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GoT and Feminism: What Happens Now?


Damon_Tor

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11 minutes ago, Cas Stark said:

What's unbelievable about it?  Real world history shows that vast millions of people choose to stay alive as slaves rather than die for freedom, vast millions over thousands of years chose life and not death. There is always a choice, as you just admit, that some people indeed have chosen to die rather than be enslaved, but not the majority which is what I said, that people will choose life over death even if it means living in slavery.  

How do you know it was the "vast majority" that ended up alive and not the minority? Because there were millions of slaves in the US? How many millions were taken out of the African colonies? How many ended up jumping ship or killing themselves? 

Dany was right to kill the slavers (though she could have chosen a more humane method). If the US government had done it with the Confederate generals, their supporters, and every single slave-owning estate owner, this benevolent slave master ideology would not exist today. And thereafter no Jim Crow. GRRM fixing history in his books. 

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17 minutes ago, Ghost+Nymeria4Eva said:

The point people trying to make is that the show-runners callously used rape as some plot device to give Sansa character. There are other women who get raped, like Dany, Cersei and Mel, but not in the context that's necessary for character growth. You can go ask women who end up in rapey marriages whether their ordeals lead to character growth. 

As I said, they don't get punished directly for their sins, but those things are what leads them to the point of losing limbs and body parts. 

But what's your point ? Yes, their actions lead to the point where they lose limbs. So what ? What does that have to do with what I'm saying about the relationship between suffering and growth ?

Are you saying that writers should only traumatize or cripple characters who have done bad things ? GRRM certainly doesn't believe that, he cripples poor Bran right off the bat. It's perfectly legitimate to subject innocent characters to trauma.

As for your other point, I have to say I respectfully disagree. Yes, there are other characters who get raped, and yes, it also has an impact on their character. Dany takes charge of her life because she's sick of the abuse she's suffering.

Cersei's resentment towards men is largely based on her experiences with physical and sexual abuse at Robert's hands. This is especially clear in the novels.

I don't remember Melisandre being raped.

And I don't need to go asking women in rapey marriages. My closest friend suffered sexual abuse for months at the hands of her partner. I've been a direct witness to the damage it did to her.

But I also witnessed how she rebuilt her life afterwards, became stronger as a person, and has since never tolerated any kind of abuse from anyone. She now stands up for herself and takes charge in ways she never did before. Her experiences changed her dramatically.

This is just life. It's tragic but true.

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7 minutes ago, Ghost+Nymeria4Eva said:

How do you know it was the "vast majority" that ended up alive and not the minority? Because there were millions of slaves in the US? How many millions were taken out of the African colonies? How many ended up jumping ship or killing themselves? 

Dany was right to kill the slavers (though she could have chosen a more humane method). If the US government had done it with the Confederate generals, their supporters, and every single slave-owning estate owner, this benevolent slave master ideology would not exist today. And thereafter no Jim Crow. GRRM fixing history in his books. 

Why are you fixated on slavery in the U.S.?  You do know that slavery goes back to the dawn of civilization, right? Greece. Rome. China. Egypt. Aztecs. Mayans the list goes on, the list of slaver societies being much longer than those that never had slavery.

That's why I said specifically thousands of years of slavery.  I know that the vast majority of slaves didn't kill themselves because of that thing called world history. 

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14 minutes ago, OldGimletEye said:

Dany committed that execution for a specific crime or offense. Not because people had owned slaves generally. She did not bother to establish who was guilty for the crime or to what degree there was guilt. She simply demanded 163 bodies to execute. That is collective guilt and punishment and it is horrendous.

Oh I've definitely seen this convoluted line of whining against Dany being anti-slavery. Oh no she didn't bother to find out which of the slave masters were bad enough to crucify kids. Seriously? That's like asking which Nazis were okay with the gas chambers. They were Grand Masters and the government that makes decisions like crucifying children is made up of them. Besides, that's definitely not what collective punishment means. A modern term, it refers to punishing people simply because of association with a guilty person. Not at all what you refer to. 

14 minutes ago, OldGimletEye said:

And now, evidently, we see her destroying an entire city, evidently because everyone in KL is responsible for Cersei and her actions. Maybe, Dany's fans should have listened.

That is just a THEORY. Some people speculate that Dany burned KL because smallfolk were guilty of supporting Cersei. The writers are not being cryptic here. Dany burned KL because she was mad. 

