Strong powerful women

[Le Cygne]

1 hour ago, HairGrowsBack said:

First of all, your use of the term "manpain"is completely misguided. Theon's story is a tragedy ; much of it is his own fault, but calling endless torture and psychological abuse "man pain" is ridiculous and invalidates your point.

Jeyne isn't developped much because she's a minor character. You just can't start and developping every minor character you've created, since you've done so specifically to serve a more important character's story. That's storytelling 101, and there is nothing wrong with that. Jeyne is there to propel Theon's character development, and make a statement about the fate of the "nobodies" of Westeros. You're supposed to feel for her, but I don't see why you'd expect her to be more fleshed out than she is. That's her purpose, and there is nothing sexist about it. You have a lot of male characters that are there to prop up female characters. Should Qarl the Maid, Hyle Hunt or Dontos be more fleshed out than they are ? Of course not. Same goes for Jeyne. 

Yep. Main vs. minor character:

Quote

Generally, the main character is energetic and is exposed to sufficient conflict to propel her through the story. The main character differs from secondary characters in a variety of ways. The primary difference is that she undergoes a metamorpohosis during the course of the story. On the other hand, the secondary characters not only don't change, they serve as a source of contrast to the main character. Through this interaction, secondary characters help to move the story along.

 

[OldGimletEye]

14 minutes ago, Jack Bauer 24 said:

And they didn't for good reason. Beinoff and Weiss know when to cut the fat.

LOL. "Cut the fat."
More like cut the fat and then add their own worse trans fat.

[HashRouge]

15 minutes ago, thehandwipes said:

Did you want to elaborate on that?  It looks like you were trying to have a thought but it got cut off.

 

Yes I was going to say more, I'm not sure how I managed that. Basically I agree with more or less everything Good Guy Garlan has said - the Sansa storyline in the shows is not brilliant, but do we really have to pretend that the Jeyne storyline in the books is so much better? Surely everyone can agree that it is needlessly gratuitous. Theon's torture, for example, largely happens off-page (the supposed castration, for example) and yet it is arguably all the more powerful for the fact that we don't see what happens. So why, on the other side of the coin, is Jeyne's suffering described in such an explicit way? It can't be to make it more effective, because we know GRRM doesn't need to be explicit to be effective. So the wedding night, for example - does that really serve any purpose other than being needlessly gratuitous? The show runners constantly get accused focusing too much on Ramsay, there being too much gratuitous violence in his scenes etc, yet I think that GRRM is guilty of exactly the same in the context of Jeyne. Her character serves two purposes - Theon's redemptive arc and showing just how deranged Ramsay is. It has nothing to do with Jeyne as a character or her experience as a woman. I don't understand why the simple fact of changing her for Sansa is so bad. Yes, the way it was done wasn't great, but the change itself actually made sense from a storytelling perspective (one of the difficulties with the show is the constant chopping and changing between locations doesn't work as well as in the book, so this cut down the different characters/ locations we have to keep up with).

[Jack Bauer 24]

Just now, OldGimletEye said:

LOL. "Cut the fat."
More like cut the fat and then add there own worse trans fat.

It's bloat. It won't effect the endgame. It's the very reason why Winds isn't out. Martin is drowning in his own bloat from the last book.

[OldGimletEye]

1 minute ago, Jack Bauer 24 said:

It's bloat. It won't effect the endgame. It's the very reason why Winds isn't out. Martin is drowning in his own bloat from the last book.

Um, there is more to the story than just the "endgame". That's why GRRM didn't directly proceed from Game of Thrones to Dream of Spring.

For some, the path is just as important as the ending.

[Good Guy Garlan]

18 minutes ago, thehandwipes said:

I don't get the idea that because she isn't particularly exciting or interesting that she's a flat poorly thought out character.  Jeyne is "just some girl."  She's not particularly smart.  She's not particularly funny.  She's not particularly beautiful.  She's "Plain Jeyne" Poole, like "Plain Jeyne" Westerling.  That doesn't mean she doesn't have depth or is a bad character. 

You just proved my point. You just described Jeyne in terms of what she's not. Like, you can't say she's "just some girl" and then that she has depth. She has no depth, just a couple of character traits. She's a watered down Sansa. Quick, what can you say about Jeyne's character and personality? Eh, I guess she had a crush on Beric and called Arya "horseface". The end. 

