The show fucked up the Cersei scene, I think everyone has acknowledged that at this point.
More outrage at depiction of rape in Game of Thrones television show (spoilers)
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The show fucked up the Cersei scene, I think everyone has acknowledged that at this point.
Fenderputty
Banned
It was probably one of the least graphic rape scenes I've ever watched too. This was a tea party compared to "Girl with the Dragon Tatoo"
The Cowboy
Member
Isn't it 5 actual depictions of rape if the Cersei one is counted?.
The Daenerys one (one of the most visually explicit rapes scenes), the Cersei one with Jamie after Joffrey died (and this is one is considered a mishandled scene in that it wasn't meant to be a rape), the Theon rape before he was castrated (almost on par with the Daenerys rape visually - and it is rape as he was in no condition to concent), the defectors on the wall scene (on par with the Daenerys rape as it was very visually explicit) and this Sansa one.
I don't remember any others, but its been a while since i watched the earlier seasons.
You can. Just not on a moral/offense ground.
"this painting is immoral" is not even something that my conservative great grandmother would've said without feeling like a XIXth century Catholic nun.
Ninja Scooter
Member
Id be surprised if a lot of the people upset have read the books. It'd be an interesting percentage to see though.
Seems like everyone except the showrunners, who were weirdly defensive of the scene/didn't really understand what everyone was seeing. That, coupled with Dany's rape, really makes me suspicious that this will be handled well at all, which is why I would've avoided it completely.
Acerac
Banned
Even without all the characters and their motivations, they just had a wedding. In the GoT world, that means sex. Granted, Sansa wanted no part in it, but I can't imagine Ramsay giving a flying fuck about that.
This show has done far worse. Feel free to criticize it for being poorly shot or what have you, but criticizing it for happening is a joke.
This show has done far worse. Feel free to criticize it for being poorly shot or what have you, but criticizing it for happening is a joke.
What was wrong with Dany's scene? Was it the act itself, or how it was shown?
NickFire
Member
What are you talking about? Being raped was not her catalyst to overcome adversity. It was her desire to overcome adversity that resulted in her marrying that despicable man.
Wiktor
Member
Well..in real life it's not and it seems in medieval ages it might have affected the victim less than it does today, because it was pretty much a regular part of life and people have amazing capability of getting used to even the biggest horrors.
But in fiction? Hell yeah it's more sinister. For couple of reasons. First being how rare it is. People might complain about common depictions of rape, but compared to murder..it happens extremely rare in fiction. Even in a rape-heavy show like GoT there are probably good 50 murders for every rape, so we're desensitized about murder far more. And second reason is that the victim of rape usually survives, so even once the horrific act is done, the suffering continues. With murder the character exists the stage, giving us excuse pretty quickly get over it.
Those are also the exact same reasons that Theon's mutilation was also more horrific than if they would straight up murdered him.
Sansa is assuming the role of a different character in the books who did get raped, and indeed raped by both Ramsay and Theon. So the rape exists, just a different character.
The Cersei rape wasn't meant to appear so; it was a fuck-up with the direction of the scene which they've admitted.
The Dany scene in the show is as it should have been in the book. The entire notion of a 13 year old girl going from terrified to turned on because her husband that she was forced to marry rubbed her shoulders for a bit was ludicrous. The show's transformation of Dany's character was better.
WrenchNinja
Member
Im not sure what's redundant here.
The question was whether it was in character for Ramsay to wait this long. As in waiting to get married at all. Why would he wait, why didnt he et married right away? For your answer, I'm not sure that's particularly believable.
It wasnt immediate. It was over a month at the very least.
Well they would be caught unawares by Stannis' approach in that scenario. Im not sure what the c'mon is for, it's not any more ludicrous than Bronn and Jaime running into the Sand Snakes at the same time.
Theon was already breaking down by Sansa being in the city.
In that sense, I agree with you. As a viewer, it sticks with you more, it's more shocking.
The poster in question that Sansa's rape could somehow be a catalyst for her to change and become stronger, a trope that I don't love.
I'm not tallying them but a large share of the complaints in this thread are from book readers criticizing the show for having Ramsay rape Sansa instead of Ramsay raping another not-Sansa girl.
