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.
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
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
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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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