I suppose as a good geek (even if I am stealthy about it), I need to talk about the Doctor Who season premiere. Oddly, though, I don't have a lot to say. I haven't really been feeling it for the past year, and I can't tell you why. There's nothing I can point to and say I dislike. I just don't care quite as much as I used to.
Then again, there is the possibility that what I have is a more normal state of caring, downgraded slightly from a state of rabid obsession.
I wonder if it has something to do with easier access making it feel less special. Before last season, I didn't get BBCAmerica on my cable service. The episodes were available OnDemand, usually the next day, but if I wanted to see it live, I had to depend on other people, who sometimes used other means to obtain the episodes. I frequently got together with friends to watch, and premieres and finales were usually special occasions. Now that I can just turn on the TV when it comes on, maybe there's less of a sense of anticipation and excitement.
Anyway, it's hard to talk about a two-parter after seeing only the first part. It feels like the whole episode was setup for a big conclusion.
But there were fun things. Making an entrance on a tank while playing electric guitar in medieval England gets bonus style points. There was lots of continuity. And I think we're going to get some fun with time travel in the way this plays out. I'm a big fan of time travel as a real story element rather than just being a means of getting to the location where the story will take place -- all that wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff. And I do love the fact that they based an entire episode (or more) on a hypothetical question asked in the classic series.
Hmm, now maybe I have talked myself into getting excited. I ought to rewatch the episode OnDemand.
For the rest of the week, be prepared for some ranting about Once Upon a Time. I've been rewatching previous seasons and veering wildly between swooning and wanting to throw things at the writers.
Monday, September 21, 2015
Friday, September 11, 2015
The Return of Continuum
The new (and final) season of Continuum starts tonight, in the post-prime time slot on SyFy (10 Central).
For those who haven't seen it, this is a series about the ramifications of time travel -- can you change the future by changing the past, and what are the ramifications of that? It's about a cop in a dystopian, corporate-controlled future who gets caught in the wave when a group of terrorist sets off a device to send them back in time so they can change the past and create a different future. She just wants to get home to her husband and son, but doing that will require finding a way to travel in time, and that requires catching the terrorists. The other issue is that if anything is changed, it might change the future so she might not have a husband or son to go back to, so she has to be very, very careful how she goes about things.
And it gets more complicated from there.
Her primary ally in all this is the genius kid she knows will grow up to be the architect of their future -- a kind of unholy mix of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs who runs the corporation that seems to control all technology. He's certainly good now (though with some issues), but whether or not his future self is good is rather ambiguous. It's also ambiguous whether his future actions suggest that he remembers these events, so that they've already happened.
It's kind of headspinning, but in a good way. I'm a sucker for time travel stories that actually play with the nature of time and traveling in time as a plot device (as opposed to the "travel to a place/time where our adventure will happen" stories). The original Terminator film is one of my all-time favorite movies. I'm less enamored of the sequels, though I did like the TV series. I love Connie Willis's time travel novels, which get into chaos theory and whether the timeline is self-correcting so that it's impossible to mess things up without something else happening to set everything right. The SyFy web site has a decent Continuum 101 page to refresh yourself, though I'm not sure this is a series you could just dive into at this point.
I'll be watching tonight because my future self sent me a reminder, which means she watched it, which means if I don't watch it I could be creating a paradoxical split timestream, and that never works out well.
Incidentally, I'm sure this series will come up at FenCon this year, since our theme is time travel, and there are lots of panels about time travel books, movies, and TV.
For those who haven't seen it, this is a series about the ramifications of time travel -- can you change the future by changing the past, and what are the ramifications of that? It's about a cop in a dystopian, corporate-controlled future who gets caught in the wave when a group of terrorist sets off a device to send them back in time so they can change the past and create a different future. She just wants to get home to her husband and son, but doing that will require finding a way to travel in time, and that requires catching the terrorists. The other issue is that if anything is changed, it might change the future so she might not have a husband or son to go back to, so she has to be very, very careful how she goes about things.
And it gets more complicated from there.
