[Show and Book SPOILERS] I don't understand [scene with Cersei and Jaime]

[Howdyphillip]

These threads just keep getting more and more offensive as time goes on. I have stayed out of the discussion for now, but I just wanted to correct an obvious error in interpreting the text, and a general lack of understanding. The girl that Tyrion raped in ADwD was not a slave as Pentos does not allow slavery. She was a sex worker that did not have the ability to refuse because of implied coercion by Illyrio Mopatis.

It is a complete fallacy that sex workers can not be raped. I have known several people that work in that profession, and it is a common occurrence. The bottom line is that any person at any time has the right to refuse sex, and if it is forced on them against their will, it is rape. Even and especially for sex workers.

[Carey Snow]

Can we all at least agree that banging your sister beside your dead incest bastards body is wrong?

Lol... bad taste? Yes. Wrong legally? Depends on the state ;)

[Rill Redthorn]

These threads just keep getting more and more offensive as time goes on. I have stayed out of the discussion for now, but I just wanted to correct an obvious error in interpreting the text, and a general lack of understanding. The girl that Tyrion raped in ADwD was not a slave as Pentos does not allow slavery. She was a sex worker that did not have the ability to refuse because of implied coercion by Illyrio Mopatis.

It is a complete fallacy that sex workers can not be raped. I have known several people that work in that profession, and it is a common occurrence. The bottom line is that any person at any time has the right to refuse sex, and if it is forced on them against their will, it is rape. Even and especially for sex workers.

Oh, I think we're discussing two different rapes. I'm talking about the redheaded Westerosi girl Tyrion rapes in Volantis who is specifically said to be a slave. (This is in the whorehouse where Jorah grabs him.)

The blonde (?) girl in Illyrio's house was another issue, but also rape.

So yeah, Tyrion's down for two.

Wonder if they'll keep that in the show....

[Moët]

This is offensive and uncalled for. I have spent a lot of time thinking about this, rereading, rewatching, going through material only tangentially related. I even started out arguing for the "grey area" of the book scene, but as we got deeper into the conversion I became more and more uncomfortable with my position and it shifted my viewpoint. My read of the scene is borne of the content in the book. Rape is coerced sex. This is the situation in both the books and the show. To say I should reread it because you disagree is just rude.

I'm aware I'm in the minority in my assertions, and at this point it's falling on deaf ears. So much of this dialogue troubles me, which is why I've been trying to assert my claims throughout this thread despite the fact that I really had no desire to revisit the topic for a second day in a row. I'm bowing out now, but I just want say that if anyone happens to find themselves in Book!Jaime's situation, I really hope they have more respect for their partner and take their objections seriously.

I think you're taking offense where none was meant.

I would suggest a reread for anyone who disagrees with GRRM about his own work. You're entitled to your opinion and how you feel about what happened, but you're not entitled to tell the author he's wrong about a story he wrote. You're also not entitled to tell two consenting adults how they should feel about how they have sex, based on what you think you saw while watching them.

The reason it's clearer in the book is because it's in Jamie's head and rape is not his intention. We aren't in anyone's head for the TV scene so it's different, but for many, like myself, it comes off the same as in the books, with Cersei objecting to the location, not the act, which she clearly participates positively in.

This scene hardly has a universal rape reaction. Many got a rape feel from it and many didn't. However, once the creators tell you what they were going for, everyone should accept it and move on, instead of forcing their own meaning on something they didn't create.

If you don't get that it was consensual when the creators made it clear it was supposed to be, and many viewers saw that, perhaps you are the one who needs to view it again without your preconceived 2014 notions that a woman means no even if she's stripping a man naked and mounting him like Myranda mounted Theon, and try to see what the creators were going for, and not force your meaning on a scene you had no hand in creating yourself.

[Swagwell]

"Sufferation" is an interesting word choice...apparently that's Rastafarian?

Suffering of the victim is definitely an issue when it comes to meting out punishment. It's not the only issue, but it's important. For example, if you decided to steal a person's kidney, you would get a harsher punishment if you carved them open without anesthesia than if you drugged them first -- but you'd get a severe punishment either way.

But a crime that involves no suffering at all is a minor crime. The suffering in the case of necrophilia is on the part of family members who don't want their loved ones' remains treated that way and some on the part of society that doesn't want you spreading any diseases you pick up that way.

Let me ask you this: If you had a daughter, how would you rate the following:

1) She is raped

2) She is flayed first and then raped

3) She dies in a drowning accident and her body is raped

Would you want the criminal in (3) treated more harshly than the rapist in (1) and (2)?

If you want to do some independent reading on moral reasoning, I'd suggest Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind". He has a proposed six-axis system for moral reasoning that seems like a pretty good model.

