A feminist take on Game of Thrones

[DJLippy]

makemorenoise.libsyn.com/suffragette-city-radio-seven-metoo-and-game-of-thrones

Podcast with a discussion of game of thrones. (24 minutes in)

Discussing rape and danerys and the Mad Queen trope. Can men write female charecters? Are the best charecters (ie Arya) just basically men with tits? Did we ignore Daenerys psychopathy because she was a woman?

Love to hear some feminist takes

The show did away with any kind of allowance that I gave the books when they introduced Rose the Happy Hooker. I know D&D have always said that she was a device to help pull together narrative threads when the action initially moved from Winterfell to Kings Landing in season 1, but there were better ways and they could have avoided the trashy soft lesbian porn element (clearly they didn't want to). Her death through sexual brutality as the hands of Joffrey also showed that they didn't give a shit about her or her story, she was just being used, funny that.

The books are brutal, but then again so is the history that the books are very loosely tied to. The rape and beatings that female characters throughout are subjected to, or risked being subjected to, would have been very real women of the period and realistically you wouldn't have had many physically strong female types to fulfil the Buffy-esq criteria. I gave them a pass because 1). The women characters at least felt well developed and the author himself didn't seem to be revelling in titillation (his readership another matter) and 2). it at least felt that the male characters were equally shat upon, so while sex as a weapon was wielded against women, as it was and still is, you didn't feel like they were being singled out for torture on the merits of being female.

Her death through sexual brutality as the hands of Joffrey also showed that they didn't give a shit about her or her story, she was just being used, funny that.

She was used to show how much of a monster he was, I thought.
Shame for her character, but most characters were disposable in those early series.

I love fantasy but so much is hard to read because of the underlying sexism.

Someone up thread asked for recommendations. I’d suggest Kate Elliot, Catherynne M Valente, Zen Cho, Theodora Goss or Naomi Novik’s latest as fantasy written unapologetically for and about women. I did a year of reading women authors (managed to go from 25% to 60%) and it really opened my eyes to what I was missing and so many amazing voices.

I was a little heartbroken over Shae if I’m honest. She’s totally different from the books in that she’s Westerosi and much more obviously in it for the money. In the show she was fierce, charming, intelligent and went up to bat for Sansa. The fact they defaulted her back to “book Shae” was a complete injustice to the interesting direction they had chosen to take her in the show.

She was used to show how much of a monster he was, I thought.
Shame for her character, but most characters were disposable in those early series

It was already painfully obvious that he was a monster, it just felt like a half arsed, 'let's wrap this up before anyone realises we've run out of ideas for her'. Much like most of season 8 tbh (who said D&D were crap at foreshadowing?)

I think Rose’s death was to show more of Littlefinger’s true colours, not Joffrey. We already knew Joffrey was a monster, and so did Littlefinger, and he handed over his employee without a second thought because it was expedient and gained him a minor advantage.

Actually the “but it’s historically accurate” people piss me off much more than the honest “It’s absolutely fantastic- I love all the sex and violence and dragons. Fantastic stories with added soft porn-what’s not to like?” fans!

This. I thought it was all a bit gross .

Tyrion was a misogynist and the fact that he is portrayed as a one of the more heroic characters is worrying and an indicator of how blind we are to misogyny.

All of the characters have an arc. Tyrion certainly starts as a misogynist but he worships Danearys, the first powerful women meets other than his hate-filled sister, and he’s devastated when she turns bad. It takes a lot to turn him against her.

The Tyrion we see in Season 8 is not the debauched Imp of Season 1.

I generally think of the books as basic, and the show as secondary. There are some differences in the way they depict women, mainly to allow them to show naked women in provocative situations.
I don't really think its accurate to call characters like Arya men with tits .

I do think in some cases there are writers who do that, in those cases I often think its shallow writing and the men are often shallow as well. In GoT they do take on some male social roles, but it is very much part of their experience as women. But I do think the way that readers, and especially viewers, respond to those characters can often be about the way that person thinks of male and female roles.
Just as an example, Sansa and Arya are both at various times annoying and cause huge issues by being naive and inexperienced. Many viewers seemed far more sympathetic to Arya because she was tough and cool, while they thought Sansa was shallow and silly. Which was never true, Sansa's chapters were always very enlightening, she noticed what was going on around her, how people responded, how power and status were manipulated in politics, she understood people's psychology and motivations really well as she became older. Things that Arya was never particularly good at or struggled with.

I was a little heartbroken over Shae if I’m honest. She’s totally different from the books in that she’s Westerosi and much more obviously in it for the money. In the show she was fierce, charming, intelligent and went up to bat for Sansa. The fact they defaulted her back to “book Shae” was a complete injustice to the her in the show because they changed her

I think this was an error that was made because they were mistaken to change her so much in the first place. In the book she really functioned mainly to tell us some important things about Tyrion and set up some of his important conflicts.

They must have known though that they had to tone all of that down a notch, in order to make him likeable. For some reason television and movie characters can't manage to be as complex as the ones in books without being totally rejected by viewer, and that seems to be across the board in any adaptation I've ever seen, it just comes across differently.
But then they decided to make her a totally different person. Maybe because they wanted more female characters that were admirable, I don't know. But the disintegration of her and Tyrion's relationship never worked very well, it was always difficult to believe someone as bright as she was and with her background could be so unrealistic about Tyrion's political and family obligations, and at the end it just seemed very implausible. It also didn't really set up Tyrion's breakdown nearly as well, his break from Jaime and murdering Shae and his father made some sense given the revelations jaime made to him in the book, but not so much in the show. He just seemed a lot more well-adjusted, up until the trial, whereas in the novel he clearly wasn't.