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| Photo identified as "promotional image"; credit believed to belong to HBO. |
At the outset, I should clarify something: When I say, "We love Game of Thrones," what I'm actually saying is, "We love A Song of Ice and Fire."
Which is to say, we love the books, expected ultimately to be seven in the set, the fictional world conceived and brought into being by George R.R. Martin.
The obligatory disclosure for those who don't already know: I have met Mr. Martin on a few occasions. His wife, Parris McBride Martin, is someone I count a dear friend (and about as close as it gets in my world to a saint). It was she who introduced me to his books some years ago, before the HBO series launched. Wings is the creator of the turtle pins Mr. Martin wears, and the Martins hosted his one-man show last year at the Jean Cocteau Cinema in Santa Fe, which they own.
These are people who have our love and respect, our gratitude, and in the case of Wings, the respect one artist affords another.
So we were delighted to learn, four years ago, that HBO was at last adapting the books into a television series. We also experienced no small amount of trepidation, wondering how the needs of the small screen would necessarily slice and dice the original stories.
I write; not for a living, because no one pays for the sort of writing that I do, but for a far more fundamental reason: Because I must. For myself. And I understand well the need for editing, for concision, for collapsing of some storylines and excision of others entirely in the service of adapting an epic and sprawling universe of books into something manageable within the confines of cable television.
But what is taking place now is not something that we can watch any longer.
I admit to the first twinges of trepidation in reading about David Benioff and D.B. (Dan) Weiss, even before the series premiered. As I always do when my gut becomes insistent, I squelched it, telling myself that I had no grounds, I wasn't being fair, I needed to watch it unfold and give it a chance.
And as always, my gut was right.
We'll get into details in a minute, but first I want to get a couple of things out of the way.
I have more than a passing familiarity with, shall we say, fannish culture. It's not something of which either of us has ever been a part, nor have we ever had a desire to be a part of it. It's a combination of identity, culture, age, and experience; it is the sort of thing that does not appeal to either of us. That said, we have a not-insignificant number of friends, and even more acquaintances, who do participate in fandom of various sorts and to varying degrees, some deeply immersed in it. And while it's not our thing, we both have an appreciation for the corners of fandom that have grown around what might be labeled "human diversity," for lack of a better label: those that give place and space and voice to creators and characters of color, of various gender identities and sexual orientations, of non-dominant cultural and spiritual traditions.
I have also regarded the mainstream parts of fandom (you can't really call them corners; they take up most of the room), particularly the part that is white and male, with an exceptionally-elevated eyebrow, with askance and skepticism, with a healthy dose of cynicism and pre-emptive side-eye.
This is normal for those of us who do not fit neatly into dominant-culture categories. Daily lived experience teaches us to do this as safeguard and defense mechanism. It doesn't mean that we dislike what male fandom (at least, not any particular given element thereof); it does mean that we recognize what neither speaks for us nor especially wishes us well.
It's one of the reasons we were both so happy to be introduced to A Song of Ice and Fire. In the sci-fi heyday of my youth, I tackled the genre early and abandoned it before most of my peers had even discovered it. Fantasy? It wasn't called that then, of course, but it existed; unfortunately, my only real exposure to any of it was the King Arthur mythology (unless you count Grimm's Fairy Tales, of course). And while I loved the stories, they had little accessibility for someone like me. Adulthood and life intervened, and I never returned to the sci-fi/fantasy genre.
Until a few years ago, with ASoIaF.
Yes, the books are white-centered. Yes, they portray violent misogyny and other bigotries. But they contain far more fully-developed, more integral characters of color than most, and they do so in a matter-of-fact way that gets to what the medieval world, even Europe, was really like. [Hint: It was never lily-white.] And Mr. Martin doesn't shy away from portraying the racism, the misogyny, the persecution of those with non-mainstream sexual orientations or gender identities, or the bigotry of dominant faiths aimed at those belonging to spiritual minorities. More, he seems to have embraced the opportunity to create plotlines that show such behaviors for the ugliness they truly are. Yes, much of it is matter-of-fact, too, which to some probably seems callous, but I appreciate the recognition of just how ugly the world was (and still is), crafted in such a way to make that ugliness apparent. It teaches.
And so while there is much in the books that is greatly disturbing to me, discomfiting and disquieting, even frankly sickening, I cannot say either that it rings false or that it serves no purpose.
