[Thanos]

Liberal and feminist dipshits all across the internet are flipping out over the Jaime/Cersei scent at the funeral last night. Always fun to see such trauma and hurt feelings caused by a fictional show about a world that doesn't exist and people that never lived. One could have a good conversation about the pros and cons of how HBO likes to porn things up in most of it's shows but watching the doofusses cringe over once scene from GOT whilst ignoring the non-stop depravity of practically each and every single episode of True Blood is absolutely fascinating.

GOT, on the show and in the books as well, is focussed around a class of nobles and other elites that are completely lacking in any moral center. They are entirely self-centered and have zero regard not just for the kingdom they're destroying and for any of the common people they're merrily murdering and raping. They also have no regard or respect for each other, which is exactly why they do things like murder entire wedding parties, flay their captives while they're still alive, and fuck/rape their sisters next to the bodies of said sister's murdered son. Like The Hound said, they're all killers, even the presumed good guys like Ned and Robb Stark who didn't have much concern at all about the effect their "honourable" actions were going to have on the average people or the world at large. We get intimations of how some of them are somewhat freer (and presumably better than the others), like the Wildlings allegedly are, but then we see the so called Free Folk wipe out a village of helpless farmers as quickly and efficiently as the Einsatzgruppen did to any Jews they caught on the Eastern Front in World War Two. Why go nuts over one disturbing scene when the entire fictional work, both in print and on TV, is one disturbing scene after another? It's actually easier to remember when the GOT characters aren't acting like sociopathic assholes because such moments are so few and far between.

The collision between GOT and the modern liberal internet commentariat is wildly fascinating to behold. I'm leaving conservatives out of the discussion for now because they're probably not watching or reading GOT anyway, and they have plenty of their own stupid behaviours to discuss elsewhere. But seeing some liberals (especially like the ones who comment on the Gawker network) practically demand that GOT absolutely and always reflect their own current worldview and politics is amazing. Ygritte shooting an arrow through the back of a man's head? Well, that's OK because she's one of the good guys and it's all Jon's fault anyway for breaking her heart. Jaime giving Cersei the fizz next to Joffrey's dead body? Deplorable! Unacceptable! Apologize right now to all women everywhere! It reminds me of what Matt Stone from South Park hinted at a long time ago. It's more fun to be in the middle throwing shit out against both sides because while conservatives are merely moronic, liberals are just complete fucking whiny assholes.

Rant over. Not meaning to cause to much trouble here but if trouble erupts anyway I, much like HBO, really don't care anyway. Just trying to get the conversation going again. Yeah, that's it, just trying to get the conversation going again. That ought to hold the little SOB's for a while......

[xerxes]

Hear hear!

I hear the same thing from my friend who I'm trying to get to watch the show and he says the same things. 'Its all porn and incest and depravity'. This coming from a guy who's obsessed with Hannibal Lecter but is far from a pussy liberal. But I digress.

It's not like GRRM is this sicko who put all his shit into his books. He takes a lot from history; from the Wars of the Roses to the Scottish clan wars and all but mandated incest between royal families in the Middle Ages.

[Thanos]

SM Stirling was once attacked by some idiots because his apparently making the genocidal genetic supermen in his Draka books the focus of attention as they conquered the world meant that he supported too genocide. He responded by saying that it was the height (or depth) of stupidity to assume that because an author writes about unpleasant and disturbing things that he somehow supports said unpleasant and disturbing things.

But this is the age we live in now, all courtesy of the despicable fanboy who thinks it's some kind of bizarre-land democracy where a creator or artist is now completely obligated to bend to the whims and wishes of the readers or viewers and to their political or social opinions. Go back a year ago, and the previously mentioned liberal viewers of GOT were in an uproar because the show was casting Spaniards and other Mediterranean people to play the Dornish. Apparently according to the liberal viewers GRRM and HBO should have cast them all black, even though there's maybe all of three black characters of note in all the books, because goddamn it, inclusivity! diversity! racism!, or some other nonsensical blather that these people worry about far too much.

It was bad enough back in the old days for creators when the fanboys merely suggested stupid plotlines to them. I can only imagine what kind of headache it is for them now with some readers and viewers now practically demanding that works of fiction completely mirror the real world they want to see come into existence.

[xerxes]

Yeah that's a problem these days. Too many outrage mongers making money off of trumped up BS. From people like Michelle Malkin to the jezebels at Jezebel and all points in between.

[xerxes]

Anyway, here's GRRM on that scene:

$1:

"I think the "butterfly effect" that I have spoken of so often was at work here. In the novels, Jaime is not present at Joffrey's death, and indeed, Cersei has been fearful that he is dead himself, that she has lost both the son and the father/ lover/ brother. And then suddenly Jaime is there before her. Maimed and changed, but Jaime nonetheless. Though the time and place is wildly inappropriate and Cersei is fearful of discovery, she is as hungry for him as he is for her.
The whole dynamic is different in the show, where Jaime has been back for weeks at the least, maybe longer, and he and Cersei have been in each other's company on numerous occasions, often quarreling. The setting is the same, but neither character is in the same place as in the books, which may be why Dan & David played the sept out differently. But that's just my surmise; we never discussed this scene, to the best of my recollection.
Also, I was writing the scene from Jaime's POV, so the reader is inside his head, hearing his thoughts. On the TV show, the camera is necessarily external. You don't know what anyone is thinking or feeling, just what they are saying and doing.
If the show had retained some of Cersei's dialogue from the books, it might have left a somewhat different impression -- but that dialogue was very much shaped by the circumstances of the books, delivered by a woman who is seeing her lover again for the first time after a long while apart during which she feared he was dead. I am not sure it would have worked with the new timeline.
That's really all I can say on this issue. The scene was always intended to be disturbing... but I do regret if it has disturbed people for the wrong reasons."

