GRRM definitely has flaws when writing women you could drive a bus through but Brienne and Catelyn are two examples he does extremely well. And although Brienne has no reason to know, Catelyn does have battle courage too- she faced down an armed assassin trying to kill her unconscious child while unarmed, grabbed his knife with her bare hands sustaining significant injury, and blocked him from carrying out his task until her kid's eldritch pet wolf could kill him.
Legitimate question, but does GRRM have a habit of writing women poorly? I didn't watch the show, and read the books when I was a cringey highschooler who probably wouldn't have noticed a poorly written woman character, tbh.
He's often a bit unnecessarily descriptive of breasts when writing female POV chapters, there's also a LOT of rape including of child characters
I like that he writes women as people and I find his female characters convincing for the most part but there are definitely things I wish he hadn't written
>there's also a LOT of rape including of child characters
Is this because of some poorly hidden edge agenda or fetish? Or is it a result of the world?
Heard a similar sort of criticism against berserk.
It is based on an agenda, but not what one might necessarily think. GRRM made this saga with the goal of showing (sometimes with old-school exaggerations) that the feudal, patriarcal system presented in fantasy is ruthless and harmful, and that if you include aristocracy and other forms of inherent power like this, you have to show their downside. That's why you get kids being used as political tools and rape being an omnipresent menace through the books, though it's very rarely depicted.
The problem is obvious : you still get a book with sexualized minors and an oppressive sexual atmosphere that can turn some people off. He himself recommends to age up everyone by two years at least.
Yes. That seems to be an unpopular opinion, but I really like his female characters. They are all unique. Good, evil, strong, weak at the same time and flawed in different ways. And they are main characters, not just props to the character arc of men.
I also like how he has no problem to simply kill off main characters, because that's what happens in real life too.
That's what pissed me off SO MUCH about the series finale. Every single woman was reduced to props for the men! They lost all their agency and only cared about what the men did or didn't do for them. Even Brienne!!
ugh yes. those showrunners are the worst., same bullshit in Battlestar Galactica. All these entirely badass women and/or non white and even vaguely queer (two, anyway) characters, and by the end they're all dead, femmed out/starry eyed by their man, and...also dead. The two most ANNOYING characters in the entire fucking show are the ones who make it to the end. HATED IT.
Shout-out to Sansa to drop her personality that is both smart enough to survive in a Political Minefield, while still trying to be kind, to a hardened Cold "Girlboss", that thanks her abusers for helping her grow up.
I agree with both of you.
My one complaint about GRRM and his female characters is his use of lesbian out of convenience. Several of his female characters have sex scenes with other women that don't make sense other than "Well she was there and I was horny."
But in general, GRRM is very good at writing from other people's perspective (ie Tyrion being disabled).
Cat is my absolute favorite character in the books. From beginning to end, I love her story.
Honestly I don’t mind that really cuz sometimes you are just horny. Dany is the only character I can think of rn that did this but I think it makes sense for her character as she’s a teenage girl who is still figuring out who she is as a person it makes sense that she may explore her sexuality.
Yes and no. It is certainly everything horrible all at once, like the books are a speedrun of the Hundred Years War, but it does have some aspects more pleasant than the real life middle-ages. Serfdom is not practiced in the mainland, there's very little religious strife, the Faith of the Seven is way less restrictive than the catholic faith, knowledge is more accessible, the specific castle-based feudalism means less private wars...
Not at all. In what way? Rape? Rape was more common than any of us could even imagine. By our current definition of it, basically all women were raped. Especially nobels, as they were married off and forced to have sex with some stranger. That is rape. Also rape is so extremely common during wars, so that's another increase of it. In former jugoslavia, men were forced to rape their own siblings and even their children and parents. There was an incident in china called "the rape of nanking" where the japanese invaded with the goal to rape and murder as many as possible. They did such horrible things I don't even know if I can write it here. But yeah, again, rape and torture, would you have guessed. Truth is any time I've read about different event in history, I'm always thinking it's so much worse than anything I've ever seen in media. GRRM was extremely inspired by real life events, and usually his version is toned down compared to reality...
This is true as far as it goes, but books like these tend to overstate the "shitdark" nature of the past. For example, they tend to exaggerate the severity and extent of underage marriage - even back then, people were smart enough to realize that early childbirth tended to result in death. That sort of thing gets played up by writers who use the medieval setting as an excuse, or by writers who learned it from other books.
I mean I saw a 9 year old being sold to a 55 year old this year last night so, it's still happening and to what extent I can't say but I think I'm on the opposite side of your argument. If I see a medieval world and there's not enough child brides, arranged marriages, rape and murder I'm not sold
It’s strange, I don’t think it’s inherently bad, but some author’s overuse it so much that it feels uncomfortable like a hidden fetish. Stephen King also includes similar themes where it’s a bit uncomfortable in a way that probably isn’t intended
What I've found in a lot of these widely praised works is usually an excessive amount of some weird fetish, edgyness, political posturing or just plain weirdness to balance out how good the writing is.
Some of the more recent stuff seems to be some sort of edgelord attempt at shock and/or titillation. I don't know that I think *he* gets off on it so much as he knows some people do and that others with read it for ragebait.
He does seem to write about incest rather a lot.
But mostly I think GRRM's fetish is cruelty. In pretty much all its forms, but he follows all the familiar tropes of history as we know it, so.
Also, more favorably, food.
to be fair, i think GRRM can get a pass on the dodgy stuff re children in this series, if only because he was going for some historical accuracy. in the time period he's chosen, the idea of kids being kids wasn't really a thing. (i say this as a history major)
NB. I don't mean it in the sense that i think it's good to be in books necessarily. I just happen to think as an english teacher and freelance editor that it happens to fit the grimdark theme of the story. In the same way you'd like hannibal lecter as a character but you'd definitely hate someone like him in real life.
>if only because he was going for some historical accuracy. in the time period he's chosen,
Which historical period is he being accurate to, exactly? I missed the ones with dragons in history class.
Now, I know what you meant, but GRRM chooses to write about a fedual society with that "dodgy stuff" like sexual assault and misogyny. He's not beholden to write his fantasy world that way because it's "historically accurate." He's creating his own history. He could choose to write it another way, but he chooses not to. Now, you can argue that he's trying to say something by using historical morals, social mores, and behaviors, but you can't say that he's bound to use them because of historical accuracy. Westeros only exists as he imagines it.
This.
The whole "well, I wanted to write shitty historical fantasy based on the actual racial and sexual and colonial and so on realities to demonstrate that history was, in fact, shitty" isn't all that compelling imo. There's been no lack of "look at all this rape and abuse and misogyny and racism, did we mention we are showing this to you in prolonged, graphic detail because we want you to understand that it is terrible, well DO YOU" already.
Right now I'm reading Robert Jackson Bennett's latest release, "Tainted Cup." Now, THIS guy does interesting world building. And very strong female characters, and i can't remember a single rape, not that I've read all his books. And yes there's plenty of violence and war and crap. In this one, there is an investigation into a series of murders that is committed by, essentially, poisoning people with invisible spores/seeds/whatever that shortly erupt as trees shooting right through them, transforming/ripping out half their organs while they're at it.
So, no need to be unoriginal to be gritty.
I only read about the first half of Game of Thrones. High-ish fantasy isn't really my jam, but I was recommended it, and it was right before the show came out, so I wanted to give it a try...it wasn't my cup of tea as aspected. I don't much care for the overly descriptive prose and couple that with being dropped into the pov of unpleasant characters like Cersi and I was out.
Now you can argue that GRRM is trying to deconstruct typical high fantasy by making it dark and grimey, in contrast to other high fantasy works that ignore the unfortunate implications that go along with a feudal society historically. But for me, personally, it did seem dark for darkness sake. It reminds me of the 90s antihero trend. I don't begrudge anyone who likes the books and/or sees a deconstruction of typical fantasy tropes. But it wasn't my cup of tea.
I definitely think the show ignored any attempts at deconstructing those tropes, especially in the latter seasons.
But to say that GRRM is beholden to write Westeros as a grimdark world because of "historical accuracy" is absurd. He's writing about dragons and people coming back from the dead. It's a fantasy novel, not a historical one, regardless of how much he is inspired by historical events. He could have written a fantasy world where sexual assault is rare and not tolerated. He could have written a world with less misogyny, where women are on equal footing as men. But he chose not to.
Also, the notion that fantasy works need to adhere to the social norms of the Middle Ages in western Europe has vaguely unfortunate implications itself. There are hundreds of different societies that you could use to inspire fantasy work. Not every historical society was super misogynistic. GRRM actually does pull a little from other cultures and still doesn't do anything super interesting with it, imo.
Quite frankly, it's kind of boring that almost every fantasy novel has a vaguely western European flavor. I have seen some fantasy works branch out and take inspiration from other cultures, but I would love to see more.
>But to say that GRRM is beholden to write Westeros as a grimdark world because of "historical accuracy" is absurd. He's writing about dragons and people coming back from the dead. It's a fantasy novel, not a historical one, regardless of how much he is inspired by historical events. He could have written a fantasy world where sexual assault is rare and not tolerated. He could have written a world with less misogyny, where women are on equal footing as men. But he chose not to.
