It's HBO, and just think, GoT isn't half as bad as the first season of Tudors when it comes to sex. Compared to books we're still getting too much nakid time and not enough heraldry, food, anecdotes that we were treated in the books. But then it's better to do exposition with naked breasts jiggling here and there than over five course meal.

 

No see, that's kinda the problem:it's not. Which is why GoT gets more shit than The Tudors.

 

That was sarcasm.

 

I'm a bit tired of the sex and nudity argument. No one complains about the gratuitous violence as making the show a joke or reducing its legitimacy somehow. Yet sex and nudity are far more common and natural parts of life than beheadings and heads smashed in with shields.

Shots could be cut away rather than showing blades entering bodies, just as easily as nudity could be covered up. The violence is just as unnecessary as the nudity -- which is to say, it isn't unnecessary at all in a show meant to depict all of the aspects of life in an honest and unshy way.

At the risk of setting off a shitstorm: it's such an unbelievably American perspective that nudity/sex is in some kind of special class of horror above and beyond all other things. That putting sex into a show just has to be some kind of secret guilty pleasure of which people must be ashamed, there for lowbrow titillation and nothing else, whereas violence is to be lauded as gritty and dark and real, valued as somehow artistic. Even TV critics for so-called liberal magazines seem to fall into the trap of this worldview.

 

Uh...no.Sex is fine.No one complained when Renly and Margaery or whoever had to fuck. I find sex during exposition scenes to be both silly, distracting and insulting quite frankly. It's as embarassing as an old 90s-style fantasy poster with the half-naked "warrior woman" in something that's supposed to pass for armor.

I find liberal dosings of female nudity (note:female nudity) everywhere to say more about HBO's marketing tactics and their view of their demographic than any attempt to create a raw world.

Note that this may not count if the sex is the exposition (see:Oberyn).


To be fair to the show it only happened a few times. They learned their lesson from Littlefinger.

And, if we're talking about nudity on cable:we need not pretend that it's meant to happen in an unshy way. It's titillation. Didn't one of the actresses come out and said that they refused to let her have a merkin because...wilding women just can't stand to not be shaved down there?

I think the problem you're running into with liberal magazines is how often this "Dark, gritty and realistic" worldview seems to be about throwing boobs at the screen. Applying a prudish mentality to people is convenient, but quite simplistic.

Not that I won't deny that the complaints about objectification aren't politically motivated and have less to do with the "realism". See: Bronn with the naked whore:theoretically possible but unpalatable. Not that this is that strange: people always apply their own standards to works. If we wanted "realistic" fantasy or historical fantasy we would have something quite different from what we always end up with on TV:relatively modern-seeming ancients who try to avoid doing anything that would turn off a modern audience.

Note:this also raises another issue: if sex (and sexualisation,more to the point) is everywhere, then you should expect the politics of sex to be more complex and to stick more in people's (feminists') heads.

 

Exactly the same argument could be made for the violence, though. A lot of the violence in the show is violence for its own sake; very little of it is essential to the plot. And even when it is, they don't have to zoom in on it and linger.

Yes, the sex is extreme. But so is the violence. People objecting to one but not the other is odd and reveals a strange and perhaps unhealthy bias.

Personally, I object to neither. The way the show depicts these things where other shows would shy away is a way of making the show feel more adult, which is necessary for fantasy if it wants to be taken seriously.

 

*Littlefinger's detailed exposition on the innate desires that drive him to be the man he is and an essential reveal of his backstory that would shape the character's motivations for the entire series*

PLAY WITH HER ASS.

*Exposition continues*

Season 1, never forget.

 

The fact that he is surrounded by all that sensuality but remains completely businesslike and uninterested in the whores beyond their ability to make him money is a pretty significant insight into his character.

 

Strange...perhaps.Common? Sure. Unhealthy? No.

The difference between me and you is that I don't think that it's the result of a conservative mindset nor do I think that worrying more about rampant sexualisation (from the POV of the arguer) is that bad or arbitrary(, nor do I think that caring about one means you don't care about the other, people have complained).

If I was a feminist looking at Tv and I thought I saw objectification masquerading under the banner of "realism" I don't see any problem with finding one more of a worthy target of criticism than the other. You seem to be thinking that the problem is "violence bad, sex bad, why pick one?". It's not. It's 'violence bad in a bland sort of way we have to put up with, sex as shown by TV bad in specific ways that we feel are relevant to our political concerns". It's nothing new, the only difference is that the cases you don't see on TV because of this reasoning are so obvious to all of us that you're not thinking about them.

