THE GAME OF THRONES/ASOIAF SPOILER THREAD (WARNING: SPOILERS)

bump (for if readers want to debate sansagate)

i think there's a difference between the event happening and whether it needed to be depicted on screen -- so that scene was not necessary, especially considering it wasn't part of source text

― Mistah FAAB (sarahell), Wednesday, May 20, 2015 4:41 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is a fair point although if they had depicted the source text of that scene (with its original victim, let's speculate they somehow kept jeyne poole around as fake arya)...i don't even want to imagine what the reactions would be, and they would be even more understandable than these are

i'm not going to stop watching the show, but that was a low point for me. like campy sand snakes, and the romance with marcella and dorne dude that didn't exist in the books, fine -- this was just the worst so far this season

right - and the obvious path of least resistance is that you dump the idea of showing it altogether, and say you imply that ramsay is being brutal without showing it on a scene-by-scene basis. (its an easy thing for us to infer!) i wouldnt be surprised if in the writers' minds that they view this atrocity as just another awful thing ramsay has done, on par with castrating/flaying theon, destroying him mentally, threatening him with rape etc but i dont know how i feel about such a perspective myself. yeeesj.

it was def a bad episode by the show's standards and the scene made it worse.

*yeeeesh

i thought trystane/myrcella was kinda cute! sappy as hell for sure though

my friend Julia Gfrörer posted a really cogent defense of these scenes as necessary as an exposé of sexual violence as a product of marriage in westerosi society a couple days ago, ie this patriarchy isn't substantially different from our own, but most narratives gloss over it http://boiledleather.com/post/119334044248/m00n-creature-boiledleather-julia-gfrorer

but yeah that being said this episode was, one hopes, a nadir for the show

you imply that ramsay is being brutal without showing it on a scene-by-scene basis. (its an easy thing for us to infer!)

exactly -- use the audience's power of imagination -- idk. it felt gratuitous and creatively lazy

If they really want to expose rape as a fundamental part of marriage, perhaps not use the horrific monster to show it? Perhaps show how horrific a normal marriage could be.

If they really want to expose rape as a fundamental part of marriage, perhaps not use the horrific monster to show it? Perhaps show how horrific a normal marriage could be.

Not that I've gone out of my way to delve into this issue, but this point is very good.

that is def fair and would be a thousand times more interesting for sure

right - and the obvious path of least resistance is that you dump the idea of showing it altogether, and say you imply that ramsay is being brutal without showing it on a scene-by-scene basis..

― slothroprhymes, Wednesday, May 20, 2015

exactly -- use the audience's power of imagination -- idk. it felt gratuitous and creatively lazy

― Mistah FAAB (sarahell), Wednesday, May 20, 2015

but being forced to watch is the point of the scene right? theon's being forced to watch, and that level of horror and outrage is what it's going to take for him to dare cross ramsay (who's done a lot worse to him than to sansa) and help her escape. so to the extent that we're horrified and outraged, job well done i guess.

there's a strand of argument that says staging this scene as part of theon's story is "just as bad" because it derails the sansa-empowerment story that's been dangled. but that's just the fantasy littlefinger's sold her (and us), and watching cherished fantasies go down the drain is pretty much the show's mo since Ned lost his head instead of catching that trip to the wall, if not since lancelot got off guinevere to push a kid out a window.

I dunno, for once whichever MRA is first to be all #remembertheonsdick may have a point. that said, the jeyne poole story is even nastier and I reserve the right to throw my tv out the window if things actually get worse from here.

the other thing with the way the story's been changed, having Sansa there, is how is she going to trust/want to go along with the guy she believes killed her brothers?

xp yeaaaaa, the sentence that ends the chapter containing the jeyne poole scene is forever burned into my brain & i hate it

well i assume he'll fess up that they're not dead. this entire storyline is a problem and underscores the larger issue: streamlining storylines is fine given the real-world considerations of global production and actors' contracts etc but as the writers lose the ability to cherrypick from the pile of GRRM's already-written strongest scenes and zingers the show is starting to feel a lot more hercules/xena in general.

counterpoint: Hercules/Xena often ruled

well, yeah

I still am resenting the fact they cut dumb Dorne boy who gets incinerated by Dany's dragons

There are a dozen better ways that lazy and cynical wedding night scene could have played out while retaining its inherent nastiness.