1 minute ago, Cas Stark said:

Why are you fixated on slavery in the U.S.?  You do know that slavery goes back to the dawn of civilization, right? Greece. Rome. China. Egypt. Aztecs. Mayans the list goes on, the list of slaver societies being much longer than those that never had slavery.

That's why I said specifically thousands of years of slavery.  I know that the vast majority of slaves didn't kill themselves because of that thing called world history. 

I knew it. This always comes up when US slavery is mentioned. And no. The slavery in ASOIAF is not based on "thousands" of years of slavery in the world. It's based on slavery in the US, not in the Aztec empire (where slaves were war captives and were not called only one-third human). If you think saying that Dany was wrong to free enslaved people because in real life most enslaved people chose to live that way, you need to get your head checked.

Let me make this clear: slavery is wrong. Dany was never wrong to defeat slaver empires. If people feel queasy about her actions in Astapor or Mereen, that because of the brutal punishments she copies from the slavers, not because it was wrong to destroy their empires. Dany is still better than the slavers, morally and otherwise, even after she kills the 163. That's how it is.

 

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12 minutes ago, Ghost+Nymeria4Eva said:

Oh I've definitely seen this convoluted line of whining against Dany being anti-slavery. Oh no she didn't bother to find out which of the slave masters were bad enough to crucify kids. Seriously? 

The only one being convoluted here is you.

12 minutes ago, Ghost+Nymeria4Eva said:

 That's like asking which Nazis were okay with the gas chambers

No it is more like killing people because they had a party affiliation, without inquiring whether they had done anything wrong specifically.

12 minutes ago, Ghost+Nymeria4Eva said:

hey were Grand Masters and the government that makes decisions like crucifying children is made up of them. Besides, that's definitely not what collective punishment means. A modern term, it refers to punishing people simply because of association with a guilty person. Not at all what you refer to. 

Did you even read this to see if it is logically consistent? You say collective punishment refers to" punishing people simply because of their association with a guilty person" and then conclude that killing people because they happen to hold the status of Grand Master is not collective punishment? Huh?

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7 minutes ago, Ghost+Nymeria4Eva said:

Oh I've definitely seen this convoluted line of whining against Dany being anti-slavery. Oh no she didn't bother to find out which of the slave masters were bad enough to crucify kids. Seriously? That's like asking which Nazis were okay with the gas chambers. They were Grand Masters and the government that makes decisions like crucifying children is made up of them. Besides, that's definitely not what collective punishment means. A modern term, it refers to punishing people simply because of association with a guilty person. Not at all what you refer to. 

That is just a THEORY. Some people speculate that Dany burned KL because smallfolk were guilty of supporting Cersei. The writers are not being cryptic here. Dany burned KL because she was mad. 

Are you under the impression that the allies killed every member of the Nazi party after WWII? Did you not realize that the Nuremberg Trials were exactly that, an attempt to investigate and place blame on the guilty individuals and not on all the Nazi Party members, or all the military or all the Germans.

I give up. 

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49 minutes ago, NickStark2494 said:

Theon losing his penis and being tortured led to character development. Jaime losing his hand led to character development. Arya losing her family led to character development.

This is all nonsense. If you read the books, then Theon being turned into Reek and Arya becoming a professional assassin is not exactly character growth. It is part of a dehumanizing process where crucial aspects of their personalities are destroyed by their traumas. Reek-Theon is considerably less than he was before he fell into Ramsay's hands. Just as Arya was so much more when she didn't think murdering people was the normal way to deal with your own and everybody else's problems.

The loss of Jaime's hand wasn't a crucial part in his arc - it was what losing the hand did to him, how it affected him. But even that is less important than other experiences he made.

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But Sansa being victimized in a misogynistic medieval setting can't lead to character development ? Why not ? What happened to Sansa is something tons of women went through and still go through. Why should the show shy away from it ?

Perhaps because her plot there doesn't make sense. And she clearly already had developed into 'a player' before she and Littlefinger got demented and thought it would be a good idea to marry her to Ramsay?

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Why shouldn't her suffering lead to growth ? That's literally what happens to all protagonists in stories, especially in a dark medieval fantasy. Characters suffer and grow by overcoming that suffering.

And this is true to life. Overcoming hardship is often how people develop and change.

I don't see the problem.

People survive ordeals, but they don't 'grow' because of that. The very concept is just silly. I mean, do you think all the vets suffering from PTSD did 'grow' because of their experience in war? That 80+-year-old people suffering from nightmares and pissing their bed because they think they are back in the trenches of World War I is character growth?

