Nitpick With Impunity: Goat Edition

[Le Cygne]

Um, girls do not typically enter puberty at 10-11. It's unusual that young-not unheard of, simply unusual. If I were to nitpick something on the boards, it would certainly be the pseudoscience and psychobabble.

Um, they do. But yes, by all means, down with pseudoscience and psychobabble. A simple search of terms and there are thousands of relevant results at one's fingertips.

Here's the source cited (Duke University) and other sources concur:

The average age of pubertal onset in girls is 10-and-a-half years old, but it ranges from seven to 13 years old... The whole process of puberty should take three to four years... The first sign of puberty in girls is most often breast development...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puberty

[Woman of War]

Technically quoting Wiki kills the debate and you may have won, Le Cygne

And yet being erotically interested in ten or twelve year olds is certainly not a positive thing in Westeros or our world. This debate happened so often in these forums and we know that kids that age are forced into sex all the time in the books and in RL. And yet no one should justify this with the argument that they technically have reached puberty, it sounds dangerously close to downplaying abuse.

[Le Cygne]

Now, on to the fantasy world of Westeros, where the author discusses the context. Here he discusses Dany having sex at 13 (obviously well into and close to beyond puberty, she has "flowered" so she is considered a woman in Westeros):

One of the reasons I wanted to do this with HBO is that I wanted to keep the sex. We had some real problems because Dany is only 13 in the books, and that’s based on medieval history. They didn’t have this concept of adolescence or the teenage years. You were a child or you were an adult. And the onset of sexual maturity meant you were an adult. So I reflected that in the books. But then when you go to film it you run into people going crazy about child pornography and there’s actual laws about how you can’t depict a 13 year old having sex even if you have an 18 year old acting the part — it’s illegal in the United Kingdom. So we ended up with a 22 year old portraying an 18 year old, instead of an 18 year old portraying a 13 year old. If we decided to lose the sex we could have kept the original ages. And once you change the age of one character you have to change the ages of all the characters, and change the date of the war [that dethroned the Mad King]. The fact we made all these changes indicates how important we thought sex was.

http://shelf-life.ew.com/2011/07/12/george-martin-talks-a-dance-with-dragons/

Long story short, them saying Dany is a "child" on the show (where she is actually, by the way, 20) is not a problem. It's a figure of speech (and they got it from the books).

[voodooqueen126]

Well. Puberty is happening earlier due to a variety of mysterious factors. It used to occur much later.

[Le Cygne]

The way he set the context, I think he must be tired of talking about it. That interview came out about the time of season 1, when there were lots of new readers. I always get the impression he's saying, work with me here. I messed up. I used to wonder why he didn't just go with an aging up in the novels, too. Give them all a couple of years and be done with it.

[voodooqueen126]

But in Daenerys's case, she would be a 16ish, which to someone like Tywin (aged 67 in the show) would make her a child. Book Daenerys had experienced menarche before her first chapter, I suppose this was considered early by medieval standards (but then Margaret Beaufort delivered the future Henry VII before her 13th birthday).

[Le Cygne]

Right, I was responding to someone upthread who was puzzled that Dany was called a child on the show (Cersei also calls her a child on the show). In the books, child is used as a relative term. Jaime (who is 15 years older than Brienne) refers to Brienne (who is nearly 20 in the books) as a child.

On the show, GRRM is indicating Dany started at 18 (they had to make her older for the sex scenes), and about 2 years has passed (maybe more), so she's about 20 now.

(Just for anyone curious, Brienne tells us she fell in love with Renly when she was 13 and he was 16, that places her at almost 20 in the books, I think...)

[Tormund GiantsMANE]

doesn't a king have to die prior to the kingsmoot? was Yarasha home when said king expired?