Her primary ally in all this is the genius kid she knows will grow up to be the architect of their future -- a kind of unholy mix of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs who runs the corporation that seems to control all technology. He's certainly good now (though with some issues), but whether or not his future self is good is rather ambiguous. It's also ambiguous whether his future actions suggest that he remembers these events, so that they've already happened.
It's kind of headspinning, but in a good way. I'm a sucker for time travel stories that actually play with the nature of time and traveling in time as a plot device (as opposed to the "travel to a place/time where our adventure will happen" stories). The original Terminator film is one of my all-time favorite movies. I'm less enamored of the sequels, though I did like the TV series. I love Connie Willis's time travel novels, which get into chaos theory and whether the timeline is self-correcting so that it's impossible to mess things up without something else happening to set everything right. The SyFy web site has a decent Continuum 101 page to refresh yourself, though I'm not sure this is a series you could just dive into at this point.
I'll be watching tonight because my future self sent me a reminder, which means she watched it, which means if I don't watch it I could be creating a paradoxical split timestream, and that never works out well.
Incidentally, I'm sure this series will come up at FenCon this year, since our theme is time travel, and there are lots of panels about time travel books, movies, and TV.
Tuesday, September 8, 2015
The Stealth Science Fiction Series
I was late to the game with Person of Interest, due to a scheduling conflict. I was always out when it was on, and at the time it wasn't available on demand, and though I was intrigued, I didn't really think of setting the VCR for it since I hadn't ever seen it (yeah, I'm behind the times and don't have a DVR, but I do have plans to correct that). I caught episodes, usually during reruns, on weeks when I had a break from the activity on that night, and then picked up the series for real during the second season. By then, the science fiction elements were really coming out.
Last weekend, I finally got to see the earlier episodes via the WGN marathon, and wow, they really did manage to sneak a science fiction series onto the procedural-heavy CBS under the guise of a procedural. In the first season, this looked like another good-guy vigilante series along the lines of The Equalizer or Leverage, where there are good guys with some advantage that allows them to intervene on behalf of ordinary people. We knew the good guys were getting information from a surveillance-oriented supercomputer, but otherwise the plots were all about the intervention of the week.
And then once they were entrenched, things started to change. Yes, they were still doing that intervention thing, but the computer became more important, and issues of artificial intelligence and what counts as a "being" came to the forefront. By the end of the latest season, the series was full-on science fiction, about a war between two intelligent -- sentient, even -- supercomputers who had very different ideas about how to carry out the task of protecting humanity. One still saw individuals as important and even seemed to have some affection for its human colleagues, and the other wanted perfection for all, at all costs.
They'd never have been able to sell that storyline up front, and I think the show is the better for it because they were able to start with a focus on the human characters and gradually build the science fiction elements as the characters themselves became more aware of what was really going on. Now that they've gone all-in on the concept, there's no telling where this could go. Are we seeing the birth of something like the Skynet system from The Terminator? Will the battle of machines go global? It's all rather riveting, and definitely worth watching if you like a dash of science fiction in your crimebusting.
Plus, possibly the most awesome dog on television, a former police/military dog with a taste for first editions and played by a dog who seems to take more pleasure in his work than any human actor (seriously, there is sheer glee all over that dog in all his scenes. That dog loves his work).
Last weekend, I finally got to see the earlier episodes via the WGN marathon, and wow, they really did manage to sneak a science fiction series onto the procedural-heavy CBS under the guise of a procedural. In the first season, this looked like another good-guy vigilante series along the lines of The Equalizer or Leverage, where there are good guys with some advantage that allows them to intervene on behalf of ordinary people. We knew the good guys were getting information from a surveillance-oriented supercomputer, but otherwise the plots were all about the intervention of the week.
And then once they were entrenched, things started to change. Yes, they were still doing that intervention thing, but the computer became more important, and issues of artificial intelligence and what counts as a "being" came to the forefront. By the end of the latest season, the series was full-on science fiction, about a war between two intelligent -- sentient, even -- supercomputers who had very different ideas about how to carry out the task of protecting humanity. One still saw individuals as important and even seemed to have some affection for its human colleagues, and the other wanted perfection for all, at all costs.
