Discuss rape and Game of Thrones HERE - HBO show only; no book spoilers

Discussions of rape are taking over the other GOT threads here. Please feel free to bring all such discussions here.

This is for discussion of the TV show as its own entity, and the issue of rape on GOT. The books do not exist in this thread. No book comparisons, references, anything, please.

To get the ball rolling:

Resolved: Westeros is a terrible place, but rape is being used gratuitously as a plot device by the show’s producers.

Gratuitously means without purpose. These scenes all have a purpose. They put the viewer on edge because we know bad things can happen to major characters at any point. That is what makes Game of Thrones such compelling television. When you watch a procedural you know that the crime is going to be solved and that any major change to the cast will only happen on the last episode of the season. In contrast you don’t know for the most part what will happen to any character at any given time. If Ned can be killed and Sansa can be raped, no one is safe.

I see all the noise about Sansa’s rape as kind of akin to Gamergate: radical feminists using rape to advance an agenda. They are very clever in picking their targets. Sansa’s rape was just a horrible thing, Ramsay Bolton is arguably the most evil person in a show full of evil persons, so it makes their attack on the show defensible.

Funny, I don’t remember a lot of fooforaw when Khal Drogo maritally raped Daenerys. You know why? Because the Daenerys rape was right out of a traditional romance novel, a real bodice ripper: a handsome, hunky barbarian who later falls in love with his victim, and who also falls in love with him.

Yes, a lot of women LUUUUURVE the rape scenes you see in erotica, erotic romances and straight-up romances. But you’ll never see the radical feminists attacking THEM, because it’s so much safer to attack the sort of rape scenes they don’t care for, like the Ramsay/Sansa rape scene, claiming that such scenes are there to appeal to men. (In fact, I think the only men who liked that scene in a sexual sort of way were rapist men, a minority of men.)

I wonder if the radical feminist types succeed in eradicating rape scenes of the sort that women don’t like from fiction, will they turn on the female romance/erotica readers too? I rather doubt it. That would be undercutting their own base. Then again, they are probably like Tea Partiers, too fanatical to take such considerations in mind.

It’s shit writing. The writers want something horrible to happen, so they make Sansa act like an idiot: “O HAI. I WILL NOW MOVE IN (AND MARRY) WITH THE PEOPLE WHO KILLED MY FAMILY AS THIS IS ABSOLUTELY THE BEST AND ONLY OPTION I HAVE. NOTHING BAD COULD POSSIBLY HAPPEN.”

I think that’s a very astute observation about the viewer response.

Okay, speaking as a (fairly feminist by traditional terms, but not “feminazi”) woman:

You really have to view the scene in the period and setting. Sansa lives in a brutal, patriarchal society. She understands women’s place in society. Like her mother, and all the other women (except perhaps Daenarys who is pushing to reclaim the throne based on her family name/roots), she’s not a fan of the way things are, but she’s been socialized to understand she has no choice. She must marry who she is told to marry. Marriage is arranged for political reasons, not romantic like we have now. She is required to submit to her husband’s every command.

I think she understands at some level she is a pawn and doesn’t quite know how to change that.

Having said all that I did wish she’d tried a little harder to beg some gentleness from Ramsey. I don’t think she knows he’s a complete monster. She’s seen him be cruel to Theon and act like a dick without being corrected, but she hasn’t seen him torture anyone. Begging him to be gentle, or at least to not have Theon watch would have been in character for her, I think. So it was disappointing to see her just bend over like a weak little mouse.

Well, Sansa clearly had the option (assuming Littlefinger wasn’t lying to her) of turning around and leaving. She instead chose to stay in Winterfell, her ancestral home, trying to gain influence and eventually destroy her hated enemy from within.

Can you suggest a way she could have done that without marrying Ramsay?
I think a key point is that however psychotic Ramsay is, he’s somewhat constrained by the fact that Sansa is a valuable and public figure in a position of theoretical respect, and Roose (who is also very very evil but much more practical and careful) has an incentive to keep her alive. She (and Littlefinger) are depending on this to keep her suffering to a minimum, and they are depending on Stannis’s army showing up soon to keep that minimum level of suffering to a hopefully-tolerable length of time.
Clearly the writers could have come up with an entirely different and unrelated plot… but I think people are wrong when they say that the plot the writers did come up with makes no sense whatsoever.

In the previous episode Ramsay threatens to kill Myranda if he ever bores him and then has sex with her. It is obvious that if she refused him she would be tortured to death. At least Sansa knows that Ramsay can’t kill her because she is too valuable to Roose.
The reason people are so upset is that it happened to Sansa, not that it happened. That shows the writers have done a good job in creating a character people care about.

Sansa had been promised to Joffrey and forcibly married to Tyrion, i imagine her thoughts on the matter were “it can’t possibly be worse than that”. Just because we know that Ramsay is much much worse than anything she could have possibly imagined does not make her decision stupid or the writing shitty.

If Ramsay ties Sansa to an X-Frame and repeatedly rapes her over the course of an entire season, it would still be less horrifying than what happened to Theon.

It doesn’t seem to me that Sansa is now thinking that nothing bad will possibly happen. She had a major character change since the Erye. She left the “hapless victims” camp to join the “agents” camp. It doesn’t make the situation pleasant for her, but it’s on her own volition : she chose to through it to further her goal. It’s not out of naivete anymore, even though Ramsay is so over the edge that it’s presumably worst than she expected. But she certainly didn’t expect to have a lovely first night with this guy she hates.
I must say however that her accepting Littlefinger’s plan at the first place seemed difficult to swallow. Her accepting to marry the son of her family’s murderer in her own former castle that they took away is a bit much. But once I agreed to go along with this premice, I don’t see any naivete in her behaviour. Just still some difficulties to adjust to her new role (for instance we see in every new uncomfortable scene, like the scene with Ramsay’s lover, or the awful family dinner, that she struggles a bit and then finds the fortitude to go over it and keep her composture).

