There's been lot of alot of talk on this thread re: Sansa's rape. Personally, whilst rape is an ugly topic, I felt it wasn't gratuitous in the way it was filmed. It was left to the viewers imagination. I felt it was in context with Ramsey's character (both book & tv), and bolstered his characters need for power & humiliation. There's been alot of pointless talk on this thread which could've been avoided if some viewers knew the backstory to this particular scene, which appears to have been made due to transposing Sansa onto another storyline.
I felt the scene between Cersei & Jaime at the crypt was far more deserving of the hullabaloo being created over this.
Someone on this thread pointed out that people have jumped the gun with 'dark' Sansa & her sudden switch to a 'player'. They were quite right. Just because LF has groomed her and she's been witness to some court intrigue doesn't suddenly mean she's gonna smooth talk her way to become sole 'Warden of the North' and dispatch with Ramsey.
She's still very much a young girl who's completely bereft of allies, surrounded by vile vicious people & their crones. Yes, she can show signs of wilfullness (the bath scene with Miranda was brilliant, she put her in her place), but you can't expect too much from her character in this respect.
If people wanna pick holes, then go for Dorne! That was wrong on all levels! All that was missing was Jar Jar Binks.
I agree with you. It was completely in context and was not anything like as shocking and awful as the torture of Theon. I'm female and I'm afraid the fact that people vent disgust over Sansa's scene and not the mutialtion and torture of a character who resorts to begging for death as he can't cope with the pain anymore worries me as to how people's moral compasses work these days
It seems to me that quite a few people are watching the show with the mindset of someone from the 21st century, viewing events as if they were happening in the real world here and now, instead of seeing it for what it is, fantasy. Westeros isn't a modern day first world country where gays can be out and proud, slavery has long been abolished, the monarchies are stable and rape in marriage is agaisnt the law, it's a grim place where grim things happen. In Sansa's (and Dany's) situation, in that land at that time, it's just not the same as here and now in 2015.
I think you're right. What worries me is that 21st century mindsets think thoughtless, rough and perverted attitudes on a wedding night is more worthy of protest than sick, psychotic torture and mutilation. Absolutely not!!!
Not commenting on the definition of rape or anything but I just wanted to make the point that, I'm not convinced this is out of duty or fear. I think Sansa knew what she was doing when she agreed to marry Ramsay. I think she sees it as a way to secure or further her position/status and probably with the long term view that she can manipulate things to her own advantage and maybe secure the Bolton's downfall. I don't think she'd have agreed otherwise.
The sex with Ramsay is unpleasant to her, more so than she probably bargained for, but it is a means to an end. It was her choice to suffer that for her own advancement.
At least that's my take on it.
My view is that it was cruel and unecessary but Sansa walked into it with her eyes wide open. Perhaps she is one of life's victims and felt she could do no other, and deserves sympathy or perhaps she has been toughened and will get her revenge in the end. I do hope so.
To add a lighter note to the thread, have you all seen this? It's 'Game of Thrones: The Musical' as performed by some of the cast on the US Red Nose Day show a day or two ago. Very funny!
To add a lighter note to the thread, have you all seen this? It's 'Game of Thrones: The Musical' as performed by some of the cast on the US Red Nose Day show a day or two ago. Very funny!
I am not excusing Khal Drogo. I am not suggesting what happened to Dany is any different to what happened to Sansa. I was replying to a post which raised exactly that point, and questioned why people were so upset about Sansa's rape and yet there wasn't the same outrage during Drogo's rape of Dany.
I explained why there wasn't the same outrage - because nobody knew anything about either Khal Drogo or Danyearas Targaryon at the start of the very first season, they were all strangers to us, whereas by the middle of season five everybody knows that Ramsay Bolton is a bastard, and that Sansa Stark is the daughter of the original hero who has already been mistreated by the Hound, by Joffrey, by Cersei and (almost) by Lyssa, therefore that is why people are more upset about the second rape than the first.