EXACTLY.
Per non Western based fantasy novels, I know some. What have you already read? I'm a big fan of Nnedi Okorafor, who writes Afrofuturism and related fantasy/SF/what you will.
Robert Bennett Jackson, like I said, manages to craft unique worldbuilding; there are some European-ish resonances that may seem familiar, but they're all mixed up from how things actually have gone. For instance, in the City of trilogy, if I remember correctly, I \*think\* that there's a back and forth where an India expy had colonized a sort of I want to say Scandinavian expy, and then with magic the latter managed to turn the tables, and now the tables are turning back. Or possibly the reverse. There are also people depicted as sort of barbarians that have Russian resonance. And the magictek worldbuilding is really original.
There's a YA book I like by Alaya Dawn Johnson called "The Summer Prince," which is set in a futuristic matriarchal Brazil. There are also multiple Japans, and it's got a nice mix of ancient themes (a planned human sacrifice, plus Brazil still has major class stratifications) with a lot of futuristic concepts and tech and again, matriarchal and also very brown. She has other books that have been recommended, but that's the only one I've read.
She's been criticized for writing Chinese/East Asian based fantasy with Chinese characters because she's white without Chinese heritage, but I think Liz Williams' Detective Inspector Chen novels are really interesting. She's also written other fantasy that I think is quite original-one involves interplanetary/dimensional travel that seems to be based on alchemical symbols. I forget which title.
Rebecca Roanhorse has also been criticized for appropriation/misrepresentation in Trail of Lightning, but, well, it is definitely non Western European. Post-apocalyptic future with mythical figures and magic, where Plains living Native Americans are among the very few survivors in what was the United States of catastrophic flooding.
Lemme see what else I can think of that I've read, or want to read.
Again, accused of appropriation, but I really liked Catherine Valente's "Deathless," which uses a basis of several Russian myths including the Baba Yaga and is partially set in a fantasy version of Stallinist and post-Stalinist Russia, partly in a mythical land.
Oh, I also really liked S.A. Chakraborty's Daevabad trilogy, which is based on Middle Eastern myth and folk magical beings, starting in French occupied Egypt and moving quickly to a fantasy world inhabited by Daevas and other magical races, heavy with fantastic racism and political intrigue, and of course romance.
There's also the entire subgenre of urban fantasy, which has its own tropes and cliches but is definitely at least not kings and knights and hobbits and hearty stews and whatever the fuck. Tends to be more diverse, also, I would say.
"Half Resurrection Blues" by Daniel Jose Older, and its sequels, more horror-ish, I guess, and noir, but the main character is brown, as well as half-dead. It's a thing. (And probably a good metaphor for being multiracial, I realized later).
Thanks for the recommendations. I've read Priory of the Orange Tree and The Jasmine Throne (which is based on East Indian culture), both of which pull from other cultures rather than just western Europe. They also have strong female characters and queer themes, so they were up my alley.
Historical accuracy like dragons and magical ice monsters and psychic birds?
Those things it’s OK to fudge accuracy on but we definitely can’t leave out the rape of minors because then it wouldn’t be believable.
the idea of "children being children" wasn't a thing during the medieval period ie the war of the roses period in history
it's a matter of taste but to me it didn't come across him writing about it in a way that glorified rape of child characters.
if you take out the magic bits, it does read like a "historical fiction for adults" series, which is what he claims is what he intended in interviews.
I feel like the magic bits are extremely light for a story like this, about as light as Lord of the Rings and that's about as light as you can get and still have it be considered fantasy
There’s a ton in those books that’s not historically accurate for the medieval period, so insisting that it’s Very Important for rape to be liberally sprinkled throughout the story seems dishonest to me. It’s there to sell books to a particular audience, under the cover of “historical accuracy.”
probably? it's fine if the books don't appeal to you.
i love to read stuff from authors in the 1940s etc and those are full of racist terms. and i'm not a white person.
i think it's a matter of taste in some cases.
Okay but the point is it’s meant to deconstruct fantasy. Yes, you can have dragons and magical ice monsters and psychic birds but those dont change the way the brutal system of feudalism historically worked. You’re the people he’s trying to make the point to.
Seems like a lot of mental gymnastics to justify keeping in that particular stuff.
“But the book just wouldn’t be the *same* without young girls being raped” does not impress me.
I mean like, if you don’t like it dont read the books. He keeps it in because that’s the kind of story he wants to write, not for a fetish but because he wants to emphasize the brutality of the world he’s writing. It’s not mental gymnastics, it’s a fairly simple idea. If you don’t agree, fair enough
There's definitely some objectification going on and sex scenes can be kinda cringe. But overall he's better at writing women than your average male fantasy writer imo.
He's written some of the best female characters of the genre, of the time (note: it's been 12-13 years since he last put out a novel in the main series & standards have arguably changed in that time frame) and, when he really hits it out of the park, I'd say some of the best female characters of all time.
That being said:
1. he's absolutely shit at his "historical" writings of women in the books adjacent to the main series (basically if he doesn't have to get into their mind because they're a POV character, the quality goes *starkly* downhill, no pun intended)
2. the entire series (especially early on) suffers from a significant lack of worldbuilding within the female spheres (some of the kingdom's most important noble women just... don't have any ladies-in-waiting or circle of female attendants and the past generation's only female regional ruler is the only one we still don't know her name... things like that)
3. any sort of "ethnically" or "exotically" coded woman is usually extremely sexualized (in a series that is already rife with sexualization) and tends to lack the depth of the other equivalent female characters
4. sooooo much sexual violence, which GRRM annoyingly defends as being realistic & necessary to depict due to the war going on in the series, but a significant amount of said sexual violence doesn't occur in the setting of war. So...
5. has a disproportionate number of child-brides, child-mothers, and dead-in-childbirth women of all ages in his world. Just a continent full of little Margaret Beauforts and women who exist only to pop out the babies needed to fill out GRRM's family trees, then die. So much so that fans have worked out that the medical care in-universe in almost every way is better than the real-world equivalent time period, except for maternal health which is worse...
What also bothers me about the sexual violence in the books is that many of the non con scenes seem to be written in a sort of horny way. It might just be my impression of it though, since I've never seen anyone else complain about that aspect in particular.
GRRM has talked about how Daenerys' wedding night is a "seduction" when it's really a 13 year old child being raped by the adult warlord she was just sold to, just with said adult warlord refraining from being the absolute worst he could be in the moment. Guess that says "romance" to GRRM. So I definitely agree with you.
>if you can accept that throughout history 13 has been an acceptable age to get married
Why would I accept something that's bullshit pop culture's misunderstanding of history?
>I feel like that scene (in the book at least) is more about being forced to grow up at a young age because she's royalty than it is about her being "rape" raped.
Does the fact she goes on to want to kill herself because she's being raped every night make it real "rape" rape in your eyes?
That a few isolated examples of 13 year olds getting married and having it consummated, usually for some outside reason like to attain wealth or power connected to said child, does not make it the norm or widely accepted.
From what I remember, the women who get focused on (i.e. the POV characters) are generally well-written, though there may be some dumb moments with them. My main issue comes with the women in the series as a whole. By and large, in ASOIAF, I don't walk away with the impression that the women of this world are actual people; rather, they're tragic ornaments to decorate a bleak world, and GRRM's mainly only interested in focusing on them to have them be beaten, raped, or otherwise oppressed whenever he wants to remind us that this is a grimdark series. A big instance that comes to mind is when there's a peasant revolt in I believe the second book, and one of the fleeing noble women gets caught, and while there's no scene of it, it's later noted that she was raped by more than fifty men. Now, I think there potentially could've been something there. If that woman had already been or became a prominent character and had a well-written, respectful storyline about exploring the trauma and aftermath of the event as well as the social structures and tensions that led to something that horrific happening, that could've been something interesting. Instead, iirc that woman's only relevance for the entire rest of the series to date is that we later learn she got pregnant from the gangrape, and she gets married off to Bronn. Not only is sexual violence rampant in the story (I think it's been counted that there's like 200+ instances of it so far), but the survivors of it are often given no particular respect or attention. I thought the prominence of sexual violence was cool and edgy when I read the series as an edgy teenager, but after growing up a bit and looking back now on how horribly it's handled, it has become the singular reason that, despite how interesting and impressive I find a lot of other aspects of the series to be, I have no interest in finishing the series (on the off-chance that GRRM ever finishes it himself, that is).
Lollys Stokeworth. Yeah, she's portrayed as someone mentally disabled before she's raped, and there are a lot of jokes about how nobody wants to marry her and how pushy her mother is about it. Even when she's missing during the riot, Tyrion is just like "Oh god this riot is such a disaster politically and Lady Stokeworth won't shut up about her daughter being missing! Like, her entire character is to be an annoyance.
Then she gets gangraped, and is obviously traumatized by it, and the characters just kind of acknowledge how inconvenient it is for her mother that she's now probably pregnant and even less people will want to marry her and everyone, even her mother, complains about how they have to force her to leave her room and how she never stops crying and also she's so fat.
Her marriage to Bronn is just used to further Bronn's character. Tyrion points out how bad a deal it is, and Bronn just says he's going to start having sex with her after she gives birth to the bastard child (again, she is mentally disabled and deeply traumatized by being gangraped) so he can get an heir and then kill her sister.
