But, nope! Today is a different day, my friends. Because here’s how it goes, when you criticize beloved nerd entertainments: You can try to be nuanced. You can try to be thoughtful. You can lay out your arguments in careful, extravagant, obsessive detail. And at the end of the day, here is what the people in the “fandom” are going to take away: You don’t like my toys? I hate you!Which, as a self-admitted fan of geeky things, seems pretty spot-on. Or maybe I just hold a grudge from those days when I was called an idiot for preferring TNG to TOS.
How Can I Be a Feminist And Love George R.R. Martin’s Books?It's impossible to write an unproblematic book, or TV show, or what-have you. TNG has both a Black Savage and a Magical Black character. I acknowledge that. I still love the show, but I recognize that, for a long time, Worf was a problematic representation of black maleness, just as Guinan was a problematic representation of black womanhood. I can both love a show and criticise it. In fact, I am more apt to criticise a show I love than a show I hate.
A world where women are perfectly safe, perfectly competent, and society is perfectly engineered to produce those conditions strikes me as one where we can’t tell any very interesting stories about women’s struggles and women’s liberation....and I don't see anywhere where Sady was asking for this.
I could talk about how the impulse to revisit an airbrushed, dragon-infested Medieval Europe strikes me as fundamentally conservative — a yearning for a time when (white) men brandished swords for their King, (white) women stayed in the castle and made babies...This sentence goes on for quite some time, but my real problem is the sentiment. This is someone who is so incredibly conscious of race and sex that she can't get through a single thought without casting her eyes about for bigotry like some Inquisitioner always on the lookout for heresy. She is almost incapable of enjoying fantasy because it depicts a time that is even more sexist and racist than the current day! Brings to mind the Christians who can't enjoy Harry Potter because it might lead to paganism.
If you are an unmarried woman, it is 100% certain that you will be raped or experience attempted rape (4/6: Arya, Sansa, Daenerys, Brienne). If you are married or engaged, there is a 75% chance that your husband or fiancee will beat or sexually assault you (3/4: Sansa, Cersei, Daenerys)In my humble opinion, 100% of everyone in those books suffers some form of abuse, regardless of sex.
Elements of fiction that force you to focus on the author's process are boring (feel free to interpolate "to grumblebee" here and elsewhere). Where the author has inserted an element for some outside moral purpose, rather than out of fictional necessity, this breaks the fictional dream and calls attention to itself. The incongruity draws attention to the author's decision, which is undesirable.I don't think this position necessarily disagrees with what Kirk is saying. The broad idea is that fictional necessity can overlap with moral purpose. An element of fiction can be both morally loaded and integral to the work in which it appears; seemingly everyone can agree this is okay.
As far as I could tell, Neil Jordan also had a contractual obligation for naked boobs and butts almost every episode
To me, what's unique about the books is Martin's extraordinary sympathy for outcasts, cripples, victims, and losers.posted by russilwvong at 1:57 PM on September 1, 2011
A lot of terrible things happen to Martin's characters. The point isn't just that War Is Hell, or even that Life Is Hard (although Martin certainly doesn't hesitate to illustrate both these themes). To me, what Martin vividly conveys is the sense of helplessness in the face of brutality and injustice; the guilt and self-loathing felt by the survivors; and the importance of compassion, to those most in need of it.
"... damned if that old man didn't fetch a fistful of coppers, beg m'lord's pardon, and thank him for the custom!"The real punchline: Arya kills him.
The men all roared, none louder than Chiswyck himself, who laughed so hard at his own story that snot dribbled from his nose down into his scraggly grey beard. Arya stood in the shadows of the stairwell and watched him.
The level of casualties and the extent of disorder caused by these wars was much exaggerated by Tudor writers and later historians. At Northampton the order was issued by the Yorkist commanders to spare the commons. But the death rate among the gentry and aristocracy participating could be high; this was especially so at Towton. On the other hand many of the knightly class avoided entanglement if they possibly could. The wars as a whole, with the exception of 1460-1, did not embroil the entire political nation. The most intense period of warfare occurred between July 1460 and March 1461, but in total there were barely more than two years' military activity throughout the 32-year period. Civilian casualties and physical damage were light. The greatest amount of destruction was caused by the army from the north with which Margaret of Anjou campaigned in January-March 1461, but the havoc caused may have been exaggerated by excitable chroniclers and Yorkist propaganda. Even at the height of fighting it was possible for most people to go about their normal business.The Hundred Years' War, on the other hand, was so brutal that according to Wikipedia, the population of France was reduced by half.
"Kuranes, clad in a dressing gown of the sort favored by London tailors in his youth, rose eagerly to meet his guest; for the sight of an Anglo-Saxon from the waking world was very dear to him..."And a few pages later:
"And as he stopped in final resignation he dared at last to look behind him, where indeed was trotting the squat slant-eyed trader of evil legend..."Please enlighten me as to how the use of one set of ethnic signifiers for heroic characters, and a different set of ethnic signifiers for evil characters, there on the printed page, is "extra-literary." The framework is embedded in the text, and as a part of the text, can be analyzed and critiqued.
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posted by gerryblog at 2:07 PM on August 31, 2011 [13 favorites]