We should pick another series

Apr 16, 2013 16:08

I am becoming increasingly dismayed by the amount of cultural space taken up by A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones, especially in what I'll call, for lack of a better term, nerd feminist discourse. This isn't just another "I'm tired of popular thing I don't like" complaint. Wherever I go to read women's thoughts about the fantasy genre or ( Read more... )

smash the patriarchy, books, meta

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tigerpetals April 28 2013, 05:13:30 UTC
Super late to this, but yes so much.

I wonder if maybe there isn't some appropriation there? Or something similar? I avoid this series (for what I've heard about Cersei and all the brutality), but with others I sometimes know the female characters are not what I want to see them as, and I choose to see them that way regardless - though I do acknowledge that that is just how I see them and how they could have been in a better story. I can't think of examples right now except for Disney.

I say 'something similar' because a lot of what I see doesn't suggest an opinion that the books/show aren't really feminist. I've reappropriated characters without realizing it was reappropriation and not what was in the source. Hmm. Not sure if that's the wording I'm looking for.

I look forward to that list.

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gryphonsegg April 28 2013, 18:49:00 UTC
I get what you're saying-- I've done the same thing myself in the past. But Cersei is just so completely over-the-top every-misogynist-stereotype-ever For the Evulz that I can't even be bothered. (I'm talking about Book Cersei, mind, I hear that the TV show humanizes her a bit, but there's so much else that's horrifying about it that, again, I can't be bothered to try.)

a lot of what I see doesn't suggest an opinion that the books/show aren't really feministThis is an aspect to the feminist meta discussion that bothers me tremendously. It's bad enough that real, live women are supposedly duty-bound to make an effort to enjoy a man's use of female stereotypes in the name of feminism(!). What's worse is that, as I mentioned to a commenter on the dreamwidth version of this post, GRRM isn't even a man who pays lip service to trying to get it right. He's made it quite clear that his most negative female characters, Cersei and Lyssa and Melisandre, aren't written to criticize sexist tropes, they really are supposed to be just that ( ... )

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