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.
Any feudal society would be reactionary, regardless of the details of the world. So in that sense it’s not inaccurate to portray this, but it really depends on how the content is handled.
I think the books of asoiaf handled it pretty well, you definitely came away from it with the feeling that the feudal lords and reactionaries and slavers and xenophobes were the bad ones and were going to get the realm destroyed due to their prejudices.
The show botched it bad and flanderized and trivialized a lot of it, especially towards the end. Just adding rape scenes for shock, even if they were out of character and made no sense
That's just keeping true to Martin's style tbh. The amount of rape in those books is frankly gratuitous. I'm not even among the people who hates depictions of sexual violence in media in general, but it's really absurdly over-the-top.
I don’t recall any rape scenes in the books being superfluous to the plot, that were out of character and made no sense, but I could be misremembering it’s a while since I read them and there’s like 5000 pages so there’s going to be a lot of everything.
This is a feudal society during civil war with rampaging armies ripping apart the countryside pillaging and looting. To omit sexual violence would be a whitewash of war and reality
Oh, yeah, definitely. There's a lot of random, unnecessary, pointless and meaningless rape in basically every book. The most grotesque one I remember is the treatment of Lollys, who existed as a background character for a surprising amount of time considering her only character traits were being fat, dumb, and ugly, all three of which we were reminded of practically every time she was mentioned and then moved on.
Well, when shit goes down in King's Landing, she gets brutally raped by "half a hundred men" (a fact we are reminded of over and over again for some reason, about this character who has practically no traits and may never have even spoken as far as I remember) and the result is that forever thereafter she's even uglier and dumber. And that's it. And we keep hearing about it.
The people saying she is fat, ugly and dumb are the reactionary people of Westeros and not GRRM. It’s supposed to create a pit in your stomach, the unfair treatment. The rape happened during a siege and battle.
She eventually marries Bronn because he’s a gold digger without qualms and she’s royalty, who takes to protecting her from the barbarity of the rest of King’s Landing. It shows the ironic ethics of Kings Landing that he is looked down on and scorned for this, while the “righteous” knights did nothing to help her and mock her.
There are like 1,000 characters in these books, saying that a character is just a “background character” kind of misses the context that there are hundreds of these types of characters who often meet all kinds of unfair and grisly fates
Incorrect, it is GRRM's narration calling her fat, ugly and dumb, "like a cow" I seem to remember his favorite phrase being.
Have you read the books? Every chapter is narrated by a character via their internal monologues. It was the character saying that and you have a really hard time grasping this.
Was GRRM endorsing necromancy when he wrote a chapter from the perspective of Qyburn?
Of course I've read the books, I have detailed information about the way specific events were described happening to an irrelevant side character who may or may not have ever spoken a word. What the hell kind of question is that? lmao
Just because the books are written from characters' perspectives does not mean it isn't GRRM writing them. He wrote them, not the fictional characters, and inevitably his quirks will show through.
It just doesn’t seem like you understand the concept of fiction and would get mad at an actor who plays a villain
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Disengage now
Already on it buddy :sicko-biker:
I am not male, I’m not your “buddy” and I have been raped before. Think before you talk
Curious how everyone who tells me to "disengage" keeps on replying. Very interesting. Wonder why that might be. Could a person be disingenuously trying to weaponize rules meant for making this place safer and less toxic in order to make it less safe and more toxic? :shocked-pikachu:
You first called a rape victim a fan of rape for disagreeing with you, then you refused to disengage and then you misgendered me. I can make a response to this level of shit hurled at me
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I would frame it as “I don’t moralize over every fictional account of bad things and blame the author” but you do you.
