I think this kind of statement needs more thinking through. It seems to me there’s a big difference between “it’s a fact of life and I have no choice but to figure out how to survive it given that I have no way to change the situation” and “it didn’t feel as bad when it happened because they were used to it.”
First, I don’t blame anyone for deciding at ANY time that ***Game of Thrones ***has crossed a line, and is no longer worth watching.
On the whole, I love the show… but it has often been guilty of sexploitation, of gratuitous nudity that did nothing to further the story. It has often shown disturbingly graphic violence that has made me reconsider whether I want to keep watching it. So, if the rape of Sansa Stark is the last straw for some viewers, I understand perfectly, and won’t try to persuade anyone to keep watching.
That said, I was saddened by that scene more than horrified. Ramsay Bolton is the most repulsive character ever to appear on the show (which is saying quite a lot!). Sansa’s wedding night was BOUND to be awful, with such a husband. I found that scene far less graphic and far less excruciating to watch than countless other scenes over the past 5 years.
It doesn’t surprise or bother me that many people have reached a breaking point with*** GOT***. But I am surprised that this particular scene is the breaking point for so many viewers. Sansa’s deflowering wasn’t really any more brutal than Dany’s was in Season One, and was far less harrowing (to me, at least) than seeing Robb Stark’s pregnant wife getting stabbed in the stomach. Sansa suffered far less at Ramsay’s hands than Theon Lovejoy did… but Theon’s torture didn’t bother many people enough to make them abandon the show.
I guess I’m just surprised that people who accepted THOSE scenes and kept watching are drawing the line HERE.
Perhaps this is better suited for the rape discussion thread, so therefore I’ll make it brief before moving on, but for the life of me I can’t understand how people don’t realize that the rape of a prominent character, who folks have invested tons of time and energy in their story, can affect people more than someone in passing who has something horrible happen to them. It’s almost like arguing why were people upset with Ned’s death in Season 1 compared to the deserter from the Night’s Watch in Episode 1.
In addition, there is definitely a “straw that breaks the camel’s back” for people. So saying you put up with x, y, z really isn’t a great argument.
People are far more invested in Sansa Stark in Season 5 of the show than they were with Dany in early Season 1 or Talisa, who we knew for a few eps (recall people were more horrified by Robb and Catelyn’s deaths). Anyway, you bring up a point to consider with the Red Wedding - why were people so affected by Robb’s death than by various other deaths that occurred in the series?
It’s simply, people care more about the misfortune that occurs to people they care about (you care about a family member being raped far more than someone in another country). It being fiction doesn’t matter when you are invested in their story.
Oh, and its Theon Greyjoy, FWIW ;).
Probably because a lot of fans throw have invested themselves emotionally with Sansa &/or Arya and want them to emerge relatively unscathed, which I think has been the case with the books so far. When they combined the Jeyne character with Sansa & was getting ready to marry her to Ramsay, I was seeing comments of apprehension & dread as to how far they would carry it, and those dreads have now been realized. So now the hopefully unscathed Sansa has been scathed, and badly.
astorian
Have you read Annamika’s post for instance? Some people (not necessarily her)just want to feel outraged something, and rape (being a heinous crime) is a good outlet.
I mean various female characters in this show have
Seen their children killed in front of them
Been torn apart by wild dogs
Seen their parents beheaded (including Sansa)
Flogged half to death by a deranged madman
Used as a human pin cushion
Tossed out a hole in a mountain side
Stabbed in their womb
None of these apparently turned “women’s bodies to a tool and a plot device” or are “brutal and unnecessary to depict”, but a rape (which was not even shown) dose/is? And we were invested in many of the characters.
Compared to all the above Sansa’s treatment last episode was minor, unpleasant, but not even the worst thing to happen to the character.
Right. I think most people would agree that the execution of Ned back in season 1 was shocking, surprising, moving, powerful, etc. – and moreso than it would have been if it had happened to a minor character. Likewise, the rape of Sansa was powerful and disturbing. What is not clear to me is why it was unacceptable/titillating/gratuitous/etc. People aren’t generally saying “this show is so disturbing and tragic, I will stop watching” they are saying something much more specific to rape and sexual violence towards women… but I’m having a hard time putting my finger on exactly what the difference is (and of course different people are saying different things).
A couple of interesting things to me. Apparently Iwan Rheon said that “Ramsey does something worse than he’s ever done and it was very hard for me to do the scene” I suspect that was the scene, but my first reaction was ‘really? That’s it?’
Cause I would not be surprised if by the end of the season Brienne has been captured and is wearing a blanket made out of a fan favorite. And that of course doesn’t account for cutting someone’s parts off or hunting down a girl with dogs.
All of that is entirely reasonable, because it’s just a question of personal preference and taste. Clearly Game of Thrones is not the show for you.
This is where you lose me. What does this mean precisely? How does a rape “reduce women and their bodies to a tool and a plot device” more than some horrible thing happening to a man do the same for him? And what does it mean to state categorically that it’s “unnecessary”? I mean, isn’t fiction itself unnecessary? Isn’t it possible that there’s a story involving rape that’s powerful and worth telling in which the rape is an integral part of the story?
I think that’s a straw that breaks the camel’s back type of thing. Plenty of complaints about how woman have been portrayed in the series, gaining strength in the last few seasons.
Our society has not always done so well when it comes to treating rape victims. It’s largely good that we’re becoming more conscious and sensitive to it. There are absolutely times when depicting rape is awful and inexcusable, such as:
- Depicting the recipient as deserving it it, whether because they brought it on themselves or are just an inferior human being.
