There's this famous quote from Dr. McCoy to Kirk which very much applies here
There's this famous quote from Dr. McCoy to Kirk which very much applies here
When the stars threw down their spears
And watered heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the lamb make thee?
I hate you people.
Spoiler:
Hope is the denial of reality
Like meOriginally Posted by Loki
Spoiler:
Keep on keepin' the beat alive!
I enjoyed the episode quite a bit. Seeing the reactions of the non-book readers is always priceless.
A lot of folks didn't like Bran's scene and a lot of people were really bummed about the dragons being locked up.
I'm curious how they will handle Dorne - they have a lot of room to play there.
Spoiler:
Hope is the denial of reality
.................................................. .................................................. .............................
Concerning The Hound:
the book doesn't make it 100% clear either:
concerning Bran as the show goes on
Spoiler:
"In a field where an overlooked bug could cost millions, you want people who will speak their minds, even if they’re sometimes obnoxious about it."
Called it, almost. But they didn't even put in this much effort.
http://time.com/3265518/game-of-thro...n-stark-hodor/
"In a field where an overlooked bug could cost millions, you want people who will speak their minds, even if they’re sometimes obnoxious about it."
Martin needs to finish the books series or this shows is going to crash and burn
It already has, I couldn't make it through the last season.
We're stuck in a bloody snowglobe.
Shocking.
So many fantastic scenes.
@taryngolightly: PLEASE HAVE STANNIS POKE HIS HEAD THROUGH THE TENT
would have been good if it had happened that way.
Anyway, I don't think the Hound being still alive works on a narrative level, so I doubt Martin would do it.
The light that once I thought compassion still casting shadows in your action
The words you shared were cold transactions that bring me to curse what you've done
When you're up there absorbed in greatness with such success you've grown complacent
I hope you scorch your many faces when you fly too close to the sun
Re-the Hound:
Spoiler:
Hope is the denial of reality
yet :P
Spoiler:
When the stars threw down their spears
And watered heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the lamb make thee?
WRT to The Hound; he could be dead, born again or simply show up some time later.
Congratulations America
"I, Elizabeth of the House Windsor, Second of Her Name, Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and Her Other Realms and Territories, Defender of the Faith and Head of the Commonwealth, do sentence you to die"
The light that once I thought compassion still casting shadows in your action
The words you shared were cold transactions that bring me to curse what you've done
When you're up there absorbed in greatness with such success you've grown complacent
I hope you scorch your many faces when you fly too close to the sun
She refused to sit on it! I mean, what's even the point of getting her there if she won't sit on it?
No woman without who's not a Dragon should ever sit on the Iron throne anyway.
.......
Congratulations America
Maybe she's scared it will cut her and reveal she's not a rightful queen?
Keep on keepin' the beat alive!
Maybe she's seen what happens to people who try and sit on it?
The light that once I thought compassion still casting shadows in your action
The words you shared were cold transactions that bring me to curse what you've done
When you're up there absorbed in greatness with such success you've grown complacent
I hope you scorch your many faces when you fly too close to the sun
I'm bumping this ancient thread!
In reference to a discussion that was happening over in the megathread:
SourceI’ve discussed last night’s episode of Game of Thrones in its entirety. I noted in my review that the final moments, even though I suspected they were coming, were hard to watch.
I’ve also discussed where I think Sansa will go in the future of the show, something I see (perhaps due to wishful thinking) as a positive progression for the eldest Stark girl.
And I believe that, as hard as last night’s episode was to watch, it was still necessary, both to stay at least somewhat true to the books, but also to propel Sansa to become the woman she needs to be to fight back, and to strike back at all those who have harmed her.
Arya’s journey has also been hard, though perhaps not quite so cruel, and she too is poised to strike back at those who have brought her House and family low.
But not everyone agrees.
Vanity Fair’s Joanna Robinson writes an emphatic “absolutely not” in response to the episode.