And once again, just because she's a supporting character it doesn't mean she has to be a flat character. Supporting =/= flat. 

There are tons of supporting characters more fleshed out than Jeyne: Stannis, Sandor, Tywin, Oberyn, Doran, freaking Obara, etc. Why shouldn't Jeyne be on this list? She's incredibly important in her role as "fake Arya", the glue holding the North together under Bolton rule. Why couldn't Martin explore her identity issues in more detail, how she felt having to pretend to be the person she used to mock and distance herself from? I don't know why people are sooooo okay with her remaining a cipher when they have crucified D&D for less. 

36 minutes ago, kimim said:

So glad someone else said this, and yes, "man pain" to the max was going on there. I was disappointed.

As always I'd like someone to switch books and show here: Imagine GRRM sending Sansa north, where the focus of the story is on HER pain, her torture, her eventual growth, with Theon as a supporting character. Sansa finally talks Theon out of his terror, and the two of them run off, and are eventually saved by Brienne.

Show keeps Sansa in the Vale, where she sits and does little other than play a disgruntled mom to Sweet Robin. Show replaces the real Sansa with a fake Jeyne, tertiary character at best, as bride to the Boltons.

Then move on to the wedding night: Jeyne is a nobody, of course. She is being raped, sure, but the focus is on Theon, and how this woman's torment changes HIM, moves HIM to become a hero. Jeyne remains utterly passive, and has to be saved by the heroic Theon.

If the show had done this, people would be screaming...and for excellent reasons.

Exactly. Spot on. I mean, like I said, after the controversial episode aired people were saying with a straight face that D&D were sexist hacks for focusing on Theon's pain instead of Sansa's, and failing to realize that GRRM did the exact same thing in the books with Jeyne. 

And their excuse when people pointed that out was to say pretty much,"Oh, Jeyne was never meant to be the focus of that storyline, duh. Her purpose was to be raped to advance Theon's character and plot."

And like, how in the seven hells is that okay? The fact that it comes from Martin makes it okay for them, I guess. He can literally do no wrong in the eyes of some people.

 

[thehandwipes]

3 minutes ago, HashRouge said:

Yes I was going to say more, I'm not sure how I managed that. Basically I agree with more or less everything Good Guy Garlan has said - the Sansa storyline in the shows is not brilliant, but do we really have to pretend that the Jeyne storyline in the books is so much better? Surely everyone can agree that it is needlessly gratuitous. Theon's torture, for example, largely happens off-page (the supposed castration, for example) and yet it is arguably all the more powerful for the fact that we don't see what happens. So why, on the other side of the coin, is Jeyne's suffering described in such an explicit way? It can't be to make it more effective, because we know GRRM doesn't need to be explicit to be effective. So the wedding night, for example - does that really serve any purpose other than being needlessly gratuitous? The show runners constantly get accused focusing too much on Ramsay, there being too much gratuitous violence in his scenes etc, yet I think that GRRM is guilty of exactly the same in the context of Jeyne. Her character serves two purposes - Theon's redemptive arc and showing just how deranged Ramsay is. It has nothing to do with Jeyne as a character or her experience as a woman. I don't understand why the simple fact of changing her for Sansa is so bad. Yes, the way it was done wasn't great, but the change itself actually made sense from a storytelling perspective (one of the difficulties with the show is the constant chopping and changing between locations doesn't work as well as in the book, so this cut down the different characters/ locations we have to keep up with).

We "see" very little of what happens to Jeyne in the books, its not "needlessly gratuitous."  There is one graphic scene and its very short, what was cut was the emotional impact that Jeyne suffered in the books that Sansa doesn't in the show.  Its precisely the consequences we witness to Jeyne that give the story such a creepy, vile aura and the consequences we don't see for Sansa that gives the show such an aura of hollowness.

And I don't understand how anyone can make the "locations" argument when we're talking about the same season as Dorne.  And the removal of fArya also disconnected the Winterfell arc from the Wall, making Jon's story make less sense.  It was just terrible planning all around.

[Channel4s-JonSnow]

5 minutes ago, thehandwipes said:

We "see" very little of what happens to Jeyne in the books, its not "needlessly gratuitous."  There is one graphic scene and its very short, what was cut was the emotional impact that Jeyne suffered in the books that Sansa doesn't in the show.  Its precisely the consequences we witness to Jeyne that give the story such a creepy, vile aura and the consequences we don't see for Sansa that gives the show such an aura of hollowness.

