so… the people who were up in arms about rape being used as a plot point in Game of Thrones… presumably aren’t watching Orange is the New Black?
so.
Published
so… the people who were up in arms about rape being used as a plot point in Game of Thrones… presumably aren’t watching Orange is the New Black?
Tattered Remains of Tartary 
…or is prison a heterotopia with its own rules even on TV?
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or Sons of Anarchy, Or OZ, or The Shield, or any number of films, books, tv, poems, paintings that use the event as a plot point
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GoT is a fantasy setting, and therefore considered their domain to complain about.
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Fantasy shows obviously have a higher standard. Must be the whole “extraordinary claims require extraordinarily high standards of behavior” thing.
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I wonder if it’s the claim to some relation to reality that makes all the difference.
That would be weird.
Like, needing an excuse to imagine things, and being able to point to prison rape – the thing we, as a society, choose to tolerate by ignoring it – in order to excuse our imaginations.
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Patrick Stuart you may not realize that the rape scenes I refer to are mostly male/male in OZ, SOA, The Shield
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I don’t watch Orange is the New Black. I’m not so much up in arms about rape being used as a plot point, but I do think Game of Thrones handled it in a really awful way. Does that count?
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Martijn Vos Awful how? I don’t watch GoT.
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Martijn Vos of course the Eye of the Beholder and all that. I havent seen GOT. I figured that the show would ruin my enjoyment of the books as usual. in Orange the event relates directly back to the characters past, and her position in the present, and plays a big role in her development and behavior. AND it shows how fucked up the man is. So, IMO, there was no gratuity in the depiction and it wouldnt havebeen as effective if it were merely described
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I’ve been meaning to watch oitnb
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Reece Carter I recommend it. outstanding character driven comedy/drama. The main two characters can be tiresome, but the rest o the cast is outstanding.
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regarding male rape in media: male rape is mostly irrelevant both online and in meatspace discourse because abused males are often othered by both males and females (for entirely different reasons), so the dialectic of identitary politics never touches the topic.
The lack of support for male victims of rape is appalling, and the social stigma terrifying.
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I think one of the reasons is also because most of the rape scenes don’t occur in the books.
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Given the much more graphic and disconcerting nature of the sexual violence that this year’s controversial GOT rape replaced, I can only think that the main distinction is that it happened to a viewpoint character (oh wait viewpoint character marital rape was a major plot point in season one…). Hmm, there’s the idea that it interrupted the princess character’s triumphant story arc. Except story arcs interrupted by really bad things are sort of a GOT staple. I don’t know exactly why this one act of sexual violence this season was special, but the internet says it was.
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Slightly anonymized spoilers for GoT:
Joshua Blackketter Michael Hazen In GoT, the girl who was already well established as the most abused character in the series, felt herself forced to marry the guy who was already established as by far the most abusive and depraved character. I can imagine what happens without having to see it. But they did show (not graphically, for a change), but panned away to the third person present: her childhood friend, and now his castrated mindless slave, and suddenly it’s about him.
Of all the fucked up shit in that show, this one was worse than most.
(I’ll keep watching, though. For intrigue and extreme plot twists, it’s second to none. Also dragons and zombies.)
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I think they’re more upset about it being used as plot device/backstory/dialogue filler/set dressing over and over and over and over again, to the point where you have consensual sex acts from the book re-contextualized and turned into rape (Jaime & Cersei).
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Joshua Blackketter I’m not sure people were complaining about the /presence/ of rape in GoT so much as the purposes to which it sometimes seems to have been used on the show – cheap shock value or a “woman in fridges”-esque way of developing male characters (Martijn Vos described it pretty concisely). Whether or not GoT has /actually/ used sexual assault that way is an entire other debate. If people aren’t up in arms about OitNB in the same way, I suspect it’s because OitNB has explored the subject in a less skeevy way, not because of any hypocrisy or weird entitlement on the part of the people objecting to GoT.
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There is also the issue of popularity and exposure. Although they are hard to compare head-to-head (Nielsen doesn’t measure Netflix shows), many more people watch GoT, and it is much more in the public eye. Which means that many more people find things to hate about it as well.
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/tv/showtracker/la-et-st-netflix-orange-is-the-new-black-we-know-its-ratings-maybe-20130722-story.html
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For the record I like Orange a whole lot more than GoT and Uzo Aduba is really, really incredible pretty much every moment she’s on screen.
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Patrick Stuart I hadn’t really considered the gender of the writers/producers, but I guess people who complain about fictional rape on the internet might be clued into that.
The way it’s handled is definitely different. It’s also pretty complex and there are accusations of rape and people who feel like they’ve made those accusations falsely even though they were not in a position to give consent and all sorts. I’m still not sure exactly what to think.
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I absolutely think there are good ways to handle rape in fiction, but GoT has a pretty terrible track record in that regard. At least on TV, and I think it’s mostly the producers of the TV adaptation that are causing the problems people complain about. I mean, no doubt there’s plenty of terrible stuff in the books (I haven’t read them), but the books are also the source of the well-written, complex female characters. But on TV, extra rape and extra female frontal nudity is constantly being added for no good reason, whereas male nudity is explicitly avoided.
I recently read an article where a director claimed that they were being pressured by HBO execs to include extra nudity wherever they could. Pub scene? Add some naked women. An exec claimed he represented the interests of perverts.
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Martijn Vos mmhhh I can remember a couple of boy-on-boy scenes that were hilariously hot.
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Paolo Greco There were a few boy-on-boy scenes, but I don’t think you actually got to see anything, did you?
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I remember there were penises in season one and fit boys groping each other. I might be wrong in details, but i defibitely remember it was definitely better done and hitter than any other got sex scene.
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Right, I went back and on youtube I could not find any danglies, but I’m at work and it’s a kind of research that’s frowned upon.
The scenes between Renly and Loras are actually way more sexay than anything else in that show, by the way.
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