“Did they really need to go there on Game of Thrones? Did we need to see Ramsay Bolton rape Sansa Stark?” she asks. “No, we absolutely did not,” she answers.
The episode’s controversial moment was horrible, Robinson writes, ”because this rape scene undercuts all the agency that’s been growing in Sansa since the end of last season. She was at the height of her power earlier in the episode when, stripped back down to her red-headed Tully roots, she told Myranda in no uncertain terms that Winterfell was her home and she would not be intimidated. It’s right in line with the Game of Thrones approach to storytelling that Sansa would have the rug pulled out from under her. (Have we forgotten Oberyn so soon?) But did it really have to be rape that brought her low? Is that really the only horror Game of Thrones can imagine visiting on its female characters?”
Sansa was regaining her agency, right up to the point that Littlefinger duped her into thinking that this plan would help her avenge herself against her enemies. And just because she finds herself in a terrible predicament now doesn’t mean she won’t regain that agency (and then some) in the not-so-distant future.
Nor do female characters face rape as “the only horror” in Game of Thrones. They face death (in multiple horrible ways) just as men do. They face imprisonment and various other humiliations. They face myriad horrors beyond rape, from the relatively small to the truly grotesque.
Catelyn faced all sorts of struggles, from a bastard son to the loss of her husband and son, to her own gory death without ever being raped. Likewise for Arya and Margaery. Brienne was certainly facing rape at one point, but it never happened and most of her fights have been with a blade. (On the flipside, knowing that Cersei was sexually assaulted at the hands of Robert Baratheon really does add sympathy and depth to her character.)
It’s all awful, of course, and I don’t think Game of Thrones has portrayed it as otherwise, at least not last night. Quite the opposite. Watching Theon cry was stirring and powerful. He’s a victim, too, of both sexual assault and torture. They are suffering together. Men and women can both be victims, and they can suffer together.
Beyond all of this, the scene itself was handled extremely well. No matter how brutal it was—and it was, very—it was never presented as titillating (something other scenes, including Dany’s can be accused of) or gratuitous. Sure, rape can be an overused plot device when it comes to placing women in terrible situations, but I don’t think this qualifies, especially since up to this point it’s been a man suffering the worst of Ramsay’s horrors.
I’ll hand the mic over to the Washington Post’s Alyssa Rosenberg on this account:
But if this scene had to exist, the show’s version of it, written by Bryan Cogman, and shot sensitively and with intelligence by Jeremy Podeswa, managed to maintain a fine balance, employing a dignity and care for the experiences of victims that “Game of Thrones” has not always demonstrated. Sansa is raped on her wedding night, but “Game of Thrones” spares her the experience of being forced to have sexual contact with two men, instead of one. Other than a shot of Ramsay ripping Sansa’s dress open, we don’t see her body during the rape: just her face, and then Theon’s contracting in agony and fear and horrible sympathy. What Ramsay is doing to Sansa doesn’t matter in the slightest. What she and Theon–and yes, there are two victims, though of very different crimes, in this scene–feel about what’s happening is what’s important. The camera refuses to join in her victimization, forcing us to focus instead on the impact of Ramsay’s latest despicable predations.
Now that’s quite an interesting lens to view this scene through. Another reason we see the rape through Theon’s eyes, I believe, is because it’s his character we follow in the books. Through his broken body and eyes we witness the horrors Ramsay meets out to his bride.
This is not about Theon’s redemption—or at least, not just about his redemption—as Robinson suggests. It’s about much more than that.
For me at least, it’s about Sansa becoming something far more than the girl she was long ago when she first left Winterfell, starry-eyed and dreaming. And however horrible this moment is for her character, I think it’s a legitimate part of her development—and someday, hopefully, her revenge.
Robinson also suggests that Sansa, Theon, Podrick and Brienne will ”band together to take down Ramsay over the next few episodes” now that Theon’s been smacked out of his “zombie/Reek fugue”. I think that’s pretty far-fetched as a book-reader (ok, there is actually zero percent chance this happens.) But I do think it’s an important moment for Theon as a character, and for the two of them together.