They'd never have been able to sell that storyline up front, and I think the show is the better for it because they were able to start with a focus on the human characters and gradually build the science fiction elements as the characters themselves became more aware of what was really going on. Now that they've gone all-in on the concept, there's no telling where this could go. Are we seeing the birth of something like the Skynet system from The Terminator? Will the battle of machines go global? It's all rather riveting, and definitely worth watching if you like a dash of science fiction in your crimebusting.
Plus, possibly the most awesome dog on television, a former police/military dog with a taste for first editions and played by a dog who seems to take more pleasure in his work than any human actor (seriously, there is sheer glee all over that dog in all his scenes. That dog loves his work).
Saturday, September 5, 2015
The Stealth Geek in Good Company
I'm not sure I can be called a stealth geek anymore since I've been outed by being included on this list of inspiring real-life geeks. Then again, I think most of these ladies would be considered good examples of stealth geeks. We don't fit the "geek girl" stereotype (which I think is mostly a media construct, anyway) but still retain all that inner geekiness.
Wednesday, September 2, 2015
Follow-up: The Heirs to Firefly
They've announced that both of the Not!Firefly shows, Dark Matter and Killjoys, have been renewed, so I guess they'll live longer than the real thing did.
What did I end up thinking about them after seeing the first season of both?
Dark Matter had an intriguing premise and a lot of promise, but I often found it frustrating. The episodes themselves weren't all that great, to be honest. The plots were usually killing time until they got to the big twist or revelation at the end of the episode, and that was what kept me watching. Usually the revelation was a big enough "oh my!" to have me anxiously waiting for the next episode to see how it would play out.
Only a few of the characters managed to emerge from the shadows of their Firefly predecessors. And there were a few episodes that you could map pretty easily to Firefly episodes.
One of the things I found frustrating about the premise of a group of people waking with no memories of who they were was how we ended up learning about them. I was hoping for more of them running into people and situations where they were known and having to piece it together from there, or them doing any kind of investigation, but for the most part, they were just told. A facial recognition search gave their identities (for the most part). Some memories were recovered with a technobabble solution. There were only a few cases where there were twists that came about through action.
And then there's the ill-advised attempt to fit a romantic plot into the mix. They never did much with it, never showed the relationship enough for us to be at all invested in it so that we'd care whether or not the latest revelation would throw a monkey wrench in it. What we learned about those people should have made us desperately concerned about what it would do to them, and instead it was kind of a non-event. We never saw what they were getting out of the relationship, never saw it as something they needed that was helping them or changing them. When it stopped (if it did -- it was vague enough to make it hard to tell), it didn't seem to change anything for either of them or for the dynamic.
It's a show I'll keep watching because I'm intrigued by the questions and answers, but the actual episodes aren't that much fun.
Killjoys, on the other hand, feels more like the rightful Heir to Firefly. It's more of a tone and feel than a direct mapping. The world feels rough and lived in, and the characters have a real sense of history with each other. The episodes on their own were fun and exciting.
Again, relationships were a weak spot. I'm not sure why they felt the need to hook up two of the leads so soon, and it was a pretty bland, nothing relationship, other than the serious fallout that resulted, which they then got over pretty quickly. It's hard to tell if what they really have going is a potential triangle, or if that's just something it's easy to read into it based on standard TV patterns. I guess they wanted to quickly intensify the relationship between the two characters without a history with each other, and sex was an easy way to do it.
TV writers so seldom get romance right, though. That's probably going to be my gripe with 99 percent of TV series.
The finale of this one launched it into a potentially interesting direction, and I'm along for the ride.
What did I end up thinking about them after seeing the first season of both?
Dark Matter had an intriguing premise and a lot of promise, but I often found it frustrating. The episodes themselves weren't all that great, to be honest. The plots were usually killing time until they got to the big twist or revelation at the end of the episode, and that was what kept me watching. Usually the revelation was a big enough "oh my!" to have me anxiously waiting for the next episode to see how it would play out.
Only a few of the characters managed to emerge from the shadows of their Firefly predecessors. And there were a few episodes that you could map pretty easily to Firefly episodes.