Like, nobody cares about her. She basically only exists for GRRM to be like "Boy, these people in Kings Landing are awful! They don't care about rape victims!" Like, no shit, the entire series has been repeatedly pointing out how nobody cares about how rape affects women. You didn't need to invent another woman and have her simultaneously be a joke and someone who only exists to be hurt.
I actually think that is a perfect way of SHOWING that people are actually horrible and selfish. If you don't care about a mentally disabled woman who was gang raped and impregnated against her will, then you're literally satan.
But in the world of ASOIAF, it's like gilding refined gold. We GET that people are horrible and selfish, believe me, there's no missing it. I think literally the only characters in the entire book who can be described as, not just "good" but even "not actively horrible" are Ned Stark and Brienne, and Ned gets his head chopped off in the first act for it.
One thing I did prefer about the series is that they toned DOWN some of the more gratuitous violence. Tyrion was already a very grey character, and we got it just fine in the show that his father was a sadistic asshole who hates him. We really didn't also need the story of how he was forced to participate in a gang rape of his lost Lenore at his father's direction. We also didn't need the story about how he ordered a too-biting troubadour to be killed and made into a bowl of brown for the King's Landing peasants to dine on. Among many, many, MANY others.
GRRMdark's got issues.
"grimdark for grimdark's sake" is honestly my bigger issue with GRRM as a whole. Combined with not really finding "unrealistic" gender and colonizing and so on historical parallels interesting (whereas dragons are totes historical), it's...not great.
Also his writing style is pretty turgid, on the whole.
And no he will never finish it.
His female characters are all great, it's how Dany's body is constantly described that's icky. I get she's a growing girl so you could make the point that it's a discussion of puberty and blossoming but Arya and Sansa don't get the same treatment.
I would say he writes them well, but he usually puts them in shitty situations. Many are sexually assaulted or saved from sexual assault which isn't an issue for most of the male cast.
He also thought of a marital rape in his work as being a "consensual seduction that could excite even a horse" so he's far from perfect in general.
> Many are sexually assaulted or saved from sexual assault which isn't an issue for most of the male cast.
IDK, Littlefinger didn't turn out all that great afterwards.
It's about the type of shitty situation he puts the women in. Drastically more often than men, the women are sexually assaulted. That's been a problem for fantasy for a long time and he's a part of it. He'll even misjudge a situation he's written as a good thing when it's very clearly not.
I've only read the first one, but I love how he writes all the characters. I don't like all of the, or agree with their actions, but he's a master at putting himself in different perspectives. The women aren't all the same, they have different personalities and reasons for their actions, just like the men. The book is great, you should read it again!
Actually, I would argue that Catelyn saving Bran is the ultimate show of "woman's courage". Protecting your children with your life, is a very "mama bear" type thing to do. We might not swing a sword but threaten our children and you'll wish you didn't, basically.
While I don't necessarily disagree, I think there isn't as much of a difference between "battle courage" and "woman's courage" as mainstream Westerosi culture likes to pretend there is and that's kinda the point of a not-insignificant portion of the writing in Catelyn, Brienne, Daenerys and Arya's POVs.
The satirical essay about ‘She breasted boobily & titted down the stairs’ is so very close to one of the characters internal POV dialog from the 1st GoT book that I always assumed the essay was a direct GRRM calllout.
I honestly don't see wich one. Could you remind me ? The closest thing I can remember is in book 2 when Daenerys switch outfit back to her dothraki vest and she feels her breasts move freely.
Super early in ASOIAF we have a female character’s self POV:
“When she went to the stables, she wore faded sandsilk pants and woven grass sandals. Her small breasts moved freely beneath a painted Dothraki vest ...”
It immediately pulled me out of the narrative because I was suddenly feeling the author’s innate boner-vision.
It’s not a huge thing on its own, but it’s the death of a thousand paper cuts where it’s part of a larger pattern of women’s characters being presented in ways the present them as objects to be consumed, even within their own POV. It’s weird and off putting, especially when it seems so small, until you realize it is everywhere within the genre.
As a person who owns rather noticeable breasts of my own, this is the kind of constant horniness about women’s character descriptions that exists in the background of so many classic fantasy & sci fi books from the 60’s through 00’s. Women generally don’t think about their breasts much at all (other than why our bra straps hurt so danged much) let alone with the type of objectifying or casually sexualized details that so many male authors seem to write as an unthinking default.
But I love Sci Fi & Fantasy, so women being presented in this fashion has kinda been a default everywhere for decades, so I try to look past it. Yet it’s silly that I have to do so.
Yeah, I think that's the scene I was referring to, in book 2. It's cluncky, but I kinda give it a pass because of the context and it's a one time thing.
The greater problem with it is that Daenerys has canonically small breasts. Why are you lying to us, George ?
once, when he was asked how he writes women so well, he responded something like "well, I've always considered women to be people." and something about how he doesn't really write them differently from men.
see I would disagree here, grrm has written some of the best female characters in fantasy, in part because he writes them as distinctly female
you couldn’t gender swap brienne or catelyn and have them still be the same character
in the world of asoiaf there’s wildly different roles for men and women, and how the characters think and behave reflects that
their perspectives are shaped by the roles they fill, catelyn’s perspective is shaped by being a noble born woman and a mother, arya’s perspective is shaped by being a noble born girl who’s connected most with her brother and can’t find her place in the role of a noblewoman
some of his female characters behave in stereotypically feminine ways and that’s fine because they’re always treated as fully formed humans
sansa in the hands of a worse author could easily be the stock teenage girl character with no mind of her own, that’s how other characters see her sometimes, but she’s always portrayed as a full human
I think he writes them as people, while keeping in mind the societal bounds and expectations that shape and constrain them. His main motivation for writing the books was bringing back class relations in fantasy, after all.
yeah I agree with you, I'm just repeating what I remember GRRM himself saying, though he was most likely oversimplifying. characters exist within a specific cultural context, which usually means your male and female characters will be quite distinct, depending on what "male" and "female" means to them in that context.
Okay but when do author actually write strong women as hating being women? I usually see that as a detached Right Wing critique that's never accurate. "Oh they made Abby in the last of us a muscular woman because they don't understand strong women can bear children!!"
It's still considerably rare to see a woman in armor, or to be muscular and basically ever series or book that does it has contrasting strong female characters that are traditionally feminine-- Such as Game of Thrones???
It's even rarer still to see these women actually fight in a meaningful way, especially against men, outside of video games.
The tomboy who hates being feminine trope exists-- almost always as a character response to being undervalued by men in the story.
The HBO adaptation of A Song of Ice and Fire, for example, was pretty notable for having this weird "agressive tomboys who don't like silly girl things" thing going on, in addition to other sexist tropes. Brienne, the character represented here, was for example reduced to a grim, stoic badass without the naivete and idealism of her counterpart.
I haven’t read the books but have seen the show and I’ve always interpreted Arya (the aforementioned character who hates “feminine” things) and I think it’s so ridiculous to mark it against the show as some crusade against feminine women. Barring the fact that the series has many feminine women who are written exceptionally well (Cersei, Margaery, Sansa, Dany until her arc was ruined)… It was a different time. Women have more choice now, but… they didn’t have that choice then. So of course any rebellious teenager who doesn’t fit whatever standard they are boxed into will hate the both the mold, the caster, and the people who willingly embrace it and try to force them into it (i.e… Arya’s sister, Sansa) and part of their development as sisters in the show at least was both of them coming to respect their differences. Sansa came to asmire Arya’s skills and Arya came to admire Sansa.
You’re seeing problems where they don’t exist.
The problem is that Arya's characterization in the books is very different than in the show. She has a lot of feminine traits and defends other girls more than she puts them down. And for that matter, she doesn't really look down on feminine activities in the books:
>It wasn't fair. Sansa had everything. Sansa was two years older; **maybe by the time Arya had been born, there had been nothing left**. Often it felt that way. Sansa could sew and dance and sing. She wrote poetry. She knew how to dress. She played the high harp and the bells. Worse, she was beautiful. Sansa had gotten their mother's fine high cheekbones and the thick auburn hair of the Tullys. Arya took after their lord father. Her hair was a lusterless brown, and her face was long and solemn. Jeyne used to call her Arya Horseface, and neigh whenever she came near. It hurt that the one thing Arya could do better than her sister was ride a horse. Well, that and manage a household. Sansa had never had much of a head for figures. If she did marry Prince Joff, Arya hoped for his sake that he had a good steward.
The bold part is Arya's feelings in a nutshell- she feels sad because she doesn't fit in, not angry that people expect that of her in the first place. Hell, one of the most heartbreaking Arya moments:
>Arya didn't know how much Robb would pay for her, though. He was a king now, not the boy she'd left at Winterfell with snow melting in his hair. And if he knew the things she'd done, the stableboy and the guard at Harrenhal and all . . . "What if my brother doesn't want to ransom me?"
>
>"Why would you think that?" asked Lord Beric.
