Well, according to an email I got from a friend of mine, the NY Times review was pretty harsh about the show. The woman who wrote it (GINIA BELLAFANTE) seemed to be saying that women don’t read this sort of thing (she says that, she personally knows no women who have read it…and so, it’s clear that women don’t read books like Game of Thrones, which seems to be mostly oriented towards male wankatude and fantasy). I don’t have a link to the article, since it was in an email, so I won’t quote from it, but it’s pretty harsh.
And yeah, it’s crap. I read it last week and was wondering why they got someone who apparently hated the entire genre to write the review. And her whole line of “any WOMAN wouldn’t like this!” is just insulting. To wit:
I simply wouldn’t belong to a book club that wanted me to read anything by Lorrie Moore instead of “The Hobbit”, so no, I wouldn’t refuse anything. But I don’t think that’s what she was getting at…
Yea, I don’t really think its fair to say the sex scenes were thrown in for the ladies. All the sex scenes were both from the book and important plot points (well, maybe not the random Dorthaki humping at the wedding). Certainly less gratuitous then those in the Borgias, Tudors and Spartacus.
My wife enjoyed the first 3 books as well, and enjoyed the show last night and is now hopeful that the next book will get things back on track (I think everyone who is even a slight fan of the series is upset about the last book and the fact that the next one has been delayed so long)…but then, she is a fan of Jane Austen…
Not to mention that the sex isn’t exactly the kind of sex that most women would enjoy. Incest, midgets with hookers, and an unwilling teenager in a forced marriage? Yeah, that was put in there solely to attract female viewers.
I’m not sure I get why that critic thinks women would enjoy seeing a teenaged girl get raped either.
My wife likes the books, but actually always hated that scene from Thrones, and thinks GRRM just gets off on writing sex scenes involving underaged girls.
Or, maybe it has to do with the historical reality of things like that happening in human history? I always took it that way…that he’s trying to inject some of the harsh reality of the real world into his books. My only problem with GRRM is that sometimes he’s a bit too harsh and realistic…and the fact that the last book in the series sucked, and he hasn’t put out the next one in a timely manner.
I think her problem with the scene in the book wasn’t so much that it reflected the reality of giving away 13 year old girls as property, but that he depicted the girl as getting into it and enjoying so much. She finds that ridiculously unrealistic and representative of pure male fantasy.
The show at least made the girl older, but if they’d kept her at 13, it would have looked pretty gross on screen.
By the way, I do think that a subtext of the books is the casual brutality of the medieval culture, and of the monarchal system itself. Even the “good” royal characters are kind of entitled assholes. It’s just about different levels of entitlement.
I don’t remember her getting into it until later, when she seemed to come to love the Khan, but it’s been a while since I read it, so I might be mis-remembering.
It would have been gross to have kept her at 13, but that’s because it’s how we view stuff today. In the past they wouldn’t have even batted an eye at something like that…either the 13 year old part OR the giving your sister away to a nomadic barbarian tribesman so you could borrow his army to take your kingdom back part.
Well, that and the fact that her brother was such a shit to her, and used to beat her regularly…as well as abuse her in other ways. That whole ‘wake the dragon’ routine. And IIRC, no one else treated her very well either in their long exile.
Your concern is well founded. But, I’m usually willing to cut some slack on this, as it’s a common problem. Plus, I’m always watching on my DVR, so I can back up if I really have to.
Exactly. The sex was to be expected in the marriage, and she had handmaids who taught her what to do and how to learn to enjoy it. Khal Drogo didn’t beat her and threaten her, and that was a great improvement over how she’d previously been treated.
Decided to put spoiler boxes around some minor details regarding Dany and Drogo that might or might not be revealed in the series later.
I don’t think it was unrealistic at all, Drogo treated Daenerys a lot better than she was used to being treated. She expected the worst and instead got something not as bad as what she had already suffered through, it is not hard to believe that she would enjoy it.
