Bronn/Shae double standard v. 2

[Scylla]

". I did say, my profession is very close to prostitution.

Except we lawyers bill in 6 mins increments for the hire of our brains rather than the more ethical system of charging on the case by case basis of a satisfied customer.

;)

[Lord Bronn Stokeworth]

Dark Sister... again with the Giant of Lannister?!?

I think that Shae resorted to those words out of fear and shock at seeing him there, her immediate reaction was to make a response that PREVIOUSLY had had an extremely positive reaction from Tyrion. She resorts to form and tries to use her sexuality and 'whoredom' to please Tyrion, again for me this just further demonstrates for me how little actual relationship she had with Tyrion.

Because she failed utterly to understand him enough to realise that after her testimony in court those words would have assumed an completely different meaning and context for Tyrion.

I also think the GRRM has a meaning in those words for us... that Tyrion is indeed a 'Giant of Lannister', despite the irony inherent in the statement given his twisted physical form, he embodies everything that the House of Lannister is writ large.

Seriously?

Shae wasn't retarded. Seriously, she wasn't. It does not take a genious to figure out something like that would embrass Tyrion. Shae showed signs of decently high emotionally intelligence. She knew exactly what she was doing.

Whore =/= stupid

EDIT: Misunderstood timing on Scylla's part. Please ignore. Only leaving it so later comments make sense.

[headtrip_honey]

Lord Bronn, why do *you* think Shae called him her giant, if not to curry favor?

To clarify, we're talking about right before he killed her, not during her testimony.

(null)

[Scylla]

The Lannister siblings each have lost their most valued qualities--Cersei her beauty, Jaime his sword hand, and Tyrion his mind.

I had not thought of it that way but you are right and it is a good point.

[Scylla]

Seriously?

Shae wasn't retarded. Seriously, she wasn't. It does not take a genious to figure out something like that would embrass Tyrion. Shae showed signs of decently high emotionally intelligence. She knew exactly what she was doing.

Whore =/= stupid

I agree that whore does not = stupid.

But Shae was asleep, she expected that Tyrion was locked up in a dungeon soon to be dead, she had just slept with his father and was expecting his return.

She was NOT expecting Tyrion.

People don't necessarily react in the most intelligent of ways under those circumstances.

And when I say people I mean all people not just whores

[Lord Bronn Stokeworth]

Sorry. I thought you were talking about during the testimony.

[dark sister]

I agree that whore does not = stupid.

But Shae was asleep, she expected that Tyrion was locked up in a dungeon soon to be dead, she had just slept with his father and was expecting his return.

She was NOT expecting Tyrion.

People don't necessarily react in the most intelligent of ways under those circumstances.

And when I say people I mean all people not just whores

I bolded the relevant part.

[Ororo727 Jon Snow Fangirl]

Yes, I said Tyrion was wrong for trusting a whore like Shae, because she is a liar and proved that to him before and he ignored it. Versus a whore like Alayaya, who was publicly whipped and not only didn't she make up a lie about him, she never told the Cercei about the secret passage that Tyrion used to go and visit Shae. See the difference? Their profession had nothing to do with their character.

[mediocre cheese]

Jeez louise, is everyone who posts here a lawyer? Do you think we can submit the time we spend posting for CLE credit?

I still have 2.5 years at columbia before I get to be a lawyer. :worried: But I think the number of esquires on these boards has more to do with the excess of law degrees that get handed out than any sociological trend related to Martin .

It has nothing to do with adversarial nature of the legal system but rather with a close nature of the relationship between a lawyer and his client. Not very different from a a close relationship between a regular client and a prostitute. The only difference is that there is no prostitute bar organization to put such "prostitute rules of professional ethics in writing". I did say, my profession is very close to prostitution.

I don't want to continue this debate with you, because its way OT, but as someone who worked for attorneys (I formerly worked as an investigator for a public defender's office before entering law school) and worked on the cases of several sex workers, I find your comparison not only asinine and incorrect, but somewhat disheartening as well. I have no idea what the leading cause of death for attorneys is (heart disease? douchebaggery?) but the leading cause of death for prostitutes is homicide. The way Shae died, strangled by a jealous creep is far from unheard of today, and is something no attorney ever has to worry about, but is a facet of existence for sex workers.

