[Book Spoilers] Loras and Alleged Character Assassination

[Theda Baratheon]

To be honest, I don't think having sex = no devotion to former lover HOWEVER, it was HOW they handled this scene. All joy, no sadness OH AND I'LL JUST TELL YOU A SECRET FAMILY PLOT???

Yeh. Not good. It's not unheard of to have sex when mourning, not at all. But as care-free as this whilst spilling the beans on an important secret? That wasn't so good.

[Ran]

Jaime makes a big deal about how Brienne felt for Renly earlier in this season. That's a contrast.

ETA:

Like I said, wouldn't complain if there had been a sense that Renly had happened, and that Loras wasn't such an idiot.

[Lady Lu]

I don’t mean to sound callous, but I think love, devotion, and sex can be three very separate things. Gabriel Garcia Marquez won a Nobel Prize for exploring that very situation in Love in the Time of Cholera. It is very, very common for people to turn to sex when they are grieving and lonely. And yeah, that grieving, lonely person is going to seem present and engaged in throes of sex. They’re getting the solace they’re looking for. The real emotional stuff comes later, when they’re alone. It makes sense to me that Loras landed in bed with someone when he found out that he was being forced to marry, and as heir of highgarden, would have to have sex he didn’t want and spend his entire life living a lie. Not being able to turn to Renly would make him hurt even worse. And sometimes when you’re really, really hurting, you find yourself in someone else’s arms. It is so human, and one thing GRRM’s characters are is human.

Also, to those who have lost the person they love most in the world, moving on doesn’t just mean romantically. In many cases it means realizing there is still normalcy in the world: the good things, the mundane, the bad. And in many cases, moving on (both romantically and in realizing the world hasn't stopped turning (or whatever it does in GRRM’s universe)), is so incredibly painful… yet it happens and it is terribly, terribly tragic when it does not. So, I wouldn’t interpret comments about moving as flippant, that Loras stopped loving Renly, but that his world is starting to have dimensions and nuance again.

[Ran]

See above note. I don't think anyone would complain if there was any sense of Loras's pain in the midst of this attempt at a rebound or whatever. But it's not there. There's no continuity.

[Red Knight]

no, loras is fine so far

[teemo]

I think some people are giving this scene way too much credit and are going out of their way to defend it for some reason...does it really make any sense that Loras would tell a complete stranger about his family's secret plans??

[Red Knight]

except for the whole 'heir to highgarden' thing, i liked willas, even if we never got to meet him

[freetickles]

I think some people are giving this scene way too much credit and are going out of their way to defend it for some reason...does it really make any sense that Loras would tell a complete stranger about his family's secret plans??

As I said above, I've never thought of Loras as a "player of the game" the way his grandmother and sister are. I don't think he grasps how important the secret of his engagement is or that the Lannisters would try to foil it, and I think (in part out of arrogance) he trusts that this squire legitimately is into his show.

[Dove]

Loras is brash, arrogant, and hotheaded, clever but not clever enough to be a playa of the game. Besides that and his romanticism, that's pretty much all there is to him in the books. There's not much character *to* assassinate.

We never really got to see if he carried himself all that differently with potential lovers or anything like that, so crying "character assassination" is a bit much. Just admit that you don't like the scene/it doesn't match your personal view of the character - and this is coming from someone who didn't like the scene as well.

[Sun]

Jaime makes a big deal about how Brienne felt for Renly earlier in this season. That's a contrast.

ETA:

Like I said, wouldn't complain if there had been a sense that Renly had happened, and that Loras wasn't such an idiot.

The operative word here is earlier. lately we've been seeing a shift in Brienne. And in this ep, we saw him get a rise out of her not because of Renly, but because he slighted her. In earlier episodes, Jaime wasn't able to get a rise out of her by disparaging her skills as a knight. He wasn't able to shake her confidence. In this ep he succeeded. Not because his quip was any sharper than anything he had lobbed at her i the past, but because now she cares about what he thinks of her. His words had an effect because she's starting to care about his good opinion.

There is no contrast. In fact, I see more of a correlation in the show's treatment of Brienne and Loras. I say the show is drawing them both as characters beginning to see their way through the pain of their loss.

See above note. I don't think anyone would complain if there was any sense of Loras's pain in the midst of this attempt at a rebound or whatever. But it's not there. There's no continuity.