Completely disagree. “Begging” woud place her again in the victim camp, and there would be no better way to make sure that Ramsay would be even worst if she had done that, or at least greatly amused. We’ve seen how a gentle attitude helped her with Joffrey. The way to go is to clench her teeth and wait for the time of revenge to come.

It’s unclear whether she believes the stories told by ramsay’s lover. But in any case, even not knowing he’s a monster, she hates him for what he is ( a Bolton) and obviously despises him for his behaviour (see the family dinner scene, when she clearly enjoyed seeing him being put back at his place by his father : “by the way i’m going to have another legitimate son”). And finally, her plan implies to get rid of (and presumably revenge on) the Boltons. There’s no way she might have the shadow of a positive opinion of Ramsay. He might be a monster or not on top of it, but it’s barely relevant for her at this point, IMO.

I can’t agree with you there: for one thing, Sansa is suspected of having been involved in Joffrey’s murder, and Cersei would love to get her hands on her (which was why Littlefinger spirited Sansa away). So, a public marriage that pinpoints her location is a great way of getting Sansa killed. It doesn’t make sense.

For another thing, Roose’s hold on the North is very shaky. A cooperative Sansa would be an enormous help to him. So letting Ramsay brutalize her: not smart.

Roose knows at least something about Ramsay’s predilections. Logical writing would have had Roose warning Ramsay to make nice with Sansa. (Even if Ramsay couldn’t control his psychopathy, there should have been the ‘treat her kindly’ scene with Roose, first, before the wedding-chamber scene. The conversation Littlefinger had with Ramsay doesn’t make up for the lack of one with Roose.)

That was Ramsey making nice with Sansa, I thought.

For Ramsey, “brutalizing” someone is more along the lines of cutting off their favorite body part or letting dogs eat you alive.

Littlefinger’s plots are byzantine. Here’s my guess as to why he did that:
(1) If Sansa and Ramsay are going to be wed, it’s going to get out and be public. Littlefinger is much better off being the one who tells Cersei rather than having her find out from somebody else.
(2) Winterfell is a hell of a long way from King’s Landing, and the Lannisters aren’t what they used to be. Not like Cersei can load Seal Team Six up into some helicopters and fly up to Winterfell in 4 hours and arrest Sansa
(3) Littlefinger does seem to place particular interest in Sansa. As I mentioned in an earlier discussion, if she died, he would be genuinely sad… for a few hours. She’s important to him, but probably still expendable as a last line of defense if necessary. Right now he has things set up nicely:
-If the Boltons win, he’s the godfather and protector of Sansa, and just has to convince her that he had her best interest at heart all along, and maybe help her with some eventual spouse-i-cide
-If Stannis wins, Stannis will presumably kill the Boltons, and spare Sansa, which is exactly what Littlefinger told Sansa he would do. She’ll end up important, he’ll end up on her good side, and he can presumably ingratiate himself with Stannis
-If Stannis and Boltons beat each other up with no clear winner and end up exhausted, he can swoop in with the Knights of the Vale, with the clear pretext of saving poor Sansa, and end up in charge of everything
-If the Lannisters end up with a resurgence of power, all he has to do is sacrifice Sansa (or possibly spirit her away in disguise again or produce a lookalike head on a stake), and he’ll end up in a position of power.

That’s the LF MO. Set things up so that whoever wins, he gets a bump up the ladder of power.

I agree that that would have been reasonable… but maybe we’re supposed to think it was implied. Or maybe Roose thought Ramsay was smart enough to realize it. Or was testing him to see if he would. Or as others have said, maybe that WAS Ramsay on his best behavior, and Roose will congratulate him for being sensible enough not to have really let his inner lusts express themselves.

I mean, that scene was horrifying to our eyes, but to the eyes of someone for whom marital rape is a normal and correct part of life, it was only mildly creepier than expected.

Sansa’s rape is about the least offensive thing anyone has ever done to anyone else on this show. It’s full of gratuitous torture and murder from beginning to end. I simply can’t believe anyone could get to the middle of season 5 without being offended, but suddenly a little rape sets them off. It just doesn’t make any sense, unless it’s politically motivated. There have been a ton of rapes on this show already!

Ramsay pretty much rapes Miranda in the previous episode but that didn’t seem to bug much. That to me indicates it’s something specific to Sansa that is the problem.

And we didn’t hear hordes of people complaining about what happened to Theon, did we?

That was more horrifying to me than the rapes on GoT.

Yeah, where was the outrage when Theon’s penis was cut off?? Talk about your sexual violence! Yet I don’t recall anyone being angered by that episode. Cutting off penises is OK, I guess. :wink:

In fairness, there was some backlash to Theon’s torture that season. Much less so than the reaction to this comparatively minor rape of Sansa, but there wasn’t none.

EDIT: It’s also worth pointing out that Theon was/is a major character, and though he did bad things so did Sansa. Most viewers seemed to despise Sansa in the first couple seasons; her spitefully trying to get Arya’s wolf killed surely played into that, but also her general demeanor and personality.

So those trying to dismiss the male torture as secondary or tertiary characters so therefore it’s obviously less impactful than a beloved character like Sansa either have very bad memories or they’re just spewing bullshit to further an agenda.

:rolleyes: