Waitaminit, didn’t Joffrey rape a whore to death? Where was the outrage then?
I think he crossbowed a whore to death, and IIRC there was a lot of criticism about that too – just another ‘casual’ treatment of violence against women (as I recall the criticism).
Too late to edit to add:
And now that I’m thinking about it, Tommen was raped too, if we are going by viewer standards. Nobody got their panties in a twist over a pre-teen boy having sex with an adult. All this hand wringing is because, this time, it was poor old Sansa who got exactly what she knew was coming once she married Ramsey. Or should have known. Did she think everyone she married would be has kind as Tyrion?
He crossbowed Roslyn. The whore Tyrion sent him was gone at with, like, a table leg.
I don’t think they show him with any sex beyond threats and outright refusal to be with prostitutes. He mostly got off on cruelty. Although I’m sure someone made a “crossbow-bolt-as-phallic-symbol” metaphor on the internets.
One more glaring example of viewers understanding that this is a fictional world were shit happens and held on to their outrage-- Craster raping all of his daughters. A whole tent full of them! And they were all his daughters.
"Because Sansa did not give clear consent, and she was not in a position in which she could give consent – she is both underage .…"
You said Sansa was underaged, and thus it was rape. But she was married, thus that part is not rape.
Hey guys- find me a sex act on the TV show that is NOT: Rape, adultery and/or Incest ?
(I am saying all sex with “whores” is rape in this case).
Yep and yep.
I agree- it certainly looks like she consented to getting married. Does anyone think she didnt?
GoT has featured innumerable acts of extreme cruelty on screen. This precise one was not particularly extreme either in the amount of suffering or the explicitness with which it was shown. Why are people reacting so strongly, what makes this one different? I think that’s an interesting discussion to have, but I don’t think you’re helping matters at all by trying to ask what seem like “gotcha” questions about precise current age of consent laws.
I don’t see what being married has to do with it, whether in the show or in real life. We’re talking about what constitutes rape, morally speaking, not medieval laws, and not weird laws about underage marriage in some communities.
In most of Westeros, it is known that women are capable of enjoying sex. If it is done well.
No bride would expect to awaken the morning after her wedding still a virgin, even if she didn’t care for the groom. Although parents tended to avoid marrying their daughters off to known maniacs, in normal times. The rowdy bedding celebrations might have been embarrassing but seem to have been rather jolly.
Most men would know that a bit of gentleness with their bride might ease the way. Perhaps a kiss? Even if she didn’t get much pleasure (rare for first timers), they were beginning a lifelong relationship. One could hope for respect & perhaps a bit of affection, eventually.
Sansa’s deflowering was brutal & humiliating, with the man she considers the murderer of her brothers looking on. (It matters that we know her.)
I hope the groom meets a deserving fate.
“not weird laws about underage marriage in some communities”- I think every state allows under 18 to get married with parent or guardian consent.
Thus her age is *not relevant. *
She also consented to the marriage and of course realized that sex would occur, even that very nite. What she objected to was having Reek in the room… and likely the brutality of the act itself.
So sure, it’s rape- but it’s so far less 'rapey" than so many other sexual encounters- why the ire on this one?
Oh , yeah, we all hope that. It was horrible and brutal.
I am forever in your debt.
Do you believe Tommen didn’t give his consent? Laws might change a lot but there’s something consistent about human experience.
Yes, we tend to have more invested in characters that we spend more time with. What’s the problem?
If a man goes to prison certain he will be raped, is it not rape because he expected it?
It hasn’t been made explicit, but in my mind, Joffrey died a virgin. Technically speaking, that is.
Most of it was from the books. It’s not pleasant and it’s very disturbing, but mostly stuff happened to the same people so it would be stupid to criticize D&D for something GRRM wrote. I don’t like that stuff, but it is in the source material. And many people DO find that too much and turned it off after the first episode.
No, I’m not. I’m saying raping a young character who was not raped in the books pushed it too far to me. If this was the first major sexually violent deviation from the books, I’d be disturbed, but my outrage is from these hack writers having no clue what to do with women other than to sexually traumatize them to titillate the wrong portion of their audience. I’m not having the vapors because someone got raped in fiction. I’m furious that these assholes keep going back to the same. fucking. thing. If they’re going to make up their own stuff, at least go to a new place.
I can too say it’s not necessary for the plot. Or at least it’s not absolutely necessary that Sansa be raped in Winterfell by her husband Ramsey for The Prince Who Was Promised to be reborn in time to stop all the Others. GRRM didn’t write it, so obviously it’s not necessary. And if you ignore the books’ ultimate plots and consider the show a whole different thing, they could have done something different. They went with rape. Again.
Cutting to Theon’s face made Sansa’s rape about THEON. This happened to further HIS plot, not hers.
And what happened to Jeyne Poole sickened me. But she was not a POV character so the level of attachment to her as a reader was not as intense for me. It’s not like I wanted that to happen. I didn’t write it. But given a choice between a non-POV character I don’t know very well and Sansa, whom I adore, I’m not picking the fucking PTSD-riddled orphan who literally lost everyone she ever knew and loved.
With all the choices D&D have made, all the things left out, characters combined, plots dropped, the fact that they chose YEARS ago they were keeping THIS story and changing it to Sansa just doesn’t sit well with me. They consistently destroy most of the female characters’ agency (Sansa), sex them up (Marg, Missandei), change them so they’re unrecognizable (Hello, Ellaria), or cut them all together (LSH, Arianne, Asha’s gone again.)
I am not outraged by “OMG RAPE”. I am outraged by “Not this shit again.”
At either 9 (book) or 13 (TV), he can’t give informed consent. That’s rape.
You can’t because GRRM has made clear that the show is its own entity and we have no idea how D&D are going to wrap things up. In the show it may well be necessary and we don’t know that yet, wait until the end of this season and we can judge if it was unnecessary or not.
This argument comes down to “the wrong person got raped”. Sorry I just don’t find that to hold any weight.
This would be a fair point if anyone were saying that what Ramsey did was worse because of who the victim was. Rape is rape, after all.
But the question isn’t how evil Ramsey’s in-universe actions are, it’s how gratuitously disturbing the scene was. Certainly it’s reasonable to be more disturbed by the scene when the victim is a character we’re invested in.
100% agreed. In the first few seasons, you got the idea that the show writers knew how to deviate from the show without fucking things up. There is no reason to believe that anymore. The entire way they decided to do Dorne shows that without the underpinning of an actual book plot they can’t write their way out of paper bag.
Indeed. Which is further exacerbated by the fact that they decided to cut out a strong, confident woman who was important to the Dornish chapters in the books as Arianne Martell. Sansa was, also, in the books, starting to grow into a confident woman herself, learning to play the game (though not without the Damocles sword of Littlefinger behind her).
For all these complaints about “oh, you are just mad because the wrong person got raped”, YES and yes it matters. It’s just not that you can substitute one female character for another (that is another issue, btw), but a character that the viewing (and reading) audience was heavily invested, who was starting to take some form of agency over her life gets reduced to a plot point for another person (Theon). What happened to Jeyne Poole was appalling, but it MATTERS that Jeyne was a secondary character who we weren’t invested in and who didn’t seem to be taking some agency for herself. These things are not to be poo-poohed away. They actually matter.
I mean, seriously, this complaint is being akin to telling someone to stop being pissed that a person you know was raped because millions of other people are raped everyday and it seems like the “wrong person” was raped. Yes, it’s fiction - but one of fiction’s goals is to get us invested in the story. I’m not going to apologize for allowing myself to react in such a way.