Did anyone (including the showrunners) remember that the whole point to Dany purchasing the Unsullied is that they were trained not to ransack cities after conquering them?

Not that I'm disagreeing that hysterical woman is a standard trope, but to be fair, pretty much literally every concept that can possibly exist in stories has a TV Tropes page.

They definitely default to "stoic" for men and "emotional" for women. I quite liked Cersei's final scene, but that's because I haven't liked her for the last couple seasons, where she's just been a blank expression with that slightly self-satisfied look Lena does well. Cersei is a fleshed-out, human character, a POV character in the books, but we haven't had a lot of her inner life for the last couple seasons.

The problem I have with Sansa's rape is that this plot device of trauma making a woman stronger is lazy writing. Sansa says this to The Hound:

We're supposed to believe that Sansa is a savvy, cynical player of the game now, but her character development hasn't involved gaining strength and knowledge through her own resourcefulness, intelligence and strength, as is the case for Arya, say. Instead, she gets traumatised by men around her, and we're supposed to implicitly understand that this trauma is a strengthening experience rather than a destructive one. Compare her response to torment at the hands of Ramsay to Theon's, for instance.

At this point some people will argue "but that's showing a Strong Character, Theon was weak and Sansa is strong, how is that a problem?". The problem is that this method they're using to progress her character arc is actually a way of avoiding having to write the character, because you don't give her agency. Rather than trying to portray her inner life and struggles, you shape her character in terms of what is done to her by other characters. That's why Sansa feels like a black box now, I don't have a good sense of what's going on in her head, or even of what she wants, except in the most general possible terms. She talks to people, but she doesn't really drive events or have agency. In the Battle of the Bastards she contacted Littlefinger to bring the Knights of the Vale and the writers were so completely disinterested in her motivations that they didn't bother to come up with a reason why she doesn't tell Jon they're on the way. The Littlefinger trial "..... Lord BAELISH?" super sick reveal also made no sense in terms of the intentions of Sansa and Arya. The focus was on engineering the Littlefinger reveal.

Take another show where bad things happen to women, like A Handmaid's Tale. Are the creators of that one sexist?

Killing Missendei was an obvious choice from the writers' point of view because they needed an excuse for Greyworm to go ape**** and start ransacking KL. Cersei doing it makes sense because she really hates her opposition and wants to see them in pain, and strategically it might spark Dany to make a tactical mistake. It's not clear to me that killing a hostage in that situation is breaking protocol during a parley in the way that killing an envoy would be, though it is out of character for Cersei to not just kill Tyrion and anyone else she could in that scene.

Fly is closer to showing the writers were sexist with Cersei's breakdown, but it didn't seem out of character to me. Cersei was in a very different time in her life in season 8 vs. 1/2. That's a completely subjective judgement though.

+1 on both counts

Oh re Sansa's rape btw, in the books this happens not to Sansa but to a character named Jeyne Poole, who barely exists in the show, she's in a scene or two in S1. So the sexual violence isn't a show invention (it's worse in the books), the show invention is that it's a character-building moment for Sansa. In the books, Jeyne is deeply broken by the abuse, just like Theon.

I said I wasn't going to get into this but it seems apparent that you and others aren't getting the point.

There's a pretty good argument that GRRM writes books that are pretty strongly feminist even though they are set in a classic patriarchal society where women are not treated as equals. I would in fact argue this.

D&D have taken that world and made it decidedly less pro-feminist and much more hostile to women. It's a brutal world, yes. They've made a lot more brutal in adding extreme violence and sexual violence against women that GRRM never intended to be there.

I'll even allow that Ros is an organic character created by the show and her tragic fate is a natural result of her actions -- getting mixed up in the world of scheming nobles as a sexual plaything. OK fine.

But taken as a whole the show has added a metric ****ton of brutal violence against women that doesn't make much sense and adds very little to the narrative besides being "shocking." We didn't need Jaime to rape Cersei next to the corpse of their first son to understand they have a dark twisted relationship. We don't need to see a pregnant woman stabbed in the belly to get the full shock value of Red Wedding. We don't need to see Ramsay raping Sansa or hunting down a girl who doesn't even exist in the books to know he's a sadistic ****er. We could have gotten that solely from the Theon/Reek storyline, but that involved violence (including sexual violence) against a man so that was toned down.

It's violence for the sake of violence against women because that's what TV does.

lol the Euron one is amazing.

If they can't end this last episode with a bit of solid writing for at least one or two of the main characters its gonna be a worse meltdown than the LOST griping lol. At least people knew that show was fubar going into the last season. For all the issues of that overall show, a huge chunk of LOST fans were at least emotionally satisfied with the ending for the characters -- and the anger was muted given it was pre-social media like we have now.

Eh? They cut his knob off - how is that "toned down"?

It's literally the most brutal form of sexual violence you can commit against a man.

They don't show it. Why? Because it's upsetting and over the line? Why isn't it over the line that they took GRRM's story and added a bunch of super gross rape scenes and nobles torturing prostitutes?

Treatment of Theon is arguably much worse in the books.

Seriously I'm not responding to this anymore.