Not buying the leap in the bolded.

 

Not really. From a real world standpoint, violence is bad and sex is good. From the standpoint of what makes good fiction, both violence and sex can be good or bad depending on how they're used. (Where "good" means "achieves the artistic aim".)

GoT wants to be perceived as gritty, realistic, dark, and honest in the way it depicts the full range of human vices. So it has lots of unrighteous violence, lots of questionable sex (e.g. prostitution), backstabbings and selfish political machinations, and it shows them all in unrelenting detail.

All of those contribute towards how people perceive the show. They're all morally questionable, but they all achieve the purpose of showing that Westeros is an immoral place by our standards. To pick one of them out as inappropriate is what's odd, and one has to question the motivation or psychology behind doing so.

Even a liberal in a conservative country might hold several conservative views that they are unaware that they hold, or unaware are conservative because those views are just accepted as given in their environment. I think that's what's happening with the feminists criticising the sex in GoT. They seem to take it as a given that a naked woman in a show has to be for titillation and that it can't contribute in any way to the artistic vision for the show. That assumption is pretty conservative.

 

And the people complaining would probably say something like "violence is bad, sex is good, sexualisation because HBO has a naked person woman quota...not so much".

And violence and sex can be good or bad for reasons other than "got the artist's point across". Or all criticism focused on how the artist's vision comes across in real life is worthless. And so is any definition of "good fiction" that concerns itself with this.

They might think the nudity is titillation because they're feminists. Okay, to not be glib: it might be because it is almost certainly always female. And they're feminists. It's not as if this doesn't happen elsewhere in media, so the sort of person interested in this will have noticed it long before now. Don't need to touch that "it is a given" thing. Convenient extremism.

Sure, sex can be used to show the difference between our societies, but let's not pretend as if the use of nudity to titillate is something new. If we're talking about nudity then the obvious one-sided nature of this speaks volumes. The fact that everyone has to be shaved when it would be more in fitting with the gritty tone and your supplied motivation -to alienate- if they weren't is also damning.

Are people allowed to criticise you if you're ""artistic vision" keeps skewing in one direction when it really shouldn't? Perhaps people find you artistic vision to be remarkably in line with the cable shows that came before it "like the tutors" and the goals of the organization that people find objectionable. It's a bit like claiming that Beyonce's artistic vision is to come across in an aggressively sexual manner. True. But it's kinda convenient that that is her view when every magazine she goes to will want a shot of her in a skimpy outfit and every video director will want the same thing.

Sex and/or nudity can contribute to an artistic vision:I don't recall anyone complaining about the rape scene in the Borgias. We simply need not be naive.

tl;dr: the whole grimdark thing is a great rationalization for the titillation that the cable channels want to show.I'm gonna quote the director of Blackwater here, recounting a conversation with an exec:

They clearly know what they're doing.

 

The word titillation has been used wayyyyy to many times on this page.

 

My dislike for the sex scenes and nudity in show has very little to do with any sort of morals-related issues, and more to do with the fact that it could be time spent better.

 

That fight scene was seriously one of the best in the series. Oberyn Martell is the badass we wanted, but don't deserve. Also Sansa revealing who she is so early, that's gonna make waves.

 

Oberyn threw so hard

 

That was a rather poor adaption, IMO.

 

Appropriate description of this episode in more than one way.

 

It's a shame we only got 8 episodes of Oberyn. Pedro Pascal was excellent. One of my favorite characters to watch this season. Even knowing the outcome, I found myself earnestly rooting for Oberyn to win.

That said, I thought the scene was handled well. It certainly captured the brutality of the book.

 

When Sansa appeared wearing that seductress dress was that supposed to symbolize her fall to the dark side or something?

I'm a bit surprised about what happened with Dany. I honestly thought they were going to cut out the stuff with Jorah being banished.

Arya appearing at the Vale was a surprise, but I figure they're going to do the same shit they did with Jon and Bran. Sansa and Arya probably won't meet up.

Overall, this season feels as if it has been stretched (filler) as much as possible just to make it to the last 3 episodes. It's still good television, but I'm thinking they should've tried incorporating more stuff from the later books so that it didn't feel like half of the season is inconsequential.

 

I like the Arya/Hound dynamic way more than I did in the books. So I don't mind her just staying with him a bit longer, instead of her meeting up with Sansa in the Vale.