You seem to think I am suggesting that Dany's rape was alright and only Sansa's was wrong. Perhaps it is you who is on drugs? I'm not saying either were right, or just. All I did was explain why the level of outrage for Dany's rape (in episode 1) was less than for Sansa's (in episode 46). I didn't express my opinion on the subject at all.
Fair enough. You just worded yourself weird, is all. I think the outrage was less about Dany because wasn't it supposedly consented to in the books? And maybe people are seeing it in that light. Like the Cersei thing; I just assumed she meant no as in not in front of the dead body rather no to sex, especially knowng of the context of the book scene. It doesn't help that writers etc. when they were being grilled about it never actually state what they classed it as.
The quality has dropped massively this season, and not just because of the increasing deviations from the book (although that doesn't help).
Benioff and Weiss are ratings-chasing. They looked at what was popular before, and then wrote something (bad) that tries to copy it, without understanding what made it good before. So what were the big talking points of previous series?
1. Shocking death of a character.
2. How good Pedro Pascal was as Oberyn Martell.
3. Rape.
This basically gave them the recipe for the fifth series. Examples:
1. Let's kill Ser Barristan the Bold, renowned for being possibly the greatest living knight, extremely skilled in combat. But how to kill him? Well, why not have some pampered former slave owners, who have very little training in how to fight, kill him with little kitchen knives while wearing masks that greatly limit their peripheral vision. While we're at it, let's have the Unsullied be killed by them as well, even though they are the most disciplined fighters in the entire world, who never break formation, and who are trained since birth, with only 1 in 4 surviving the training.
The problem here is not so much that they killed Barry, but that it was a cheap throwaway death done to titillate, but that serves no real purpose. It shows that they do not understand why the deaths GRRM wrote were so shocking, and such talking points. Show watchers didn't even care that Barry died. It was barely mentioned by people I talked to.
They're trying to make every episode have something exciting, but it just cheapens it. GRRM's deaths are thrilling because of the build up and because they are unexpected and because it's both believable and well-written. Barry's death was done only to serve as a talking point for that week's episode, and even at that it failed.
Part of the problem is that the show, even though they are now moving past the books, still has to stick to the key plot points and ending that GRRM has yet to publish. This means any deviations they make have to be of no consequence to the overall story. This leads to such pointless scenes as the attempted capture of Myrcella. It has to be pointless because they can't break the story too much. So this limits them in what they can write and it ends up coming off like a poor fan fiction where characters wear plot armour and say cheesy lines.
Two northerners walk into a palace wearing Scooby Doo disguises without being stopped, and then have the Sand Snakes turn up at the exact same time and start spinning around with their weapons that they don't know how to use a full 2 metres from the person they're "attacking". Then the guards finally turn up to stop any of the main characters from dying. You can tell that it's not something GRRM would have written, because it's not realistic. It's written to serve a plot point for the show writers, but not because it's how those characters are likely to behave.
2. The Sand Snakes. Terrible cheap sets, terrible accents, terrible writing, terrible dialogue, terrible fight choreography, terrible acting. Just terrible. It's like something out of a bad fan fiction, or an episode of Xena. They eschewed plots involving the Ironborn, Jaime's character evolving in the Riverlands, or the real Dorne story involving Arianne and Quentyn, because they wanted to play on the success of Pedro. Unfortunately it's becoming clear that their ability to write new plots is terrible.
3. The raping of Sansa. The actual rape is less of a problem than all the furore it's caused would suggest. In fact the rape was necessary given the path they're put her character on. The real problem here is that they were writing to give an actress a role (and they admitted this), rather than writing for it to be a good story or a good TV show. There's been a few changes like that, where it's clear they've taken the story in a certain direction to fit with the actors they want to use.
This again comes back to the problem of writing that doesn't match how a character would behave based on his/her personality and previous behaviour. They wrote Sansa's parts to give the actress a bigger role, and to give them more opportunity to create talking points like her being raped, and to avoid introducing new characters (something they've avoided a lot this series), none of which would be a problem if the actions of characters were still believable. In the case of Littlefinger and Sansa, they were not.