It would be nice to see Loras react to the mention of Renly. Perhaps in the coming weeks...

[Sun]

combined posts.

[Ser Luke.]

It's the only part of the episode I didn't like, and I am not a book purist AT ALL. Just seemed really...random and out of character.

Eh, anything for more sex scenes, right?

[Lady Lu]

I think some people are giving this scene way too much credit and are going out of their way to defend it for some reason...does it really make any sense that Loras would tell a complete stranger about his family's secret plans??

I actually do like book Loras despite (or because of) his rashness, and am postulating how TV Loras might have the same motivations as book Loras, despite the significant changes to the TV Tyrells. I don't mind if people disagree with my thoughts: online forums wouldn't be any fun if everyone agreed. :D I'm not justifying/defending the scene at any cost, just saying again, that maybe that book/TV motivations aren't as different as they appear at first glance. I wrote in a different thread that his sharing the secrets would have bothered me a lot more had it been any situation other than Sansa's. After deviating from the books, I think this is one of the least worst ways the news of the Sansa-Tyrell match could have found its way to the Lannisters.

[HouseLark]

Hard to say how this will play out in future episodes. I viewed at as a grief fuck which is definitely not unusual.

Either way, Loras was never an interesting character to me, he's just a classic blowhard knight. Everything he does outside of Renly is utterly predictable. The only interesting thing about him is his homosexuality which is a bit unexpected for that type of character. There were always going to be shortcuts in this adaptation and using Loras as a plot tunnel is a reasonable change.

So "character assassination"; yeah, I suppose it is but it's the assassination of a mid-ranking bureaucrat rather than the president.

[Broken Fox]

It was a dumb scene and a dumb way to advance that plot, but there are bigger fish to fry than Loras Tyrell at the moment, so I don't really care. And I like Loras.

[Spaßvogel]

It was a dumb scene and a dumb way to advance that plot, but there are bigger fish to fry than Loras Tyrell at the moment, so I don't really care. And I like Loras.

That's kind of my feeling. It was as gratuitous as the sexposition scenes.

[flyerhawk]

Wow. I really need to re-read the books because my memory of Loras was that he was a teenaged vain beautiful boy who was very good at jousting who also was gay and loved Renley. That pretty much sums up the entirety of Loras from the books for me.

He was never political. But some of you think it is simply beyond reason that such a boy would hop in the sack with someone else, regardless of sexual orientation? And given the fact that he was gay you don't think he would talk to some random squire, he just banged, about the girl that his family is setting him up to marry?

Thankfully neither the books or the show make all of their characters polticial manipulators.

In the show, it was fairly obvious that Olenna and Margaery told Loras he should marry Sansa. If Loras is willing to be a pawn in the game like that then he probably isn't a player.

[shiola]

Loras didn't really have a character to assassinate imo.

I laughed pretty hard at this. it's true. He looks like a bit of an idiot on the show, compared to what in the books exactly?

[Stannis the Wight]

I'm surprised people really care. Loras is a peripheral character who makes no significant impact to the plot of the story in ASOIAF. He does some stuff in AFFC and that is really about it.

The Tyrell's are a matriarchy and the men are the bimbos, hence he is being portrayed as such.

[Lord Martin Sheol]

I do agree with the character assasination idea. Here's the deal, it may not come to notice to those who haven't read the books, but even if he's not a major player, he does have its relevance. The quote of the cande doesn't takes place months ago, it takes place a couple of weeks ago at a maximum. Don't forget that he's a Kingsguards, he did made a vow of celibacy, and maybe for our world that doesn't mean much or is considered impossible, but for a medieval world such as that one, in that culture it was common, an known oathbreakers had a hard time. In our context what Loras did was rather normal or expected, so for the average viewer that was enterily normal, but in ASoIaF context, that was rather unthinkable. Not to mention the looseness of his tongue... In our society, we don't hold a real value on love, as we're proving, even to say that having sex with someone you don't love doesn't hurt the relationship with the one you love and that it means nothing, we seem to value sex. Well, sex sells, producers know that. Another thing..., it does kind of falls into the stereotype of gay man to jump into the first they get a chance to... I'm not even in favor of homosexuality, but I'm also against degrading people, and I find that stereotyping degrading.

This issue was indeed a consequence of things going so fast, in order to bring the Tyrell's plot to the Lannisters, but I'm really not happy at all with the outcome.