I liked this take on it.
Fantasizing Consent
By Sarah Mesle
“WE BOTH PEDDLE FANTASIES,” Petyr Baelish says to Brother Lancel. “Mine just happen to be entertaining.” Petyr’s joke was a rare respite in this week’s brutal episode of Game of Thrones. But this quip is also a provocative insight, a kind of metacomment on the show itself. Game of Thrones, like Petyr and Lancel, peddles fantasies. But are its fantasies entertaining? Are they satisfying? For whom?
Like the johns in Littlefinger’s brothel, viewers of Game of Thrones have thrown down money and time for the chance to indulge in an elaborate fantasy. Often, even when it’s been grim, it’s been satisfying too. But something is different this week. “Unbent, Unbroken, Unbowed” offered a fantasy that viewers seem unwilling to buy. Why not? Why was it this episode, rather than some of the even more graphic episodes, that ended up a sort of fantasy shark jumping?
The quick answer is Sansa’s rape: it was awful, and what’s more, it was disappointing: disappointing that the show would, yet again, see rape as it’s most effective plot device. (My brother put it to me this way: "Game of Thrones’s attitude seems to be, why jump the shark when you can rape it instead?") For several reasons — because of the victim, the perpetrator, the witness, but also because of its overall plot — this time the show was not able to align fantasy and brutality. This wasn’t what we wanted; it wasn’t even what we wanted to reassure ourselves we didn’t want.
It’s hard to understand why Sansa’s experience registered the way it did without thinking about the entirety of the episode. How does Ramsay’s abuse of Sansa compare to the High Sparrow’s imprisonment of Loras, or to Jaqen H’ghar’s beating of Arya? How do all of these combine to render this show’s dark fantasy whole? How does situating a rape at the end of a story about identity, truth, lying, and desire seem like such a profound violation, not only of Sansa, but also of us?
To answer that question, I think it’s worth pausing a moment over the idea of fantasy itself. The word “fantasy,” when applied to Game of Thrones, refers both to a particular narrative genre — a story set in any kind of fundamentally pre-modern world — and to a kind of imaginative desire. These two meanings aren’t the same, but they’re often weirdly conflated, partly because many familiar qualities of the fantasy genre — Dragons, noble warriors, beautifully embroidered dresses — fulfill emotional fantasies as well. And, too, the “premodern” part of the fantasy genre has its particular appeal to many people’s desires: if modernity abstracts us, puts a careful ordering of society between us and our bodies, the premodern, we like to think, will return us to a life that feels a little more raw, a little more embodied, a little more real.
But things go a little sideways when the historical qualities of emotional fantasy are mistakenly justified by a sense of historical realism. There is a human past about which we can be truthful, be “realistic,” but we can never be realistic about Westeros because Westeros does not exist. Westeros plays by a set of established rules — fantasy novels are still novels, and all novels satisfy by contracting rules with their readers — but those rules are not “realism,” whatever realism is. If Westeros is similar to our world, it is because Westeros’s creators have made it that way.
Let me be clear: stories of all kinds can teach us, really, about the world. But they do it not through mirroring the world but through metaphor. They are aesthetic representations, and that is not a weakness. Their difference from the real is precisely the force they wield.
And yet the claim of realism has a powerful tug on the conversation about Game of Thrones. When people complain about rape in the show, or homophobia, or brutality, they are often met with the response that “that’s how it really was.” But of course, it can’t be how Westeros “really was,” because Westeros never was at all.
The dangerous trick here goes like this: someone fantasizes about a world in which rape frequently occurs and consistently goes unpunished; to explore this emotional fantasy, they set it in a premodern narrative fantasy world where they can displace their own desire onto “history.” The dark impulse or desire isn’t theirs, then; it’s the world’s. It’s history’s. And once a dark personal fantasy becomes “realism,” gazing upon this dark thought or idea isn’t a kind of humiliating or dangerous self-reflection, it’s laudable: it’s an honest engagement with truth.