And I don't understand how anyone can make the "locations" argument when we're talking about the same season as Dorne.  And the removal of fArya also disconnected the Winterfell arc from the Wall, making Jon's story make less sense.  It was just terrible planning all around.

Funny because a lot of people described the shows Winterfell storyline as vile and creepy. There is actually very little that is gratuitous in fact, almost nothing is shown of what happens to Sansa, its left up to the imagination. Thats why its so upsetting for a lot of people.

Plus, removing F/Arya really had very little effect on Jon's story last season, his arc was one of the highlights. You can see the way they can move things around to make it work this season too without it really causing many problems. 

[Good Guy Garlan]

1 minute ago, thehandwipes said:

We "see" very little of what happens to Jeyne in the books, its not "needlessly gratuitous."  There is one graphic scene and its very short, what was cut was the emotional impact that Jeyne suffered in the books that Sansa doesn't in the show.  Its precisely the consequences we witness to Jeyne that give the story such a creepy, vile aura and the consequences we don't see for Sansa that gives the show such an aura of hollowness.

And I don't understand how anyone can make the "locations" argument when we're talking about the same season as Dorne.  And the removal of fArya also disconnected the Winterfell arc from the Wall, making Jon's story make less sense.  It was just terrible planning all around.

"Very short"? It goes on for pages and pages, in excruciating detail! Ramsay penetrates Jeyne making her scream in pain and then forces Reek to give her oral sex, threatening to nail his tongue to the wall if she's not "wet". I dare you to tell me that's not at least as awful as what the show did. Would purists be clapping if they had adapted that scene to the letter, only with Jeyne instead of Sansa? I mean, Jeyne in the books is forced to have intercourse with a dog and has her breasts full of bite marks. How the FUCK is that not "needlessly gratuitous"? And please, do explain about the consequences we see Jeyne suffering, especially since she vanished off page after the leap so we never see anything resembling an aftermath. You're just contradicting yourself. First you say there's no graphic material but then you say it's that graphic material what makes the storyline in the books so marvelously creepy. So which one is it?

[Ser Quork]

 

4 minutes ago, Good Guy Garlan said:

 

Exactly. Spot on. I mean, like I said, after the controversial episode aired people were saying with a straight face that D&D were sexist hacks for focusing on Theon's pain instead of Sansa's, and failing to realize that GRRM did the exact same thing in the books with Jeyne. 

And their excuse when people pointed that out was to say pretty much,"Oh, Jeyne was never meant to be the focus of that storyline, duh. Her purpose was to be raped to advance Theon's character and plot."

And like, how in the seven hells is that okay? The fact that it comes from Martin makes it okay for them, I guess. He can literally do no wrong in the eyes of some people.

 

No, he didn't.  Theon was made complicit in the wedding night brutality in the book - he too was abused.  In the show, he stood there and cried.  There is a fundamental difference.  No, it's not comfortable - and it's not meant to be.

1 minute ago, thehandwipes said:

We "see" very little of what happens to Jeyne in the books, its not "needlessly gratuitous."  There is one graphic scene and its very short, what was cut was the emotional impact that Jeyne suffered in the books that Sansa doesn't in the show.  Its precisely the consequences we witness to Jeyne that give the story such a creepy, vile aura and the consequences we don't see for Sansa that gives the show such an aura of hollowness.

And I don't understand how anyone can make the "locations" argument when we're talking about the same season as Dorne.  And the removal of fArya also disconnected the Winterfell arc from the Wall, making Jon's story make less sense.  It was just terrible planning all around.

Agreed.

And especially the bold. Jon's story makes less and less sense.  What is currently happening with Slo-Poke Jon and Sansa who has to nag him to tie his shoelaces is just painful to watch.

[Jack Bauer 24]

2 minutes ago, Ser Quork said:

 

No, he didn't.  Theon was made complicit in the wedding night brutality in the book - he too was abused.  In the show, he stood there and cried.  There is a fundamental difference.  No, it's not comfortable - and it's not meant to be.

Agreed.

And especially the bold. Jon's story makes less and less sense.  What is currently happening with Slo-Poke Jon and Sansa who has to nag him to tie his shoelaces is just painful to watch.

He just got resurrected after being murdered. You serious?

