Today there was another attempted rape, at which point my boyfriend announced “If there’s another
rape scene, I’m not going to be able to watch this show anymore” and
he’s only a casual viewer. So I wonder if the writers are actually
taking note of any of this, and considering that it might be a good idea
to significantly reduce the amount of violence against women. Because
it would. It would be a very good idea.
I totally agree, except that the first night wasn’t consensual in the books either. So, Drogo gets the 13-year-old child bride he bought to say ‘yes’ that one time by virtue of not being the savage monster she expected. Wow, big deal. Are we supposed to assume that if Dany’d said ‘no’ instead he would have stopped right there? Really?
Dany was in no position to be no and be safe. More important, she wasn’t even aware that she could say no (because, let’s be frank, she couldn’t). From the first line of that chapeter Dany is painfully aware that she’s going to have sex with Drogo by the end of the night, and she’s scared out of her mind.
“He can have her tomorrow if he likes,” her brother said. “So as long as he pays the price.”
And
“As the hours passed, the terror grew in Dany, until was all she could do not to scream.”
The idea that she can say not doesn’t even pass through her mind, because Dany is from a culture where there’s no such thing as spousal rape, and just married a man whose culture involves men ‘mounting [a woman] as a stallion mounts a mare’.
All Dany has in this chapter is a semblance of control. She is asked what she wants, but she is in not real position to refuse (as her next chapter confirms – Drogo doesn’t ask if he can ‘ride her as rentlessly as he rode his stallion’ when she’s hurt and bleeding.)
She is in no position to give her consent. At this point, all Dany wanted was not to be married. Instead, her saying ‘yes’ is more about her taking whatever agency she could get, because Drogo at least made a show of giving a damn what she wanted any way or the other (I say made a show because he clearly didn’t care about Daenerys’s ‘consent’ when he bought her). Daenerys saying yes is about deciding to be a woman instead of a scared little girl under Viserys’s thumb, Daenerys saying yes is all about her and her character development, and is a very important, if fleeting way to assert herself. That’s good.
But Daenerys is also thirteen years old and a glorified sex slave, and it boggles my mind how much people like to ignore this, espcially in such an usually unofrgiving fandom.
We have fans acting like their relationship is so perfect when it started out incredibly stetcky and dub-con at least, even in the books.
We have Martin himself who continues to write Dany’s chapters as if Drogo was the great love of her life, but still parts of the fandom keep regarding him as if he were some sort of feminist god (I’m waiting eagerly for the moment where Dany finally realizes that she has Stockholm Syndrome. If that never happens, I’ll be disgusted.)
We have people dissing the show for treating Dany’s wedding night as the rape it was, but somehow conveniently unaware of how by romanticizing the scene in the books they are glorifying a relationship between a thirty-year-old man and a thirteen-year-old child bride.
I’ve had this rant building for a while, so here goes.
I have no use for works that must depict increasing cruelty to hold an
audience’s attention. If all you have to say about suffering is “can you
top this?” I am not impressed. And I resent the implication that this makes me too weak-willed or emotionally involved to properly form an opinion.
There is a fine line between doing something brilliant that generates controversy, and generating a controversy in the hope of appearing brilliant. The former should not be used to make excuses for the latter. The mere act of pushing the envelope does not, in and of itself, result in an artistic triumph above criticism. Indeed, the point of pushing the envelope would seem to be to risk failure, incite emotions, and invite criticism. If you poke the bear, you don’t get to whine that the bear is taking it too personally, or that the bear should wait and see where you’re going with this.
It’s a free society and stuff, so I’m not gonna tell anyone they can’t wallow in their sadism or creepy shit. But people who do that crap don’t get a free pass, that says it’s ~*~art~*~ so nobody can say anything bad. Art is supposed to pull you in and tell you something. If a work tells me “this artist is just trying to fuck with people,” it’s not my job to apologize and learn to enjoy that.