:drunk: You got me,, I listen to a lot of reggae and dancehall and apparently my english is patois-tinged from travelling the caribbean extensively. For instance I know the meaning of excellent words like bandulo, mannish water or Bull-bucka (the latter being a person stubborn enough to butt heads with a bull).

But I digress...

I agree with much of what you are saying and of course rape is one of the worst things you could do to another person, it just feels like SOME people(not meaning you) consider it the end-all crime that can never be forgiven, while they seem fine or at least apathetic towards other equally horrible and reprehensible acts. I wonder if it has to do with that it is a sexual crime mixed up with a violent crime? Or is it that it is a predatory crime where one part is weak and the other strong?

Ah NVM, interesting discussion though. thx.

[Rill Redthorn]

:drunk: You got me,, I listen to a lot of reggae and dancehall and apparently my english is patois-tinged from travelling the caribbean extensively. For instance I know the meaning of excellent words like bandulo, mannish water or Bull-bucka (the latter being a person stubborn enough to butt heads with a bull).

I agree with much of what you are saying and of course rape is one of the worst things you could do to another person, it just feels like SOME people(not meaning you) consider it the end-all crime that can never be forgiven, while they seem fine or at least apathetic towards other equally horrible and reprehensible acts. I wonder if it has to do with that it is a sexual crime mixed up with a violent crime? Or is it that it is a predatory crime where one part is weak and the other strong?

Ah NVM, interesting discussion though. thx.

Yeah, I was going to go "Sufferation is not a word!" but, having been burned by being wrong on vocabulary before (rare, but it happens), decided to Google it before going all grammar Nazi -- and Rastafarian popped up.

I don't think that people believe that, for example, raping someone is worse than the crap Ramsay does. The reason this issue has flared the way it has is because the definition of rape -- and sadly many of the excuses and justifications for it that we've seen on the boards here -- is very much a current topic in the Western world, particularly the United States, and is starting to be an issue in the non-Western world as well. When it comes to things like flaying someone alive, there's no argument about definitions or the damage done, nor is there any debate about Ramsay Snow's morality.

Rape, however, is a different issue. People are responding strongly to it not because they believe it's worse to be raped than to be flayed -- it's because there's no argument about flaying. Or tossing kids from windows. Or eating people.

That's the heart of it and why it's being argued aggressively.

If, by some weird historical chance, slavery were still an issue in the United States right now, we'd be arguing over whether or not Daenerys had any right to take the slave soldiers from the Astapori the way she did. Not whether or not she actually improved their lot by doing so, mind you, but whether or not freeing them was the morally correct thing to do. We only argue about issues that reflect on our current time and morality.

And yes, the popular fiction of the day does stir up massive amounts of debate when it tackles subjects of current interest. This is why Harriet Beecher Stowe is credited with helping to bring about the American Civil War due to her novel Uncle Tom's Cabin*. It was actually a really terribly written book (even for that day!) but she tackled slavery head-on and it became a massive bestseller, and pro-slavery people wrote several fictional rebuttals to her anti-slavery views, called "Anti-Tom literature," which were popular in the South.

This sort of reaction is not anything new.

*There's a popular but probably false anecdote than Stowe actually got to meet Abraham Lincoln, and he shook her hand and said "So you're the little lady who started this great big war." That likely didn't happen, but the fact that the anecdote is all over the place indicates that people thought it was reasonable that it could have.

[bloodsteel bitterraven]

Honestly my biggest issue with this show is that Ramsay was not involved in the death of those two children.

It was Ramsay who killed the boys. Yes, Theon gave the ok, but he didn't do it himself and he hated Ramsay/Reek for suggesting it.

[DaveyJoe]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnvzqfWJXm0

[Fjordgazer]

Tyrion didn't treat her kindly at all, however.

There's nothing "blurry" at all about Tyrion's behavior there and even Tyrion doesn't think there is, so I don't know what you're getting at here. Tyrion was/is on a downward slide in the books, and becoming a rapist was a sign of how far down he's fallen.

I didn't remember that part very well in ADWD, but you're right, deep down, it is rape. Speaking in general though, every esentially good man who ever made use of slave sex workers is a rapist? That's where i'd say it gets blurrier.

[Fjordgazer]

I think you're taking offense where none was meant.

I would suggest a reread for anyone who disagrees with GRRM about his own work. You're entitled to your opinion and how you feel about what happened, but you're not entitled to tell the author he's wrong about a story he wrote. You're also not entitled to tell two consenting adults how they should feel about how they have sex, based on what you think you saw while watching them.

The reason it's clearer in the book is because it's in Jamie's head and rape is not his intention. We aren't in anyone's head for the TV scene so it's different, but for many, like myself, it comes off the same as in the books, with Cersei objecting to the location, not the act, which she clearly participates positively in.

