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.
The problem is the shocking lack of story literacy in the United States in particular and the world more broadly. It's pretty much impossible for many to understand that somebody being the protagonist of the story does not mean they're good. Actions that happen in the story are not actions that are being endorsed by the author. Lolita is about how if you're a total fucking creep you can turn even the most horrific acts into some beautiful, self justified story and that's bad, not how pedophilia is good. It's kind of like how you can't make a war movie that critiques war even if that's exactly your intent. It's almost impossible to portray racism, misogyny, etc in ways that most audiences these days will understand "oh, the existence of this thing in the setting is not because the author likes this thing and it's actually because they're critiquing it!"
Even worse are the dimwits who go “Ive never seen the series or are even aware of the series” and then go popping off based on whatever third hand account is accusing the work of.
If you don't even know what the story is about and even admit to not watching it, then why even give a critique about it? You’re basing your analysis on a story you made up in your head to get mad at.
I mean in the written lore, dynastic misogyny was kinda of the primary catalyst for why they fight such a devastating civil war
Misogyny literally cost the Targaryens their dragons
I was interested in the "world" of GoT, so I did some digging into the maps and places that didn't come up in the show. The broader world is really just a lazy version of our own world. Like, there's a land with an Asian-sounding name that has Asian-looking people in it. Some cold forested land in the north that is named some word that's very close to "Moscow". There are black folks but they live in the warm, tropical south. And some more examples like that.
It gets extremely lazy sometimes. There's the city Qarth that's the seat of a renowned trading empire and it's a rival to the surrounding areas. It's depicted as controlled by rulers only interested in gold and jewels who maintain their decadence through control of the sea lanes. Oh and it's on a separate continent.
It's just Carthage, it's how Romans talked about Carthage.
Carthage is Qart Hadasht in it's original Phoenician too
Is that lazy though? What's wrong with putting Carthage in a story
Why wouldn’t melanin levels correspond to distance from the equator?
It’s not like GRRM makes a secret out of doing this, he’s talked about it a ton in interviews how the plot of GoT is loosely based off the War of the Roses and that Westeros is England but bigger.
Not saying he's like, racist about it per se. Just that he's uncreative.
Mossovy (what you though was Moscow) is more like Siberia than Moscow. Its a general area not even a city or nation state.
The closest equivalent to Medieval Russian would be Norvos or Qohor and even then its a really distant analog
That's also the woman who set a woman who poisoned her rapist husband on fire...
Geez, people weren't kidding with the Hillary comparison.
it's so weird because the show (haven't read the books) seemed to look at her actions positively throughout the first seasons and then in the couple of last ones she starts acting more and more unhinged until become a war criminal and a despot. so fucking bizarre that all the show lead up to was a cringe cautionary tale of "populism". i'm not sure if it was supposed to be more about her being a relative of the mad king or what but it was so awful either way.
As another user said, if your worldbuilding is based on materialist conception of history then it’s going to necessarily involve class struggle and reaction. If your feudal world doesn’t have these then it’s very disconnected from how reality works and it endorses an idealist view of history if you can just edit out the parts of reality you don’t like when they should be there based on the conditions. This is the primary way that monarchists and reactionaries push their ideology, they make up a clean fantasy world and say that’s what happened instead of the reality.
Writing a bunch of feudal fantasy fiction where there’s no reaction is Disneyfied monarchist propaganda
Like a fuck tonne of shitty low fantasy, GoT is specifically late-late-mediaeval/Early Renaissance, which is basically a time of economic collapse as the little ice age stalls the social gains of the post-plague years.
So it's a particularly awful time for women, it's the beginning of the stripping of the convents' power, the harassment of formerly powerful guilds of sex workers, and the beginning of restriction on women's formerly quite extensive Roman-law derived property rights. all in a backdrop of horrifying famine and war.
We almost never see the greater freedom and power held by women in the early and high periods, or the clean, fine clothing and garish colours most peasants wore (looking at you Kingdom Come deliverance and your 3 stitches per inch seams), because the past has to be gritty and shit.
I'm all for "showing things as they actually were" but if you're going to do that then actually fucking show them.
Wait so you're telling me that human history isn't some slow, steady march of things progressively getting better for everyone but especially women? :confusion:
It's always fun to remember that in some parts of early medieval northern europe women controlled the farm and the money because men were thought to be bad at math.
I yearn for a high budget product that depicts how garishly and ornately dressed everyone was and never, ever, ever has anyone wearing black or brown leather.
I think for both of them it comes down to why it exists in your setting?
Is the fictional society racist just because and it’s not really relevant, there’s just an underclass race for no reason? Or even worse, it’s idolized? That’s bad.
Is the fictional society racist because your work is trying to comment on real racism and it’s an important part of the story? That’s fine.
Of course, there is also no reason not to create a fantasy world that does not correspond to the realities of materialist history, it is a fictitious setting after all. It all depends on the writers/creators.
What you are describing is how Hollywood and Disney has presented medieval history up until recently, and it was basically just monarchist propaganda because it glorifies feudalism and hides all the bad parts
The Elder Scrolls does racism fairly well. Prejudice and bigotry coexist with ignorance and simple superstition. The politics of Morrowind are deeply entwined with the recent end of the race based slave plantation system. Skyrim's secondary conflict is between the provincial blood and soil stormcloaks, the cosmopolitan empire, and the fanatically, supernaturally xenophobic Thalmor. Khajiit aren't allowed to entire stormcloak cities, dunmer refugees from Vvardenfell are confined to a ghetto and face racialized violence, the ongoing low intensity conflict in the reach pits the indigenous reachmen against the Nord colonizers, Redguard travelers from Hammerfell are regarded as stranged and exotic. It's not always well done, but the racism in Skyrim generally reflects the material realities of the people involved instead of simply being a clusmy allegory for a real world situation.