Dorne stuff ridiculous.

please do list them

Oh, I dunno. Littlefinger better preps her for her fate or at least acknowledges (how can he not know?) she is marrying a psycho, and warns her she is in for hell, but convinces her the reward will be worth the horror. Or rather than showing (as such) the rape, they just have it take place behind closed doors and imply it. Or instead of depicting Sansa's torture at the hands of a known vile reprobate reveal that she is steeled up to submit to his aggression for the sake of a bigger picture (a la Dany did). Or have her tell off his equally psycho underling (Miranda?) with a "you don't know who you're fucking with," have one of the North folk kill her, then later as Ramsay advances cut to a lantern in the high tower. Or strike Ramsay with impotence.. Or just have her kill Ramsay, since Roose is already expecting a new son/heir. And so on. Really, since they're deviating from the book, the sky is the limit, even within the restrictions Martin has implicitly set. Martin pointed out in his own reaction how the show is basically dealing with the repercussions of changes it made several seasons ago, so it's not like there's a "right" way to handle the story, if they're going off-book. The scene, at least with what we know, does nothing to develop the Ramsay character (whose torture of Theon already overdid it), Theon (who has been in a state of fear and disgust since the aforementioned), or Sansa (who has had to deal with tons of shit since the first moments of the show, iirc).

Expecting Sansa to have taken some measure of vengeance immediately on Ramsay/prevent what happened from happening seems to be as Pollyanna-ish as expecting Arya to save Ned from his execution.

Littlefinger is like Walter White in constantly winging it and lucking out so don't think he would trust Sansa to survive the Boltons - he's just gambling on it so he has a chance to take the North himself. It's preposterous but as he said "the climb is all there is".

The scene, at least with what we know, does nothing to develop the Ramsay character (whose torture of Theon already overdid it), Theon (who has been in a state of fear and disgust since the aforementioned), or Sansa (who has had to deal with tons of shit since the first moments of the show, iirc).

― Josh in Chicago, Wednesday, May 20, 2015

but this is rong tho. being forced to watch this is precisely the turn for theon. and we'll buy it when it comes bc we've been forced to watch too.

Which is a legit criticism I've encountered, that making this about Theon further robs Sansa of strength. Besides, why would this be the turn? He's already killed children and passed them off as her siblings. He's been tortured and emasculated at length by a monster. He's been turned into a slobbering dog. Why would the rape of the pseudo-sibling he totally sold out make sense as the straw that breaks his back?

Certainly Sansa could have killed Ramsay this early, given all the screen time spent showing him to be death-worthy and her tortured. Maybe she won't take vengeance at all, but at this point, there has been an awful lot of waiting for Sansa to fight back in some way. Because the alternative is she dies (which given all she's put up with would be ironically anti-climactic) or do nothing, which makes her a dead end.

My point is the show can do whatever it wants. Someone else pointed out that the new R-rated, non-stop violence Mad Max movie is literally about the liberation of model-hot sex slaves, and yet it avoids depictions of sex and sexual assault, let alone nudity, and leaves the bad stuff to the imagination (without ever lingering on it, or even speaking much about it), trusting the audience to put two and two together. But of course, trusting the audience is generally not one of the strengths of TV (let alone movies) but this far along in the show after so much nastiness it really does strike me as cynical to default to shock tactics. They already had the water cooler crowd cornered.

Which is a legit criticism I've encountered, that making this about Theon further robs Sansa of strength.

― Josh in Chicago, Wednesday, May 20, 2015

addressed upthread. this is "legit" if and only if you believe we're supposed to be seeing sansa achieve some sort of agency this season. that's a fantasy that littlefinger's offered her (and us), but raising and then dashing our hopes is kinda this show's thing so...

btw all my comments here are prefaced by my previous statements in the non-spoiler thread: wrt sansa, the show so far has been more cruel than the books, and nothing is gained by tossing her from one monster to another, but from a production perspective it beats losing her for a season.

I'm still surprised that Littlefinger left her with Ramsay. As much as he's a ladder-climber, I also thought he was angling for some Tully lovin'...

xps
Pretty sure the Mad Max movie avoided depictions of backstory and was quite deliberately light on context while GOT is 95% exposition and foreshadowing.

Conflicted about the whole thing but I don't find that comparison helpful at all.

Over 5 seasons we've essentially been conditioned by the fact that Sansa has so often been in danger of violence and physical trauma but had been spared the worst of it as others around her succumbed. I think that's why this feels like a grotesque betrayal of something the show never actually promised.