I wanna see the receipts. I see basically no one saying this.
CrocMother
Banned
I think her willingness to go through with the marriage to Ramsay was a sign that she has already become stronger.
I've got a feeling that this will all play into GRRMs intentions for characters like Ramsey and Roose. At some point he'll stop punishing the good characters and some of the worst ones will get comeuppance more horrible than anything before. It will play in to Theon's end game and possible redemption / sacrifice too.
WordsintheWater
Member
So this is people's limit when it comes to this show? Gonna spoil this just in case.
I feel like this type of stuff is par for the course in this type of show. I understand those upset that it's not following the books, but for someone who hasn't read them I didn't feel like it was out of the ordinary for this show.
Kids being burned and hung, pregnant lady being stabbed in the belly and slaughtered is all okay?
Same, but it has been a long time since I read it.
Again, not discounting it and not trying to be insensitive to those who have gone through it but it is hypcritical to call out rape when all of the other brutality is consumed and given pass.
Yup. The Dany/Drogo one was a justifiable book-to-tv change IMO. The show doesn't have as much time to spend with each character, so having Dany fall in love and be consenting wouldn't have been very believable given the condensed time line.
But this scene? Especially after the obvious behind-the-scenes issues of the last rape? Questionable at best. Can't help but think they're using rape as a substitute for the shock-deaths because there are fewer and fewer major characters they can kill off as the saga approaches its third act.
More the aftermath. I never felt like they actually dealt with it, and then she fell in love with him.
It's the least objectionable of the three, though.
Sho_Nuff82
Member
I wonder how people felt about the rape scene in 12 Years a Slave. We had an Oscar and SAG-award winning actress portray a character who begged for death after being raped and tortured by her abuser.
And she never gets away.
Sometimes, that's the point. Life sucks, fuck hope. Would posters in this thread advocate for the removal of her character (as she was a real person), or the removal of her rape (as it's a thing that actually happened, on far more occasions than the one portrayed in the film) because it sours her "character arc"? Or perhaps they would be missing the point of this story and are not being realistic about the horrors of slavery?
Look, platy, it's really cool to break from reality with these dragons and magic and all, but all the Game of Thrones fans watching for the historical accuracy (basically all of them) expect that we remain accurate to history, and by that I mean that newlywed women should expect to get raped.
I mean, I know it sounds oddly specific, but trust me....this is the Middle Ages. With the dragons and the magic.
Acerac
Banned
Wow, that seems incredibly out of character. He must be written extremely differently in the books.
Fbh
Member
After hearing about there being an outrage over this episode and then watching it last night I couldn't help but think "that's it"?
Don't take me wrong, it was a horrible scene of someone doing a horrible thing. And like most "big moments" of Game of Thrones it was aiming for shockvalue.
But I don't get many of the "they went too far" reactions. This is, after all, the show that had a pregnant woman getting stabbed multiple times in the stomach ON SCREEN (not to metion daenerys getting raped on screen multiple times in season 1). Are my morals wrong for finding that more outrageous than a off screen rape scene?
Don't take me wrong, it was a horrible scene of someone doing a horrible thing. And like most "big moments" of Game of Thrones it was aiming for shockvalue.
But I don't get many of the "they went too far" reactions. This is, after all, the show that had a pregnant woman getting stabbed multiple times in the stomach ON SCREEN (not to metion daenerys getting raped on screen multiple times in season 1). Are my morals wrong for finding that more outrageous than a off screen rape scene?
Warm Machine
Member
Someone overcoming an obstacle and becoming stronger because of it is intrinsic to drama. It may be a trope but it is the trope that drives most narrative.
It's the context, it's extremely fucked up to us but to the character and the world it makes sense. I don't think you have to agree with the outcome, but you should at least understand why it happened that way. The show certainly doesn't make it easy though due to the lack of backstory, and that's just kinda the fault of the format.
It's happened plenty of times, it's even right on the first page! I had a back-and-forth with another poster who explained the rationalization as being, because Sansa is a main character we're rooting for, it's harder to stomach her being raped than if it happened to a side character. How could I make that up? I haven't read the books and had no idea until today that the original scene involved another girl.