One of the things I found frustrating about the premise of a group of people waking with no memories of who they were was how we ended up learning about them. I was hoping for more of them running into people and situations where they were known and having to piece it together from there, or them doing any kind of investigation, but for the most part, they were just told. A facial recognition search gave their identities (for the most part). Some memories were recovered with a technobabble solution. There were only a few cases where there were twists that came about through action.
And then there's the ill-advised attempt to fit a romantic plot into the mix. They never did much with it, never showed the relationship enough for us to be at all invested in it so that we'd care whether or not the latest revelation would throw a monkey wrench in it. What we learned about those people should have made us desperately concerned about what it would do to them, and instead it was kind of a non-event. We never saw what they were getting out of the relationship, never saw it as something they needed that was helping them or changing them. When it stopped (if it did -- it was vague enough to make it hard to tell), it didn't seem to change anything for either of them or for the dynamic.
It's a show I'll keep watching because I'm intrigued by the questions and answers, but the actual episodes aren't that much fun.
Killjoys, on the other hand, feels more like the rightful Heir to Firefly. It's more of a tone and feel than a direct mapping. The world feels rough and lived in, and the characters have a real sense of history with each other. The episodes on their own were fun and exciting.
Again, relationships were a weak spot. I'm not sure why they felt the need to hook up two of the leads so soon, and it was a pretty bland, nothing relationship, other than the serious fallout that resulted, which they then got over pretty quickly. It's hard to tell if what they really have going is a potential triangle, or if that's just something it's easy to read into it based on standard TV patterns. I guess they wanted to quickly intensify the relationship between the two characters without a history with each other, and sex was an easy way to do it.
TV writers so seldom get romance right, though. That's probably going to be my gripe with 99 percent of TV series.
The finale of this one launched it into a potentially interesting direction, and I'm along for the ride.
Thursday, June 25, 2015
Not!Firefly
I've really missed Sci Fi (now SyFy) Fridays. I don't know how long they've been showing wrestling in that spot, but it seems like forever since the golden age of three (or more) solid hours of science fiction programming on Friday nights. Usually, there was at least one Stargate show, often two (SG-1 and Atlantis), sometimes Battlestar Galactica, sometimes Doctor Who. And for a brief time they showed the entire series of Firefly in the pre-prime time slot. I'd settle on the sofa with a pizza at six and watch all night.
And now it's back. They've moved wrestling to another night (it still doesn't belong on the network, but I guess if it helps pay the bills and keep the other stuff on, I can live with it), so we have three hours of science fiction shows on Friday night. And, wonder of wonders, two of those actually involve spaceships, something SyFy has avoided for a long time while they've focused on shows that were more "paranormal" than science fiction. I like a lot of the paranormal stuff, but I also enjoy spaceship shows.
The first hour is devoted to the returning Defiance, which is sort of a post-apocalyptic Western with aliens on earth. The next two hours are new shows that both fall into the category of Not!Firefly. Otherwise known as "we loved Firefly, so we wrote fanfic and then filed off the serial numbers and added a twist or two." I can hardly criticize, as my very first attempt at writing was Star Wars mental fanfic with the serial numbers filed off. In my defense, I was twelve. And I didn't get a TV development deal out of it. But hey, I liked (loved, obsessed over) Firefly, so a couple of hours of Almost, but Not Quite, Entirely Unlike Firefly (Really! It's Totally Different!) is fine with me.
So, the first hour of Not!Firefly Night is Killjoys, which has only had one episode so far. Basically, Not!Inara is the captain, except her mystical special training seems to have been as a ninja-like assassin instead of as a courtesan, and it seems like Not!Simon is her first officer, only he's a thief instead of a doctor, and Not!Simon and Not!Mal are brothers, and they're all bounty hunters instead of smugglers. The world is very, very Firefly. We even have the evil corporation that seems to be in charge of everything. I liked the pilot, although the weak link is Not!Mal, who has none of Mal's personality or charm. Maybe he'll warm up as they go along.
