On one hand it makes sense that medieval european social relations imply, well, medieval european social relations and it makes sense to use your novel (or your show) to examine those.
On the other I can relate to many people wanting to see women in medieval fantasy to be represented in some other way than constant misery porn.
I don't understand why people seem to think depicting something in a work of fiction is somehow the same as endorsing it. George RR Martin clearly doesn't endorse the violent misogyny of Westeros.
Because some people (including in this thread) are addicted to being angry online.
It's not a matter of thinking that the show endorses it (though the show does sometimes luxuriate in it in uncomfortable ways), but that even when it's being depicted as a bad thing, it's still kind of exhausting
Then don’t watch it? There’s definitely an element of moralism at play here that goes beyond taste and “exhaustion”
I mean, I'm not watching it. I stopped watching GoT after Season 2 for that reason too.
I think it's kind of weird that I'm being portrayed as angry online about this tbh. When the topic comes up and I explain why I stopped watching, the responses to that are always way more angry than I am
Well in this thread I had someone accuse me of “really enjoying portrayals of rape” for having a different literary analysis than them and not condemning GRRM to hellfire. Not your fault, but people get extremely mad online about this on both sides and I have never had an ASOIAF fan call me a rapist for disagreeing with them
But then how would I get angry enough to post about it online?
But he does exploit it to arouse the prurient interests of his readers. He didn't have to make Daenerys thirteen. The average age of marriage for women during the War of the Roses was 18-25. If he wanted a real, gritty, blood and filth medieval world Daenerys would have been an adult when she married. He chose to depict a child having sex and being raped, fairly graphically, because he thought it would arouse or enrage his audience.
Anf that's just one example of a point where his allegedly realistic, grounded medieval fantasy world is actually more violent, more depraved, and more scandalous than the real world conflict it's nominally based on.
Not true. Margaret Beaufort was married to Edmund Tutor, a man twelve years her senior, at the age of twelve. She became pregnant immediately after her wedding night, and gave birth to Henry Tudor, the future King Henry VII, at the age of thirteen. She spent the rest of her life politicking for her interests and the interests of her son, getting control over her land, and pressing her son's ultimately successful claim to the throne. Daenerys being a victim of child rape and then going on to become a significant political force is perfectly in line with the real history of the War of the Roses.