Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-5014364-20160505022737

A thought struck me:

There's been a lot of controversy about condensing together the Sansa Stark and Jeyne Poole storylines, given that Sansa never even meets the Boltons in the novels.

Officially, I'm actually non-committal on this in general principal - for all we know, Littlefinger or Harold Hardyng might rape Sansa in the next novel, and this is just their way of condensing it. Then again, the bad way they handled the Dorne storyline has led me to seriously question if this is even remotely related to the next novel. Who knows.

But what I am upset about is how Benioff and Weiss have mishandled this and many other situations: their general answer is to avoid giving interviews of any kind whatsoever. When a controversial adaptation choice occurs, they just don't talk about it. I saw them say once that whenever they give interviews on such matters the fans aren't satisfied by their answers so it would cause less damage not to give them.

No, that is a godawful Public Relations strategy. Yes, people are annoyed when it turns out you cannot adequately defend a decision you made (i.e. plot holes that simply have no real explanation)....but not giving answers at all is even worse. Refusing to give answers at all is basically holding up a sign admitting "I don't know"....even if they might actually have a defense. We ask questions to give them a chance to defend themselves and present a counter-explanation, or even verbal retcon.

But I digress...

I do think it incredibly bizarre that Benioff and Weiss made basically one comment on why they combined Sansa with the Boltons, which I think was repeated by Cogman in the DVD commentary: something along the lines of vaguely "we didn't want to give Sansa's storyline a year off".....

That's absurd, given that they gave her brother Bran the year off that same season. Also...did it honestly never occur to them that this was changing Sansa's storyarc?

io9's Charlie Jane Anders had a great article reviewing Season 5 as a whole, and this was part of a major complaint: they rushed things so poorly that in some cases there wasn't a coherent character arc. But again, that ties into "maybe this happens in the next novel with someone else"....god help them if it doesn't.

But okay, fine, we'll see the next book on that.

There are two other things people keep repeating about this.

And let me clarify: I'm not so much even disgusted that they did it, as I'm disgusted that they put such little effort into making explanations for it (surely they should have known this would be controversial, didn't it occur to them to have some prepared statements?)

First, was Cogman's honestly nice attempt to address it even though it wasn't his idea to do it, fixating on "well what else would Ramsay do? First we made the decision to marry them, and after that it wouldn't be true to the situation to have him not mistreat her"

....yeah, that's a stilted argument when the choices are linked. No, these weren't separate decisions. Tell anyway back in Season 2 when they got the idea to do this that "we're going to marry Sansa to Ramsay" the absolute next thought they have is "but won't that mean he rapes her like Jeyne?"

The analogy I keep using is if they had Tyrion thrown into a lion pit and then eaten by lions....and they keep deflecting the question by giving the fake answer "well, of course we had to have the lions eat him once he was in the pit, it's unrealistic that a lion in that situation wouldn't eat him".

....when our question was about why the heck you made the decision to throw him into the lion pit in the first place.

I mean...it's an obvious stalling tactic. I wonder if staff saying that even believe it. "Well what else would Ramsay do?" -- no one was asking that. We were questioning the logic of including it in the first place.

And they fixated so much on how the wedding night scene was filmed -- for god's sake it was filmed entirely well and tastefully, we're questioning Sansa's season-long storyarc'. They reduced her to a crying prisoner locked in her chambers....yet keep trying to spin it as something better or her being brave or whatever. If that was their intent it doesn't come through on the screen.

But maybe that's all a smokescreen because they don't want to say "Littlefinger rapes her in the next novel and we condensed that with this"....fair enough.

What really gets me is how so many people were saying "you're just angry it happened to a major character".

For the sake of argument, putting EVERYTHING else about this aside. Purely focusing on this last remark.

I mean, I saw Peter Dinklage repeating that in interviews. I say "repeating" because I thnk one person just said it and other cast members struggling with what to say just latched onto it.

The accusation is that rape happened all the time in the books and TV series before this (it did, I cite as a good example Polliver's men harassing an innkeeper's daughter in the Season 4 premiere).....and accusing that we're just annoyed they changed it so it happens to a major character now.

So my response to that is:

1 - Yes, it matters more when it happens to a major character....because a major part of handling rape maturely in drama is to show the character being traumatized afterwards. Too often, rape is just used as a cheap shock tactic, or to build up the reaction of the male characters (the "Girlfriend Stuffed in the Fridge" trope) but don't show its long-term aftermath.