[Fearsome Fred]

Versus a whore like Alayaya, who was publicly whipped and not only didn't she make up a lie about him, she never told the Cercei about the secret passage that Tyrion used to go and visit Shae. See the difference? Their profession had nothing to do with their character.

Alayaya is yet another of Tyrion's victims. He deliberately placed her in danger for the sake of his own selfish needs. She owed him nothing.

Alayaya was protecting her mother's secrets, not Tyrion's. And it is easy to avoid revealing a secret that your interrogator does not expect. Especially when the interrogator is not investigating a serious murder.

[Arland]

mediocre chees

I think legal system usually deals with pathological cases, which represent only a tiny fraction of very complex reality. If I were to base my life on my experience from my legal work I for example wouldn't have dared to set a foot in a hospital. There are very different people out there... with different desires and different values.. and all kind of weird ideas. .

[Ser Lepus]

lawyers, lawyers in training and lawyer´s minions everywhere! Where the f**k have I gotten myself into! This is a den of iniquity...

[Arland]

"lawyers, lawyer in training and lawyer´s minions everywhere! Where the f**k have I gotten myself into! This is a den of iniquity...

No, you simply got yourself into Land of Always Winter, ruled by the Others, who actually are -- guess who?

[Ororo727 Jon Snow Fangirl]

Alayaya is yet another of Tyrion's victims. He deliberately placed her in danger for the sake of his own selfish needs. She owed him nothing.

Alayaya was protecting her mother's secrets, not Tyrion's. And it is easy to avoid revealing a secret that your interrogator does not expect. Especially when the interrogator is not investigating a serious murder.

Easy when you are being whipped? You are reaching very very far with that comment. Been tortured much that you would know how easy it is? Also, I beg to differ that the passage was her mother's secret and not the secret of who built the tunnel from the Red Keep to the whore house and who built THE whore house. If anything she didn't implicate Lord Varys, who I'm certain uses that tunnel quite often. The point is she took a whipping and didn't make up a lie against Tyrion in order to get herself out of the situation.

[Sand Snake No. 9]

Easy when you are being whipped? You are reaching very very far with that comment. Been tortured much that you would know how easy it is? Also, I beg to differ that the passage was her mother's secret and not the secret of who built the tunnel from the Red Keep to the whore house and who built THE whore house. If anything she didn't implicate Lord Varys, who I'm certain uses that tunnel quite often. The point is she took a whipping and didn't make up a lie against Tyrion in order to get herself out of the situation.

More important, Alayaya didn't tell the truth about Tyrion, which was that she wasn't his whore. She saved two people that way -- Tyrion and Shae -- and all she got out of it were permanent scares and some jade set in silver. Tyrion, a Lannister, didn't even pony up some gold.

Alayaya stood up to imprisonment and a whipping. That's what I call tough. She is one of my heros in this story.

mediocre cheese -- Columbia. Mazel tov.

[Woman of War]

First. "Feminazi". Please do not use that term. It disqualifies you from every halfway intelligent conversation. The National Socialist propagated an inhuman ideology, killed millions of Jews, political opponents and civilians from occupied countries in the most cruel way possible and started one of the most terrible wars in human history. It left Germany a legacy with which my home country is still trying to deal with. Please give me one good argument why you use feminism and national socialism in word.

i can only underline what that other poster wrote. I would politely ask everybody not to make comparisons like that. For personal biographical reasons I feel annoyed but I am no sneak or tattler and would not "call the mods".

About Shae: people in this thread seem to see Shae only in her role as "she was a whore, what did you expect" or "she was a prostitute and had to look after herself to survive", end of being interested.

Shae was a young woman with her own biography, she is not a POV character but this does not hinder people to analyse a character down to every molecule. So the young woman Shae may deserve some words too. She was a person - and, I believe, an emotionally very damaged person.