- Depicting rape as in and of itself humorous.
- Depicting rape to titillate the audience.
- Depicting rape as part of reducing a female character to serving purely as a motivation tool for male characters.
When rape is used as a storytelling tool in these situations, it’s gross and offensive. However, none of them accurately describe how it’s been used in Game of Thrones. Nobody, as far as I’m aware, thinks Sansa deserves it. I mean, it’s perpetrated by pretty much the worst person ever. It’s an unfortunate fact of life that humans in historical times resembling GoT had a very different conception of personal liberty, duty, and sexual obligations than we do now. To deny that such things happened in the past isn’t condoning them, and I would in fact argue that refusing to acknowledge our sordid human history disrespects the people who suffered. That’s a much more involved subject, though.
Clearly, it wasn’t for humor. I won’t say that horrible things can never play a role in humor, I think being able to acknowledge the humor in awful things is an important part of how we can psychologically come to terms with them and gain some control over them, but rape as a joke punchline is just flat out awful, lazy, and juvenile. There’s good reason why “panda rape” is widely regarded as the low point of The Simpsons. Not really a factor here, though.
I can see how some may see GoT as full of various types of porn, I won’t deny that I enjoy the sight of pretty naked people, but it’s a stretch to make the jump to it’s just torture porn, I think. The appeal of drama in general is to see how people react when pushed to their limits. In the GoT case those circumstances happen to be pretty damn brutal. The story is largely effective because it does a good job of having people react to horror in a recognizably true to life way in novel circumstances. But for a show that pretty much coined the term ‘sexposition’, the depictions of rape are surprisingly unsexy. Minimal on screen nudity, plenty of skin crawling discomfort. Maybe some people get off on it, but they definitely feel revolting and unpleasant to me.
Sansa is definitely not just there as a motivation tool. We’ve spent huge chunks of time following her and her ordeals, and they’ve never been brushed off as trivial background details. Female characters who suffer and are abused just to motivate more important male characters is a nasty, lazy storytelling tool, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that any suffering of a female character that motivates a male character is automatically bad. I mean, people have empathy, there’s a reason why that trope became so popular in the first place. If she were just a thinly sketched out background character written in to motivate Theon, sure, that would definitely be deserving of criticism. But she’s very clearly more than that.
We should be sensitive to sexual violence and vigilant in never trivializing it. It’s pretty much the worst thing that most people in our society can reasonably fear happening to them. But honestly, critically, and responsibly acknowledging it as an unsavory fact of life is a good thing and I think criticism of Game of Thrones on these grounds is misguided.
Yeah, I know. I actually called him “Theon Joyboy” in my first draft, because I’d recently seen the movie version of Evelyn Waugh’s*** The Loved One.***
I immediately realized my error and “corrected” it to Lovejoy!
Also, it wasn’t rape.
Last time I checked, women pretty much run the whole ****ing thing except North of the Neck and West of Dany.
My main beef with the show-runners is why would Sansa agree to marry what’s his face anyway?
She’s going to take back Winterfell by herself?
It makes no sense.
In the book version, the woman they pass off as Sansa had no choice - and was treated much more brutally by Ramsay.
But I don’t understand why Sansa would voluntarily go there.
I heartily endorse this article: All (hopefully) of the bad arguments about rape on Game of Thrones debunked
Presumably because the wife (or daughter-in-law) of the de-facto Lord of the North has some influence, especially if she’s a Stark (while she’s in hiding, she has no influence at all). Further, she may have some knowledge/expectation of how much run-of-the-mill northerners (and nobles who aren’t sworn to the Boltons) loved the Starks (like the servants who have pretty much said this on the show), and expects to wield considerable influence there.
But we’ll see. It’s not like this storyline is complete.
Ok, then we need a thread with only book discussion. Then a thread which only discusses the Facebook version, then a thread which dips into fanfic, then … no matter what you do, some one will get their panties in a bunch and have an attack of the vapors. :p:D
"Edit: Woops, how did I end up in this thread? Must’ve clicked it off the CS page and went to the last post. Anyway, I probably won’t be here for any replies, since I’m generally not participating in this thread.":dubious:
Well, as I wrote in the other thread, I’m often more bothered by the fate of anonymous characters, and precisely the execution of this deserter bothered me a lot because really, the poor shmoe hadn’t deserved it. While we’ve seen Ned’s story and how it came to such a situation as a result of his own actions (right or wrong). Somehow, I see more nobodies as victims than main characters, whose fate is just part of the story.
And in this particular case, I don’t see Sansa as a victim because she deliberatly chose to be there (even though she probably expected her wedding night to be less brutal, she hates the guts of the Ramsays, so it’s not like she had the slighest chance of enjoying this night). She decided it was worth it to go through that (which by the way is a major change for this character : remember her naivete regarding sex when she was discussing with Margaery, and all her romantic concepts). Sansa is now on par with other characters (like for instance her sister Arya), deliberatly going through unpleasant things to achieve her ultimate goals.
At this point of the story, Sansa isn’t anymore a victim : she’s a schemer and this is an unavoidable part of her scheme. While on the othe hand, if it had been the daughter of the miller or something, who would have had exactly zero choice in the matter (and would probably end up eaten by dogs), it would have bothered me much more.
But I admit I’m probably weird about this. However, even with this caveat, I’m still not sure why this scene with Sansa would make the show horrid while the exact same scene with some perfectly unknown character wouldn’t have. Either this depiction is wrong or it isn’t (people were more arguing about it being wrong per se than about it being wrong because Sansa was the victim).