Here is why so many of us have been buying what Game of Thrones sells: Game of Thrones often excels at making titillation of various kinds feel like a kind of betterment, or seriousness. It excels at giving fantasy the weight of the real, at making some people’s fantasies seem historical and universal, at making any objection to the graphic display of those fantasies seem small-minded and fearful.
Which is not to say that our job here is to sniff out and expose to the hygienic light of day the queasy “wrongness” of Game of Thrones’s fantasies. I do not think that having dark, dangerous fantasies makes you, necessarily, a dark dangerous person. Fantasies — desires — are a product, maybe, of our deepest selves, but they are not our whole selves.
This is the other way that fantasies interact with reality: not historical realities, but psychological ones. Fantasies connect to identity, but in precarious and volatile ways. We can fantasize about things we don’t actually want (like, to take the terrible topic at hand, rape). And that makes fantasies scary. Fantasies can make us feel like we don’t know who we are.
And it’s the question of identity’s truth that “Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken” probes over and over again. Arya’s scenes in the House of Black and White get at the weird intersection of storymaking, fantasy, and identity. “Who are you?” she asks another girl. The story she is told — about a girl, “just like you,” who sought revenge — brings a dangerous smile to Arya’s face. But she quickly learns the story may have little purchase on the world itself. Instead, Arya quickly realizes, this made-up story is designed to tell Arya what she wants to hear. She has been, as Petyr will say, peddled a fantasy. And she bought it.
Fascinatingly, she learns the same thing when she herself tells a story to Jaqen H’ghar: the lashes fall from his whip, opening her up, every time she tries to keep the truth of herself concealed. “I don’t want to play the game!” she finally cries out, at the moment she painfully realizes she has been peddling a fantasy to herself. But, as Jaqen says, “We never stop playing.” Importantly, Jaqen, insisting so violently on truth, connects truth to play — and while he punishes Arya for lying in this scene, he will reward her a scene later for telling a lie, in the form of a story, a story with psychological rather than historical truth, to the girl she will kill. Arya, too, becomes a fantasy peddler. It’s by engaging in this blurry sense of identity that she finally gets permission to learn about the Hall of Many Faces. She has become herself enough that she can become, not no one, but someone else.
Tyrion and Jorah too are telling stories: to each other and to the slavers who find them. These are also stories about identity, violence, betrayal, and desire. “That true?” the slaver asks. Tyrion, who is obviously a master at the game of faces, knows exactly what the slavers want to hear, even as he’s not sure what to make of the stories he tells about himself and his violence towards his father (Tyrion does not tell Jorah, I noticed, that he also killed Shae). There are a couple of things we might make of this scene — the saavy way it links Jorah’s fighting to Tyrion’s storytelling as equally necessary tools for survival, and the appealing camaraderie between the two men — but we might notice particularly how much more satisfying it is than the following scene in which Jaime and the Sand Snakes engage in some completely useless shenanigans that are neither entertaining nor narratively meaningful.
But what really interested me about these scenes is a sort of anxiety they started to produce in me around the border between fantasy and realism. I liked Tyrion’s scenes; I didn’t like the Dorne scenes; but both these sequences kept returning me to the question: whose fantasy is this? Who is the implied watcher, the implied fantasizer?
Both sequences relied on strange fantasy clichés: the shriekingly incompetent princess, like the dark-skinned and easy-to-manipulate slavers, are straight out of fantasy central casting, and they are not fun for me to watch. But there seems little room to complain about them. If you point out that it’s annoying to watch Myrcella’s helpfulessness, and annoying to see the Sand Snakes completely fail to make a plan despite their legendary prowess, and annoying that people of color seem to show up only in such cliché ways, you’re often told that you are taking fantasy too seriously.