Then the next round of Not!Firefly is Dark Matter, where they barely bothered filing the serial numbers off the characters, though they're in a totally different situation. It's basically Firefly Alt-Universe fanfic with the character names changed. A group of people wakes up from some kind of cryosleep on a spaceship, with no memory of who they are, why they're there, or where they're going, but they do seem to each have some kind of skill that comes to them without any memory of having learned it or having used it. The woman who just falls into the captain role is Not!Zoe. Then there's Not!Simon and Not!Jayne. There's a young girl who's a blend of Kaylee and River, and RivLee is so obvious in her origins that I can't even put the Not! in there. I'm thinking that the Asian swordsman is maybe a gender-flipped Not!Inara (for the mystic exoticness, not so much for being a courtesan, though who knows?), and then we have Not!Book. The only slight twist is a rather snarky android with homicidal tendencies, who did not appear in Firefly (unless maybe she's our Not!Mal). We don't learn any of the characters' names until the very end of the pilot, and they refer to each other by numbers that I can't keep straight, which doesn't help my tendency to refer to them by their Firefly character names.
I was a little ho-hum on this one, mostly amusing myself by mapping all the Firefly parallels, until the very end of the episode and we learned who they were, and that intrigued me enough that I immediately watched the next episode (I was watching OnDemand). I'm kind of a sucker for "blank slate" stories, the idea of what would you be if you didn't know who you were, and I have a feeling that the identities we learned about may not be that straightforward (I have theories, based on the obvious Firefly 2.0 situation, but we shall see if I'm right).
It's not Firefly, nowhere near the same level of writing or acting, and I wouldn't recommend that they re-run the real deal in that pre-prime time slot because the newcomers would suffer in comparison, but if you have the original memorized and want something new that kind of scratches a similar itch, check these out.
And now it's back. They've moved wrestling to another night (it still doesn't belong on the network, but I guess if it helps pay the bills and keep the other stuff on, I can live with it), so we have three hours of science fiction shows on Friday night. And, wonder of wonders, two of those actually involve spaceships, something SyFy has avoided for a long time while they've focused on shows that were more "paranormal" than science fiction. I like a lot of the paranormal stuff, but I also enjoy spaceship shows.
The first hour is devoted to the returning Defiance, which is sort of a post-apocalyptic Western with aliens on earth. The next two hours are new shows that both fall into the category of Not!Firefly. Otherwise known as "we loved Firefly, so we wrote fanfic and then filed off the serial numbers and added a twist or two." I can hardly criticize, as my very first attempt at writing was Star Wars mental fanfic with the serial numbers filed off. In my defense, I was twelve. And I didn't get a TV development deal out of it. But hey, I liked (loved, obsessed over) Firefly, so a couple of hours of Almost, but Not Quite, Entirely Unlike Firefly (Really! It's Totally Different!) is fine with me.
So, the first hour of Not!Firefly Night is Killjoys, which has only had one episode so far. Basically, Not!Inara is the captain, except her mystical special training seems to have been as a ninja-like assassin instead of as a courtesan, and it seems like Not!Simon is her first officer, only he's a thief instead of a doctor, and Not!Simon and Not!Mal are brothers, and they're all bounty hunters instead of smugglers. The world is very, very Firefly. We even have the evil corporation that seems to be in charge of everything. I liked the pilot, although the weak link is Not!Mal, who has none of Mal's personality or charm. Maybe he'll warm up as they go along.
Then the next round of Not!Firefly is Dark Matter, where they barely bothered filing the serial numbers off the characters, though they're in a totally different situation. It's basically Firefly Alt-Universe fanfic with the character names changed. A group of people wakes up from some kind of cryosleep on a spaceship, with no memory of who they are, why they're there, or where they're going, but they do seem to each have some kind of skill that comes to them without any memory of having learned it or having used it. The woman who just falls into the captain role is Not!Zoe. Then there's Not!Simon and Not!Jayne. There's a young girl who's a blend of Kaylee and River, and RivLee is so obvious in her origins that I can't even put the Not! in there. I'm thinking that the Asian swordsman is maybe a gender-flipped Not!Inara (for the mystic exoticness, not so much for being a courtesan, though who knows?), and then we have Not!Book. The only slight twist is a rather snarky android with homicidal tendencies, who did not appear in Firefly (unless maybe she's our Not!Mal). We don't learn any of the characters' names until the very end of the pilot, and they refer to each other by numbers that I can't keep straight, which doesn't help my tendency to refer to them by their Firefly character names.