Yeah of all things here the Littlefinger oversight makes the least amount of sense.

Yes part of what makes the Sansa situation so troublesome is how many times she's been saved from rape and death before (Arya a few times too). She made it this far only to resign herself to the prospect of both via LF's desperate gamble and the slightest chance of it working.

Suspect Theon will sacrifice himself to save Sansa, killing Ramsay in the process. It leaves a sense of his redemption open to viewers, to balance a heroic deed at the end with his terrible crimes and punishment for them. Sansa's strength will come more thru surviving like Cersei and eventually beating LF at his own game (perhaps even to his own delight) I guess.

I think this is how they bring Brienne back into the game or whoever in the north remembers and answers to small scale LOTR beacons

if you believe we're supposed to be seeing sansa achieve some sort of agency this season

Sure, but like I said, why bring her back to just punish her more? Why bring her back to do nothing? That doesn't achieve or advance anything. By rewriting the book, which is fair game, they have deliberately opted to bring her back, but to what end? I guess we'll see. Or maybe not. It's just erratic or perhaps simply problematic storytelling, imo, and even if there is an overarching goal, the show does seem to be squandering its runtime by cruising ahead full-throttle but choosing wrong-feeling or seemingly gratuitous beats to stuff in its constrained (by time/number of eps) narrative.

It's just erratic or perhaps simply problematic storytelling, imo...

Now we're getting somewhere.

if there is an overarching goal

It seems to be "don't lose sophie for a season like we did with bran/hodor"

I just think a lot of people are really tired of shows/films/art/culture putting female characters in there without a clue as to what they're there for, and then just rapes and punishes them over and over and over. You can say that GoT never promised to let Sansa have agency, but why the fuck show her story? What's the point? Yeah, she's a Stark, but so's Rickon, and people don't care about him. The show took this character from the books, showed all her suffering, and then when her suffering in the books stopped, they created another storyline for her so she could suffer some more. What the fuck?

no argument wrt exhaustion or wrt that general feeling of "seriously guys?"

wrt why focus on her story, we honestly don't know yet, right? the assumption is that sansa will end up a paranoid machiavel somewhere between littlefinger and cersei with tragic consequences down the line but who knows?

Yeah, we don't know. But I think at this point, people's confidence in the showrunners to turn this story into something good is pretty much nil. Nothing came of Jamie's rape of Cersei, after all. I think more people have hoped that they'd learn from that mistake, and not invent yet another rape of a major character in the very next season. But nope.

idk afaict jaime and cersei don't seem to be snuggling much lately

I've spoilered the remainder of the books for myself now and we seem to be virtually at the end as far as the TV show goes?

What's the original books Sansa supposed to be doing all this time in the later books? Does she just disappear?

kickin' around the Vale in disguise

Has this ever happened before in pop culture, where a series or story is adapted into a TV show before the story is done, and the TV show overtakes the narrative of the original material and has to make it up as it goes along? I guess "Walking Dead" is like this, to an extent, but that was never devised with an end in mind, so it doesn't really matter. This is different. Must be frustrating to Martin, unless he is really good at focusing, because the popularity of the show will make many people approach his (in theory) forthcoming novels like *they're* the adaptation, or they're the ones that are different. Not to mention that the show, at least in some places, will start to spoil his narrative (vs. the opposite). I mean, does he watch the show? Wouldn't it be tough to write a book with the show and its changes in mind, knowing (apparently) that both show and novels are ultimately (probably) ending up at more or less the same place?

he writes for the show, so he probably watches it yeah

and he's already admitted that the TV version of Osha made him change his plans for the character

I have to say I'm pretty impressed that the tv guys have managed to abandon the shitty plotlines of the last two books and come up with something worse though

I wonder how show watchers who aren't readers are gonna respond to cersei's "walk," lena headey has confirmed that that's gonna happen

well, once they brought in the zealots, i figured that was definitely gonna happen

they gave themselves a fig leaf by making the high septon do it first but I assume it will be very hard to watch and people will lose their minds

first casting leak for season six lists what is clearly euron greyjoy and randyl tarly as the first major parts they're looking for.

i feel like the show has slowly killed my enthusiasm for the series, i was super excited back during season 1 to see everything translated to the screen so well and now i don't know if i'm even going to bother reading the last couple books when they come out

Really though it's probably more that I've had 10 years to find and read better fantasy series while grrm mostly sat on his thumbs

Would love recommendations!