How to deal with disturbing and sexual scenes in the books?

[dacagey8]

I am a very impressionable reader with hyperactive imagination. I've watched the first season of the show, and then I decided to read the books. I like some parts, but other parts are a bit disturbing for me. I am not talking about scenes with battles and death, those are okay, but the scenes with torture, rape and sexualization of minors are hard to read for me. How do you people deal with that?

[SPOILER ALERT FOR SOME SCENES THAT DISTURBED ME. ALSO PROBABLY NSFW.]

For some context, I am a 25 yo male, but in many ways I am like a hyper impressionable teenager when I read or watch movies. I just got to the part in the third book about Sansa's "wedding night" with Tyrion (please don't spoil about anything after that). I get it that in Westeros, a girl is considered a "woman" after flowering, but Tyrion and even Tywin admit that she is still a child. She herself says she is not even 13 yet! While no actual sex happens, Tyrion and Sansa still end up naked in bed, with her staring at his erect penis and him ogling her assets. I can't get that mental image out of my head. That may be because I enjoy some weird stuff like loli hentai, but in this case it's disturbing because characters like Sansa feel real in a way hentai caricatures never do.  Some other scenes that I can't get out of my head include Dany's wedding night, (which is slightly less disturbing than Sansa's, but still), Varys' story about his castration, Melisandre's "childbirth", the rapes of Lollys, Palla and that girl in the tavern the Mountain raped (all of these happen offscreen, but try to tell that to my imagination), and everything involving the Unsullied, especially the part where the slaver cuts off a nipple just to prove a point.

[END OF SPOILER]

What I want to hear, am I alone in being fixated on scenes like that, or is it normal? My friends don't seem to care that much about the story and characters as much as I do, to them it's just fiction to read and forget. But not to me. Just so we are clear, I am not deeply disturbed, like, in a clinical way. I don't need therapy or anything. I am just wondering how people deal with difficult parts in books.  Once again, please don't spoil anything after Sansa's wedding!

[Adaneth]

Nothing wrong with you. We all are different and are sensitivities vary. I try to not skip, no matter how hard it is for me. But there are scenes which are too graphic and I can't handle it. It's not an author's problem, it's a me problem. If I can't handle it I just skip them. For example, I have a phobia towards rats. Even writing the word gives me shivers. lol

So, every time I see something about them in the books, I just skip that paragraph. 

[Jaenara Belarys]

We just deal with it, I suppose. I just tell myself that it's fictional and that since you paid for it, you might as well finish it. 

Edited December 20, 2023 by Jaenara Belarys

[Phylum of Alexandria]

I think part of it is trust in the author's vision, and some idea of his moral compass. 

I trust that GRRM is weaving his fictional world and scenarios to highlight issues and behaviors that, more of less, can and have happened in our world. 

He can sometimes execute clumsily, as I feel he did with Dothraki culture. But even then, I have trust in what he's trying to do, which is to get us to think about the dark and disturbing aspects of real human cultures. And in doing so, to contextualize the role of heroes in a somewhat believable world that reckons with the complexity and messiness of our world.

But then again, I was weaned on trash flicks as a teen, so maybe my threshold for tolerance is higher. It's subjective.