She no doubt has made a lot of abuse experiences at a very young age. When we meet her, at no more than eighteen, she was already a seasoned professional, we don't know for sure if she really has been abused by her father. Abuse experiences can be considered like torture in their results for the personality of a victim: They lead to feeling worthless, alienated from not only your body but from your personality. They numb all emotions, an act of self preservation done subconsciously by the victim herself to avoid the total breakdown. This has been described very well by Martin himself when you read the advice Jaime gives to Brienne to "hide inside herself" in case she gets raped, obviously something he did when he witnessed the burnings as a rather young boy.

How do all those experiences leave Shae? She is not stupid at all, but rather streetwise. She is a good actress - stated. I do not want to offend any actors here but I believe that Shae is not relatively good at it because she - like a really good actor - has a very good access to her own emotions but because as abuse victim she has lost all contact. Certainly Shae is not vile but she has become cold. Cold and numbed towards her own and other's feelings and emotional needs. She can bring every emotion to the surface, randomly, only depending on what is needed for her physical and material survival and probably has no idea what she might really feel. Leave me alone with that Julia Roberts cliché: the whore with the golden heart. Victims of child abuse do not turn into mature goldenhearted courtesans but into victimized adults!

So we have Shae who turned out as highly damaged: no, she is not "nice". She makes truly ugly remarks about Lollys and suggests to drug Sansa and have sex beside her. This all seems incredibly heartless and spitful but I think to Shae it was simply the appropriate thought and an easy opportunity given the circumstances. And I was really glad that she did not suggest to drug Sansa so that Tyrion could rape her, given the fact that apparently she really disliked Sansa. I am not trying to demonize Shae but to explain that she was rather alienated from authentic empathy and that she had e very specific emotional intelligence: the intelligence of a torture survivor.

So in Shae and Tyrion two very emotionally damaged personalities have found each other: two abuse victims. Tyrion wanted his fantasy girlfriend and Shae did that act nearly perfectly, without, unlike the HBO Shae, ever showing any edges. And Tyrion did not ask for a person, he asked for a shadow. Remember the scene with the "counterweight spell": He found Shae's ignorance amusing, if he had wanted to take her seriously he would have lost a few short explanations about counterweight mechanics. Apart from that Shae maybe would not have listened, whereas one of the prostitutes who had started to learn to read might have enjoyed getting told something new. This shows again that these two persons never tried to know anything about each other, Tyrion not even tried to find a prostitute who could have been more than a projection surface and Shae was not able to see the human being behind the "ugly cripple" and to realize that he was craving for love.

And then this happened what so often is bound to happen: two victims of child abuse come together and perpetuate the abusive structures. And it ends as so often described in your morning paper: with violence.

This is not an excuse for murder of course. (I am talking about Shae, not about Tywin).

Two deeply damaged persons unable to reach out to each other.

So what could Shae have expected from Tyrion? Not only safety and payment but respect as a person. If he managed to fantazise his wishes towards his fantasy woman he could as well imagine his emotional obligations towards the girlfriend he fantazises to love.

And what could Tyrion have expected from Shae? Basic human decency. Shae may not have felt very much for Tyrion but she must have realized that there had developed an emotional imbalance. And in that case it is not important that Tyrion only loved the shadow of Shae, not her true, somewhere deeply buried, personality.

It is a heartless and cruel behavior to humiliate someone publicly in the way Shae did. This has nothing to do with her profession as someone who sells her body, not her soul, nor with man vs woman. It has to do with the moral obligation not to betray someone who is caught in an emotional trap, with trying to preserve another person's dignity. This is certainly an experience of emotional care from another person that Shae never met in all her life. She simply never learned that kind of empathy herself. While Tyrion shows a very selective empathy, Shae for her own survival, no doubt has learned to read others' emotions but never learned to mirror them, to truly feel them which is the base of empathy. This resulted in not feeling any reason why she should not be spiteful - she did it because she could.

Before there is any misunderstanding - no excuse for murder.

I cannot add anything to the Bronn/Shae comparison because i am not interested enough to write a similar text about Bronn.

