Board Thread:TV Show Discussion/@comment-5014364-20160722144125

Benioff & Weiss live Q&A panel at Oxford Union, March 2015 (right before the Season 5 premiere).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfvVluNxujc

There reached a point after Season 3 when the show became popular enough that showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss just plain stopped giving public interviews. Not even "live Q&A panels" but in publications - they'd make "press releases" in things like Entertainment Weekly, but not probing questions from the fanbase. Particularly because from Season 4 onwards they started making increasingly wacky or controversial changes. They hit upon a winning formula: just plain don't give interviews or live appearances.

Since Season 4 began, they only really gave two live Q&A's: this and the Season 4 San Diego Comic Con panel. Season 4 San Diego Comic-Con Panel didn't get any major questions in, really: no one dared ask about the alleged Jaime/Cersei rape scene (they never intended it, it was just poorly filmed and they were too cowardly to admit it - making it worse). One guy, just as they were at the end, asked "Why did you cut out Tysha"? And they just bs'd him saying "ah, well you know, we just ran out of time" (dude, you had 4 minutes for a story about crushing beetles; if you mean "narrative focus"...why bother reminding us about Tysha at least once in all prior seasons?

So this panel is interesting because it's a solid hour of live Q&A, and they get increasingly awkward as they're asked perfectly obvious and probing questions.

Apparently they were so uncomfortable with it that they just plain didn't make public appearances after this: i.e. Season 5's San Diego Comic Con Panel (said they were "busy"). I think they just plain didn't want to deal with questions about the MASSIVE change of having Sansa Stark get raped by Ramsay Bolton, who she doesn't even meet in the novels. That struck me as cowardly and worse than actually doing it: if they believed in this change so much, they'd stand by it. The fact that they don't think they can easily defend it...kind of means they shouldn't do it.

So today, Benioff and Weiss are actually going to make their first public panel appearance with audience Q&A at Season 6's Comic-Con panel.  I'm interested in what they'll be asked. So I posted this, their last live Q&A.

Two important moments from this panel:

1 - When asked about excessive nudity in the show (Sexposition) - and no, we're not upset by "nudity" but by "extreme gender imbalance in nudity as if written by a 13 year old boy" -- True Blood aired alongside Game of Thrones but it had equal gender nudity.

....their answer was intriguing. Benioff and Weiss outright defended that "adding in nudity is what separates us from children's Fantasy like Frodo and the Lord of the Rings"

...The Lord of the Rings was a PG-13 rated movie series, which by definition children wouldn't be watching, which was aimed at adults, swept the Oscars, and indeed was praised at the time for ALREADY "breaking Fantasy literature out of the ghetto of being lumped with children's stuff".

....look at the random rape scenes which occurred in Season 5; Gilly/Samwell storyline a bit boring? Invent a scene of Gilly nearly getting raped, only for her attackers to get beat up - "isn't that satisfying?"

...ugh, I used to think they merged Sansa with Ramsay due to time constraints. Now I suspect they actually think they improved the source material and made it "more satisfying" when Ramsay died because he raped a main female character. Dude, there are reasons that Kylo Ren didn't rape Rey in the new Star Wars; because it's simplistic, lazy writing.

But Benioff and Weiss seem convinced that it's "look how mature we're being".

2 - 45 minutes in, when a young woman directly asks them about the alleged Jaime/Cersei rape scene, and they are utterly caught off guard and have no prepared response.

This is the moment when all lingering respect I had for Benioff and Weiss died. Benioff just fumbles around incoherently, visibly trying to be evasive, randomly and poorly reciting some talking points about "the cast works hard", and then ultimately just repeated her question back at her: "We had him do that because we felt it was a thing he would do". Wow.

They will be held accountable for this. This is unprofessional. 