I hope they can improve for the last three episodes, but I'm not holding my breath. The show and the books are very different things now. That doesn't mean that the show has to get worse (previous deviations have not mattered or have been improvements or necessary for writing for TV), but unfortunately it's a victim of its own success and now it seems to be catering to and dumbing down for mainstream audiences.
Did I hear a line in the Red Wedding song about it being Robb Stark's wedding? Something wrong there. ;-)
Not the first time that mistake has been made on U.S tv, that skit of Jon Snow being invited to a New York dinner party had him say that Robb was killed at his own wedding.
Plus as you saw Chris Martin thinks Kardashian is one of the noble houses of Westeros
The quality has dropped massively this season, and not just because of the increasing deviations from the book (although that doesn't help).
edited for space
It's difficult to criticise without knowing where the book story is going. I suspect Ser Barristan won't survive much longer, and so the show has killed him off a little early, but at a convenient point.
With Sansa, I find the show version quite persuasive, but again, I don't know where book Sansa's story is going. It may turn out that they are just cutting out a big loop to bring her straight to the place where the book will take her.
I agree that the Sand Snakes are awful, but I thought they were poor in the book too. There are too many of them, it's overdone. One militant vengeful one would have been enough for me.
but I am very interested in the fourth one, who is not in Dorne. It remains to be seen if she will be included in the show. I hope so.
It's difficult to criticise without knowing where the book story is going. I suspect Ser Barristan won't survive much longer, and so the show has killed him off a little early, but at a convenient point.
I agree with this. Where Ser Barristan Selmy is in the books I suspected that he probably will be dying soon, and they just got it out of the way earlier. Again, the problem is not that he died, but how they did it and why they did it. The how I covered already. The why was pretty much because they want to have a shock in every episode, and perhaps because they felt viewers had more affinity with Ser Friendzone, who will probably take on Barry's remaining parts now.
but I am very interested in the fourth one, who is not in Dorne. It remains to be seen if she will be included in the show. I hope so.
Agreed as well. I actually think the Sand Snakes in Dorne were not GRRM's best writing in the books, so it's not like I was disappointed that they'd ruined them. But it's quite an achievement to somehow make them even worse and more laughable. They're by far the worst thing about the entire show so far.
I shall be watching it late tonight. Anyone else, seeing as it's a bank holiday tomorrow?
Of course. Thankfully I have morrow off too. Itching to see whats going down in Winterfell. I'll take a rain check on Dorne though....
PS: Dorne's hardly had much sunlight since we've been privy to it! Looks more like Cornwall. All we need is for Bronn to wear a pair of crocs & it would be Cornwall...
Watched the episode on Friday after being away. I thought it was very good for the most part. Those on here, a few weeks back, who said that it didn't look good for Sansa were spot on. The events in King's Landing seem to be escalating quickly! I can see Lady Olenna Tyrell sorting the Lannisters out (not for the first time!). I hope the story-lines in Dorne start to pick up - the characters there don't seem to have had that much air time.
Surely it's all gonna kick off at Winterfell soon? Can't wait to find out what happens
I agree that the Sand Snakes are awful, but I thought they were poor in the book too. There are too many of them, it's overdone. One militant vengeful one would have been enough for me.
but I am very interested in the fourth one, who is not in Dorne. It remains to be seen if she will be included in the show. I hope so.
I agree. The San Snakes have been nothing more than a damp squib.
The writer's tried to cash in on the success of Oberyn Martell as a character by building up all this suspense surrounding his vengeful daughters - even though they haven't, thus far, featured too much in the books. And it just hasn't worked.
Everything we've seen of the Sand Snakes so far in the show has been pretty shite to be honest. From the acting, to the appalling fight sequence.
Storylines have been changed - Jaime has been shipped off to Dorne and the far more interesting Dornish character, Arianne, has been cut - presumably to give the Sand Snakes (and Trystane) more to do. And it has not worked.
They have been over-hyped and everyone was expecting - or at least supposed to be expecting - great things.
But so far, fir me, the Sand Snakes, and all the Dorne stuff in general, has been very very weak.
I agree with what's in your Spoiler tags though!
I take it you are referring to Sarella who is playing some sort of "game" in Oldtown? I'm looking forward to where they're going with that.