The show has creators. They make the choices.They chose to use rape as a plot device. Again. – Jill Pantozzi, The Mary Sue
It is possible to write fantasy without falling back on the harmful cliché that an old-timey setting offers a free pass to show women getting raped all the time. –Everdeen Mason, Refinery29
The issue with the show returning to rape as a trope is not simply because there have been thinkpieces speaking out against it, and is not solely driven by the rational concerns lying at the heart of those thinkpieces. It’s also that the show has lost my faith as a viewer that the writers know how to articulate the aftermath of this rape effectively… –Myles McNutt, AV Club
We already knew that Ramsay Bolton was a sadist and an abuser of women, we already knew that Theon Greyjoy was his tormented puppet. Showing Sansa’s dress ripped, showing her face shoved down into the bed, hearing her screams did nothing to reveal character, or advance the plot, or critique anything about Westerosi society or about our own conceptions of medieval society that hasn’t already been critiqued. – Steven Attewell, Salon
In general, I’m not a big fan of people getting raped in entertainment as a manipulative way of heightening the stakes, but I’m even less of a fan of people getting raped in entertainment when it accomplishes absolutely nothing. – Laura Hudson, Wired
What character development could be wrung from this tragedy that could not have been created without a violent rape? Why does Game of Thrones — and so much popular entertainment — revert to this horrific crime when they want their female characters to “grow”? – Michal Schick, Hypable
Was it really important to make that scene about Theon’s pain? If Game of Thrones was going to go there, shouldn’t they at least have had the courage to keep the camera on Turner’s face?…But the last thing we needed was to have a powerful young woman brought low in order for a male character to find redemption. No thank you. – Joanna Robinson, Vanity Fair
To show Sansa being raped as the kicker to an episode — and then to cut to Theon, as if it’s his view, his reaction, his internalizing of the moment that matters — just felt like more of the same old same old we’ve been getting since Ros died, since Tansy was hunted, since Cersei was raped. – Nina Shen Rastogi, Vulture
There are thousands of ways to make a character and a series compelling without having to humiliate and dehumanize her with sexual force. Come on, Game of Thrones, you should know better than that. – Rachel Semigran, Bustle
Now with Sansa and Ramsay, Game of Thrones is seemingly confirming that it has no idea how to use rape as a storytelling device — crass as it may sound, fictional sexual violence can be extremely powerful if managed carefully (see: The Americans) — and rape is just about the worst storytelling device to deploy clumsily. – Jen Trolio, Vox
Welcome to cable drama, where a woman’s rape is an opportunity for a man’s character development….what really makes the wedding night rape of Sansa Stark notable is the fact that as brutal and honestly unnecessary as the moment is, the show doesn’t even have the courtesy of letting Sansa’s emotions about the event serve as the center of the moment….
This was a choice and the choice was to marry off a teenage girl, rape her, and not even have the dignity to care primarily about her feelings about her fate.
The show pretty much added a new, and in my opinion, entirely unnecessary victimization to her story. More concerningly, after Jaime’s rape of Cersei last season, it’s yet another rape Benioff and Weiss decided to add to the show that was not in the text and at this point, we don’t need anymore. – Lauren Morgan, New York Daily News
There have been numerous plot points and characters from Martin’s novels that have been omitted from the series; I’d love to hear what the showrunners’ arguments are for not only keeping the brutal assault of a young woman, but changing the storyline so that it happened to a beloved character. I’ll be waiting for an explanation, but like Jaime Lannister’s guilt [over raping Cersei], I’m not expecting it to actually arrive. – Casey Cipriani, Indiewire
There were so many ways around this very horrible and very predictable outcome and D&D decided to use what would shock viewers the most. Maybe I’m naive and hope too much for the good things, but I’m also a fan of good writing and creative characters who grow. Sansa’s “wedding” involved neither.- Jen Stayrock, Workprint
Bad enough that the assault upon the Stark princess by ghastly Ramsay Bolton was explicitly presented as an exercise in voyeurism, with Theon Greyjoy forced to watch as Sansa was violently assailed. What made the scene worse, and perhaps unforgivable, was that the rape was in the context of Sansa displaying increased maturity and independence. – Ed Powers, Independent.ie
Personally, I’d really like Game of Thrones to be a good 30-40 per cent less weird about women (and having Warrior Princess fighting girls in Dorne isn’t quite what I’m after, chaps). – Chris Bennion, Independent.co.uk
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“Fans have a direct experience with the crime than with murder or other really serious violent acts.
Often you can tell exactly what the story line was because it’s prompting calls about a certain issue or from a certain group of survivors.” – Scott Berkowitz,
president and founder of the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network (RAINN) The hotline which receives a noticeable increase in calls every time there’s a portrayal of rape on a popular show. Support is available 24/7 through the National Sexual Assault Hotline: 800-656-HOPE
Last night, they raped an underage girl and, even in the midst of that trauma, the camera focused on Theon and how painful it was for him to watch it. Sansa is raped in her childhood home, in her parent’s bed, where the only good times of her life were spent. And even the horror of sexual violence in the only safe place that she has ever known isn’t the focus of the scene. Pain does not even belong to the woman who has to suffer it.
The northern girl. Winterfell’s daughter. We heard she killed the king with a spell, and afterward changed into a wolf with big leathery wings like a bat, and flew out a tower window.