This scene hardly has a universal rape reaction. Many got a rape feel from it and many didn't. However, once the creators tell you what they were going for, everyone should accept it and move on, instead of forcing their own meaning on something they didn't create.

If you don't get that it was consensual when the creators made it clear it was supposed to be, and many viewers saw that, perhaps you are the one who needs to view it again without your preconceived 2014 notions that a woman means no even if she's stripping a man naked and mounting him like Myranda mounted Theon, and try to see what the creators were going for, and not force your meaning on a scene you had no hand in creating yourself.

Pretty much this. The thing is, my first impression was: "well the showrunners got themselves a rape controversy here, are they happy?". But the more you watch the scene, the more you feel it's the dialogue that failed to convey the consent the way it should have.

[Otho Bracken]

My wife has a minority opinion that the show scene wasn't rape. She says that Cersei's body language didn't match her words. Cersei could have thrown one-armed Jaime off any time & screamed for guards. By the time they were on the floor he leg was wrapped around him. She could have turned it into much more of a scuffle than she did.

In our modern world, we're all taught that "no means no". But in Westeros, you gotta smack someone hard to mean no, and I think Jaime and most of all Cersei knows this. She has no problem smacking people when she means it.

I think the director was too subtle in showing "consensualness" given his audience.

[Zman1863]

And yes, the popular fiction of the day does stir up massive amounts of debate when it tackles subjects of current interest. This is why Harriet Beecher Stowe is credited with helping to bring about the American Civil War due to her novel Uncle Tom's Cabin*. It was actually a really terribly written book (even for that day!) but she tackled slavery head-on and it became a massive bestseller, and pro-slavery people wrote several fictional rebuttals to her anti-slavery views, called "Anti-Tom literature," which were popular in the South.

This sort of reaction is not anything new.

*There's a popular but probably false anecdote than Stowe actually got to meet Abraham Lincoln, and he shook her hand and said "So you're the little lady who started this great big war." That likely didn't happen, but the fact that the anecdote is all over the place indicates that people thought it was reasonable that it could have.

Yeah there's a lot to this. And I agree that Uncle Tom's Cabin was a bad book, regardless of its significance. I am happy to find people who share the opinion.

[Rill Redthorn]

I think you're taking offense where none was meant.

I would suggest a reread for anyone who disagrees with GRRM about his own work. You're entitled to your opinion and how you feel about what happened, but you're not entitled to tell the author he's wrong about a story he wrote. You're also not entitled to tell two consenting adults how they should feel about how they have sex, based on what you think you saw while watching them.

The reason it's clearer in the book is because it's in Jamie's head and rape is not his intention. We aren't in anyone's head for the TV scene so it's different, but for many, like myself, it comes off the same as in the books, with Cersei objecting to the location, not the act, which she clearly participates positively in.

This scene hardly has a universal rape reaction. Many got a rape feel from it and many didn't. However, once the creators tell you what they were going for, everyone should accept it and move on, instead of forcing their own meaning on something they didn't create.

If you don't get that it was consensual when the creators made it clear it was supposed to be, and many viewers saw that, perhaps you are the one who needs to view it again without your preconceived 2014 notions that a woman means no even if she's stripping a man naked and mounting him like Myranda mounted Theon, and try to see what the creators were going for, and not force your meaning on a scene you had no hand in creating yourself.

I'd say that about 90% of people are viewing the TV scene as rape. That's where the balance of popular opinion lies. Similarly, the balance of popular opinion about the book scene runs about 90% in the other direction -- not rape.

As for the creators of the TV show, one is on the record saying it was definitely rape*, and the director says it "starts as rape and turns consensual", which is the nastiest part of this whole scene (seriously, shame on you, Graves.) So we've got one creator saying "Oh yeah, it was rape" and one making the completely insane assertion that a rape can turn into a not-rape (ugh.) We also have Graves saying, contradicting himself: ""I'm never that excited about going to film forced sex." So the creators of the show viewed it as rape except for Graves' insane excuse-making flip-flopping. (Or as my housemate put it when I mentioned that line, "Good God, was he trying to stir up a shitstorm??" Who knows, maybe he was...)

*Edit: I found the exact quote on rape from David Benioff in this episode's video diary: "It becomes a really kind of horrifying scene, because you see, obviously, Joffrey’s body right there, and you see that Cersei is resisting this. She’s saying no, and he’s forcing himself on her."

Yeah there's a lot to this. And I agree that Uncle Tom's Cabin was a bad book, regardless of its significance. I am happy to find people who share the opinion.