So Shae is not, as many posters seem to think, a clever businesswoman who made a reasonable decision, but someone who made a morally ugly decision, resulting from her own biography.

[voodooqueen126]

i can only underline what that other poster wrote. I would politely ask everybody not to make comparisons like that. For personal biographical reasons I feel annoyed but I am no sneak or tattler and would not "call the mods".

About Shae: people in this thread seem to see Shae only in her role as "she was a whore, what did you expect" or "she was a prostitute and had to look after herself to survive"

Shae was a young woman with her own biography, she is not a POV character but this does not hinder people to analyse a character down to every molecule. So the young woman Shae may deserve some words too. She was a person - and, I believe, an emotionally very damaged person.

She no doubt has made a lot of abuse experiences at a very young age. When we meet her, at no more than eighteen, she was already a seasoned professional, we don't know for sure if she really has been abused by her father. Abuse experiences can be considered like torture in their results for the personality of a victim: They lead to feeling worthless, alienated from not only your body but from your personality. They numb all emotions, an act of self preservation done subconsciously by the victim herself to avoid the total breakdown. This has been described very well by Martin himself when you read the advice Jaime gives to Brienne to "hide inside herself" in case she gets raped, obviously something he did when he witnessed the burnings as a rather young boy.

How do all those experiences leave Shae? She is not stupid at all, but rather streetwise. She is a good actress - stated. I do not want to offend any actors here but I believe that Shae is not relatively good at it because she - like a really good actor - has a very good access to her own emotions but because as abuse victim she has lost all contact. Certainly Shae is not vile but she has become cold. Cold and numbed towards her own and other's feelings and emotional needs. She can bring every emotion to the surface, randomly, only depending on what is needed for her physical and material survival and probably has no idea what she might really feel. Leave me alone with that Julia Roberts cliché: the whore with the golden heart. Victims of child abuse do not turn into mature goldenhearted courtesans but into victimized adults!

So we have Shae who turned out as highly damaged: no, she is not "nice". She makes truly ugly remarks about Lollys and suggests to drug Sansa and have sex beside her. This all seems incredibly heartless and spitful but I think to Shae it was simply the appropriate thought and an easy opportunity given the circumstances. And I was really glad that she did not suggest to drug Sansa so that Tyrion could rape her, given the fact that apparently she really disliked Sansa. I am not trying to demonize Shae but to explain that she was rather alienated from authentic empathy and that she had e very specific emotional intelligence: the intelligence of a torture survivor.

So in Shae and Tyrion two very emotionally damaged personalities have found each other: two abuse victims. Tyrion wanted his fantasy girlfriend and Shae did that act nearly perfectly, without, unlike the HBO Shae, ever showing any edges. And Tyrion did not ask for a person, he asked for a shadow. Remember the scene with the "counterweight spell": He found Shae's ignorance amusing, if he had wanted to take her seriously he would have lost a few short explanations about counterweight mechanics. Apart from that Shae maybe would not have listened, whereas one of the prostitutes who had started to learn to read might have enjoyed getting told something new. This shows again that these two persons never tried to know anything about each other, Tyrion not even tried to find a prostitute who could have been more than a projection surface and Shae was not able to see the human being behind the "ugly cripple" and to realize that he was craving for love.

And then this happened what so often is bound to happen: two victims of child abuse come together and perpetuate the abusive structures. And it ends as so often described in your morning paper: with violence.

This is not an excuse for murder of course. (I am talking about Shae, not about Tywin).

Two deeply damaged persons unable to reach out to each other.

So what could Shae have expected from Tyrion? Not only safety and payment but respect as a person. If he managed to fantazise his wishes towards his fantasy woman he could as well imagine his emotional obligations towards the girlfriend he fantazises to love.

And what could Tyrion have expected from Shae? Basic human decency. Shae may not have felt very much for Tyrion but she must have realized that there had developed an emotional imbalance. And in that case it is not important that Tyrion only loved the shadow of Shae, not her true, somewhere deeply buried, personality.

