No doubt. At the very least reading “As I Lay Dying” suggests among other things that a woman never really gets over losing a child. Perhaps fiction is the least depressing source to consult for something like this.
Well in “A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century” Barbara Tuchman does some speculating on the topic. She noted that the infant mortality rate was extemely high at the time, so high that parents distanced themselves from their kids from infancy until they were five or six years old. They did not hug them or give them much physical affection, not even naming them until them quite often, because the odds were so high that they might die of some disease or other, to lessen the heartbreak that would engender. That part was not the speculation, that was historical fact. Her speculation was that the outlandish cruelty and indifference to human suffering of the times … Game of Thrones level stuff, and then some … was because all these children who had been denied physical and emotional affection as children grew up to be emotionally cold and distant to suffering as a result.
So, yeah … high child mortality rates were horrible things indeed.
Yes, women were often subjected to sex they didn’t want in medieval times.
Another thing that happened a lot in medieval times, was bricklaying.
Yet Game of Thrones has barely ever shown bricklaying—but has shown women being subjected to sex they don’t want quite a few times! Why would that be? Why on earth doesn’t Game of Thrones spend more time showing bricklaying?
The answer may lie somewhere in the vicinity of the concept What Do Audiences Enjoy Watching…
Own it.
Saying people enjoying watching rape is troublesome. I’d say people might enjoy watching things in which dramatic events, one of which is rape, up the stakes.
I agree, like in Fight Club when they were asked to censor the scene where Edward Norton brutally beats Jared Leto. They mostly showed the crowd’s reactions instead of the actual beating, and it made the whole thing seem much worse. By focusing on Theon, they made the scene feel worse without actually having to be as visually gratuitous, while also presumably setting up Theon’s upcoming retaliation towards Ramsey. I certainly didn’t enjoy that scene, but it was very cleverly executed.
I think it’s mostly about Sansa, with Theon as a side note. Theon doesn’t have much more character development left, and I think this whole Ramsey arc is coming to a close while Sansa’s arc will develop further. As others have said, she was given the choice not to marry Ramsey, but she chose to do so - having some idea of what she would suffer as a result - so she could get her revenge. That’s another major moment of character development for her. Sansa was a passive victim for most of the series, and now she’s starting to fight back, even though she knows she’ll have to go through more horror before the end.
It sucks that terrible things are still happening to her, but I find that I’ve stopped thinking “I really hope Sansa makes it out of this” in place of “I can’t wait to see Sansa get her revenge.” I just hope they don’t do what they’ve done with so many other characters, and have her not make it out ok.
On a side note regarding Sansa’s potential future: I do think it’s unlikely that she’s going to get Nedded. It looks like they’re setting up the last of the Stark family to be concentrated agents of awesome, almost like the power of the entire family is getting distilled into the survivors. Bran is presumably going to become the artillery with his warging, Arya the master stealth assassin, and Sansa the political powerhouse, owing to her apprenticeship with Baelish.
This theory works great as long as you ignore Rickon, who seems to be pretty much a non-entity.
I say Sansa was raped. The why’s and wherefores don’t matter. YMMV.
I don’t think it something that titillates most people. Some yes, but not most. It’s a TV show. I wasn’t complaining about it being shown, it happening or anything else other than, I, personally, not liking it and thinking it was rape. I am not outraged or offended and not justifying, rationalizing or defending.
I’m more interested in the Kings Landing storyline. And Arya, always Arya.
Anyone have any ideas about what’s going to come of Daenerys new betrothal? Her fiance did not appear overly thrilled.
Yes, of course it is.
And if you asked people who flocked to public hangings in (say) 19th century America if they were enjoying watching people experience the agony of hanging, I’m sure they’d have said “No, of course not: what I enjoy is seeing justice served.”
And if you asked people watching gladiatorial combat in ancient Rome if they were enjoying watching people experience the agony of being chopped up and impaled and so on, I’m sure they’d have said “No, of course not: what I enjoy is seeing the will of the Gods made manifest.”
And on and on.
We humans aren’t much on self-honesty when it comes to these things. But you can bet that the HBO producers know on which side their bread is buttered.
Nice of you to preemptively dismiss anyone that says they don’t enjoy watching rape.
Snarky!
But aside from that: how would you explain the fact that GoT has, several times, depicted women submitting to sex they didn’t want–but has not given equal time to any of dozens of other things that happened in medieval times?
(A partial list: brick-laying; sowing of grain in fields; celebrations equivalent to Maypoles or other rural pursuits that acknowledge the rhythms of the year; rituals relating to the GoT system of knighthood; and so on.)
What I’m suggesting is that “reasons” offered for the inclusion of scenes such as Sansa-and-Ramsay, Jaime-and-Cersei-at-the-bier, and Daenerys-and-Drogo, are…specious. The one about “it happened in medieval times so of course it has to be shown on the show” is the particular silly argument I was refuting.
As for the human tendency to enjoy watching violence but deny enjoying it: denying that the tendency exists at all is, perhaps, predictable.
It does exist. Not in all people at all times, of course. It’s perfectly possible and indeed likely that many watch Game of Thrones, for example, for reasons other than ‘gee, I hope they show some woman getting raped, tonight!’
But ask yourself this: there are many sorts of violence that HBO’s GoT could show. It’s a premium channel. There is no FCC enforcing broadcast standards, because HBO isn’t broadcast.
So why is it that some of the potential types of violence that could be shown on GoT appear multiple times–and others appear not at all?