[Thanos]

I'm more disturbed that the overall culture is now so ridiculously hypersensitive that someone feels the need to apologize for something that happened in a work of fiction.

[Tyler_1]

Thanos Thanos:

I'm more disturbed that the overall culture is now so ridiculously hypersensitive that someone feels the need to apologize for something that happened in a work of fiction.

Even I know it isn't real...no one has a cat. Anyway I hope whoever had fits, has them again every episode over something or other, and then pees their pants during the finale.

[Thanos]

Considering that they have the same temperament as cats just consider Dany's dragons to be big lizard-looking kitties.

[Unsound]

The thing that bothered me most about the rape scene is that it interrupts the way Jaime was becoming a character you could like. In the books he's quite a way down the road to redemption at this point, but I kinda feel like raping your sister is the kind of thing it's hard to come back from.

Hopefully they do have a reason for it that will become clear in time. The show is good enough, and has enough shocking scenes in it otherwise, that it doesn't need to do stuff like that just for the sake of doing it.

[Thanos]

SPOILERTZ!

The thing is that in the books we really don't know how Jaime ends up any more than we do anyone else. All we know for sure is that he takes on Tywin's work of stabilizing the kingdom in the wake of the war. He really doesn't do it by being nice either, he does it by intimidating the remaining belligerents into cooperating by threatening to bring the army in kill them all if they don't stop fighting each other. And throughout his mission GRRM really concentrates on Jaime doing it mostly to permanently get away from King's Landing and Cersei altogether. Add in also, throughout his mission, that Jaime really does have genuine contempt for practically everyone he encounters. Some, like the Freys, certainly deserve it, but some of the other don't. Except maybe for Tyrion, Jon, and Sansa there really are no genuinely sympathetic major characters in the entire epic. Most of them have flaws and most of them have some responsibility they have to share for the outbreak of the war and all the death and devastation it caused. Jaime might be changing from the person he was when he tossed Bran Stark out of a window but it'll remain to be seen if, aside from his friendship and loyalty to Brienne, he's changed for the better or is now well on his way to becoming another Tywin.

I suspect that HBO, if they leave it as a rape which leads to the permanent rupture between Jaime and Cersei, is using it as a reason to propel Cersei's descent into paranoia and megalomania. With only an hour per program for ten programs they really don't have enough time to concentrate on the hows and whys of Cersei becoming the way she is. Basically she's been a creature of rage since she was a child when her mother died giving birth to Tyrion. She was then stuck with a completely loveless father and then got parcelled off as a bride to a drunken joke of a usurper king in Robert Baratheon. She's really anger incarnate. HBO might be using the rape, combined with Joffrey's murder, as the combination that finally pushes her over the edge.

[Thanos]

Next week's promo indicates that Cersei might not be anywhere near as bothered by the entire incident as some of the more sensitive fans were.

[Tyler_1]

0:

cat dragons rule.jpg [ 158.99 KiB | Viewed 139 times ]

[Unsound]

Thanos Thanos:

SPOILERTZ!

The thing is that in the books we really don't know how Jaime ends up any more than we do anyone else. All we know for sure is that he takes on Tywin's work of stabilizing the kingdom in the wake of the war. He really doesn't do it by being nice either, he does it by intimidating the remaining belligerents into cooperating by threatening to bring the army in kill them all if they don't stop fighting each other. And throughout his mission GRRM really concentrates on Jaime doing it mostly to permanently get away from King's Landing and Cersei altogether. Add in also, throughout his mission, that Jaime really does have genuine contempt for practically everyone he encounters. Some, like the Freys, certainly deserve it, but some of the other don't. Except maybe for Tyrion, Jon, and Sansa there really are no genuinely sympathetic major characters in the entire epic. Most of them have flaws and most of them have some responsibility they have to share for the outbreak of the war and all the death and devastation it caused. Jaime might be changing from the person he was when he tossed Bran Stark out of a window but it'll remain to be seen if, aside from his friendship and loyalty to Brienne, he's changed for the better or is now well on his way to becoming another Tywin.

I suspect that HBO, if they leave it as a rape which leads to the permanent rupture between Jaime and Cersei, is using it as a reason to propel Cersei's descent into paranoia and megalomania. With only an hour per program for ten programs they really don't have enough time to concentrate on the hows and whys of Cersei becoming the way she is. Basically she's been a creature of rage since she was a child when her mother died giving birth to Tyrion. She was then stuck with a completely loveless father and then got parcelled off as a bride to a drunken joke of a usurper king in Robert Baratheon. She's really anger incarnate. HBO might be using the rape, combined with Joffrey's murder, as the combination that finally pushes her over the edge.

i would add Arya to your list of sympathetic characters, but otherwise very nice analysis. Been a while since I reas the books, but I mostly just remember Jaime as starting to define himself by his role as commander of the Kingsgaurd, with the devotion to duty and honour that goes with that. Which would seem to be at odds with being able to rape his sister.

[ShepherdsDog]

$1:

Except maybe for Tyrion, Jon, and Sansa there really are no genuinely sympathetic major characters in the entire epic.

I thought Sansa was/is a shallow, vapid twit. Bran, and in most cases Jon Snow deserve some sympathy. The characters in this are great because they are all shades of grey.

[Zipperfish]

Poor Joffrey;. Theonly decent shit out of the lot of them.