With "minor" characters like the unnamed innkeeper's daughter in the Season 4 premiere, by definition we're never going to see the emotional aftermath for them in subsequent episodes. They don't reappear!

In contrast, it's weird to have a "major character" raped if they aren't appropriatedly traumatized in the subsequent episodes.

2 - Yes, it is a problem when you reduce the number of female characters who have "agency". Imagine if you have a Justice League live-action TV series with seven cast members, of which two are female:  Wonder Woman and Hawkgirl. If Wonder Woman gets raped, one of two things happens:

A - she's fine the next episode and has no long-term trauma, which is untrue to the situation and trivializes rape;

B - she actually is realistically traumatized....in which case you just reduced the number of strong, self-actualized females in the cast by half. Well, some shows explicitly want to deal with such issues and have characters traumatized but dealing with it (Jessica Jones, for example). But that only works if you deal with it as a long-term issue.

Similar issue happened with Catelyn Stark: "Does it matter that we took away her political agency?  So many other minor female characters have none."....yeah, which is the entire reason it was important that Catelyn was one of the women who DID have political agency!

Now if the books later, I don't know, have Arya get raped or something....Martin knew to set that up and plan out its reverberations throughout her characterization in the future.

I'm not sure if the TV show can handle such a drastic change....but the key point is that "yeah, it reduces the number of empowered women on the show" albeit "this can be tasteful if you show them eventually regaining their empowerment in realistic fashion, not a forced method that doesn't show their trauma".

3 - By definition, having a "major" character raped is going to affect the overall story more than if a "minor" character gets raped. How much of the physical screentime does Sansa take up? Compared to minor unnamed characters who don't reappear? It affects more of the story. No, this has nothing to do with "well you're not horrified by rape when it happens to characters you don't know" -- this is a story structure criticism, not a question about violent content (given that other murders or sexual assaults occur in the TV series, mostly based on the books, which were worked in quite well - i.e. Lhazareen village in Season 1).

Whoa this was long...sorry....well if you're actually still reading at this point, what happened was the analogy occurred to me:

"You're only upset because a major character was raped when it happens to minor ones all the time"...

....is comparable in several respects to saying "you're only annoyed we killed someone who doesn't die in the novels because they're a major character, when minor characters die all the time"

I mean it's like saying "You're only upset Barristan Selmy and now Doran Martell were killed because they are major characters - where's your sympathy for the minor background characters who die?"

No. This is a structural criticism, plot structure. "Harming" major characters in some fashion will alter their storyline, or it should.

I mean...imagine if back in Season 5, Jon Snow got his hand cut off like Jaime Lannister. And if someone said "well, minor background characters suffer mutilations all the time, you're only annoyed because it's a major character"

There's no "only" about it, and YES that's why we call them "major characters" - not the act of mutilation itself, but that Jon's behavior isn't correspondingly changed afterwards (or, if it is changed, that it kind of wrecks his original character arc).

Thus of all the responses I've seen:


 * "We didn't want to give Sansa a year off" -- that doesn't explain how this makes a coherent storyarc, just that you were willing to sacrifice storyarc to watch actors emote. Didn't we have this problem to a lesser degree in Season 2?  When they were afraid to give characters time off if they didn't have anyting to do?
 * "Well, what else would Ramsay do in that situation?" - purely a strawman argument meant to deflect from the obvious question, "why did you choose to pair her with Ramsay in the first place?" - anyone would know this isn't a two-part decision.
 * "You're just upset this happened to a major character, you wouldn't be offended by rape which happens to a minor characer" -- YES, because by definition, minor background characters don't have storyarcs, major characters DO have storyarcs and characterizatino. This is a plot structure criticism, not a violent content criticism.

They haven't even really presented explanations about "how did it make sense for Sansa's character arc to combine her with the Boltons like this?"

It's entirely possible that something similar enough happens in a future novel, which would make more sense.

But I'm stunned that they said they were planning to do this since Season 2. Actually that alone makes me suspect a future novel will do it - back in Season 2 they didn't even know if they'd get a Season 3, all of that wacky condensation that went about with Dorne? That came later. Surely, they'd have told George R.R. Martin about such plans back in Season 2?

I don't know, and there might be better defenses of this decision out there. I'd read them. But things like "you're just angry because it's a major character"? Those are facile arguments with little effort put into them. 