But I did not like these scenes. I felt excluded, and I felt the show was hedging its bets against my criticisms. I felt silenced.
And I felt the same thing, though for different reasons, in the subsequent sequence, when Loras is brought up for trial. All the King’s Landings scenes are about truth, and about identity, and about lying: about how powerful people negotiate what versions of truth they are going to throw their weight behind. And this underlying interest becomes particularly important because what is overtly at stake is the matter of Loras Tyrell’s “fornication” and “buggery”: this show, which is so often about our own complex desires, now hinges on a plotline in which a character’s desires are persecuted, persecuted for being fundamentally “perverse,” untrue to nature.
And, ok, people: I just cannot express enough how much this entire plotline pisses me off. Everything about it fills me with rage.
This show does not ask us to sympathize with homophobia, and it presents gay desire as a normal. But it does, I think, do something worse: it implies that homophobia, like homosexuality, is a fundamental part of being human, something that only the sophisticated resist. This is a very dramatic example of a particular emotional fantasy that some people have — a fantasy about punishing gay desire — being made to seem like an inevitable part of historical realism. The plot of Game of Thrones makes it seem reasonable for Cersei to think that militarizing a church would inevitably lead to the persecution of “perverts,” and thus of her enemy Loras.
But why is this inevitable? It is not. Forget that the word Cersei uses to describe Loras, “pervert,” did not come to refer to sexual identity until the very recent past (this plotline, like a lot of fantasy, relies on a Victorian interpretation of the middle ages rather than the middle ages themselves): even if premodern persecution of anal sex is very likely, even if it has often happened in human history, homophobia, as it being portrayed in this show, is simply not inevitable.
The Sparrow’s zealousness about sexuality is a choice made by the creators of this world, just like those creators are choosing White Walkers but not vampires as the monsters Westeros will face. And to act as though that is not so is more than just a profound and boring failure of imagination. It is a failure to see those with queer desires as fully human. It is to reassert that, when we are not protected by social rules, what humans really do is go after the gays.
It slowly became clear to me that what would happen in this trial was that Olyver, Loras’s sexual partner from episode two, would be trotted out to testify. I was convinced that he would in fact be less trotted than pulled; that we would see that he had been brutalized (like the gay men in Littlefinger’s brothel) or tortured. I was relieved when his body was intact, and then I was furious that the show had created a situation in which the failure to torture a gay body would be seen as a kind of televisual generosity. And I was angered further when the sheer fact of a squire having seen his knight naked, and knowing about a birthmark (a birthmark the color of wine and the shape of Dorne: if you would like to close read this bullshit, I would recommend the Salem witch trials as inter texts) as conclusive proof of gayness.
What we are seeing, in the show, is a kind of operating logic that leads toward silencing dissenting voices. Power is working to make its own desires seem true, natural, real, and everything else a kind of blasphemy. What I was feeling, watching the show, was also a kind of silencing: a silencing of my own critique.
And this is where I was when the show took us to Winterfell, to Sansa. To Sansa’s rape. Like much of the episode, this sequence begins with language about violence, identity, and disguise: Sansa is washed like the corpses at the episode’s beginning, her hair stripped clean of its dye. Myranda, like Arya at the episode’s beginning, tells a story that uses truth to spin a fantasy: a dark, threatening one this time. And importantly, Sansa understands both these meanings, just as she understands what it means that Theon must use his own name to give her away: just as she knows what it means when she consents to take Ramsay. “I take this man,” she says, in her beautiful white dress, standing in the candlelight, in the new fallen snow.
To what, Dear Television, does Sansa consent? What is “real,” believable, about what happens next, when Ramsay rips open her dress, pushes her face into the furs, and fucks her? Why was this scene so violating to viewers?
It’s more than the fact that Sansa has been here before, though that is part of it. And it’s more than the fact that we know and care about Sansa, although that is also true.