I was a little ho-hum on this one, mostly amusing myself by mapping all the Firefly parallels, until the very end of the episode and we learned who they were, and that intrigued me enough that I immediately watched the next episode (I was watching OnDemand). I'm kind of a sucker for "blank slate" stories, the idea of what would you be if you didn't know who you were, and I have a feeling that the identities we learned about may not be that straightforward (I have theories, based on the obvious Firefly 2.0 situation, but we shall see if I'm right).
It's not Firefly, nowhere near the same level of writing or acting, and I wouldn't recommend that they re-run the real deal in that pre-prime time slot because the newcomers would suffer in comparison, but if you have the original memorized and want something new that kind of scratches a similar itch, check these out.
Friday, May 22, 2015
That Game of Thrones Episode
Although there's been a lot of disturbing stuff on the Game of Thrones TV series, the ending of last week's episode really irked me, enough that I fired off an angry tweet. Now, after thinking about it and reading other responses, I think I've unpacked what exactly it was that bothered me so much. Spoilers ahead for books and TV series.
1) It was a breaking point/final straw about lazy writing
It's a sad reality that the kneejerk reaction to a woman doing something on the Internet that displeases a certain kind of man is a rape threat. I've been fortunate to have avoided that, probably due to being too obscure an author to get that kind of attention, but I've seen it happen to way too many other female authors. "You should be raped/you deserve to be raped/I ought to come rape you" is used to mean "I disagree with your opinion," "what you said made me feel uncomfortable," "you aren't writing fast enough and I want more books," "you took a character in a direction I didn't like" or "the e-book of your newest release didn't download onto my reader at precisely the stroke of midnight even though I pre-ordered it."
The Game of Thrones TV series is starting to feel the same way. They need to show that it's a dangerous, gritty world? Rape. They need to show that women are vulnerable and aren't safe? Rape. They need to show that a man is a twisted jerk? Rape. They want to shock the audience? Rape. An exposition scene might be boring? Rape of a topless or naked woman.
So, basically a team of supposedly professional writers for a highly praised, award-winning TV series is functioning on the creative level of your average Internet troll. It's lazy writing, prurience masquerading as "grit."
2) "But it's realistic!" "There's rape in the books!"
Yes, women have been raped throughout history. Yes, there's rape in the books. But there was lots of other unsavory stuff going on in those historical eras and in the books. The books depict the terrible aftermath of a war, showing how it's the common people who are suffering even after the nobles have wrapped up their war over which nobles will be in power. There's starvation because crops were destroyed in battle. Homes were destroyed. There's a flood of refugees on the roads. Lawless bands of former soldiers abruptly cut loose at the end of the war are roaming around, terrorizing the population. And, yes, this includes rape. The show mostly boils this down to rape, skimming over the rest. It's the shorthand for "things are tough all over." Also, most of the key rape scenes in the TV series were not rapes in the books or happened to different characters in a different context. They're adding bonus rape to major characters.
3) Did these writers even read the books?
I feel like in the latest scene involving Sansa that the writers were so eager to include a rape of a major character (perhaps not coincidentally played by an actress who recently became "legal") that they entirely missed the point of this segment of the books. The theme of that story line was fakery because there was a lot going on that wasn't what it seemed. While a woman was raped at the corresponding part of the story in similar circumstances (the consummation of an arranged marriage), the point was that the Boltons were trying to cement their hold on the north by marrying Ramsay to "Arya Stark," who was actually an impostor. Which meant this marriage actually did nothing to solidify their hold. Meanwhile, the Lords of the North who were gathered to witness this wedding were actually plotting against them and undermining them. Even the minstrel playing in the hall was actually someone else in disguise. It looked like the ultimate Bolton triumph, but readers could tell that they were actually building a house of sand that was in danger of collapsing completely. Although the events were horrifying, there was an iota of hope that it was all about to turn around. But the TV show replaced the fake Arya with the real Sansa Stark, so this marriage actually does solidify their claim. The lords aren't there. Mance isn't there in his minstrel disguise. So it's a very different event from what happened in the book.