It is a heartless and cruel behavior to humiliate someone publicly in the way Shae did. This has nothing to do with her profession as someone who sells her body, not her soul, nor with man vs woman. It has to do with the moral obligation not to betray someone who is caught in an emotional trap, with trying to preserve another person's dignity. This is certainly an experience of emotional care from another person that Shae never met in all her life. She simply never learned that kind of empathy herself. While Tyrion shows a very selective empathy, Shae for her own survival, no doubt has learned to read others' emotions but never learned to mirror them, to truly feel them which is the base of empathy. This resulted in not feeling any reason why she should not be spiteful - she did it because she could.

Before there is any misunderstanding - no excuse for murder.

I cannot add anything to the Bronn/Shae comparison because i am not interested enough to write a similar text about Bronn.

So Shae is not, as many posters seem to think, a clever businesswoman who made a reasonable decision, but someone who made a morally ugly decision, resulting from her own biography.

That's a rather good description and psychological portrait.

[Fearsome Fred]

Easy when you are being whipped? You are reaching very very far with that comment. Been tortured much that you would know how easy it is?

You are confused. The only difficulty such a person faces is in NOT giving the interrogator the answer the interrogator expects. The only answer suspected in this case was that she was Tyrion's whore. That is all she had to say to satisfy them.

It is also true that prolonged unrelenting torture will tear down all bounderies of the mind, break the spirit, and cause a person to spill everything they know. But Alayaya did not face that kind of torture.

Also, I beg to differ that the passage was her mother's secret and not the secret of who built the tunnel

Stop wasting my time. It is her mother's secret, whoever else's secret it may have been.

The point is she took a whipping and didn't make up a lie against Tyrion in order to get herself out of the situation.

She only gave the interrogator the answers the interrogator expected. It is difficult to do otherwise, truth or not.

[dark sister]

You are confused. The only difficulty such a person faces is in NOT giving the interrogator the answer the interrogator expects. The only answer suspected in this case was that she was Tyrion's whore. That is all she had to say to satisfy them.

It is also true that prolonged unrelenting torture will tear down all bounderies of the mind, break the spirit, and cause a person to spill everything they know. But Alayaya did not face that kind of torture.

Stop wasting my time. It is her mother's secret, whoever else's secret it may have been.

She only gave the interrogator the answers the interrogator expected. It is difficult to do otherwise, truth or not.

You have no idea what the interrogator asked, Fearsome Fred. Are you truly trying to deny that Alayaya and Shae have very different personalities? They've even gone into their professions as whores for different reasons. Yaya has been taught by her mother that it is honorable and sacred to the gods in the Summer Isles to work as a prostitute. With Shae, we don't even have a reliable backstory, but we do know that she tries to manipulate people, even while being interrogated by someone as horrible as the queen. I guess you just can't grasp that difference.

[Fearsome Fred]

You have no idea what the interrogator asked, Fearsome Fred.

Which makes the comparison pointless, Dark Sister.

The only point to the comparison is to demonize Shae by comparison, and the comparison is based only on speculation. This is not a premise in MY argument. Let those making the argument establish that their premises are true, or else withdraw the argument.

As far as we know, Yaya was asked NO questions, except (maybe) to confirm that Tyrion paid regularly for her services. When she confirmed this, she was whipped, not so much as punishment to Yaya, but as punishment of Tyrion. Once the order was given, it was probably carried out as a matter of routine by an underling. Feel free to speculate otherwise in order to demonize Shae so you can justify the murder of Shae ... but that is all you are doing.

Are you truly trying to deny that Alayaya and Shae have very different personalities?

Not at all. Why should I? They probably do (being different people and all) but we know next to nothing about the real Shae, and we know even less about the real Alayaya.

They've even gone into their professions as whores for different reasons. Yaya has been taught by her mother that it is honorable and sacred to the gods in the Summer Isles to work as a prostitute.

Is this difference supposed to refect favorably on one and against the other?

With Shae, we don't even have a reliable backstory, but we do know that she tries to manipulate people, even while being interrogated by someone as horrible as the queen. I guess you just can't grasp that difference.

Insult noted, Dark Sister.