No you responded to my request to disengage with a condescending misgender. That was you, not me
:cat-confused:
Literally what the hell are you talking about
In response to my clear request to disengage
It was clearly not a genuine request to disengage considering you're STILL REPLYING :bird-screm-2:
I didn't misgender you, I still literally have no idea where you got that from
Buddy is a gendered term, especially when used condescendingly and in the context of basically calling me a rape apologist. You know exactly what you are doing, and the disengage request has already been broken by you trying to get the last word in
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Geez, I wonder why the person who was hurt and asked you to stop talking didn't stop talking when you continued to talk. Log off
Pat Nixon is on this list but it's mostly men. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddy_(nickname)
i don't really think of buddy as being gendered but i guess I can see why somebody would
I mean, I guess? I've never heard anyone express the opinion that "buddy" is a gendered term before. My entire life I have heard men, women, and nonbinary people referred to as "buddy" by men, women, and nonbinary people. It's not even like "dude" where it's mostly gendered but can be used in other ways, like it literally just doesn't have that connotation at all for me.
https://www.reddit.com/r/asktransgender/comments/hq8zav/is_bud_genderneutral/
Ok, I mean, three commenters there say it is gendered, three say it is gender neutral. Regardless, you don't need to worry about me calling you "buddy" or anything because I will not be addressing you. Please leave me alone.
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when you definitely read what i wrote :shrug-outta-hecks:
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no. im not interested in continuing to argue about this, especially with those who are not actually reading the shit i've already wrote.
seriously, this was a whole ass struggle session. click on my profile and start reading if you want my thoughts
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I’m just calling a rape victim a fan of rape :smug-face:
Hey, just to be clear, when I said "please leave me alone" I meant that I wish for you to disengage. Sorry if that wasn't clear enough.
Sure thing buddy
:crazy-frog-trans:
I haven’t watched GOT or read ASOIAF and I’m just popping in to say that you are deliberately misinterpreting the other person’s words in bad faith. “I get that you’re a big fan of the portrayal of rape”??? What kind of asshole says something like this off the cuff?
Here is a quote:
This is the kind of thing :reddit-logo:ors say constantly in discussions about the merit of specific depictions of rape in order to shut down those discussions and act like the problem is the depiction of rape as a whole.
What are you even trying to argue here? That rape should never be portrayed in media in any way shape or form?
?????
No. What? Where the hell did you get that from? Nothing I have said has in any way implied anything nearing that conclusion. I have, in fact, explicitly stated otherwise at every single opportunity. :jesse-wtf: :jesse-wtf: :jesse-wtf: :jesse-wtf:
So then what are you arguing? What do you specifically disagree with in the quote? I don’t think portrayal of rape is a necessity when depicting war, but it is absolutely a reality of it. The focus should be on whether that portrayal is done in a manner that provides substance, or if it is simply exploitative.
I disagree that it has anything to do with the conversation. It is a disingenuous strawman intended to shut down criticism of specific portrayals of specific rapes.
To give a concrete example, the depictions of sexual violence against Daenerys in ASOIAF are well done. The depictions of sexual violence against Lollys are gratuitous, gross, and weird.
Fair enough, I can’t comment on either of these since I haven’t seen or read them. I’ll just say that from what was written in this thread, u/A_Serbian_Milf seemed to be making fair points concerning narrative voices, and accusing them of being fans of the portrayal of rape because of their opinion on a piece of art is a ridiculous escalation that no one should ever do, especially considering your target may in fact be a victim themselves.
The thing about that is, the books truly are not written from characters' perspectives entirely. Each chapter follows a character, and might include a good chunk of internal monologue from that character which gives an insight into how they think about other characters, themselves, the politics, and their place in the world. But there is also true narration, separate from the character's internal monologue, which is written in GRRM's voice, and it is parts of this narration I took issue with.
Where? He consistently writes in a 3'rd person limited style, from the perspective of the viewpoint characters. There's no 3'rd person omniscient perspective in the books where Martin is telling you what he thinks through his actual voice. Everything is told through the layers of the characters' perspectives.
I guess we have to get into narrative voice analysis to determine whether or not I’m a rape apologist
Oh wow, I saw where she called you that. That's pretty fucking horrible, even more that people are upvoting her.
People pick their side at the top of the thread and then just go vote accordingly, I doubt half of them even read it
It definitely does seem a bit :yikes: to have a character who serves as the butt of a joke for most of their presence be brutally raped. Again I can't give a proper take on this, and I don't know if GRRM managed to make a cogent point with this. Serb seemed to think so, but really my main issue here is what you said to them over how they interpreted the text. Please don't do that, it creates an extremely hostile environment, especially for victims. I like this place because discourse generally doesn't gravitate in that direction.