4) It was given a really creepy context that wasn't in the book.
In the book, Ramsay is a monster, all the way through, with no redeeming qualities. There might be a few twisted individuals who identify with him, but that's on them because I don't get the feeling that Martin is in any way trying to make him sympathetic. On TV, this character is played by a handsome actor with a lot of charm and charisma. When we meet him, he's tormenting Theon, a traitor who bears a lot of responsibility for what happened to the Stark family, so although Ramsay is cruel, there's the sense of "the enemy of my enemy." He gets the snarky one-liners and clever quips. We actually see his degradation of Theon instead of it being something that's already happened by the time we catch up with the character again. Show-Ramsay has a bevy of beautiful women at his beck and call to help him with his sadism. When he tortures and castrates Theon, there are naked women on the screen. Ramsay is depicted in a consensual relationship with a beautiful woman who's even jealous of his arranged bride. In short, on the show, he's shown to be kind of a cool dude, and is pretty much the way the Internet trolls would like to see themselves -- they're irresistible to beautiful women, but they also get to force themselves on the women who think they're too good for them. That makes the scene in question feel like it was written to cater to the worst elements of the audience.
5) It actually does make a difference that it happens to a secondary character.
This sequence in the book is mostly about Theon's growth, how the way Ramsay treats his wife is what breaks Theon out of his tortured conditioning and Stockholm Syndrome and makes him help the girl and defy Ramsay -- it's his redemption arc. While it is kind of icky that a woman's rape is used for a man's growth, the woman is a supporting, secondary character, and that's what supporting characters do. They help create and support the plots for the major characters. There are plenty of major female characters in the books, most of whom are not raped and who have their own arcs that aren't about supporting the emotional growth of men. I'll withhold judgment until I see how the aftermath plays out here, but the camera did focus on Theon's face and his reaction, so there's a good chance that this arc will still be largely about his growth. The problem here is that Sansa is a major character in her own right who has her own story and her own arc, so one of the major female characters in the story (who has not been raped at the point where the books leave off so far) may have been demoted into a position of supporting the arc of a male character (who is arguably a less important character than she is in the books), and they're using a rape of her to do so.
So, all this is why my reaction to this episode was "Seriously, guys? Oh, come on." I'm not going to stop watching because I want to see how the story plays out (and goodness knows if we'll ever get to the end of the books), but I did want to raise my voice. I don't know if the outcry will actually make these guys think, but I don't want anyone to have any illusions that no one has noticed what they're doing here. It would be lovely if the freedom offered by HBO weren't just used to make television with all the maturity of a 13-year-old boy. "Mature audiences" really should mean more than "hee hee, boobies!"
1) It was a breaking point/final straw about lazy writing
It's a sad reality that the kneejerk reaction to a woman doing something on the Internet that displeases a certain kind of man is a rape threat. I've been fortunate to have avoided that, probably due to being too obscure an author to get that kind of attention, but I've seen it happen to way too many other female authors. "You should be raped/you deserve to be raped/I ought to come rape you" is used to mean "I disagree with your opinion," "what you said made me feel uncomfortable," "you aren't writing fast enough and I want more books," "you took a character in a direction I didn't like" or "the e-book of your newest release didn't download onto my reader at precisely the stroke of midnight even though I pre-ordered it."
The Game of Thrones TV series is starting to feel the same way. They need to show that it's a dangerous, gritty world? Rape. They need to show that women are vulnerable and aren't safe? Rape. They need to show that a man is a twisted jerk? Rape. They want to shock the audience? Rape. An exposition scene might be boring? Rape of a topless or naked woman.
So, basically a team of supposedly professional writers for a highly praised, award-winning TV series is functioning on the creative level of your average Internet troll. It's lazy writing, prurience masquerading as "grit."
2) "But it's realistic!" "There's rape in the books!"