I hope they don't cut the whole Oldtown/Citadel plot completely. I don't think they well as they've made a point of having Sam mention and explain the Citadel recently.
PS: Dorne's hardly had much sunlight since we've been privy to it! Looks more like Cornwall. All we need is for Bronn to wear a pair of crocs & it would be Cornwall...
I mentioned this previously too. I feel they've got the whole geography of Dorne all wrong.
I know that the whole of a Dorne isn't supposed to be rolling desert but in the scenes where Bronn and Jaime were travelling to the Water Gardens, the landscapes just didn't look right.
I agree. The San Snakes have been nothing more than a damp squib.
The writer's tried to cash in on the success of Oberyn Martell as a character by building up all this suspense surrounding his vengeful daughters - even though they haven't, thus far, featured too much in the books. And it just hasn't worked.
Everything we've seen of the Sand Snakes so far in the show has been pretty shite to be honest. From the acting, to the appalling fight sequence.
Storylines have been changed - Jaime has been shipped off to Dorne and the far more interesting Dornish character, Arianne, has been cut - presumably to give the Sand Snakes (and Trystane) more to do. And it has not worked.
They have been over-hyped and everyone was expecting - or at least supposed to be expecting - great things.
But so far, fir me, the Sand Snakes, and all the Dorne stuff in general, has been very very weak.
I agree with what's in your Spoiler tags though!
I take it you are referring to Sarella who is playing some sort of "game" in Oldtown? I'm looking forward to where they're going with that.
I hope they don't cut the whole Oldtown/Citadel plot completely. I don't think they well as they've made a point of having Sam mention and explain the Citadel recently.
I can't remember where I read it (I will try and find it) but I read that they are location scouting for scenes in Oldtown and Highgarden for next season
I can't remember where I read it (I will try and find it) but I read that they are location scouting for scenes in Oldtown and Highgarden for next season
PS: Dorne's hardly had much sunlight since we've been privy to it! Looks more like Cornwall. All we need is for Bronn to wear a pair of crocs & it would be Cornwall...
They filmed a lot of the Dorne scenes in Northern Ireland to save on costs, although the Water Gardens were filmed in a Spanish royal palace, but they were only allowed to film there for 1 week, which is why those scenes might feel rushed or underwhelming. Although it's a very beautiful palace and unusual to be allowed to film there, they might have been better building a set and using some CGI because I felt the Water Gardens were underwhelming compared to how I imagined them in the books.
I mentioned this previously too. I feel they've got the whole geography of Dorne all wrong.
I know that the whole of a Dorne isn't supposed to be rolling desert but in the scenes where Bronn and Jaime were travelling to the Water Gardens, the landscapes just didn't look right.
TBH even in the books I had trouble 'visualizing' it in my head...! Nothing so far has linked it together, so to speak. For me anyway.
They filmed a lot of the Dorne scenes in Northern Ireland to save on costs, although the Water Gardens were filmed in a Spanish royal palace, but they were only allowed to film there for 1 week, which is why those scenes might feel rushed or underwhelming. Although it's a very beautiful palace and unusual to be allowed to film there, they might have been better building a set and using some CGI because I felt the Water Gardens were underwhelming compared to how I imagined them in the books.
Yup, the Alcazar, which is a truly beautiful piece of architecture, I guess there was possible restrictions on where they could/couldn't film on site. The scenes at the Watergardens remind me of the very first episode of GoT where Dany, Viserys & Illyrio are in the gardens at Pentos. Everything looked too polished & clean set wise (and costumes too). I kept thinking 'fairy tale land' rather than a real place.
Anyways, enough bitching! Still cant wait for the next episode! Take me to Winterfell!
Comments
That'll be in Episode 7, 'Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares'.
I agree with you. It was completely in context and was not anything like as shocking and awful as the torture of Theon. I'm female and I'm afraid the fact that people vent disgust over Sansa's scene and not the mutialtion and torture of a character who resorts to begging for death as he can't cope with the pain anymore worries me as to how people's moral compasses work these days
I think you're right. What worries me is that 21st century mindsets think thoughtless, rough and perverted attitudes on a wedding night is more worthy of protest than sick, psychotic torture and mutilation. Absolutely not!!!