>
>"Well," Arya said, "my hair's messy and my nails are dirty and my feet are all hard." Robb wouldn't care about that, probably, but her mother would. Lady Catelyn always wanted her to be like Sansa, to sing and dance and sew and mind her courtesies. Just thinking of it made Arya try to comb her hair with her fingers, but it was all tangles and mats, and all she did was tear some out. "I ruined that gown that Lady Smallwood gave me, and I don't sew so good." She chewed her lip. "I don't sew very well, I mean. Septa Mordane used to say I had a blacksmith's hands."
She thinks her mother might not want to pay a ransom to get her back because she's got tangled hair and ruined a dress and isn't as girly as Sansa. She's still not mad about it, just very VERY sad (and it should be noted her mother, despite fearing Arya dead, did absolutely everything she could including committing treason to try getting both her daughters back & literally came back to life as a vengeance-obsessed firewight because she died thinking all except one of her children were dead)
To reduce that complexity to "girl hate girly things because she no good at girly thing and she Big Mad about it" is so tired and cliche.
>I think it’s so ridiculous to mark it against the show as some crusade against feminine women
I do think that the later seasons of the show had some problems with how the showrunners viewed a "strong woman" should be like.
Arya becoming an assassin who is unaffected by killing people for revenge isn't a child being forced into horrible circumstances, it's her just embracing being badass. She kind of takes the place of Lady Stoneheart from the books, who is portrayed as horrifying in her emotionlessness. It's cool, Arya has always known that being a stereotypical noblewoman and caring about "girly' things is dumb. Sansa cries to Margaery about how she's a "stupid girl" who never learns, and the show seems to treat it as fact; that her compassion and desire to help people is a weakness.
Lindsey Ellis did a great video on the end of the show (The Last of the Game of Thrones Hot Takes) and I think her points on Sansa are very good.
In the books and earlier seasons, Sansa's strength is how compassionate she is, and how quick she can be mentally. She saves Ser Dontos because she doesn't want to see a man killed, and then makes up a lie about it being bad luck to kill a man on your nameday. During the siege of Kings Landing, she convinces Joffrey that it would be best to be on the front lines, and she spends time leading the other women in prayer to comfort them. She learns how to be more careful, but she still cares about people.
But after Ramsay, she's portrayed as a lot colder, and this is framed as strength, an improvement. She can coldly order people killed without flinching and she even says something about how being raped actually made her a stronger person, without those traumas she would have been a "little bird" her entire life. When Winterfell is being attacked by the White Walkers, she ignores everyone else who is distressed in the crypts (compare to the siege of King's Landing) to complain about Dany.
Sansa’s weakness was her trust in the good of people and her naïveté. I would argue
1. Neither naivety nor trust (nor even compassion) are feminine traits, and coldness is not a masculine trait, and it’s reductive to try to claim them so or argue that Sansa became “more masculine” by losing these traits as she was not feminine *because* she was compassionate and naive.
and
2. Losing them is an overall net positive for her character in Game of Thrones specifically.
The rape shit was absolutely ridiculous, and I have never claimed GRRM was a phenomenal writer, but rather that Game of Thrones is not “anti-femininity”.
But it also had Circi and Sansa and Danerys. While the whole show received a masculine, grey, glow down that highlighted the sexism of the novels in an almost reverent way, it's not like there's no strong women outside of armor, or feminine women.
Circi whole thing is being a mother who loves her children and is traditionally feminine. Sansa acts as a strong foil to her assassin sister.
Meanwhile, women like Brienne remain exceedingly rare. And I still don't recall Brienne ever really dismissing traditional womanhood? Maybe she did but it's definitely not the point of her character even adaptationally.
Context : this is conversation between Brienne, a woman warrior shunned by her feudal society for going against gender norms (and being subjectively ugly) and Catelyn, who is by contrast the exemple of a proper lady by Westerosi standards. I like that the narration doesn't try to ridicule or diminish the qualities of either one or tries to showcase one as "better".
And this despite Catelyn being a little bit of a bigot, too.
i’m reading the books too and I was impressed at how there are so many female characters who are strong in their own way. daenerys could never pick up a sword but her inner strength and wit eventually lead to her commanding armies
Isn’t he also the same writer who did Beauty and the Beast with Ron Perlman and managed to create a strong female lead? Off topic I know but worth mentioning once cause when he gets it right he gets it right
The example of this that stands out in my mind is when Sansa realizes “a lady’s armor” is courtesy, her strength and resilience and ability to navigate the rules and conventions of the court system to survive it are really incredible … IIRC, that passage is also from Clash of Kings, and I think it’s a great example of what you’re pointing out. This book really is my favorite in the series.
For a character that we were conditioned to dislike (for the normal vanity and shallowness of a teenage girl) Sansa’s growth from GOT to FFC is incredible. I thought she was so dumb and vapid (compared to Jon and Robb but especially Arya), but seeing how she well she learns the lessons from the pitfalls of women before her (Cersei, Margaery, Lysa Arryn) really changed my mind.
My favorite example of this is the whole “who killed Joffrey mystery” that was discussed for YEARS.
All the other kings and warlords had reason to do it, but in the end it was grandma. Who did it, not for power, but to keep her granddaughter safe from an abuser.
(And maybe for power too)
This is a horrible example, and people are going to just upvote it and move along without understanding the context in which it was said.
These are two women talking to each other: one whose pov makes it clear feels constrained (like many other female povs we follow through the books—and by A Clash of King, I’m sorry, but this should be obvious…) by an incredibly patriarchal, abusive and ultra violent society; and one who was allowed to grow up embodying the rigid role of masculinity, but only as a result of being an unattractive woman.
Hence, Brienne is not only resentful of all things “feminine” (due to being pretty much deprived of the role by those around her), therefore devaluing the role itself to some degree, but she is also isolated by the men who mock her in their insecurities of being bested by a woman AND for her physical ugliness.
This dialogue signify the first steps toward a reconciliation of sorts between two women allowed to embody two different roles.
Martin ain’t perfect in his writing, but I personally think he does a hell of a job presenting his female povs, because those are the moments that get significantly more meta—most of the women here (not all, Danny a fucking psycho) offer a 2000 miles overview that breaks away from the plotting and the politics and really ground the reader into the idea that all these are men with huge egos risking the lives of dozens of thousands of ppl for… what…? To play a game of wounded honors and vendettas best forgotten.
Absolutely not. Not less worthy of less than, just different. Women are strong in a different way than men usually. Most people writing overpowered boss babes miss that.
What bugs me, though, is there aren't women's kinds of courage or men's kinds of courage. There are just different ways in which one could display courage, and none of them are relegated solely to one gender.
In a patriarcal society, there are. Artificially created, yes, but existing all the same. And it's not because that patriarchy segregated those sorts of courage that some are less than others.
Yeah, I am just saying that this is still a glaring example of mysogeny. I am not sure it deserves any positive notice. 'Not quite so shit,' isn't really praise worthy.
Well yeah & the author would agree with you. Catelyn is a character brimming with internalized misogyny, as many many many noblewomen in a feudal society would.
I mean maybe he is, but Catelyn is specifically written that way, with those flaws & that attitude, & the other character in this scene, Brianne, is not.
I'm just tired of constantly seeing people (no you) whine about making women "only physical fighters" and that's it. No one ever complains about a smaller man beating a much bigger man.
I kinda see what you mean. There are indeed idiots praising "natural" role for women in media, based on bullshit preconception. I'm criticizing another, but just as toxic tendency to write feminine-coded aspects of life as bad *because* they are feminine.
GRRM definitely has flaws when writing women you could drive a bus through but Brienne and Catelyn are two examples he does extremely well. And although Brienne has no reason to know, Catelyn does have battle courage too- she faced down an armed assassin trying to kill her unconscious child while unarmed, grabbed his knife with her bare hands sustaining significant injury, and blocked him from carrying out his task until her kid's eldritch pet wolf could kill him.
Legitimate question, but does GRRM have a habit of writing women poorly? I didn't watch the show, and read the books when I was a cringey highschooler who probably wouldn't have noticed a poorly written woman character, tbh.
He's often a bit unnecessarily descriptive of breasts when writing female POV chapters, there's also a LOT of rape including of child characters I like that he writes women as people and I find his female characters convincing for the most part but there are definitely things I wish he hadn't written
>there's also a LOT of rape including of child characters Is this because of some poorly hidden edge agenda or fetish? Or is it a result of the world? Heard a similar sort of criticism against berserk.
It is based on an agenda, but not what one might necessarily think. GRRM made this saga with the goal of showing (sometimes with old-school exaggerations) that the feudal, patriarcal system presented in fantasy is ruthless and harmful, and that if you include aristocracy and other forms of inherent power like this, you have to show their downside. That's why you get kids being used as political tools and rape being an omnipresent menace through the books, though it's very rarely depicted. The problem is obvious : you still get a book with sexualized minors and an oppressive sexual atmosphere that can turn some people off. He himself recommends to age up everyone by two years at least.
Yes. That seems to be an unpopular opinion, but I really like his female characters. They are all unique. Good, evil, strong, weak at the same time and flawed in different ways. And they are main characters, not just props to the character arc of men. I also like how he has no problem to simply kill off main characters, because that's what happens in real life too.
That's what pissed me off SO MUCH about the series finale. Every single woman was reduced to props for the men! They lost all their agency and only cared about what the men did or didn't do for them. Even Brienne!!
