through female eyes. Unlike Game of Thrones, Outlander allows the audience to hear our protagonist’s internal monologue as she meditates on matters like the tension between science and suspicion in a society unfamiliar to the progress she’s witnessed as a visitor from the future. Thrust into a world unfamiliar with her modenity, Claire is endowed with a poignant power––knowledge no one else has.
Even more significantly, though, I don’t feel myself constantly on guard while watching Outlander, whereas Game of Thrones has me holding my breath in case one of my favorite characters bites the dust in gruesome fashion. There’s conflict, obviously, since there’s an ongoing war, but there’s a level of comfort that comes with watching a story driven by a female voice with a stable level of power. This show is centered around her story and hers alone, making the key parts of the plot work in her favor. Though it’s undeniable that she’s fallen into a world unfriendly to her kind, she is rarely at a disadvantage impossible for her to overcome.
Differences aside, positioning Outlander as a woman’s show in opposition to the masculine extreme of Game of Thrones is not only artificial, but harmful. While the former will likely always be the underdog, marketing it to a female demographic can only be isolating. Welcoming everyone to the party, after all, is the best way to broaden the conversation. Now, if only we can find a tagline to rival “winter is coming.”