My view is that it was cruel and unecessary but Sansa walked into it with her eyes wide open. Perhaps she is one of life's victims and felt she could do no other, and deserves sympathy or perhaps she has been toughened and will get her revenge in the end. I do hope so.
I miss The Hound. I do hope he survived! His heart's in the right place.
Yes, I miss him too, he made me laugh.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfI_mUIvYq8
That's just a teaser, full sketch is here.
Fair enough. You just worded yourself weird, is all. I think the outrage was less about Dany because wasn't it supposedly consented to in the books? And maybe people are seeing it in that light. Like the Cersei thing; I just assumed she meant no as in not in front of the dead body rather no to sex, especially knowng of the context of the book scene. It doesn't help that writers etc. when they were being grilled about it never actually state what they classed it as.
Whoops thanks - sorry clicked on the wrong youtube link. Very funny (and that's not something you usually associate with Coldplay).
Did I hear a line in the Red Wedding song about it being Robb Stark's wedding? Something wrong there. ;-)
Benioff and Weiss are ratings-chasing. They looked at what was popular before, and then wrote something (bad) that tries to copy it, without understanding what made it good before. So what were the big talking points of previous series?
1. Shocking death of a character.
2. How good Pedro Pascal was as Oberyn Martell.
3. Rape.
This basically gave them the recipe for the fifth series. Examples:
1. Let's kill Ser Barristan the Bold, renowned for being possibly the greatest living knight, extremely skilled in combat. But how to kill him? Well, why not have some pampered former slave owners, who have very little training in how to fight, kill him with little kitchen knives while wearing masks that greatly limit their peripheral vision. While we're at it, let's have the Unsullied be killed by them as well, even though they are the most disciplined fighters in the entire world, who never break formation, and who are trained since birth, with only 1 in 4 surviving the training.
The problem here is not so much that they killed Barry, but that it was a cheap throwaway death done to titillate, but that serves no real purpose. It shows that they do not understand why the deaths GRRM wrote were so shocking, and such talking points. Show watchers didn't even care that Barry died. It was barely mentioned by people I talked to.
They're trying to make every episode have something exciting, but it just cheapens it. GRRM's deaths are thrilling because of the build up and because they are unexpected and because it's both believable and well-written. Barry's death was done only to serve as a talking point for that week's episode, and even at that it failed.
Part of the problem is that the show, even though they are now moving past the books, still has to stick to the key plot points and ending that GRRM has yet to publish. This means any deviations they make have to be of no consequence to the overall story. This leads to such pointless scenes as the attempted capture of Myrcella. It has to be pointless because they can't break the story too much. So this limits them in what they can write and it ends up coming off like a poor fan fiction where characters wear plot armour and say cheesy lines.
Two northerners walk into a palace wearing Scooby Doo disguises without being stopped, and then have the Sand Snakes turn up at the exact same time and start spinning around with their weapons that they don't know how to use a full 2 metres from the person they're "attacking". Then the guards finally turn up to stop any of the main characters from dying. You can tell that it's not something GRRM would have written, because it's not realistic. It's written to serve a plot point for the show writers, but not because it's how those characters are likely to behave.
2. The Sand Snakes. Terrible cheap sets, terrible accents, terrible writing, terrible dialogue, terrible fight choreography, terrible acting. Just terrible. It's like something out of a bad fan fiction, or an episode of Xena. They eschewed plots involving the Ironborn, Jaime's character evolving in the Riverlands, or the real Dorne story involving Arianne and Quentyn, because they wanted to play on the success of Pedro. Unfortunately it's becoming clear that their ability to write new plots is terrible.
3. The raping of Sansa. The actual rape is less of a problem than all the furore it's caused would suggest. In fact the rape was necessary given the path they're put her character on. The real problem here is that they were writing to give an actress a role (and they admitted this), rather than writing for it to be a good story or a good TV show. There's been a few changes like that, where it's clear they've taken the story in a certain direction to fit with the actors they want to use.