The HBO series is something else entirely.
I said that my first twinge of doubt arrived on HBO's public introduction of Benioff and Weiss. My second twinge, much more insistent, arrived with the very first episode.
It occurred with the incestuous sex scene between Jaime and Cersei.
Now, having read all of the books available to that point, I knew well what to expect. I also knew that, however squicky their relationship might be (and, of course, we know that incest was practiced among medieval royal houses as a way of keeping the bloodlines pure, so this was not a plotline without either real-life precedent or a larger literary purpose), their relationship was . . . complicated, shall we say. Mr. Martin's portrayal of the two leaves no room for doubt as to their love for each other, in all of its shame-inducing, glorious, contradictory messiness. There are times, reading the books, when it's almost possible to forget that the two are also brother and sister and to regard them simply as horribly star-crossed lovers.
There was nothing in that early sex scene that indicated a lack of love for each other, a lack of closeness, a mechanical operation reduced solely to manipulation of one or two body parts and a whole lot of mental triggers.
And yet, we were treated to a scene in which the entire episode has a transactional feel to it, not least because the entire thing takes place with them both fully clothed and Jaime entering Cersei from behind.
Now, when I see a sex scene involving that particular position, and it's written by a man, my reaction is going to involving certain questions as to how he views sex, and how he views women. And my radar was already pinging. Those reservations were borne out through the remainder of the season, when virtually every sex scene involved the exact same position.
Now, let's be clear: I have no problem with the position itself (trust me on this), nor do I have a problem with sex scenes generally (trust me on this, too). What I do have a problem with, and it's an enormous one, is the reduction of sex to something that erases everything but the mechanics, and especially when that something also erases the women involved. When men consistently portray heterosexual sexual activity in a way that keeps the man from having to see the woman's face, and does so in a way that is basically devoid of anything but the act of fucking, then there are serious questions to be asked about how that man views women — particularly with regard to how he views women within the context of sexual dynamics.
At the time, I saw online some others hesitantly raising this issue, if only around the edges. The show's defenders immediately tried to foreclose the discussion by announcing that of course it was done that way, so that the camera could capture both participants' faces.
Which is, of course, bullshit. Anyone who's ever seen a sex scene done well, one that embraces the range of human emotion and reaction involved, knows that it can be done quite easily, and frankly far more effectively, by allowing other positioning and movement and behavior that is not merely transactional.
So by the end of Season 1, I had even more reservations than I began it with.
By Season 2, as storylines began to be truncated and even amputated entirely, I began to develop more questions, more reservations. It's one thing to telescope a plot and remove fringe characters and events. It's another entirely to alter whole timelines and destinies and whack out hundreds of pages of truly integral plot — the very things that made Mr. Martin's characters who they are. Adaptation requires a scalpel, not a battle-axe, but by Season 3, the changes I was seeing in episodes written by others stank of the literary rot of wholesale hackery.
By Season 4, we missed the season pretty much entire. Last year, the air time wound up being inconvenient for us, which made it easy to say, "Oh, we'll catch the repeats." And then the exigencies of life, coupled with an increasing disenchantment with the show's direction, made it easy to forget.
This season, we watched the first episode, and the second. Wings endured my figuratively throwing peanuts at the screen in exasperation with the plot changes. By Episode 3, we had other things to do. Once the foreshadowing of the current Sansa Stark storyline came clear, I was essentially done; these were not the books any longer.
And then last Sunday night, Twitter blew up.
I did not know what had happened at first; not having watched it, it took me a bit to piece it together. But I began seeing too many people pronounce themselves "done with it."
[And now, if you have not seen it and intend to do so, don't read on, because there will be spoilers.]
Now, there is more than a bit of disingenuousness at work here, and I have to say that I'm a little tired of some of the outrage, while at the same time wholly in agreement with other aspects of it.
If you don't know, Benioff and Weiss have completely excised the existence of Jeyne Poole from the story. She was the orphaned young woman, destitute landed gentry, who was abducted by Roose Bolton, and made over to have at least a vague resemblance to the missing (and presumed dead although she was in fact not) Arya Stark, the youngest daughter of the late Ned Stark. In the books, Sansa was also "missing," insofar as Littlefinger was keeping her well hidden from Cersei's sworn swords, which would have made Arya, could she be found, perhaps the only Stark heir available to inherit Winterfell. Since Roose Bolton intended to consolidate his power sufficiently to become the new "King of the North," he hatched a plan whereby Jeyne Pool would be made over into "Arya Stark," with former Stark ward Theon to affirm that it was indeed her, and she would be married off to Bolton's newly-legitimized hellspawn, Ramsay (Snow) Bolton.