They want their Disney monarchist propaganda without any icky bad things that really happened under monarchies
Dude, fuck off.
In a lot of media there is a villain who kills a subordinate who messes up or delivers bad news or something. This subordinate is irrelevant to the story, the viewer is just supposed to see that the villain is bad or crazy.
I don't think writers want underlings to be vaporized randomly
I actually don't see how this is relevant to the conversation at all. What are you talking about?
How many years of P R E S T I G E T V before we can stop calling it shock and start calling it tedious redundant standard practice?
A real shock would be a leftist story of overthrowing an oppressive ruling class without both-sides bullshit. How's that for shock?
Yeah the real twist ending would have been if Dany won and just began instituting a social revolution and actually “broke the wheel” of feudalism.
I think the books make a good point that Dany’s instincts was to kill all the slavers immediately, and she got talked down into moderation by her rich boomer advisors, and that ended up backfiring big time when the slaver class reformed and mutinied against her. The moral of that story was purge the slavers and go with your first instinct of classicide being based.
Too bad they then pivoted that in the show into teaching Dany to be evil and kill tons of civilians for no reason
Actual change is the real bad guy in GoT and liberal media as a whole. It's a stale status quo at the end, even with a melted le Iron Throne.
The new show treat being defended as passionately as it is, even here, saddens me. Even for people that like the books, the shows are both sloppier and emphasize sexual violence more than the books already do and the excuses of "realism" and whatever get flimsy there. Just like "objective" reporting, someone has to decide what is to be reported because not everything can be reported and likewise fiction has to decide that
spoiler
Ye Olde Gaynge Raype is going to happen a lot and be the emphasis a lot and in the visual version will have lots of full frontal :awooga: for the hogs, under whatever justifications or pretenses but it's still full frontal :awooga: for the hogs.
Yes i don’t think anyone here is really defending the show.
It’s not about “realism” in the books, it’s about subverting tropes but still telling a compelling soap opera basically (GRRM used to write soap opera screenplays for a living). The old trope of fantasy was monarchist-friendly noblebright idealist nonsense. GRRM smashed that and brought it down to a dirty grimdark material reality, exposed the nobility for the disgusting base humans they were. If you read the books they are quite materialist in their understanding of history and social movements, and there are progressive and reactionary dialectics going on. I don’t think it’s fair to lump the books in here
How long and how often can those tropes be subverted until they're just the new tropes and the new status quo? Is boisterous and colorful ye medieval court paegentry really that persistent and everywhere in literature, or on Netflix? Why not subvert it some other way than
spoiler
Ye Olde Gaynge Raype after doing for this many years and getting it copied this many times?
I know why not: it's consistently and reliably profitable. Doesn't mean I have to like it and its exhausting proliferation.
The new trope is realpolitik-friendly grimdark defeatist nonsense that condemns even the idea of change (a la "break the wheel") as naive, stupid, or even crazy. And that's not even a new trope, just an application of the very old "changing society somewhat is bad actually" one. :improve-society: :very-intelligent:
Edit: I was mistaken regarding the intent of some of the above poster's posts, so I removed the error regarding what they were defending and for what purpose.
Mind sharing the comments defending the show?
I explicitly said this, GoT is a victim of its success in that it was such a widespread phenomena it became the new cliche. Can’t really fault GRRM in 1995 for that though can you? It wasn’t a trope to have a materialist fantasy in 1995.
“All masscult is fascist” I know I know.
What you're saying implies that whatever was novelty in 1995 gets a free pass in 2022 for being the new status quo. I don't agree with that either.
I've had pleasant discussions with you in the past so I won't assume that you're asking this of me in bad faith, but with that said, if you don't already see it for yourself in the thread as-is then you've already rejected what I believe constitutes defending the show, especially because now that I look again, the posts that defended the show that I was going to link as per your request are mostly your posts. If you don't see them as show defense, and I saw them as show defense, that's an impasse that out of courtesy leans in your favor.