This again comes back to the problem of writing that doesn't match how a character would behave based on his/her personality and previous behaviour. They wrote Sansa's parts to give the actress a bigger role, and to give them more opportunity to create talking points like her being raped, and to avoid introducing new characters (something they've avoided a lot this series), none of which would be a problem if the actions of characters were still believable. In the case of Littlefinger and Sansa, they were not.
I hope they can improve for the last three episodes, but I'm not holding my breath. The show and the books are very different things now. That doesn't mean that the show has to get worse (previous deviations have not mattered or have been improvements or necessary for writing for TV), but unfortunately it's a victim of its own success and now it seems to be catering to and dumbing down for mainstream audiences.
Not the first time that mistake has been made on U.S tv, that skit of Jon Snow being invited to a New York dinner party had him say that Robb was killed at his own wedding.
Plus as you saw Chris Martin thinks Kardashian is one of the noble houses of Westeros
edited for space
It's difficult to criticise without knowing where the book story is going. I suspect Ser Barristan won't survive much longer, and so the show has killed him off a little early, but at a convenient point.
With Sansa, I find the show version quite persuasive, but again, I don't know where book Sansa's story is going. It may turn out that they are just cutting out a big loop to bring her straight to the place where the book will take her.
I agree that the Sand Snakes are awful, but I thought they were poor in the book too. There are too many of them, it's overdone. One militant vengeful one would have been enough for me.
Agreed as well. I actually think the Sand Snakes in Dorne were not GRRM's best writing in the books, so it's not like I was disappointed that they'd ruined them. But it's quite an achievement to somehow make them even worse and more laughable. They're by far the worst thing about the entire show so far.
Of course. Thankfully I have morrow off too. Itching to see whats going down in Winterfell. I'll take a rain check on Dorne though....
PS: Dorne's hardly had much sunlight since we've been privy to it! Looks more like Cornwall. All we need is for Bronn to wear a pair of crocs & it would be Cornwall...
Surely it's all gonna kick off at Winterfell soon? Can't wait to find out what happens
I thought the same myself
The writer's tried to cash in on the success of Oberyn Martell as a character by building up all this suspense surrounding his vengeful daughters - even though they haven't, thus far, featured too much in the books. And it just hasn't worked.
Everything we've seen of the Sand Snakes so far in the show has been pretty shite to be honest. From the acting, to the appalling fight sequence.
Storylines have been changed - Jaime has been shipped off to Dorne and the far more interesting Dornish character, Arianne, has been cut - presumably to give the Sand Snakes (and Trystane) more to do. And it has not worked.
They have been over-hyped and everyone was expecting - or at least supposed to be expecting - great things.
But so far, fir me, the Sand Snakes, and all the Dorne stuff in general, has been very very weak.
I agree with what's in your Spoiler tags though!
I hope they don't cut the whole Oldtown/Citadel plot completely. I don't think they well as they've made a point of having Sam mention and explain the Citadel recently.
I know that the whole of a Dorne isn't supposed to be rolling desert but in the scenes where Bronn and Jaime were travelling to the Water Gardens, the landscapes just didn't look right.
They filmed a lot of the Dorne scenes in Northern Ireland to save on costs, although the Water Gardens were filmed in a Spanish royal palace, but they were only allowed to film there for 1 week, which is why those scenes might feel rushed or underwhelming. Although it's a very beautiful palace and unusual to be allowed to film there, they might have been better building a set and using some CGI because I felt the Water Gardens were underwhelming compared to how I imagined them in the books.
TBH even in the books I had trouble 'visualizing' it in my head...! Nothing so far has linked it together, so to speak. For me anyway.
Yup, the Alcazar, which is a truly beautiful piece of architecture, I guess there was possible restrictions on where they could/couldn't film on site. The scenes at the Watergardens remind me of the very first episode of GoT where Dany, Viserys & Illyrio are in the gardens at Pentos. Everything looked too polished & clean set wise (and costumes too). I kept thinking 'fairy tale land' rather than a real place.
Anyways, enough bitching! Still cant wait for the next episode! Take me to Winterfell!