You actually see the consequences for a lot of the other brutality or it at least informs the audience of something about the world or the characters. People remember when horrible things like the butcher's boy getting murdered by The Hound happen and hold the characters accountable for it later on. The rapes, so far, have basically just been there as window dressing as "another horrible things that the horrible people do" or get quickly forgotten about.
Pai Pai Master
Banned
Most characters are written pretty differently in the books.
Dany/Drogo is a bit more ambiguous than that - it's still rape by modern conventions in the book (underage). Jamie / Cersei might actually have been rape because as even GRRM pointed out; the book is showing it from Jamie's point of view, which is not an unbiased one. The argument the showrunners made (and GRRM agreed with IIRC) was that from a neutral POV (not Jamie's), it very well could have been rape. Also, Jeyne was raped in the book by Ramsay. So honestly...none of these are clear-cut additions, and the third one is just a character switch. BTW, the third one is oodles worse in the book than it is on TV. The craziest part of these arguments is that the TV show is pretty tame compared to the depravity in the books themselves.
And yet as a pop culture junkie, I'm really sick that the obstacle seems to be rape for a lot of women. Is that it? Is that the best we can come up with? Is that the only adversity we can come up with for our female characters?
That's more of a macro problem than the more micro issues I had with that scene.
Brian Griffin
Member
As I posted earlier, those other things aren't "real" to people, as in they don't happen every day to thousands of people. Rape happens to thousands of people every day, thus it has a much greater effect on people when shown in media.
Acerac
Banned
Problem is, GRRM has explicitly used it over and over again, and it's a really big theme to GRRM's writing (that rape is often tamed down / under-utilized in this genre). I can't blame GoT for using it. I mean, the book more or less just makes a minor female character to be raped solely for the development of Theon. At least this version probably develops Sansa and Theon.
I think it's hard to demand "historical" censorship when so much of what we consider historical in popular culture is really just people repeating what they've learned from other stories, not actual history.
I mean, male sexual violence is also incredibly fucking prevalent in anything involving war and torture and would "historically" make as much sense as female sexual violence in a place like Westeros, but we don't hear those kinds of stories often, so we don't think it even exists except as an anomaly. The question is never brought up as "Why are writers censoring male sexual violence?"
I stopped watching the show in season one, but from the first few novels I read, ASOIF does mention this stuff in passing from what I remember, but it's never really explicit or focused on the way female sexual violence is. Is that censorship?
Don't think this is a good analogy for GoT. GoT likes to get its' rape on and show the horrors of how women are treated and then the next episode (and maybe even the same episode sometimes) shower the viewer in titties so much it has coined phrases like sexposition and jokes that HBO has a CEO of Tits. And a lot of those scenes clearly meant to titilate feature characters in some sort of slavery position (like Littlefinger's whores).
Most fiction dealing with rape doesn't tend to have other "Fuck yeah tits" scenes.
Er, Arya? At most, GoT has two characters where this is true. You might think that's 2 too many, but the show has other female characters where this isn't the case.
BennyBlanco
aka IMurRIVAL69
That's not what I said though, I said I'm not sure why people are assuming this will be used as a catalyst for Theon's character to change like I've seen people allude to in this thread. All I said is I look forward to seeing where they go with her character from here.
that's the scary thing. I see it but I try to pretend maybe we can one day live in a world where a comedian's character isn't judged based of his stand up routing or "jests" that he makes on twitter. But that is a flip side to the coin of wanting to be a more inclusive world.
It doesn't sit well with me, especially because we almost never see the emotional fallout for the survivor. Contrast that with the SOA comparison I made earlier, that handled rape so much better than GoT has ever done (I can't believe I'm giving that show praise for its depiction of sexual assault, but here we are).
If we were actually enraging with these characters on what it means to be a survivor, than that's a whole different beast. But we're not.
That's a lie. Ramsay is much worse in the books than the tv show.
Edit: Refering to drogo?
I think it's pretty obvious this will be used to change Theon's character. I also think it's not just about Theon, but also about Sansa.
They're talking about Drogo.
Again, macro issue. Not just Game of Thrones. Sexual assault without emotional fallout from the survivor and using it as a plot point is pervasive in TV and film as a trope. I'm tired of it.
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