And it’s more than the fact that the camera focused on Theon’s reaction to the rape, although this is key. Many have noted that the camera seemed to put the emphasis on a man’s response to rape rather than the rape itself: that’s true, but that’s not the only thing that was happening. Think about what Ramsey says to Theon: “You knew her when she was a girl. Now watch as she becomes a woman.” Who else has watched Sansa in this way? We have. We are Theon, here.
We have watched as Sansa has changed, and we have been hopeful that she has, indeed, learned how to, in Petyr’s words, “maneuver.” Sansa’s body is being violated, and that is happening so dramatically that there’s no room to complain about what’s happening to her character. And now, like Theon, we’re forced — forced? — to watch as Ramsay tries to demonstrate that womanhood and rape are synonymous. And because the plotline grants her no psychological progress or development, it feels like the story’s creators are joining with Ramsay in saying: the plot of rape is not one a woman can expect to escape.
This scene is primarily a violation of Sansa, but it is a violation of us too. It hurts us, I think, because it hems us in at all sides. Like Sansa, we willingly consented to participate in this show. Like Reek, we are told to watch, but are not being forcibly held. We stay because we made a contract. We made a deal, even if we didn’t understand the terms to which we agreed. And so not only are we being made to watch something painful, but we are also being told, implicitly, that it is our fantasy to do so.
This episode of Game of Thrones does to viewers what the world so often does to women: it mistakes presence for consent. Whether it does so in a way that is ultimately useful and revealing, or a way that is fundamentally unredeemable is not something about which there’s only one right way to feel, just like there’s no one right way to feel about rape itself.
“I want you to be happy,” Ramsay says to Sansa. I imagine the show saying the same thing to all of us. You wanted it, didn’t you?
The light that once I thought compassion still casting shadows in your action
The words you shared were cold transactions that bring me to curse what you've done
When you're up there absorbed in greatness with such success you've grown complacent
I hope you scorch your many faces when you fly too close to the sun
I'm going to admit that I didn't make it all the way through the article. It provoked a bit too much eye rolling. But it did manage to hit on the disconnect, I think, starting here:
The thing is, for most people, the second isn't at all true especially when applied to Game of Thrones. While many people like to watch Game of Thrones, nobody sane wants to live in Westeros. It is an awful place with very few redeeming qualities. And the article goes on to repeatedly conflate these two definitions by assuming that by depicting a thing, people are fantasizing about and endorsing a "dark personal fantasy". This is absurd, and about the third time the author implied it I couldn't get myself to read any further.The word “fantasy,” when applied to Game of Thrones, refers both to a particular narrative genre — a story set in any kind of fundamentally pre-modern world — and to a kind of imaginative desire.
Think you're operating on a pretty simplistic definition of 'fantasy' here, Wraith, people have fantasies that they would never want to actually happen, doesn't mean there isn't something about them which the fantasizer finds appealing - the very fact of it being a fantasy rather than reality allows them to enjoy that aspect of their fantasy without the bad stuff affecting them or anyone else. "fantasizing about" != "endorsing"
And quite obviously, there is something in the world GRRM has created which appeals to many, given the amount of people who enjoy obsessing over the minutiae of his world through the medium of voluminous Wikis and supplementary materials like 'A World of Ice and Fire', wearing t-shirts that say things like 'STARK, Winter is Coming' or 'LANNISTER, Hear Me Roar' or writing tongue in cheek articles for serious publications like Le Monde or the Wall Street Journal which analyse the economics or politics of Westeros as if it were a real place.