I pretty explicitly open up with saying the show handled everything poorly, bastardized the entire premise and added a bunch of sexposition and gratuitous sexual violence. Feel free to post said comments of me “defending the show”
Do you also want to call Mark Twain and Huckleberry Finn racist by 2022 standards? Go ahead, but this is just sophistry, it was an anti-racist work in its context and should be judged as such when appreciating the literature or artistic merit
GRRM legitimately believes that previously fantasy authors were papering over these problems in feudal societies and he wants to explore these concepts through his characters. He felt he was doing an unveiling of the reactionary fantasy tropes, making them explicit and forefront and condemned by the reader instead of accepted as a given
I must have missed your emphasis then when reading further and further down from, because like I said what looked like defense of the show were primarily and almost entirely your posts in this thread. Much of the "this is actually just the point of view of the characters when calling a repeatedly traumatized sexual assault victim a cow" style arguments could defend the show almost as easily as the books. That is why I took it as show defense further down in the thread.
I've read almost everything Mark Twain and I'm fond of Mr. Clemens' work, but that said, if it came down to it I'd be more than willing to call out some of his bad takes and his outright lifting of his pen name with some possible plagarism in the background as well.
Did you catch the part where my fine interlocutor accused me of “being really into rape” for not wanting a sanitized fictional box to hide in, but being ok with exploring real world problems within fiction? You can disagree with my take, we can discuss it, but that is overstepping the line. I asked for them to disengage as I have had experiences with sexual assault in the past, and they doubled down and started misgendering me.
I did see that post, yes.
I believe I know where that accusation came from, though. It's one thing to have sexual violence be a part of a story, and it's another to have it so often and so much that it does, regardless of the supposed intent of the author, eventually become a source of entertainment that draws in people that liked it, wanted more of it, and read it for sexual violence as entertainment. I know Game of Thrones/ASOFAI fans that do read/watch because of that content, and they weren't pleasant people. I'm not saying you're one such person and now that I read your arguments, I do not believe you're "really into rape" yourself. That said, the titillation factor of the show, continuing with the new slop that just came out, was also a factor for general audiences as well, by my own experience, going all the way back to the books as well.
Full disclosure: my first ever recommendation to GRRM's work was from a college roomate who tried to pitch the books to me as
spoiler
"It's like Lord of the Rings, but where Galadriel gets raped by orcs! It's a realistic fantasy world with realistic adult consequences!*" :so-true:
Yes, he thought that was a persuasive pitch. It apparently was for his other friends. :kombucha-disgust:
Haven’t seen the new slop but I assume it sucks ass like the latter portions of the show. Would just be nice to have a conversation about exploitation versus exploration, the role of criticism, etc. without getting so wound up people are calling me a rape apologist
My take is exploration can become exploitation, first unintentionally then by design, especially when the profit motive is involved. The most glaring example of that is the shows.
Basically the only way to avoid this is just by having no diversity, at least nothing bad happening to women, and going back to noblebright.
My opinion is that it’s ok if art steps on some toes and makes some mistakes.
I think this is an unfair presumption.
If the narrative voice was either one consistent sympathetic one or at the least swung back to one even while the "exploration" happened, there'd be less hog readers snickering about "the cow" and getting off to the half a hundred committing sexual violence on her. Yes, unreliable narrator is a thing, but it was still the writer's choice to do that and keep doing that over time in a way that consistently fed the hogs long after the first book. Is it really exploration after it becomes well-explored territory in the books and keeps happening?
I feel it is less okay if those mistakes kept getting made with no significant changes and gradually seem less like mistakes and more like deliberate choices that become brand identifiers over time.
I don't think this is an either/or thing and it doesn't need to be.
The shows, for example, could have very easily "explored" a bleak and cruel medieval fantasy setting, sexual violence mentioned or off-focus, or perhaps presented as horror and atrocity or even done from a grotesque cinematic point of view instead of the :awooga: treatment with corresponding camera angles, focus, and even narrative alterations to the books' story to further emphasize hog feeding.
Honestly of every argument in this thread, and every point made; that request to NOT be called a rape apologist really ought to be the takeaway. I don't care who anyone agrees with here on narratives and portrayals, that line should not even come close to being crossed, and everything else should become secondary
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