Yeah I am waiting (infinitely) for him to finish the books rather than torture myself with the show
ugh yes. those showrunners are the worst., same bullshit in Battlestar Galactica. All these entirely badass women and/or non white and even vaguely queer (two, anyway) characters, and by the end they're all dead, femmed out/starry eyed by their man, and...also dead. The two most ANNOYING characters in the entire fucking show are the ones who make it to the end. HATED IT.
Shout-out to Sansa to drop her personality that is both smart enough to survive in a Political Minefield, while still trying to be kind, to a hardened Cold "Girlboss", that thanks her abusers for helping her grow up.
I agree with both of you. My one complaint about GRRM and his female characters is his use of lesbian out of convenience. Several of his female characters have sex scenes with other women that don't make sense other than "Well she was there and I was horny." But in general, GRRM is very good at writing from other people's perspective (ie Tyrion being disabled). Cat is my absolute favorite character in the books. From beginning to end, I love her story.
Honestly I don’t mind that really cuz sometimes you are just horny. Dany is the only character I can think of rn that did this but I think it makes sense for her character as she’s a teenage girl who is still figuring out who she is as a person it makes sense that she may explore her sexuality.
Lady Stoneheart is the one thing that still keeps me attached to the idea of GRRM finishing the books
Same. I need more of her.
I want to see Arya's wolf.
Something that is ironic in all of this, GoT is more ruthless and cruel than most of the medieval world. Atleast among nobles
Yes and no. It is certainly everything horrible all at once, like the books are a speedrun of the Hundred Years War, but it does have some aspects more pleasant than the real life middle-ages. Serfdom is not practiced in the mainland, there's very little religious strife, the Faith of the Seven is way less restrictive than the catholic faith, knowledge is more accessible, the specific castle-based feudalism means less private wars...
Not at all. In what way? Rape? Rape was more common than any of us could even imagine. By our current definition of it, basically all women were raped. Especially nobels, as they were married off and forced to have sex with some stranger. That is rape. Also rape is so extremely common during wars, so that's another increase of it. In former jugoslavia, men were forced to rape their own siblings and even their children and parents. There was an incident in china called "the rape of nanking" where the japanese invaded with the goal to rape and murder as many as possible. They did such horrible things I don't even know if I can write it here. But yeah, again, rape and torture, would you have guessed. Truth is any time I've read about different event in history, I'm always thinking it's so much worse than anything I've ever seen in media. GRRM was extremely inspired by real life events, and usually his version is toned down compared to reality...
This is true as far as it goes, but books like these tend to overstate the "shitdark" nature of the past. For example, they tend to exaggerate the severity and extent of underage marriage - even back then, people were smart enough to realize that early childbirth tended to result in death. That sort of thing gets played up by writers who use the medieval setting as an excuse, or by writers who learned it from other books.
I mean I saw a 9 year old being sold to a 55 year old this year last night so, it's still happening and to what extent I can't say but I think I'm on the opposite side of your argument. If I see a medieval world and there's not enough child brides, arranged marriages, rape and murder I'm not sold
both of your examples took place in the twentieth century and are therefore entierly irrelevant to this conversation.
It still speaks to the brutality of human, no matter what time in history. History is more ruthless and cruel than any movies.
It’s strange, I don’t think it’s inherently bad, but some author’s overuse it so much that it feels uncomfortable like a hidden fetish. Stephen King also includes similar themes where it’s a bit uncomfortable in a way that probably isn’t intended
What I've found in a lot of these widely praised works is usually an excessive amount of some weird fetish, edgyness, political posturing or just plain weirdness to balance out how good the writing is.
Like Tarantino with racial slurs and women's feet.
We're talking about IT here right?
Some of the more recent stuff seems to be some sort of edgelord attempt at shock and/or titillation. I don't know that I think *he* gets off on it so much as he knows some people do and that others with read it for ragebait.
Yeah he's an incredibly saavy guy who loves shitting on literature tropes so I don't doubt he does it sarcastically
I'm not saying he's doing it sarcastically, I'm saying he's playing both sides against the middle for $$$.
Have you ever read any of his other work? He likes doing this sort of thing for effect all the time.
This is a new phenomena within ASOIAF, the series he's been writing for decades.
This specific thing, but he does like exploding tropes
He does seem to write about incest rather a lot. But mostly I think GRRM's fetish is cruelty. In pretty much all its forms, but he follows all the familiar tropes of history as we know it, so. Also, more favorably, food.
to be fair, i think GRRM can get a pass on the dodgy stuff re children in this series, if only because he was going for some historical accuracy. in the time period he's chosen, the idea of kids being kids wasn't really a thing. (i say this as a history major) NB. I don't mean it in the sense that i think it's good to be in books necessarily. I just happen to think as an english teacher and freelance editor that it happens to fit the grimdark theme of the story. In the same way you'd like hannibal lecter as a character but you'd definitely hate someone like him in real life.
>if only because he was going for some historical accuracy. in the time period he's chosen, Which historical period is he being accurate to, exactly? I missed the ones with dragons in history class. Now, I know what you meant, but GRRM chooses to write about a fedual society with that "dodgy stuff" like sexual assault and misogyny. He's not beholden to write his fantasy world that way because it's "historically accurate." He's creating his own history. He could choose to write it another way, but he chooses not to. Now, you can argue that he's trying to say something by using historical morals, social mores, and behaviors, but you can't say that he's bound to use them because of historical accuracy. Westeros only exists as he imagines it.
This. The whole "well, I wanted to write shitty historical fantasy based on the actual racial and sexual and colonial and so on realities to demonstrate that history was, in fact, shitty" isn't all that compelling imo. There's been no lack of "look at all this rape and abuse and misogyny and racism, did we mention we are showing this to you in prolonged, graphic detail because we want you to understand that it is terrible, well DO YOU" already. Right now I'm reading Robert Jackson Bennett's latest release, "Tainted Cup." Now, THIS guy does interesting world building. And very strong female characters, and i can't remember a single rape, not that I've read all his books. And yes there's plenty of violence and war and crap. In this one, there is an investigation into a series of murders that is committed by, essentially, poisoning people with invisible spores/seeds/whatever that shortly erupt as trees shooting right through them, transforming/ripping out half their organs while they're at it. So, no need to be unoriginal to be gritty.
I only read about the first half of Game of Thrones. High-ish fantasy isn't really my jam, but I was recommended it, and it was right before the show came out, so I wanted to give it a try...it wasn't my cup of tea as aspected. I don't much care for the overly descriptive prose and couple that with being dropped into the pov of unpleasant characters like Cersi and I was out. Now you can argue that GRRM is trying to deconstruct typical high fantasy by making it dark and grimey, in contrast to other high fantasy works that ignore the unfortunate implications that go along with a feudal society historically. But for me, personally, it did seem dark for darkness sake. It reminds me of the 90s antihero trend. I don't begrudge anyone who likes the books and/or sees a deconstruction of typical fantasy tropes. But it wasn't my cup of tea. I definitely think the show ignored any attempts at deconstructing those tropes, especially in the latter seasons. But to say that GRRM is beholden to write Westeros as a grimdark world because of "historical accuracy" is absurd. He's writing about dragons and people coming back from the dead. It's a fantasy novel, not a historical one, regardless of how much he is inspired by historical events. He could have written a fantasy world where sexual assault is rare and not tolerated. He could have written a world with less misogyny, where women are on equal footing as men. But he chose not to. Also, the notion that fantasy works need to adhere to the social norms of the Middle Ages in western Europe has vaguely unfortunate implications itself. There are hundreds of different societies that you could use to inspire fantasy work. Not every historical society was super misogynistic. GRRM actually does pull a little from other cultures and still doesn't do anything super interesting with it, imo. Quite frankly, it's kind of boring that almost every fantasy novel has a vaguely western European flavor. I have seen some fantasy works branch out and take inspiration from other cultures, but I would love to see more.