The light that once I thought compassion still casting shadows in your action
The words you shared were cold transactions that bring me to curse what you've done
When you're up there absorbed in greatness with such success you've grown complacent
I hope you scorch your many faces when you fly too close to the sun
The gist of the article is that she doesn't like the elements of the show where ideas she likes are punished (or ideas he dislikes are not). Needless to say, that's a rather idiotic criterion for judging shows. Incidentally, Westerors might not have existed, but it's clearly based on medieval Europe (as are much fantasy shows). And in medieval Europe, what happened to Sansa was decidedly not rape. Furthermore, it was not abnormal. The only thing you could say was immoral (according to the norms of the type) about the act was that it was a bit rougher than it had to be. But it certainly wasn't Joffrey rough. And it definitely wasn't Ramsay's normal level of rough. In the end, it seems that a lot of people want to see a world where their ideas get rewarded, and characters who hold those beliefs are rewarded. These people should stop watching TV.
Where were these same whiners when Theon was tortured? Why did they not care when Brienne was almost raped? Is it because Sansa is a pretty white teen, and they don't want to see pretty white teens hurt?
Hope is the denial of reality
You're a native speaker, Steely. I'm sure you know that "fantasize" is not a perfect synonym to "imagines" and there are connotations that separate the two words. You're not going to convince me that the author didn't mean that these were "dark personal fantasies" elaborating on "imaginative desires", because the author used those exact words. I'm also not going to be convinced that the people working on the show secretly want to commit rape and only avoid it due to fear of the consequences. I find it completely absurd that anyone would even imply something like that. It's only the most simplistic, childish stories that are mere wish fulfillment, only depicting things that someone wants, secretly or not.
I first read that post at lunch time. It's now early evening. And I've still not figured out how you managed to get any of that from the article, even allowing for the fact that you say you haven't read all of it. Like, you think the author is saying the people on the show secretly want to commit rape? Just... what?
I've also not been able to figure out what connection, if any, there is between the words I wrote in my post, whatever process went on in your head, and the post that subsequently appeared in this thread. You seem to be under the impression that I've confused 'fantasizing about something' and simply 'imagining something'. Er, no. I was talking, very clearly I think, about fantasies.
Since you have a long history of making considered and well thought out posts I'll choose to believe that you've recently suffered a sharp blow to the head, donated a large quantity of blood to the victim of a road traffic accident or are suffering side effects from some kind of prescription medication.
The light that once I thought compassion still casting shadows in your action
The words you shared were cold transactions that bring me to curse what you've done
When you're up there absorbed in greatness with such success you've grown complacent
I hope you scorch your many faces when you fly too close to the sun
Initially, I objected because the author of the piece was using different definitions of fantasy as if you could swap them out at will while still making sense. I objected to the idea that because GoT is a fantasy (as in, a certain genre of fiction) that it is something that people fantasize (Oxford: daydream about something desired) about. Depictions do not imply desires, and the author seemed to speak as though proving the genre proved the desire, simply because they use the same word. (And when I went back to reread to make sure I hadn't misunderstood, a paragraph below where I stopped last time they explicitly swapped the two words!)
I understood the author to be saying that the depiction of the events in GoT reveals certain dark desires of the showrunners, and the showrunners try to use the event's fictional nature to excuse this. The author rejects the excuse. I reject the very premise of the statement.
Maybe I misunderstood you. Perhaps you misunderstood me and the misunderstandings compounded. So, explicitly please, what was the point of your post previous to the last?
Well, since you asked so nicely
Very simply, that a fantasy (in the sense of something desired) does not necessarily have to be something that person would actually want to happen in real life. Some aspect of it merely needs to fulfil a particular emotional need. In a fantasy, you can simply disregard the negative consequences of the scenario were it to actually happen and focus on the part that
For example, someone who trains in martial arts might have fantasy were they intervene in some violent situation and use their skills to save someone's life. Obviously, they wouldn't want that to actually happen in real life; they know in reality the situation would be dangerous and frightening, that their chances of coming out on top were well shy of 100% and that even if everything goes according to plan the person they saved would still have had an unpleasant and traumatic experience and that it would be better for all concerned if it had never happened in the first place. But in their fantasy, they can disregard all that stuff and skip straight to the part where they're being a hero.