That's just nonsense.

And if you look at the show then there is no character growth of any kind anyway because no character is coherently or developing in any way, shape, or form.

I mean, can you explain how being raped helped Sansa's development in the show? I can't. 

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8 minutes ago, Ghost+Nymeria4Eva said:

That is just a THEORY. Some people speculate that Dany burned KL because smallfolk were guilty of supporting Cersei. The writers are not being cryptic here. Dany burned KL because she was mad. 

D&D said something like she wanted to make it "personal". One wonders what she had against the common people of KL.

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13 minutes ago, Ghost+Nymeria4Eva said:

Oh I've definitely seen this convoluted line of whining against Dany being anti-slavery. Oh no she didn't bother to find out which of the slave masters were bad enough to crucify kids. Seriously? That's like asking which Nazis were okay with the gas chambers. They were Grand Masters and the government that makes decisions like crucifying children is made up of them. Besides, that's definitely not what collective punishment means. A modern term, it refers to punishing people simply because of association with a guilty person. Not at all what you refer to. 

That is just a THEORY. Some people speculate that Dany burned KL because smallfolk were guilty of supporting Cersei. The writers are not being cryptic here. Dany burned KL because she was mad. 

I knew it. This always comes up when US slavery is mentioned. And no. The slavery in ASOIAF is not based on "thousands" of years of slavery in the world. It's based on slavery in the US, not in the Aztec empire (where slaves were war captives and were not called only one-third human). If you think saying that Dany was wrong to free enslaved people because in real life most enslaved people chose to live that way, you need to get your head checked.

Let me make this clear: slavery is wrong. Dany was never wrong to defeat slaver empires. If people feel queasy about her actions in Astapor or Mereen, that because of the brutal punishments she copies from the slavers, not because it was wrong to destroy their empires. Dany is still better than the slavers, morally and otherwise, even after she kills the 163. That's how it is.

 

How do you know it's based on the US?  The slaves in Essos are not of a single race, but many races in the books.  The slavers enslave whomever they can find, even their own people, so I think you are wrong, it is more of a parallel to the ancient world than to the U.S. 

Um, yeah, we all know slavery is wrong, but you don't seem able to move beyond this type of binary thinking--slavery is bad, so anyone doing anything against slavery is automatically good. 

 

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5 minutes ago, Lord Varys said:

This is all nonsense. If you read the books, then Theon being turned into Reek and Arya becoming a professional assassin is not exactly character growth. It is part of a dehumanizing process where crucial aspects of their personalities are destroyed by their traumas. Reek-Theon is considerably less than he was before he fell into Ramsay's hands. Just as Arya was so much more when she didn't think murdering people was the normal way to deal with your own and everybody else's problems.

The loss of Jaime's hand wasn't a crucial part in his arc - it was what losing the hand did to him, how it affected him. But even that is less important than other experiences he made.

Perhaps because her plot there doesn't make sense. And she clearly already had developed into 'a player' before she and Littlefinger got demented and thought it would be a good idea to marry her to Ramsay?

People survive ordeals, but they don't 'grow' because of that. The very concept is just silly. I mean, do you think all the vets suffering from PTSD did 'grow' because of their experience in war? That 80+-year-old people suffering from nightmares and pissing their bed because they think they are back in the trenches of World War I is character growth?

That's just nonsense.

And if you look at the show then there is no character growth of any kind anyway because no character is coherently or developing in any way, shape, or form.

I mean, can you explain how being raped helped Sansa's development in the show? I can't. 

When life gives you lemons.. you make lemonade.  Or you have a nervous breakdown and never recover.  

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1 minute ago, OldGimletEye said:

D&D said something like she wanted to make it "personal". One wonders what she had against the common people of KL.

That was so stupid… They could at least have tried to justify danny's actions… 

Her seing the red keep and thinking "Now it is personal. DIE DIE DIE" Is one of the most stupid things I have ever heard...

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1 minute ago, divica said:

That was so stupid… They could at least have tried to justify danny's actions… 

Her seing the red keep and thinking "Now it is personal. DIE DIE DIE" Is one of the most stupid things I have ever heard...

Very stupid, but then, that's how the showrunners roll.  I hope they are intending that she 'snapped' but I don't even really like that too much, rather than she is supposed to now be like clinically INSANE as opposed to having just gone rogue and turned into the tyrant instead of the liberator she fancies herself.  

