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 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.