I'm posting in a bunch of different GoT threads so I'm having trouble keeping track a bit, but I don't think this has been mentioned ITT: The Jaime/Cersei scene isn't supposed to be rape. Everyone involved said it was written and filmed without that intention.

I think people's reaction to it was a bit weird and incoherent. You can definitely take the filmmakers to task for it, but it's not entirely clear at what point the problem was introduced. And while it might be real-world misogyny that they were oblivious to how the finished scene looked, it's not a storytelling mistake or storytelling sexism/misogyny, because there was no storytelling intent to depict a rape. It's also not a reason to think Jaime is evil, because not only was it not intended to be rape, in-world that is most certainly not rape. In-world, that suggestion would be laughed at. So it's similar to people consummating marriages with 13 year olds; in-world that's not supposed to suggest they're bad people.

It is weird, obviously, having sex next to their son's corpse. Did that actually have a storytelling point? I don't remember.

They also didn't show Sansa's rape - why?

It's a world where men are routinely decapitated, soldiers castrated, and children are burned at the stake for reasons. Furthermore, rape is common in war even during modern conflicts, so it's certainly not out of place in GRRM's world.

Considering all the other gross stuff that goes on within this universe, rape and torture are not out of place, and not exclusive to women.

Violence against women that is depicted as unequivocally Bad is not obviously sexist. Unless you think that people secretly like watching it because they hate women, and you think the writers secretly like presenting it because they hate women. Yeah, it is gratuitous violence, and stabbing a pregnant woman is for shock value because guess what, stabbing pregnant women is shocking and that's what they were going for. Doesn't make it sexist. And it doesn't make the show less feminist, since the fact that violence against women is a real problem is a big part of feminism!

And as is said above there's plenty of intentionally shocking, gratuitous violence to go around for both men and women.

At least in 5 years disney can buy that **** and reboot into the GOTCU and print billions.

For a not rape they managed to make it seem incredibly rapey. More terrible writing. Also even in world that would be considered rape, they weren't married and I am pretty sure incest was not kosher at that point either.

Well "they're not married and it's incest" applies to every act of sex ever between them, that doesn't make it rape.

Personally I didn't ever think that scene depicted rape, that was a take I read on the internet after the ep. I find it a bit weird how that scene is singled out to be examined critically with the lens of modern morality. Drogo straight up rapes Dany repeatedly in S1 and then later he's her "sun and stars" and she's in love and thinks he's awesome, but for some reason that wasn't as controversial. I had similar sorts of feelings about the Cersei scene, like obviously I think that's rape in the real world, but the real world isn't being depicted. It's a world where women are given away into sexual slavery to cement political alliances on the regular.

Compare that with attitudes to acts of horrific violence in the series. Dany has 163 people crucified alive in Meereen without bothering to find out who was actually at fault for the crimes committed and it's "hmm, was Dany's dark turn REALLY set up, or was it totally out of the blue?". (Correctly so, because in-world, in the circumstances Dany was in, crucifying people like that is standard operating procedure). But when Jaime keeps his dick in Cersei for one second after she says "no", oh man, better man the Twitter barricades, we need a long discussion on how this is problematic for Jaime and makes him a bad guy.

Yea, I was going to post when did Jamie rape Cerise as I assumed it was a scene I had missed.

I thought maybe people were referring to the sex next to dead child scene, I just took that scene to be indicative of the crazy/super intense lust/attraction/love they had for each other.

I'm not woke but I thought the scene was rapey as ****.

Like the argument for why it's more controversial than showing Dany crucifying people is that young people might be watching and you shouldn't model rapey behaviour to them without clearly identifying it as bad. Which kind of speaks to the lack of modelling appropriate sexual behaviour in our culture. Like we're not scared that people will be like "crucifying people is ok" because we elsewhere teach them about nonviolence. The fear with the rapey scene is that we don't adequately teach people about how healthy sex works, which is totally true.

Anyway, I digress.

This is not a danger/setback, it's awating death
It has already been established that she drops her guard when facing death(see blackwater)


and there is truth to that
women just like men have certain advantages/disadvantages

our society is overcompensating sexism instead of finding the right balance, acting like men and women are the same is not the answer ffs

LMAO so the argument is that the rape scene which is 100% a rape scene proves that the showrunners aren't misogynists because they didn't realize it was a rape scene? OK.

I don't have a problem with the Sansa line in isolation, if Sansa had been shown as a deeply traumatized person who nevertheless had learned and grown. That is how someone could cope with serious bad **** happening to them, telling a story to themselves about how it made them who they are.

In the show, however, Sansa did all of her learning and growing offscreen, there's no connection to any of that ****, she was an idiot just getting manhandled by the plot for 6 seasons, then halfway through season 7 she cast some sort of spell and stole half of Tyrion's IQ points.

cashy- Kid I'm gonna assume you're like 19. This advice might not set in right away, but it's good advice: stop watching political Youtubes. It's bad for you. I know it gives you a sense of unearned superiority and community, but the end of that road is not a place you want to go.

At a super fundamental level if you are writing a sex scene and some significant part of the audience views is as rape (or vice versa) you've clearly failed at storytelling.

You’re ridiculously patronizing, do you know that?