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1 minute ago, divica said:

That was so stupid… They could at least have tried to justify danny's actions… 

Her seing the red keep and thinking "Now it is personal. DIE DIE DIE" Is one of the most stupid things I have ever heard...

We are limited by post-Enlghtenment thinking.  We say that the Smallfolk are not responsible for their leaders' decisions.

Dany says, "Oh yes they are.  They didn't lift a finger to assist their rightful Queen."

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15 minutes ago, Ghost+Nymeria4Eva said:

Oh I've definitely seen this convoluted line of whining against Dany being anti-slavery. Oh no she didn't bother to find out which of the slave masters were bad enough to crucify kids. Seriously? That's like asking which Nazis were okay with the gas chambers. They were Grand Masters and the government that makes decisions like crucifying children is made up of them. Besides, that's definitely not what collective punishment means. A modern term, it refers to punishing people simply because of association with a guilty person. Not at all what you refer to. 

That is just a THEORY. Some people speculate that Dany burned KL because smallfolk were guilty of supporting Cersei. The writers are not being cryptic here. Dany burned KL because she was mad. 

I knew it. This always comes up when US slavery is mentioned. And no. The slavery in ASOIAF is not based on "thousands" of years of slavery in the world. It's based on slavery in the US, not in the Aztec empire (where slaves were war captives and were not called only one-third human). If you think saying that Dany was wrong to free enslaved people because in real life most enslaved people chose to live that way, you need to get your head checked.

Let me make this clear: slavery is wrong. Dany was never wrong to defeat slaver empires. If people feel queasy about her actions in Astapor or Mereen, that because of the brutal punishments she copies from the slavers, not because it was wrong to destroy their empires. Dany is still better than the slavers, morally and otherwise, even after she kills the 163. That's how it is.

 

I think the point was more Dany showed up, said "these are my new rules, you already broke my rules, now you die"   Not defending what the masters were doing, but that was thier way of life preDany, that was thier rules.  When you waltz in and change the rules, you can't really punish people that broke them before you made them.  Hence Tyrion trying to do that 8 year plan or whatever it was.  

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3 minutes ago, Cas Stark said:

Very stupid, but then, that's how the showrunners roll.  I hope they are intending that she 'snapped' but I don't even really like that too much, rather than she is supposed to now be like clinically INSANE as opposed to having just gone rogue and turned into the tyrant instead of the liberator she fancies herself.  

I've criticised the show runners for all sorts of things, but they've nailed this.

It's very important that *we* see no justification (and Jon, Davos, and Tyrion) for what Dany did, but that Dany (and most of her soldiers) see it as entirely justified 

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Just now, SeanF said:

I've criticised the show runners for all sorts of things, but they've nailed this.

It's very important that *we* see no justification (and Jon, Davos, and Tyrion) for what Dany did, but that Dany (and most of her soldiers) see it as entirely justified 

Yeah, I get that this was their intent, 'no justification' My issue is that I don't want her to be 'insane' I feel like that is a cop out, certainly trauma is part of what brought her to that point, but I want it to be her having made a rational judgement that this is the way she needs to go.  

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21 minutes ago, OldGimletEye said:

No it is more like murdering people because they had a party affiliation, without inquiring whether they had done anything wrong specifically.

The Nazis were a party. Lol. 

21 minutes ago, OldGimletEye said:

Did you even read this to see if it is logically consistent? You say collective punishment refers to" punishing people simply because of their association with a guilty person" and then conclude that killing people because they happen to hold the status of Grand Master is not collective punishment? Huh?

Grand Master is an official title given to slave masters with political power. It's in the books that Grand Masters rule the city. If Dany killed Grand Masters' friends, family, chess buddies, etc, then it would be collective punishment. She orders the deaths of 163 officials who would undoubtedly be responsible for the decision to kill those children, even if they are not the ones who went out there and hung the bodies on the crosses. 

18 minutes ago, OldGimletEye said:

D&D said something like she wanted to make it "personal". One wonders what she had against the common people of KL

They probably meant make it personal against Cersei, not the people in KL. She burns KL right in front of Cersei's eyes, and slowly moves in on the Red Keep. Then again, these might have been more empty words from D&D.

21 minutes ago, Cas Stark said:

Are you under the impression that the allies killed every member of the Nazi party after WWII? Did you not realize that the Nuremberg Trials were exactly that, an attempt to investigate and place blame on the guilty individuals and not on all the Nazi Party members, or all the military or all the Germans.

