Tolkien: and then the Good King came and cast out the Evil Stewards who were corrupt because they ruled without the correct bloodline. Everything was peaceful after that and there was no more evil. There are two women in this story. Monarchy is good. The actual singular God who created everything wants you to be ruled by a 300 year old nobleman. The End.
GRRM: Feudalism is inherently destructive. Even the Noble Good Guys cause unimaginable suffering due to the structures of the system they operate within. Women are no more than brood mares under Feudalism. There is a Good King whose father was deposed. This Good King has spent his life living amongst the common people in order to become a good ruler. He is being manipulated by cynical actors and will bring devastation to the world when he begins his conquest. Thirty years ago the Hero of Prophecy acted to save the world from the Great Evil. He unleashed devastation on the land, died, and destroyed his own dynasty, possibly dooming the world. There are no gods, only powerful forces beyond our understanding that operate through the power of blood. Once upon a time there was a Good King who ruled justly. He brought peace to the land and improved the common folks' lot tremendously. Due the nature of Feudalism, the succession crisis that succeeded his reign led to the most bloodshed in 300 years. No one who wants war understands its cost.
People who dislike things because they're popular: Wow these are exactly the same!
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Also, attempting to "break the wheel" makes things just as bad if not worse, so just pick your favorite quippy reasonably sexually violent noble to root for! :so-true:
:michael-laugh: i actually enjoyed the books, but i had an issue with this too. His writing is so pessimistic especially on that point. World is bad, but changing it is always worse, is a pretty fucked world view, very lib one though
You're perfectly welcome and allowed to enjoy them, but since the starter of this thread took shots at Tolkien and presented GRRM in such a flattering and totally leftist way, I had to say something.
Totally understandable. Plenty of room for critique of GRRM for sure
When the show was announced I decided to re-read the books and I quickly realized what a miserable fucking torture porn mess they are and just stopped.
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Then soon after a scheming Romani fantasy ethnic minority that she made the mistake of sparing betrays her
Yeah who knew that
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slaughtering someone's entire tribe and then personally saving them from their 15th rape of the day
wouldn't earn you their undying gratitude. What's the objection here?
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summons the fucking devil in a blood magic ritual, aborts her child, resurrects her husband as a mindless zombie, and facilitates the destruction of the clan
Yeah that's all stuff that happens. It helps illustrate that this is a world of powerful and unknowable blood magic. Again, I don't know what the objection is beyond "this depiction of events is an endorsement of them"
"Objective" news reporters still have to decide (or have decided for them by the corporation) what "objective" news is fit to report.
Fiction writers have even less of an excuse for what they choose to write. What they write is a choice, and presenting a fictional world "realistically" is still a matter of choice about what is "realistically" presented, especially in frequency and emphasis. It may not "endorse" sexual violence to write about it, but writing about it and writing about it again and writing about it again and writing about it again and writing about it again is at some point clearly a narrative choice and not just "illustration" or "an event," especially with how it's framed in the story (or the show, with the author's already implied permission).
Yes GRRM chose to write about rape to illustrate how horribly violent and misogynistic his Feudal world is. You're welcome to not like that depiction. He chose to write a story that shows that hypocritical moralism at the last second doesn't excuse horrific violence preceding it.
As I said before many times in this thread, it's one thing to illustrate it and another to illustrate it again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again.
Dune had
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rape as a plot point when Baron Harkonnen raped a Bene Gessarit and managed to survive a retalitory Golm Jabbar poisoning which directly shaped his appearance and his psyche forever after
and the point was illustrated without being revisited again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again. At some point, it simply becomes about what the author wants to emphasize more than what the story absolutely needs, and clearly you and the rest of his fandom are totally fine with that but if you can't see how that's offputting to other people, I don't know how else to explain it.
As I said again and again, you're welcome to not like this depiction. But there is easily 100x as much non-sexual violence as there is sexual violence. People are just used to genocide in their stories.
Yeah I don't.
I didn't even imply that I was absolutely fond of all the non-sexual violence presented as exhaustively as banners and pigeon pie, either. To me, GRRM gets too lost in the details of what he gets into, and what he gets into is unpleasant overall for me, be it slaughter or sexual violence. That's a matter of subjective taste, of course.
Dune has plenty of murder and mayhem and weighty consequences and presents the perils and potentials of power in a way that fascinate me, and it does it without repetitive "and this battle was this gory!" or going into excessive details about the Harkonnens' latest acts of brutality, sexual or otherwise. That's more my jam. Things can be illustrated without being driven into the ground with repetition and over-emphasis.
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My interpretation of events is Mirri Maz Duur doesn't distinguish between the people who genocided her tribe and their queen who does not have as much power as their king, yet nonetheless has more than anyone else (who else could stop a warrior from raping a woman and claim her as their own slave without killing the warrior?). Dany then proceeds to ask this victim for help in keeping the man who just oversaw the genocide of her people alive. She then exacts revenge on the hypocritical queen who saved her from a force commanded by her husband. She explicitly tells her savior how hollow she finds the gesture.
To extend it to real life, I think the only reason Europeans and their descendants haven't experienced similar reprisals is because of the completeness of their genocides and the effectiveness of the caste systems they erected to prevent just such a thing.
Who is, I cannot stress this enough, 13.
And I checked, and during the War of the Roses period that the story is loosely based on the average age of first marriage for women was 18-25.