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
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
I don’t recall any rape scenes in the books being superfluous to the plot, but I could be misremembering
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
The people saying she is fat, ugly and dumb are the reactionary people of Westeros and not GRRM
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
I get that you’re a big fan of the portrayal of rape
Disengage now
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
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
No you responded to my request to disengage with a condescending misgender.
:cat-confused:
Literally what the hell are you talking about
already on it buddy
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
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.
Even then, by all means, call out that you don’t think it’s justified to use rape as a world building tool
when you definitely read what i wrote :shrug-outta-hecks:
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
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.
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:
To omit sexual violence would be a whitewash of war and reality
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.
What do you specifically disagree with in the quote?
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.
air points concerning narrative voices
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.
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
I get that you’re a big fan of the portrayal of rape
Dude, fuck off.
happening to an irrelevant side character who may or may not have ever spoken a word.
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?
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
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
Mind sharing the comments defending the show?
How long and how often can those tropes be subverted until they’re just the new tropes and the new status quo?
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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
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 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.
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.
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.
my favorite show is revolutionary girl utena, which features misogyny and sexual abuse prominently. but you wouldn't watch the show if all you wanted was to see tits, because it doesn't frontload that stuff.
the problem with game of thrones and related media criticism is that it feels like to some viewers that the misogyny and sexual violence is only there to titillate the audience. and that the shows don't actually have too much to say about those things. whether those criticisms are always valid is another thing, and one i'm not qualified to talk about given my lack of interest in the franchise.
I’d say it’s a valid complaint about the show, but not a valid complaint about the books
I totally agree. Not a fan of the show at all, but really enjoyed the books. I felt like the books used the medieval society as a way to explore trauma, misogyny, and marginslized people. Or can certainly be read that way, regardless of how the author may or may not have meant anything. I was dealing with past trauma at the time, and found it useful how many of the characters reflected different ways of dealing with trauma
I agree I also found it quite cathartic at helping cope with trauma
like i said i haven't read or watched anything to do with the franchise, but that is the vibe i get from seeing all the discourse.
i've heard hbo sometimes mandates that a sex scene be added to their shows, and even if that isn't the case it's a lot easier to make "sex sells" an important part of your tv show than your doorstopper fantasy even if there's a perfectly equal amount of sexual content between the two.
Yes for the first 3 seasons they were almost identical to the book except for a bunch of added sexposition scenes with prostitutes. Oh yeah and they made the gay characters Loras and Renly into a shallow easily seduced slutty stereotype instead of the loyal, ambitious and complex knights they were in the books.
Then as time went on the show got more and more detached and eventually ran out of content. Then they went off the rails.
What they did with Loras and Renly immediately made me hate the show, because i loved the portrayal of those characters in the books. And the sexpostion scenes always seemed so forced and silly. Didn't make it past the first season.
yea that's basically my opinion. if you're sexualizing your female characters constantly while also showing how miserable being sexualized makes them it just makes it seem like another one of those shitty fantasies written for incels to me.
I'm way too sleepy and tired this morning to think up something so I'll quote replies...
If I had the ability to create a fantasy world for a mass audience I would simply not make sexual violence part of it. Because for most of us that IS a fantasy world. I do not understand why they do this.
Does it ever cross any of these dude's minds how much more interesting a story might be if there wasn't misogyny built in? It's all just so incredibly boring at this point. Maybe challenge yourselves to try something new, guys. Surprise us.
I would simply not make sexual violence part of it. Because for most of us that IS a fantasy world.
Why I can't get into a number of shows tbh, so many seem to insist on having it
This is a big reason I like Star Trek (though admittedly the original series is pretty sexist, even if it was trail blazing in it's time). Giving us an actual positive vision of a better world seems in short supply today.
Medieval fantasy shows don't even reflect medieval life accurately to the extent that nerds talk about being "realistic". It's its own whole thing, a largely invented fiction that occasionally shares some aesthetics with 16th century England.
Justifying it as "just realism" is a lazy copout for hack writers, at least have the decency to come up with a more elaborate justification and show that you're putting thought and work into it.
It's all stupid shock value stuff. They don't actually intend to make it a deep foray into the loss that people experience. People are not traumatized as they are in real life. It's just all fun and games to them. Someone will be traumatized and look all fucked up one episode and then the next they're just fine.
And the depictions of medieval times are all gritty and disgusting, but in fact most things did look clean despite them not being clean. Much like today
And the depictions of medieval times are all gritty and disgusting, but in fact most things did look clean despite them not being clean. Much like today
What, are you trying to say people find being covered and surrounded in dirt and shit and garbage unpleasant?
No people just enjoy being caked in mud and shit, visibly so even. Just a natural state of things
I know when I have shit visibly smeared and caked on my skin I find that totally normal and don’t bother trying to clean it off.
they could literally just not have misogyny. It’s a bullshit excuse. unless it’s written by a woman and has a very specific point to make for the story, including it is gratuitous
The misogyny is a pretty integral plot point its what drove the entire continent into ruin and cost the Targaryens everything, had they just gone with the original female heir or even thr female heir before her there wouldn’t have been a civil war.
stories about restoring the "correct" "good" monarchy are dumb and bad
i have my own treats to attend to, i don't know this one.
i still think it's a waste of time to moralize art, and even more so to moralize low art that takes the stupidity of its audience as a given.
I agree. Enjoy art that you enjoy. As the great theorist said "all masscult under late capitalism is fascist".
On the other hand I also sympathize with people being annoyed at being sold images of their oppression clearly meant to excite and titillate with claim that this is analysis and condemnation.
Come to think of it, critics probably had this discussion about exploitation movies a million times...
