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.
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