[Tianzi]

If the problem is that Jeyne is part of the trend of, well, distancing the reader from rape victims, that OK, I can see it. But I honestly don't know how she was supposed to be fleshed out. I suppose we don't demand giving her a POV and well, her daily life in her Winterhell would probably drip with something one would call a gratutious violence. The second way is interaction with others, but she didn't seem to have too much that in the castle, and in then in a very short time she was a broken shell of a person. And we wouldn't get to know her anyway, since she was pretending to be someone else. And since Ramsay is the psycho he is (at least in the books he is treated like an idiotic fuck-up deadweight, not some 'cool' supervillain), her wifely fate couldn't really go much differently. Well, if I wrote it, I'd cut some horrific details and the dogs bit (unfortunately the dog fetish made it into the show, albeit in a different fashion), but well. If the story was to remain Theon's (who is male, but wasn't exactly styled into cool testosterone protector of resident damsels), I really don't know what could be done to improve Jeyne's part.

Also, I think I prefer the 'broken', non-inspirational description than Sansa's who had to be raped to finally learn life.

[JonCon's Red Beard]

The amount of dislike for ASOIAF as a literature piece is astonishing. There is zero respect for it as such. We get it, the last two books don't have the sophistication many of you are used to read... you're all used to read scandinavian poetry in original language while you do classic ballet, calm down.

9 minutes ago, Ser Quork said:

No, he didn't.  Theon was made complicit in the wedding night brutality in the book - he too was abused.  In the show, he stood there and cried.  There is a fundamental difference.  No, it's not comfortable - and it's not meant to be.

 

Also, Theon is a main character, as much as Sansa. Jeyne was a secondary minor character. Here, Sansa was reduced as such.

[Good Guy Garlan]

7 minutes ago, Ser Quork said:

 

No, he didn't.  Theon was made complicit in the wedding night brutality in the book - he too was abused.  In the show, he stood there and cried.  There is a fundamental difference.  No, it's not comfortable - and it's not meant to be. 

So forcing Theon to watch his sister's rape is not a form of abuse too? 

And even so, that's just one time. After the wedding night Jeyne is unceremoniously dumped offpage to get raped while the focus is on Theon lurking around Winterfell for chapters on end. I love Theon and I like those chapters, but the whole thing is like, "Keep your eyes on Theon and his pain, never mind the woman being constantly tortured in the background until the plot requires her to make an appearance"

 

 

[thehandwipes]

6 minutes ago, Good Guy Garlan said:

"Very short"? It goes on for pages and pages, in excruciating detail! Ramsay penetrates Jeyne making her scream in pain and then forces Reek to give her oral sex, threatening to nail his tongue to the wall if she's not "wet". I dare you to tell me that's not at least as awful as what the show did. Would purists be clapping if they had adapted that scene to the letter, only with Jeyne instead of Sansa? I mean, Jeyne in the books is forced to have intercourse with a dog and has her breasts full of bite marks. How the FUCK is that not "needlessly gratuitous"? And please, do explain about the consequences we see Jeyne suffering, especially since she vanished off page after the leap so we never see anything resembling an aftermath. You're just contradicting yourself. First you say there's no graphic material but then you say it's that graphic material what makes the storyline in the books so marvelously creepy. So which one is it?

There are no "pages and pages" of Jeyne having intercourse with dogs or Reek performing oral sex.  I assume you know that.

Quote

Lord Ramsay sat beside his bride, slid his hand along her inner thigh, then jammed two fingers up inside her.  The girl let out a gasp of pain.

That is as graphic as it gets, if your copy of ADWD has a more graphic depiction of Jeyne being raped, please share it, because mine doesn't.

She is not forced to have sex with dogs, she is threatened with dogs.  Her emotional and physical state when they reach her is exactly the consequences I'm talking about.  They are far more graphic than the rapes that happened off-page. 

Really, she vanished off page after the jump.  Jon vanished off page after the stabbing.  Strange.

[Ser Quork]

1 minute ago, Good Guy Garlan said:

So forcing Theon to watch his sister's rape is not a form of abuse too? 

And even so, that's just one time. After the wedding night Jeyne is unceremoniously dumped offpage to get raped while the focus is on Theon lurking around Winterfell for chapters on end. I love Theon and I like those chapters, but the whole thing is like, "Keep your eyes on Theon and his pain, never mind the woman being constantly tortured in the background until the plot requires her to make an appearance"

 

 

No, it's "keep your eyes on what Theon is noticing around him, at all the threads of the story" (it is his point of view, and I think you're losing sight of that).   The story is more than the wedding night rape - that's the mistake the show made.  (Btw, ignoring Jeyne's pain is the whole point that the article I quoted above made.)