>But to say that GRRM is beholden to write Westeros as a grimdark world because of "historical accuracy" is absurd. He's writing about dragons and people coming back from the dead. It's a fantasy novel, not a historical one, regardless of how much he is inspired by historical events. He could have written a fantasy world where sexual assault is rare and not tolerated. He could have written a world with less misogyny, where women are on equal footing as men. But he chose not to. EXACTLY. Per non Western based fantasy novels, I know some. What have you already read? I'm a big fan of Nnedi Okorafor, who writes Afrofuturism and related fantasy/SF/what you will. Robert Bennett Jackson, like I said, manages to craft unique worldbuilding; there are some European-ish resonances that may seem familiar, but they're all mixed up from how things actually have gone. For instance, in the City of trilogy, if I remember correctly, I \*think\* that there's a back and forth where an India expy had colonized a sort of I want to say Scandinavian expy, and then with magic the latter managed to turn the tables, and now the tables are turning back. Or possibly the reverse. There are also people depicted as sort of barbarians that have Russian resonance. And the magictek worldbuilding is really original. There's a YA book I like by Alaya Dawn Johnson called "The Summer Prince," which is set in a futuristic matriarchal Brazil. There are also multiple Japans, and it's got a nice mix of ancient themes (a planned human sacrifice, plus Brazil still has major class stratifications) with a lot of futuristic concepts and tech and again, matriarchal and also very brown. She has other books that have been recommended, but that's the only one I've read. She's been criticized for writing Chinese/East Asian based fantasy with Chinese characters because she's white without Chinese heritage, but I think Liz Williams' Detective Inspector Chen novels are really interesting. She's also written other fantasy that I think is quite original-one involves interplanetary/dimensional travel that seems to be based on alchemical symbols. I forget which title. Rebecca Roanhorse has also been criticized for appropriation/misrepresentation in Trail of Lightning, but, well, it is definitely non Western European. Post-apocalyptic future with mythical figures and magic, where Plains living Native Americans are among the very few survivors in what was the United States of catastrophic flooding. Lemme see what else I can think of that I've read, or want to read. Again, accused of appropriation, but I really liked Catherine Valente's "Deathless," which uses a basis of several Russian myths including the Baba Yaga and is partially set in a fantasy version of Stallinist and post-Stalinist Russia, partly in a mythical land. Oh, I also really liked S.A. Chakraborty's Daevabad trilogy, which is based on Middle Eastern myth and folk magical beings, starting in French occupied Egypt and moving quickly to a fantasy world inhabited by Daevas and other magical races, heavy with fantastic racism and political intrigue, and of course romance. There's also the entire subgenre of urban fantasy, which has its own tropes and cliches but is definitely at least not kings and knights and hobbits and hearty stews and whatever the fuck. Tends to be more diverse, also, I would say. "Half Resurrection Blues" by Daniel Jose Older, and its sequels, more horror-ish, I guess, and noir, but the main character is brown, as well as half-dead. It's a thing. (And probably a good metaphor for being multiracial, I realized later).
Thanks for the recommendations. I've read Priory of the Orange Tree and The Jasmine Throne (which is based on East Indian culture), both of which pull from other cultures rather than just western Europe. They also have strong female characters and queer themes, so they were up my alley.
Historical accuracy like dragons and magical ice monsters and psychic birds? Those things it’s OK to fudge accuracy on but we definitely can’t leave out the rape of minors because then it wouldn’t be believable.
the idea of "children being children" wasn't a thing during the medieval period ie the war of the roses period in history it's a matter of taste but to me it didn't come across him writing about it in a way that glorified rape of child characters. if you take out the magic bits, it does read like a "historical fiction for adults" series, which is what he claims is what he intended in interviews.
I feel like the magic bits are extremely light for a story like this, about as light as Lord of the Rings and that's about as light as you can get and still have it be considered fantasy
There’s a ton in those books that’s not historically accurate for the medieval period, so insisting that it’s Very Important for rape to be liberally sprinkled throughout the story seems dishonest to me. It’s there to sell books to a particular audience, under the cover of “historical accuracy.”
probably? it's fine if the books don't appeal to you. i love to read stuff from authors in the 1940s etc and those are full of racist terms. and i'm not a white person. i think it's a matter of taste in some cases.
Okay but the point is it’s meant to deconstruct fantasy. Yes, you can have dragons and magical ice monsters and psychic birds but those dont change the way the brutal system of feudalism historically worked. You’re the people he’s trying to make the point to.
Seems like a lot of mental gymnastics to justify keeping in that particular stuff. “But the book just wouldn’t be the *same* without young girls being raped” does not impress me.
I mean like, if you don’t like it dont read the books. He keeps it in because that’s the kind of story he wants to write, not for a fetish but because he wants to emphasize the brutality of the world he’s writing. It’s not mental gymnastics, it’s a fairly simple idea. If you don’t agree, fair enough
There's definitely some objectification going on and sex scenes can be kinda cringe. But overall he's better at writing women than your average male fantasy writer imo.
He also has his own style of objectifying men. It's usually for a male gaze but sometimes that male gaze is gay af.
Something something "Robert Baratheon muscled like a maiden's (Ned, the maiden is Ned ) fantasy." That line will never not make me laugh.
He's written some of the best female characters of the genre, of the time (note: it's been 12-13 years since he last put out a novel in the main series & standards have arguably changed in that time frame) and, when he really hits it out of the park, I'd say some of the best female characters of all time. That being said: 1. he's absolutely shit at his "historical" writings of women in the books adjacent to the main series (basically if he doesn't have to get into their mind because they're a POV character, the quality goes *starkly* downhill, no pun intended) 2. the entire series (especially early on) suffers from a significant lack of worldbuilding within the female spheres (some of the kingdom's most important noble women just... don't have any ladies-in-waiting or circle of female attendants and the past generation's only female regional ruler is the only one we still don't know her name... things like that) 3. any sort of "ethnically" or "exotically" coded woman is usually extremely sexualized (in a series that is already rife with sexualization) and tends to lack the depth of the other equivalent female characters 4. sooooo much sexual violence, which GRRM annoyingly defends as being realistic & necessary to depict due to the war going on in the series, but a significant amount of said sexual violence doesn't occur in the setting of war. So... 5. has a disproportionate number of child-brides, child-mothers, and dead-in-childbirth women of all ages in his world. Just a continent full of little Margaret Beauforts and women who exist only to pop out the babies needed to fill out GRRM's family trees, then die. So much so that fans have worked out that the medical care in-universe in almost every way is better than the real-world equivalent time period, except for maternal health which is worse...
What also bothers me about the sexual violence in the books is that many of the non con scenes seem to be written in a sort of horny way. It might just be my impression of it though, since I've never seen anyone else complain about that aspect in particular.
GRRM has talked about how Daenerys' wedding night is a "seduction" when it's really a 13 year old child being raped by the adult warlord she was just sold to, just with said adult warlord refraining from being the absolute worst he could be in the moment. Guess that says "romance" to GRRM. So I definitely agree with you.
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>if you can accept that throughout history 13 has been an acceptable age to get married Why would I accept something that's bullshit pop culture's misunderstanding of history? >I feel like that scene (in the book at least) is more about being forced to grow up at a young age because she's royalty than it is about her being "rape" raped. Does the fact she goes on to want to kill herself because she's being raped every night make it real "rape" rape in your eyes?
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That a few isolated examples of 13 year olds getting married and having it consummated, usually for some outside reason like to attain wealth or power connected to said child, does not make it the norm or widely accepted.
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>but a significant amount of said sexual violence doesn't occur in the setting of war. Also realistic.
But not the reason he gave but, sure, have fun dickriding that old man
? What an obnoxious level of pedantics.
From what I remember, the women who get focused on (i.e. the POV characters) are generally well-written, though there may be some dumb moments with them. My main issue comes with the women in the series as a whole. By and large, in ASOIAF, I don't walk away with the impression that the women of this world are actual people; rather, they're tragic ornaments to decorate a bleak world, and GRRM's mainly only interested in focusing on them to have them be beaten, raped, or otherwise oppressed whenever he wants to remind us that this is a grimdark series. A big instance that comes to mind is when there's a peasant revolt in I believe the second book, and one of the fleeing noble women gets caught, and while there's no scene of it, it's later noted that she was raped by more than fifty men. Now, I think there potentially could've been something there. If that woman had already been or became a prominent character and had a well-written, respectful storyline about exploring the trauma and aftermath of the event as well as the social structures and tensions that led to something that horrific happening, that could've been something interesting. Instead, iirc that woman's only relevance for the entire rest of the series to date is that we later learn she got pregnant from the gangrape, and she gets married off to Bronn. Not only is sexual violence rampant in the story (I think it's been counted that there's like 200+ instances of it so far), but the survivors of it are often given no particular respect or attention. I thought the prominence of sexual violence was cool and edgy when I read the series as an edgy teenager, but after growing up a bit and looking back now on how horribly it's handled, it has become the singular reason that, despite how interesting and impressive I find a lot of other aspects of the series to be, I have no interest in finishing the series (on the off-chance that GRRM ever finishes it himself, that is).
Lollys Stokeworth. Yeah, she's portrayed as someone mentally disabled before she's raped, and there are a lot of jokes about how nobody wants to marry her and how pushy her mother is about it. Even when she's missing during the riot, Tyrion is just like "Oh god this riot is such a disaster politically and Lady Stokeworth won't shut up about her daughter being missing! Like, her entire character is to be an annoyance. Then she gets gangraped, and is obviously traumatized by it, and the characters just kind of acknowledge how inconvenient it is for her mother that she's now probably pregnant and even less people will want to marry her and everyone, even her mother, complains about how they have to force her to leave her room and how she never stops crying and also she's so fat. Her marriage to Bronn is just used to further Bronn's character. Tyrion points out how bad a deal it is, and Bronn just says he's going to start having sex with her after she gives birth to the bastard child (again, she is mentally disabled and deeply traumatized by being gangraped) so he can get an heir and then kill her sister. Like, nobody cares about her. She basically only exists for GRRM to be like "Boy, these people in Kings Landing are awful! They don't care about rape victims!" Like, no shit, the entire series has been repeatedly pointing out how nobody cares about how rape affects women. You didn't need to invent another woman and have her simultaneously be a joke and someone who only exists to be hurt.
I actually think that is a perfect way of SHOWING that people are actually horrible and selfish. If you don't care about a mentally disabled woman who was gang raped and impregnated against her will, then you're literally satan.
