George R.R. Martin On Why There's Violence Against Women On GAME OF THRONES
The rape of Sansa Stark on a recent episode of HBO's Game Of Thrones caused quite a stir, and it wasn't the first time the horrific treatment of a female character on the show received backlash. Now, in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, author George R.R. Martin responds...
Westeros is not a very nice place if you happen to be a woman. It's not a particularly nice place for men either, but the fact remains that in the patriarchal society depicted in HBO's Game Of Thrones and the source novels, the ladies tend to get the grimmest time of it.
Over the course of 5 seasons there have been several instances of sexual violence that stirred up controversy, and the most recent - the rape of Sansa stark by Ramsay Bolton - prompted many fans to claim they were "done" with the show altogether. One of the main issues stemmed from this being yet another example of the showrunners adding a rape scene that didn't occur in the books (at least, not to that particular character), and given what Sansa had already been through prior to that it just proved too much for some to take.
Of course, it's fiction - but as George R.R. Martin explains below, it is also supposed to be an accurate depiction of life in the Middle Ages... just with, y'know, dragons and stuff.
“The books reflect a patriarchal society based on the Middle Ages. The Middle Ages were not a time of sexual egalitarianism. It was very classist, dividing people into three classes. And they had strong ideas about the roles of women. One of the charges against Joan of Arc that got her burned at the stake was that she wore men’s clothing—that was not a small thing. There were, of course, some strong and competent women. It still doesn’t change the nature of the society. And if you look at the books, my heroes and viewpoint characters are all misfits. They’re outliers. They don’t fit the roles society has for them. They’re ‘cripples, bastards, and broken things‘—a dwarf, a fat guy who can’t fight, a bastard, and women who don’t fit comfortably into the roles society has for them (though there are also those who do—like Sansa and Catelyn).
“Now there are people who will say to that, ‘Well, he’s not writing history, he’s writing fantasy—he put in dragons, he should have made an egalitarian society.’ Just because you put in dragons doesn’t mean you can put in anything you want. If pigs could fly, then that’s your book. But that doesn’t mean you also want people walking on their hands instead of their feet. If you’re going to do [a fantasy element], it’s best to only do one of them, or a few. I wanted my books to be strongly grounded in history and to show what medieval society was like, and I was also reacting to a lot of fantasy fiction. Most stories depict what I call the ‘Disneyland Middle Ages’—there are princes and princesses and knights in shining armor, but they didn’t want to show what those societies meant and how they functioned.
“I have millions of women readers who love the books, who come up to me and tell me they love the female characters. Some love Arya, some love Dany, some love Sansa, some love Brienne, some love Cersei—there’s thousands of women who love Cersei despite her obvious flaws. It’s a complicated argument. To be non-sexist, does that mean you need to portray an egalitarian society? That’s not in our history; it’s something for science fiction. And 21st century America isn’t egalitarian, either. There are still barriers against women. It’s better than what it was. It’s not Mad Men any more, which was in my lifetime.
“And then there’s the whole issue of sexual violence, which I’ve been criticized for as well. I’m writing about war, which what almost all epic fantasy is about. But if you’re going to write about war, and you just want to include all the cool battles and heroes killing a lot of orcs and things like that and you don’t portray [sexual violence], then there’s something fundamentally dishonest about that. Rape, unfortunately, is still a part of war today. It’s not a strong testament to the human race, but I don’t think we should pretend it doesn’t exist.
“I want to portray struggle. Drama comes out of conflict. If you portray a utopia, then you probably wrote a pretty boring book.”
What do you guys think? Are you satisfied with Martin's explanation, or do you think a fantasy series should tame down the realism? Perhaps you feel the whole thing was blown out of proportion in the first place. Sound off below.
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