 

[Good Guy Garlan]

5 minutes ago, Tianzi said:

If the problem is that Jeyne is part of the trend of, well, distancing the reader from rape victims, that OK, I can see it. But I honestly don't know how she was supposed to be fleshed out. I suppose we don't demand giving her a POV and well, her daily life in her Winterhell would probably drip with something one would call a gratutious violence. The second way is interaction with others, but she didn't seem to have too much that in the castle, and in then in a very short time she was a broken shell of a person. And we wouldn't get to know her anyway, since she was pretending to be someone else. And since Ramsay is the psycho he is (at least in the books he is treated like an idiotic fuck-up deadweight, not some 'cool' supervillain), her wifely fate couldn't really go much differently. Well, if I wrote it, I'd cut some horrific details and the dogs bit (unfortunately the dog fetish made it into the show, albeit in a different fashion), but well. If the story was to remain Theon's (who is male, but wasn't exactly styled into cool testosterone protector of resident damsels), I really don't know what could be done to improve Jeyne's part.

I mean, GRRM made the conscious decision to have Jeyne in the background with the occasional bout of graphic abuse being thrust into the foreground, but it just as easily could've been different. Like, Lady Dustin herself says that the lords are starting to talk about how Ramsay kept Jeyne locked all day. How did super smart Roose miss that? Jeyne could've been out and about, under the constant pressure of having to pretend to be Arya. Imagine the irony of a Walda-Jeyne bonding moment, for example. 

5 minutes ago, thehandwipes said:

There are no "pages and pages" of Jeyne having intercourse with dogs or Reek performing oral sex.  I assume you know that.

That is as graphic as it gets, if your copy of ADWD has a more graphic depiction of Jeyne being raped, please share it, because mine doesn't.

She is not forced to have sex with dogs, she is threatened with dogs.  Her emotional and physical state when they reach her is exactly the consequences I'm talking about.  They are far more graphic than the rapes that happened off-page. 

Really, she vanished off page after the jump.  Jon vanished off page after the stabbing.  Strange.

This downplaying of her sexual abuse in the books is not a good luck. That scene of the wedding night is not short, is not a blink and you miss it moment. That quote is incredibly graphic. The dog thing is unnecessarily disturbing. 

I don't know about you, maybe your standards are different than mine, but Jeyne's explicit (and implicit) abuse is as needlessly graphic as it gets. 

[Tianzi]

Sidestepping from Jeyne Poole and going back to the show, I stumbled onto this:
 http://theculturalvacuum.tumblr.com/post/124496344519/on-myranda

They sort of have a point, and I always cringed for the psycho husband wasn't enough and Sansa was put against some catty, jealous ex-girlfriend.

[Tianzi]

2 minutes ago, Good Guy Garlan said:

I mean, GRRM made the conscious decision to have Jeyne in the background with the occasional bout of graphic abuse being thrust into the foreground, but it just as easily could've been different. Like, Lady Dustin herself says that the lords are starting to talk about how Ramsay kept Jeyne locked all day. How did super smart Roose miss that? Jeyne could've been out and about, under the constant pressure of having to pretend to be Arya. Imagine the irony of a Walda-Jeyne bonding moment, for example. 

I think that the super smart Roose might have been doing some damage control. He knew Jeyne was a fake and adding to that what Ramsay was, it could be more dangerous to have her in public.

[Ser Quork]

3 minutes ago, Tianzi said:

Sidestepping from Jeyne Poole and going back to the show, I stumbled onto this:
 http://theculturalvacuum.tumblr.com/post/124496344519/on-myranda

They sort of have a point, and I always cringed for the psycho husband wasn't enough and Sansa was put against some catty, jealous ex-girlfriend.

I don't think there's a single thing they did right with their Sansa in Winterhell arc.

Ramsay is converted from an ugly brute, known for his brutality, to Ramsay, handsome hobbit and master fu-fighter and all-round Villain Sue with a Shades of Grey romantic interest.  How was any of this justified?  In their minds, I suppose, having Brute!Ramsay would be a giveaway to deluded!Littlefinger of what exactly Ramsay was, and then they couldn't justify putting Sansa there.     Just hellish.