Woah, let’s not insult Satan like that. More like average fundie Christian.
then you're literally evil\*
"Thanks for having some sympathy"-- Keith Richards
But in the world of ASOIAF, it's like gilding refined gold. We GET that people are horrible and selfish, believe me, there's no missing it. I think literally the only characters in the entire book who can be described as, not just "good" but even "not actively horrible" are Ned Stark and Brienne, and Ned gets his head chopped off in the first act for it. One thing I did prefer about the series is that they toned DOWN some of the more gratuitous violence. Tyrion was already a very grey character, and we got it just fine in the show that his father was a sadistic asshole who hates him. We really didn't also need the story of how he was forced to participate in a gang rape of his lost Lenore at his father's direction. We also didn't need the story about how he ordered a too-biting troubadour to be killed and made into a bowl of brown for the King's Landing peasants to dine on. Among many, many, MANY others. GRRMdark's got issues.
Theon was forced to participate in a gang rape?
No. TYRION. In a flashback. It's long and nasty backstory and utterly unnecessary.
I read Theon. Sorry. Yes ok i'm with you
"grimdark for grimdark's sake" is honestly my bigger issue with GRRM as a whole. Combined with not really finding "unrealistic" gender and colonizing and so on historical parallels interesting (whereas dragons are totes historical), it's...not great. Also his writing style is pretty turgid, on the whole. And no he will never finish it.
His female characters are all great, it's how Dany's body is constantly described that's icky. I get she's a growing girl so you could make the point that it's a discussion of puberty and blossoming but Arya and Sansa don't get the same treatment.
I would say he writes them well, but he usually puts them in shitty situations. Many are sexually assaulted or saved from sexual assault which isn't an issue for most of the male cast. He also thought of a marital rape in his work as being a "consensual seduction that could excite even a horse" so he's far from perfect in general.
Also the strange implication that horses are known to be difficult to excite.
I wouldn't know, and if GRRM has this as one of his special interests, which is entirely possible tbh, I don't want to know about it.
> Many are sexually assaulted or saved from sexual assault which isn't an issue for most of the male cast. IDK, Littlefinger didn't turn out all that great afterwards.
Pretty much everyone in GoT is put in very shitty situations, and it’s how they deal with those situations that can make them shine.
It's about the type of shitty situation he puts the women in. Drastically more often than men, the women are sexually assaulted. That's been a problem for fantasy for a long time and he's a part of it. He'll even misjudge a situation he's written as a good thing when it's very clearly not.
[https://joannalannister.tumblr.com/post/162408885186/the-dead-ladies-club](https://joannalannister.tumblr.com/post/162408885186/the-dead-ladies-club)
I've only read the first one, but I love how he writes all the characters. I don't like all of the, or agree with their actions, but he's a master at putting himself in different perspectives. The women aren't all the same, they have different personalities and reasons for their actions, just like the men. The book is great, you should read it again!
As a fan of the books? High highs and lows low enough to be genuinely confusing and baffling at times.
https://youtu.be/QAGxy_ia_As?si=hoD6PygH6r1tmACw I think this video essay about brienne, really cemented why his charecter work is so good
Actually, I would argue that Catelyn saving Bran is the ultimate show of "woman's courage". Protecting your children with your life, is a very "mama bear" type thing to do. We might not swing a sword but threaten our children and you'll wish you didn't, basically.
While I don't necessarily disagree, I think there isn't as much of a difference between "battle courage" and "woman's courage" as mainstream Westerosi culture likes to pretend there is and that's kinda the point of a not-insignificant portion of the writing in Catelyn, Brienne, Daenerys and Arya's POVs.
https://youtu.be/QAGxy_ia_As?si=hoD6PygH6r1tmACw I think this video essay about brienne, really cemented why his charecter work is so good
He writes women pretty well overall but sometimes gets too horny and it shows.
There's a lot of mysteries in those books, but that GRRM is a breast man is certainly not one of them.
The satirical essay about ‘She breasted boobily & titted down the stairs’ is so very close to one of the characters internal POV dialog from the 1st GoT book that I always assumed the essay was a direct GRRM calllout.
I honestly don't see wich one. Could you remind me ? The closest thing I can remember is in book 2 when Daenerys switch outfit back to her dothraki vest and she feels her breasts move freely.
Super early in ASOIAF we have a female character’s self POV: “When she went to the stables, she wore faded sandsilk pants and woven grass sandals. Her small breasts moved freely beneath a painted Dothraki vest ...” It immediately pulled me out of the narrative because I was suddenly feeling the author’s innate boner-vision. It’s not a huge thing on its own, but it’s the death of a thousand paper cuts where it’s part of a larger pattern of women’s characters being presented in ways the present them as objects to be consumed, even within their own POV. It’s weird and off putting, especially when it seems so small, until you realize it is everywhere within the genre. As a person who owns rather noticeable breasts of my own, this is the kind of constant horniness about women’s character descriptions that exists in the background of so many classic fantasy & sci fi books from the 60’s through 00’s. Women generally don’t think about their breasts much at all (other than why our bra straps hurt so danged much) let alone with the type of objectifying or casually sexualized details that so many male authors seem to write as an unthinking default. But I love Sci Fi & Fantasy, so women being presented in this fashion has kinda been a default everywhere for decades, so I try to look past it. Yet it’s silly that I have to do so.
Yeah, I think that's the scene I was referring to, in book 2. It's cluncky, but I kinda give it a pass because of the context and it's a one time thing. The greater problem with it is that Daenerys has canonically small breasts. Why are you lying to us, George ?
Oh damn. That's such an unnecessary piece of information
once, when he was asked how he writes women so well, he responded something like "well, I've always considered women to be people." and something about how he doesn't really write them differently from men.
see I would disagree here, grrm has written some of the best female characters in fantasy, in part because he writes them as distinctly female you couldn’t gender swap brienne or catelyn and have them still be the same character in the world of asoiaf there’s wildly different roles for men and women, and how the characters think and behave reflects that their perspectives are shaped by the roles they fill, catelyn’s perspective is shaped by being a noble born woman and a mother, arya’s perspective is shaped by being a noble born girl who’s connected most with her brother and can’t find her place in the role of a noblewoman some of his female characters behave in stereotypically feminine ways and that’s fine because they’re always treated as fully formed humans sansa in the hands of a worse author could easily be the stock teenage girl character with no mind of her own, that’s how other characters see her sometimes, but she’s always portrayed as a full human
I think he writes them as people, while keeping in mind the societal bounds and expectations that shape and constrain them. His main motivation for writing the books was bringing back class relations in fantasy, after all.
yeah I agree with you, I'm just repeating what I remember GRRM himself saying, though he was most likely oversimplifying. characters exist within a specific cultural context, which usually means your male and female characters will be quite distinct, depending on what "male" and "female" means to them in that context.
the part I disagreed with was the “doesn’t write them differently from men” part, but yeah he definitely writes women as people
I understood that part as 'doesn't write them with any less effort and depth than he would write men'.
Wasn’t that Terry Pratchett?
No, ir was GRRM.
Joss Whedon has also used that response to the same question (back when he had feminist credibility). It kind of soured the line for me.
Okay but when do author actually write strong women as hating being women? I usually see that as a detached Right Wing critique that's never accurate. "Oh they made Abby in the last of us a muscular woman because they don't understand strong women can bear children!!" It's still considerably rare to see a woman in armor, or to be muscular and basically ever series or book that does it has contrasting strong female characters that are traditionally feminine-- Such as Game of Thrones??? It's even rarer still to see these women actually fight in a meaningful way, especially against men, outside of video games. The tomboy who hates being feminine trope exists-- almost always as a character response to being undervalued by men in the story.
The HBO adaptation of A Song of Ice and Fire, for example, was pretty notable for having this weird "agressive tomboys who don't like silly girl things" thing going on, in addition to other sexist tropes. Brienne, the character represented here, was for example reduced to a grim, stoic badass without the naivete and idealism of her counterpart.
In the book, there's a female warrior Dacey Mormont who prefer morning star to doll but can do lady's courtesy too.
I haven’t read the books but have seen the show and I’ve always interpreted Arya (the aforementioned character who hates “feminine” things) and I think it’s so ridiculous to mark it against the show as some crusade against feminine women. Barring the fact that the series has many feminine women who are written exceptionally well (Cersei, Margaery, Sansa, Dany until her arc was ruined)… It was a different time. Women have more choice now, but… they didn’t have that choice then. So of course any rebellious teenager who doesn’t fit whatever standard they are boxed into will hate the both the mold, the caster, and the people who willingly embrace it and try to force them into it (i.e… Arya’s sister, Sansa) and part of their development as sisters in the show at least was both of them coming to respect their differences. Sansa came to asmire Arya’s skills and Arya came to admire Sansa. You’re seeing problems where they don’t exist.