If you could show that including rape scenes increased viewership overall, it wouldn’t mate whether any specific person said he or she didn’t like to watch it. It would still support his contention.
I wouldn’t say that I harbor any general rule about depictions of rape in shows, but I was put off by how it was handled in the Cersei-Jaime scene last season and in this Sansa scene.
In the first season I would call the Daenerys-Drogo scene a rape scene and I found it disturbing but appropriate. I thought it was handled well and was appropriately included.
I quit watching “Downton Abbey” after the rape. That to me was just tawdry.
The rape scene at the beginning of Joan of Arc with Milla Jovovich still haunts me and I still haven’t figured out whether I think it needed to depicted in the way it was.
We have heard or seen fletching, blacksmithing, knighting, wedding ceremonies, prayer, hawking wares, etc. Why don’t they show all of the possible millions of mundane things? Why put more focus on high drama things than low drama things? Drama is a genre for a reason.
Even if GoT was an encyclopedia of every type of violence, some would be left out. I’m not sure what your point is there. Of the dozens of types of violence GoT shows, why is one of them one of the most common types?
Acsenray, I thought the Jaime-Cersei rape scene was awful too. It didn’t affect the plot at all and neither character reacted to it again. Of course, that might be because the director didn’t actually think it was rape, for some reason.
This episode was the lowest rated one of the season on Rotten Tomatoes. I guess too many people are overcompensating to disguise their love of rape.
Because it is useful for advancing a plot involving a brutal maniac. Are you seriously proposing GoT should use all forms of violence equally so as not to send a message that it condones one over another?
My point is that rational beings such as the GoT showrunners make decisions about what to film based on what they believe the audience will find interesting and compelling viewing–i.e. on what the audience will enjoy seeing as opposed to what the audience will reject.
There are forms of violence that the majority of the audience would reject, and then the showrunners would be out of a job. So the showrunners, understandably enough, show the particular forms of violence that will lead viewers to continue tuning in.
No. That’s not what I was proposing.
Actually, I wasn’t proposing anything. I was merely commenting on the obvious fact that on any particular show, some things get shown and some other things don’t get shown, and this isn’t random. Instead, the question “What will bring viewers to the show?” influences what is filmed and presented.
So rape is terrible enough to put you off of shows entirely, but beheading, torture, murdering and burning children, stabbing nursing babies, skinning people alive…that’s not as bad as rape?
And my point is that saying people like watching rape and that people like the type of drama that can unfold because of it or the type of plot it can be a part of are two completely different things. I don’t think you’re going to find many people that like that scene in The Accused, but you’d still find a lot of people that like or appreciate that movie.
I’m not sure I agree with you that there is violence they could show that would turn people off unless you went into hardcore torture porn. We’ve seen baby stabbing, beheadings, dog and horse murder, rape, attempted rape, dismemberment, flaying, gelding, eye stabbing, immolation, rats eating people, genital stabbing, whipping, shooting, ripping out tongues, poisoning, head crushing…
Is there any way I can get trigger warnings for this sort of nonsense? It sets me off.
If they would’ve graphically shown Sansa being raped, it would’ve been decried as gratuitous and salacious. So instead we watch someone’s reaction to it, along with the audio, and we’re left to our imaginations. Theon’s reaction to the scene may end up being pivotal if we’re shown his agony and the reason that he finally regains some agency and snaps back. We’re also shown someone who’s in the same position as the audience - watching something extremely unpleasant - which is a way to show horror without actually showing the horror. Saying that because we saw Theon agonizing over it means it’s all about Theon is so fucking absurd. Is this sort of “needing to create problems of things no one actually believes” tumblr shit going to be saturating the whole fucking internet from now on?
Showing everyone making fucking bread from scratch starting from a pile of grain isn’t worth the screen time because it’s not relevant to the story. We do see plenty of people performing medieval chores. This season we saw people doing construction to rebuild Winterfell. A few seconds of screen time that gives context to the story and reminds us what happened.
You know what this show has shown a hundred times more of than women submitting to sex they don’t want? Murder. People are fucking murdered left and right. Often brutally. Often unfairly. Why is it that no one gives a shit about murder? Why aren’t we told that people can’t watch the show anymore because the murder is just too much? The show has murdered innocent kids over and over again, for fucks sake. Is murdering innocent people in horrific ways just not as bad as rape?
You’re all fucking ridiculous. Horrible, unfair shit has happened to all sorts of people in the show. Why is it that rape is somehow sacred and special and beyond the pale and obviously only done for salacious reasons and when men are shown being disgusted by it then obviously it’s only about the men’s reaction and the women don’t matter? Because rape is super special and violence against women is the only violence that matters? Forget all of the horrible torture and maiming and killing and fucking setting children on fire. If you had any modern sensibilities, only rape would disgust you, you patriarchal pig!
“Condone” is the wrong question. I’m sure that the show does not condone any of the acts of cruelty that are depicted.
But the beheading of Eddard Stark for treason might have a different significance in a time and place where such beheadings are an ongoing issue and are used to put classes of people in their place.
In our society, rape has an immediacy and deeper significance and meaning that decapitation doesn’t.
So it necessarily reads differently to us.
Remember, when it comes to fiction, every story is really about ourselves in one way or another.
Yeah, was there this level of debate when Joff shot Ros full of crossbow bolts? I mean at least he didn’t RAPE her!
As far as we know, anyway.
And now that I think about it, I don’t recall much discussion about Ramsay and Myranda chasing Tansy through the forrest, shooting her with arrows and letting the dogs finish her off, because…Damn, at least they didn’t RAPE her.