Oh yeah, it's atrocious. Ask anyone with a literary background about the quality of that novel and they'll hem and haw and go, "Well...it was the style of the day..." and try to change the subject. And it was the style of the day, but even that style could be done better or worse, and Stowe did worse. But the impact was wildly disproportional to the quality of the work, thanks to the topic and the way she approached it by taking the slaves' point of view, which wasn't something white authors had done at that point.

[Florina Laufeyson]

Graves should probably be sacked. I know im using strikethrough but im actually of that opinion because he obviously cant direct worth shit if this is the result.

[Fjordgazer]

I'd say that about 90% of people are viewing the TV scene as rape. That's where the balance of popular opinion lies. Similarly, the balance of popular opinion about the book scene runs about 90% in the other direction -- not rape.

Again, people assuming something is true for an absolute majority because the segment in question is more vocal, and more knee-jerk incendiary as well (calling people potential rapists, scumbags and other niceties).

[Zman1863]

Again, people assuming something is true for an absolute majority because the segment in question is more vocal, and more knee-jerk as well (calling people potential rapists, scumbags and other niceties).

I doubt it. I'm not confident about percentages, but having watched with an unsullied viewer and having gone through the unsullied reviews of the episode I think the overall viewer reaction is pretty one sided that it was a rape scene. Its among the people that are more accustomed to delving deeper, the book readers, that the divide is really happening. But still, I think if they gave a false impression of the scene to most show-only viewers, they missed the mark.

[Florina Laufeyson]

Again, people assuming something is true for an absolute majority because the segment in question is more vocal, and more knee-jerk incendiary as well (calling people potential rapists, scumbags and other niceties).

Dude~

The amount of stink im seeing about this business is not limited to us, the Inner Fandom. Its far and wide and everywhere. Trust me. The unsullied viewers are just all "eww wat." Its to the point were show runners and even Nikolaj had to say something about it.

[Rill Redthorn]

Graves should probably be sacked. I know im using strikethrough but im actually of that opinion because he obviously cant direct worth shit if this is the result.

He did episodes 8 & 10 (which is kind of a scary thought...he got the finale...) and they're already in the can, so no taking that back, but I think I heard somewhere he's not slated to direct in Season 5? I don't know if that was wishful thinking on someone's part -- it might be a bit too early for them to have absolutely settled on directors for all of Season 5's episodes already but I don't know how far ahead they work so maybe not.

Anyway, he seems to be otherwise a reasonably competent director, and sadly he's by far not the only director in Hollywood with a drastically skewed vision of human sexuality, particularly the female half of it. (**SIGH**) I doubt this will affect his career one way or another.

Again, people assuming something is true for an absolute majority because the segment in question is more vocal, and more knee-jerk incendiary as well (calling people potential rapists, scumbags and other niceties).

What is this, a "silent majority" argument? You sound like a US Republican in November 2012 claiming that all the polls that show Obama winning are "skewed" because clearly the pollsters are only talking to people who want Obama in office, not a representative sample. In your "unskewed" view, anyone who's talking about this issue is obviously pushing an agenda, and there are way more people who are not speaking up who conveniently all agree with you? :rofl: Don't stop believing, dude.

[Fjordgazer]

Dude~

The amount of stink im seeing about this business is not limited to us, the Inner Fandom. Its far and wide and everywhere. Trust me. The unsullied viewers are just all "eww wat." Its to the point were show runners and even Nikolaj had to say something about it.

The internet has a way of blowing every controversy out of proportion. I'm not denying that the majority's first impression (like mine) was rape, and that the final cut of the scene failed to set the mood the directors intended. What i find preposterous is that people are reacting towards those who conclude (after thoughtful reflection) that it was not rape by calling names and being extremely judgmental. This is a very twisted relationship between twisted individuals (especially Cersei), and it's wrong to assume that reading the scene as "not rape" is equivalent to condoning actual rape in the real world and failing to recognize women's boundaries.

[Florina Laufeyson]

He did episodes 8 & 10 (which is kind of a scary thought...he got the finale...) and they're already in the can, so no taking that back, but I think I heard somewhere he's not slated to direct in Season 5? I don't know if that was wishful thinking on someone's part -- it might be a bit too early for them to have absolutely settled on directors for all of Season 5's episodes already but I don't know how far ahead they work so maybe not.

Anyway, he seems to be otherwise a reasonably competent director, and sadly he's by far not the only director in Hollywood with a drastically skewed vision of human sexuality, particularly the female half of it. (**SIGH**) I doubt this will affect his career one way or another.

Yeah i figured as much, but i really dont think i want him back for season 5 if he mishandles material. I suppose it could be worse. He could be Michael Bay. D:

Also the Silent Majority has an opinion. Ive heard it.