Anyone who has read the books also knows that the Boltons were known for flaying their enemies in very literal terms, and that young Ramsay took this activity to whole new depths of depravity. [As an aside, this was another reason I grew exasperated with Benioff and Weiss and their penchant for graphic and unnecessary violence. Mr. Martin hints at what Ramsay did to Theon, but never defines it explicitly; I've always suspected that it was not the physical castration that HBO chose to exploit so graphically, but rather something more in keeping with Bolton tradition. Yes, that might actually have been worse for poor Theon, but it wouldn't contain the same shock value on screen, now, would it?]
At any rate, in last week's episode, there is of course no Jeyne Poole; Ramsay is being married off to none other than Sansa Stark. Apparently, the episode ended with an especially brutal, graphically violent scene in which Ramsay raped Sansa. And fans the world over howled, some in genuine pain because their own memories were badly triggered, others less so.
First, the genuine response: This is what has disturbed me for so long about the HBO series. It fosters a sense that show's creators do not actually like women, even if that occurs only on some deep, wholly unconscious level. Where Mr. Martin wrote women characters in three dimensions and more (hell, at times, he could even make me identify with Cersei, and that's no small feat), these two have reduced the women to cardboard cutouts. Where the books treat women's sexual agency with complexity and the assaults against their persons and spirits with sympathy and perhaps sometimes even empathy, the series erases them except in service of shock value. Most of the sexual violence in the TV series does not actually advance a single plotline, although it does do so quite well in the books. And one of the criticisms I read of the scene is that Sansa Stark was reduced to screams only, while the camera apparently trained its sights on Ramsay and Theon.
That said, to some degree, certain critics of the scene are simply being coy. I've seen two blanket statements being flung about in high dudgeon, and they are revealing of what some people's real objections are, especially when taken together.
First: "It wasn't in the book!"
Except it was. The character of Jeyne Poole was most assuredly raped by Ramsay on her wedding night, brutally so, with the enforced assistance of Theon. Which tells me that the real objection is this:
Second: "How could you do this to Sansa!"
And now we come to it.
Because people who know enough to be able to say "It wasn't in the book!' know that the only part of it that wasn't in the book was the identity of the victim. They are outraged that the show would put one of the [white, "good-girl"] heroines in that position, and yet, had the series followed the books in this regard and showed the rape of the mostly unknown Jeyne Poole, I suspect that the only outrage we would have heard was from those who (like myself) would have found the scene done in a way that was violently triggering and gratuitous. So when the objections are rooted in those two points, people can miss me with them entirely — especially since I also suspect that, had the adaptation involved the rape of a character of color (since the series seems to be playing fast and loose with portrayals of characters of color generally, slotting them repeatedly into negative stereotypes), we would have heard nary a peep from a certain segment of the fans objecting so strenuously now.
What I am seeing, and hearing from others, is that the heart and soul of the books, the attention to character development that made them so believable and made the characters so accessible to so many of us, have been stripped out entirely, mostly in the service of sensationalism and shock value. In that regard, it strikes me that many of the show's episodes (referring here to those not written by Mr. Martin himself) amount to little more than fan fiction, and fan fiction done badly, at that. [Those who are familiar with ASoIaF and Mr. Martin's work know that he doesn't like so-called "fan fiction" (and indeed, it is this that I tend to think has given rise to so much of the violent and hate-filled rhetoric aimed in his direction by alleged former "fans," truly ugly stuff that I suspect is rooted in resentment that he did not praise their plagiarism).]
I have since learned that there was another violent and gratuitous rape scene in last night's episode. I am glad, for far too many reasons, to have missed both of the last two episodes. I do not need my own memories triggered by scenes that I had no cause to expect; in the books, at least, I can skip over them (and I have, on some occasions). We will not be returning to the television series, unless and until we see evidence of a sea change in how Benioff and Weiss and HBO are approaching their adaptation of the books. Instead, we'll simply await the next book itself, which I regard at this point as a far better use of my leisure time. At least then we'll be able to view Mr. Martin's actual characters and contexts in all their confounding complexity.
As I said, we love
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