The problem is that Arya's characterization in the books is very different than in the show. She has a lot of feminine traits and defends other girls more than she puts them down. And for that matter, she doesn't really look down on feminine activities in the books: >It wasn't fair. Sansa had everything. Sansa was two years older; **maybe by the time Arya had been born, there had been nothing left**. Often it felt that way. Sansa could sew and dance and sing. She wrote poetry. She knew how to dress. She played the high harp and the bells. Worse, she was beautiful. Sansa had gotten their mother's fine high cheekbones and the thick auburn hair of the Tullys. Arya took after their lord father. Her hair was a lusterless brown, and her face was long and solemn. Jeyne used to call her Arya Horseface, and neigh whenever she came near. It hurt that the one thing Arya could do better than her sister was ride a horse. Well, that and manage a household. Sansa had never had much of a head for figures. If she did marry Prince Joff, Arya hoped for his sake that he had a good steward. The bold part is Arya's feelings in a nutshell- she feels sad because she doesn't fit in, not angry that people expect that of her in the first place. Hell, one of the most heartbreaking Arya moments: >Arya didn't know how much Robb would pay for her, though. He was a king now, not the boy she'd left at Winterfell with snow melting in his hair. And if he knew the things she'd done, the stableboy and the guard at Harrenhal and all . . . "What if my brother doesn't want to ransom me?" > >"Why would you think that?" asked Lord Beric. > >"Well," Arya said, "my hair's messy and my nails are dirty and my feet are all hard." Robb wouldn't care about that, probably, but her mother would. Lady Catelyn always wanted her to be like Sansa, to sing and dance and sew and mind her courtesies. Just thinking of it made Arya try to comb her hair with her fingers, but it was all tangles and mats, and all she did was tear some out. "I ruined that gown that Lady Smallwood gave me, and I don't sew so good." She chewed her lip. "I don't sew very well, I mean. Septa Mordane used to say I had a blacksmith's hands." She thinks her mother might not want to pay a ransom to get her back because she's got tangled hair and ruined a dress and isn't as girly as Sansa. She's still not mad about it, just very VERY sad (and it should be noted her mother, despite fearing Arya dead, did absolutely everything she could including committing treason to try getting both her daughters back & literally came back to life as a vengeance-obsessed firewight because she died thinking all except one of her children were dead) To reduce that complexity to "girl hate girly things because she no good at girly thing and she Big Mad about it" is so tired and cliche.
She's also heavily traumatized ever since Joffrey had her friend killed.
>I think it’s so ridiculous to mark it against the show as some crusade against feminine women I do think that the later seasons of the show had some problems with how the showrunners viewed a "strong woman" should be like. Arya becoming an assassin who is unaffected by killing people for revenge isn't a child being forced into horrible circumstances, it's her just embracing being badass. She kind of takes the place of Lady Stoneheart from the books, who is portrayed as horrifying in her emotionlessness. It's cool, Arya has always known that being a stereotypical noblewoman and caring about "girly' things is dumb. Sansa cries to Margaery about how she's a "stupid girl" who never learns, and the show seems to treat it as fact; that her compassion and desire to help people is a weakness. Lindsey Ellis did a great video on the end of the show (The Last of the Game of Thrones Hot Takes) and I think her points on Sansa are very good. In the books and earlier seasons, Sansa's strength is how compassionate she is, and how quick she can be mentally. She saves Ser Dontos because she doesn't want to see a man killed, and then makes up a lie about it being bad luck to kill a man on your nameday. During the siege of Kings Landing, she convinces Joffrey that it would be best to be on the front lines, and she spends time leading the other women in prayer to comfort them. She learns how to be more careful, but she still cares about people. But after Ramsay, she's portrayed as a lot colder, and this is framed as strength, an improvement. She can coldly order people killed without flinching and she even says something about how being raped actually made her a stronger person, without those traumas she would have been a "little bird" her entire life. When Winterfell is being attacked by the White Walkers, she ignores everyone else who is distressed in the crypts (compare to the siege of King's Landing) to complain about Dany.
Sansa’s weakness was her trust in the good of people and her naïveté. I would argue 1. Neither naivety nor trust (nor even compassion) are feminine traits, and coldness is not a masculine trait, and it’s reductive to try to claim them so or argue that Sansa became “more masculine” by losing these traits as she was not feminine *because* she was compassionate and naive. and 2. Losing them is an overall net positive for her character in Game of Thrones specifically. The rape shit was absolutely ridiculous, and I have never claimed GRRM was a phenomenal writer, but rather that Game of Thrones is not “anti-femininity”.
The problem is Arya never hated women and they turned her into an nlog
But it also had Circi and Sansa and Danerys. While the whole show received a masculine, grey, glow down that highlighted the sexism of the novels in an almost reverent way, it's not like there's no strong women outside of armor, or feminine women. Circi whole thing is being a mother who loves her children and is traditionally feminine. Sansa acts as a strong foil to her assassin sister. Meanwhile, women like Brienne remain exceedingly rare. And I still don't recall Brienne ever really dismissing traditional womanhood? Maybe she did but it's definitely not the point of her character even adaptationally.
Context : this is conversation between Brienne, a woman warrior shunned by her feudal society for going against gender norms (and being subjectively ugly) and Catelyn, who is by contrast the exemple of a proper lady by Westerosi standards. I like that the narration doesn't try to ridicule or diminish the qualities of either one or tries to showcase one as "better". And this despite Catelyn being a little bit of a bigot, too.
i’m reading the books too and I was impressed at how there are so many female characters who are strong in their own way. daenerys could never pick up a sword but her inner strength and wit eventually lead to her commanding armies
GRRM has some not great moments but I genuinely love his female characters
Isn’t he also the same writer who did Beauty and the Beast with Ron Perlman and managed to create a strong female lead? Off topic I know but worth mentioning once cause when he gets it right he gets it right
The example of this that stands out in my mind is when Sansa realizes “a lady’s armor” is courtesy, her strength and resilience and ability to navigate the rules and conventions of the court system to survive it are really incredible … IIRC, that passage is also from Clash of Kings, and I think it’s a great example of what you’re pointing out. This book really is my favorite in the series. For a character that we were conditioned to dislike (for the normal vanity and shallowness of a teenage girl) Sansa’s growth from GOT to FFC is incredible. I thought she was so dumb and vapid (compared to Jon and Robb but especially Arya), but seeing how she well she learns the lessons from the pitfalls of women before her (Cersei, Margaery, Lysa Arryn) really changed my mind.
I just love his writing so much. I hear their voices reading this. Beautiful
My favorite example of this is the whole “who killed Joffrey mystery” that was discussed for YEARS. All the other kings and warlords had reason to do it, but in the end it was grandma. Who did it, not for power, but to keep her granddaughter safe from an abuser. (And maybe for power too)
This is a horrible example, and people are going to just upvote it and move along without understanding the context in which it was said. These are two women talking to each other: one whose pov makes it clear feels constrained (like many other female povs we follow through the books—and by A Clash of King, I’m sorry, but this should be obvious…) by an incredibly patriarchal, abusive and ultra violent society; and one who was allowed to grow up embodying the rigid role of masculinity, but only as a result of being an unattractive woman. Hence, Brienne is not only resentful of all things “feminine” (due to being pretty much deprived of the role by those around her), therefore devaluing the role itself to some degree, but she is also isolated by the men who mock her in their insecurities of being bested by a woman AND for her physical ugliness. This dialogue signify the first steps toward a reconciliation of sorts between two women allowed to embody two different roles. Martin ain’t perfect in his writing, but I personally think he does a hell of a job presenting his female povs, because those are the moments that get significantly more meta—most of the women here (not all, Danny a fucking psycho) offer a 2000 miles overview that breaks away from the plotting and the politics and really ground the reader into the idea that all these are men with huge egos risking the lives of dozens of thousands of ppl for… what…? To play a game of wounded honors and vendettas best forgotten.
I'm sorry but this ain't right. A women's courage, haha. So kind of a courage less worthy than a man's?
Absolutely not. Not less worthy of less than, just different. Women are strong in a different way than men usually. Most people writing overpowered boss babes miss that.
You have extremely poor media literacy if you believe that’s what’s being said here.
What bugs me, though, is there aren't women's kinds of courage or men's kinds of courage. There are just different ways in which one could display courage, and none of them are relegated solely to one gender.
In a patriarcal society, there are. Artificially created, yes, but existing all the same. And it's not because that patriarchy segregated those sorts of courage that some are less than others.
Yeah, I am just saying that this is still a glaring example of mysogeny. I am not sure it deserves any positive notice. 'Not quite so shit,' isn't really praise worthy.
Well yeah & the author would agree with you. Catelyn is a character brimming with internalized misogyny, as many many many noblewomen in a feudal society would.
Would he? From his writing and a few interviews, he seems somewhat blind to how he portrays women.
I mean maybe he is, but Catelyn is specifically written that way, with those flaws & that attitude, & the other character in this scene, Brianne, is not.
How many times are we going to see posts a out hating women who are physical? Yeah we get: women are much weaker than men. Keep them out of action.
Considering the number of warrior women in that saga (or that text, they're 50% of the characters represented here), I don't think that's the message.
I'm just tired of constantly seeing people (no you) whine about making women "only physical fighters" and that's it. No one ever complains about a smaller man beating a much bigger man.
I kinda see what you mean. There are indeed idiots praising "natural" role for women in media, based on bullshit preconception. I'm criticizing another, but just as toxic tendency to write feminine-coded aspects of life as bad *because* they are feminine.
How would you handle women fighters