I don't remember my history lessons exactly, but I think all Nazi party members were considered guilty, even today. The Nuremberg trials were just a formality to punish the top ranking officers. Most Nazis died in the war, some fled, others cut deals, etc. Banality of evil and all that. Don't they still arrest WWII Nazis, as geriatric as they are now? You nab them and ask them what they did, and voila, you have the charge. You do know that every single Nazi committed a crime, right? They didn't just sit around at home and have nothing to do with the Holocaust. That why they went to WAR and shot everyone wearing the uniform. If Churchill ordered his officers to grab 163 top ranking Nazis and execute them for the Holocaust, would he have committed a war crime? Would the guilt of those officers ever be in any doubt? No. 

17 minutes ago, Cas Stark said:

How do you know it's based on the US?  The slaves in Essos are not of a single race, but many races in the books.  The slavers enslave whomever they can find, even their own people, so I think you are wrong, it is more of a parallel to the ancient world than to the U.S. 

Because slavery in ancient times was not practiced the way it was in the US, and how they do in Slaver's Bay. People were enslaved by war or debt in ancient times, and for most cases could liberate themselves. There was no legislation to call them subhumans. Also the slaves in the US came from many different ethnic groups and tribes. African isn't a single "race." Slave-based economies are very much American, and that's what GRRM shows in Slaver's Bay, right down to the Reconstruction. 

22 minutes ago, Cas Stark said:

slavery is bad, so anyone doing anything against slavery is automatically good. 

Yes, dude, slavery is bad. Doing something against it with the right intention is always good, even if the person doing so is otherwise bad. Most people who want to portray Dany as a potential tyrant just simply refer to the brutality of the punishments she metes out to the slave masters. They don't double down on defending the slave masters like you are doing here. You can't call Dany bad when her intentions are good. 

 

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12 minutes ago, Ghost+Nymeria4Eva said:

The Nazis were a party. Lol. 

Well no shit. Did you ever consider that many ordinary Germans might have joined the Nazi party for various reasons, without committing any crimes specifically? I'm pretty sure Osksar Schindler was a Nazi Party member. Did he deserve to die?

12 minutes ago, Ghost+Nymeria4Eva said:

Grand Master is an official title given to slave masters with political power. It's in the books that Grand Masters rule the city. If Dany killed Grand Masters' friends, family, chess buddies, etc, then it would be collective punishment. She orders the deaths of 163 officials who would undoubtedly be responsible for the decision to kill those children, even if they are not the ones who went out there and hung the bodies on the crosses. 

Even if this were true, she had no idea which Grand Master approved or disapproved the idea.

 

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2 minutes ago, Ghost+Nymeria4Eva said:

The Nazis were a party. Lol. 

Grand Master is an official title given to slave masters with political power. It's in the books that Grand Masters rule the city. If Dany killed Grand Masters' friends, family, chess buddies, etc, then it would be collective punishment. She orders the deaths of 163 officials who would undoubtedly be responsible for the decision to kill those children, even if they are not the ones who went out there and hung the bodies on the crosses. 

I don't remember my history lessons exactly, but I think all Nazi party members were considered guilty, even today. The Nuremberg trials were just a formality to punish the top ranking officers. Most Nazis died in the war, some fled, others cut deals, etc. Banality of evil and all that. Don't they still arrest WWII Nazis, as geriatric as they are now? You nab them and ask them what they did, and voila, you have the charge. You do know that every single Nazi committed a crime, right? They didn't just sit around at home and have nothing to do with the Holocaust. That why they went to WAR and shot everyone wearing the uniform. If Churchill ordered his officers to grab 163 top ranking Nazis and execute them for the Holocaust, would he have committed a war crime? Would the guilt of those officers ever be in any doubt? No. 

Oh my.  You might want to check your WWII history.  

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4 minutes ago, SeanF said:

I've criticised the show runners for all sorts of things, but they've nailed this.

It's very important that *we* see no justification (and Jon, Davos, and Tyrion) for what Dany did, but that Dany (and most of her soldiers) see it as entirely justified 

They nailed it if she was known as an insane person...

Until last ep she was perfectly rational and saw herself as a savior of the inocent...

I have no idea how she can rationalize burning the city when they surrendered and she could have gone and killed the person she hates… They can t even justify it emotionally… If she had only burned the red keep I could support that they nailed it...

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