Yes, women have been raped throughout history. Yes, there's rape in the books. But there was lots of other unsavory stuff going on in those historical eras and in the books. The books depict the terrible aftermath of a war, showing how it's the common people who are suffering even after the nobles have wrapped up their war over which nobles will be in power. There's starvation because crops were destroyed in battle. Homes were destroyed. There's a flood of refugees on the roads. Lawless bands of former soldiers abruptly cut loose at the end of the war are roaming around, terrorizing the population. And, yes, this includes rape. The show mostly boils this down to rape, skimming over the rest. It's the shorthand for "things are tough all over." Also, most of the key rape scenes in the TV series were not rapes in the books or happened to different characters in a different context. They're adding bonus rape to major characters.
3) Did these writers even read the books?
I feel like in the latest scene involving Sansa that the writers were so eager to include a rape of a major character (perhaps not coincidentally played by an actress who recently became "legal") that they entirely missed the point of this segment of the books. The theme of that story line was fakery because there was a lot going on that wasn't what it seemed. While a woman was raped at the corresponding part of the story in similar circumstances (the consummation of an arranged marriage), the point was that the Boltons were trying to cement their hold on the north by marrying Ramsay to "Arya Stark," who was actually an impostor. Which meant this marriage actually did nothing to solidify their hold. Meanwhile, the Lords of the North who were gathered to witness this wedding were actually plotting against them and undermining them. Even the minstrel playing in the hall was actually someone else in disguise. It looked like the ultimate Bolton triumph, but readers could tell that they were actually building a house of sand that was in danger of collapsing completely. Although the events were horrifying, there was an iota of hope that it was all about to turn around. But the TV show replaced the fake Arya with the real Sansa Stark, so this marriage actually does solidify their claim. The lords aren't there. Mance isn't there in his minstrel disguise. So it's a very different event from what happened in the book.
4) It was given a really creepy context that wasn't in the book.
In the book, Ramsay is a monster, all the way through, with no redeeming qualities. There might be a few twisted individuals who identify with him, but that's on them because I don't get the feeling that Martin is in any way trying to make him sympathetic. On TV, this character is played by a handsome actor with a lot of charm and charisma. When we meet him, he's tormenting Theon, a traitor who bears a lot of responsibility for what happened to the Stark family, so although Ramsay is cruel, there's the sense of "the enemy of my enemy." He gets the snarky one-liners and clever quips. We actually see his degradation of Theon instead of it being something that's already happened by the time we catch up with the character again. Show-Ramsay has a bevy of beautiful women at his beck and call to help him with his sadism. When he tortures and castrates Theon, there are naked women on the screen. Ramsay is depicted in a consensual relationship with a beautiful woman who's even jealous of his arranged bride. In short, on the show, he's shown to be kind of a cool dude, and is pretty much the way the Internet trolls would like to see themselves -- they're irresistible to beautiful women, but they also get to force themselves on the women who think they're too good for them. That makes the scene in question feel like it was written to cater to the worst elements of the audience.
5) It actually does make a difference that it happens to a secondary character.
This sequence in the book is mostly about Theon's growth, how the way Ramsay treats his wife is what breaks Theon out of his tortured conditioning and Stockholm Syndrome and makes him help the girl and defy Ramsay -- it's his redemption arc. While it is kind of icky that a woman's rape is used for a man's growth, the woman is a supporting, secondary character, and that's what supporting characters do. They help create and support the plots for the major characters. There are plenty of major female characters in the books, most of whom are not raped and who have their own arcs that aren't about supporting the emotional growth of men. I'll withhold judgment until I see how the aftermath plays out here, but the camera did focus on Theon's face and his reaction, so there's a good chance that this arc will still be largely about his growth. The problem here is that Sansa is a major character in her own right who has her own story and her own arc, so one of the major female characters in the story (who has not been raped at the point where the books leave off so far) may have been demoted into a position of supporting the arc of a male character (who is arguably a less important character than she is in the books), and they're using a rape of her to do so.
So, all this is why my reaction to this episode was "Seriously, guys? Oh, come on." I'm not going to stop watching because I want to see how the story plays out (and goodness knows if we'll ever get to the end of the books), but I did want to raise my voice. I don't know if the outcry will actually make these guys think, but I don't want anyone to have any illusions that no one has noticed what they're doing here. It would be lovely if the freedom offered by HBO weren't just used to make television with all the maturity of a 13-year-old boy. "Mature audiences" really should mean more than "hee hee, boobies!"
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