Or you might have the victim of bullying who fantasizes about violently murdering their bullies - they don't want to actually kill them, they know that would be wrong and likely end up with them in prison. But it's an empowering fantasy that acts as a form of escapism from the dis-empowerment they feel from being victimized.
And so on.
So, just because people understand intellectually that Westeros would be a terrible place to live doesn't mean that visiting there in the form of a story doesn't fulfil some sort of emotional need on the part of the reader, and in that sense Game of Thrones like all fiction is fantasy in both senses of the word. We know that the lives of Tyrion, Sansa, Cercei et al are terrible and the fates GRRM meets out to his characters are frequently horrific. But their lives are colorful, interesting and they get to do things like take part in court intrigue, behead / poison / burn alive people who irritate them, lead armies, fight duels, have cool clothes and badass heraldry and say things like "I am a Stark of Winterfell" and have people take notice. They lives are about something, and while our lives are safe and comfortable they are in comparison mundane and trivial. They get to be part of a story.
Now that I think of it this was the same point another article from the same site made around the time of season 4:
So, in summery: yeah, Westeros might be as you say 'an awful place with few redeeming qualities' but one of those redeeming qualities is that in Westeros you get to do cool shit like being the King in the North, and that's your fantasy ('daydream about something desired') right there.Theon begins to sound not unlike HBO GO, HBO’s streaming service and hope for the technological future, which initially advertised itself with this tagline: “The story you could be watching is better than the one you’re in.” The ad campaign consists of people stuck inside banal, numb, modern situations — doctors’ waiting rooms, elevators with annoying people on cellphones, lunches with boring co-workers. These people are screaming inside, I am so not Robb Stark right now. This audience longs for the “authentic” experience that apparently only CGI, cable technology and graphic high-fantasy on demand can provide, and Theon too longs to be inside a better story. Theon is this audience’s proxy.
In fact, rereading the article, the author makes *exactly* this point:
You might make the valid point that this is just like any other story. But there's something a little different about Game of Thrones in that it repeatedly displays open contempt for fantasies (again, both senses of the word) by constantly suggesting that a common fantasy narrative trope is about to happen, then showing you what would 'really' happen instead (a trait most clearly exemplified in the character of Sansa Stark, incidentally - some of her stuff from Season 1/A Game of Thrones is *really* on the nose about this particular point), thus legitimising it's own fantasies (both senses) with a sense of realism and/or 'realism'.This is the other way that fantasies interact with reality: not historical realities, but psychological ones. Fantasies connect to identity, but in precarious and volatile ways. We can fantasize about things we don’t actually want (like, to take the terrible topic at hand, rape). And that makes fantasies scary. Fantasies can make us feel like we don’t know who we are.
The points that apparently caused you to stop reading were not in reference to Sansa's rape, but this tendency of the show to use brutality and violence to lend a sense of verisimilitude to it's fantasies (both series), and make them seem more real, more authentic and therefore more satisfying, the 'dark personal fantasy'.
What the article wants to know is, what is it about Sansa's scene that caused everyone to lose their shit where they haven't through the past four seasons? About which it concludes; because it makes us feel complicit in the whole thing, we enjoy the show because of it's 'gritty realism' makes our fantasies seem more real, then puts us in a place where the only character we can possibly empathize with is forced to find out just how gritty that realism can get. Then it leaves the open question of whether or not it is saying something useful by doing this.
I don't know that I agree, I just thought it was a more interesting take on the whole thing than the usual 'showing any kind of rape is wrong because it means the creators think rape is a good thing!11111'/'noo, it's super realistic because a woman couldn't leave the house without being raped at least five times on the way down to the well in the olden times!!!11' derp-fest.
The light that once I thought compassion still casting shadows in your action
The words you shared were cold transactions that bring me to curse what you've done
When you're up there absorbed in greatness with such success you've grown complacent
I hope you scorch your many faces when you fly too close to the sun
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