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Post by eyesofmist on Mar 2, 2015 12:36:57 GMT
I have read this interview to Clive Standen, Rollo in Vikings and he surprised me because I had made the mistake of thinking someone so brawny always doing action scenes and showing off his muscles wouldn't be so articulate when he speaks and wouldn't have so interesting a vision of female characters as the one he shows. D&D could learn a couple of things from this actor. He is still interested in action scenes because he is such an athletic and active guy but this doesn't mean he is not intelligent,thoughtful or that he does not have the correct approach to what a good feminine character should be. See this extract from the interview: I can't begin to explain how much I agree and reading this is like a breath of fresh air after reading so many wrong interpretations about what a good female character should be. We have this problem with Game of Thrones TV show and also with the readers who think only strong women are good characters,and by strong they mean warrior women or manipulators with political power or the ones who use their sexaulity to achieve something. That is why they can't value Sansa or Catelyn as characters in the show. In the books,they are tree-dimensional and complex and feel genuine and convincing,which is what makes a good character. There are all types of male characters but why is the range of female ones so reduced and what's more, so archetypical and nothing to do with real women in most cases? Movies don't usually offer good parts for women nowadays and it is a shame. We find better options on TV,women of different ages and personalities,not like the girl who is as tough as the guys and does the same things and/or is sexy and young so they can lust after her. George RR Martin has really good female charactes in his books but the show has made them no justice, I'm afraid. Some of them have been underdeveloped and adultered to the point that they are barely recognizable and the changes are not for the better,IMO. In Vikings, Lagertha is a warrior but it is clear how she became one,she was brought up and trained to be one, you can't expect the same from Sansa,who was educated in a different way. Aslaugh or Siggy aren't warrios like Lagertha but they are interesting women too. There is not only one type of strong female character. What's more, a good character doesn't necessarily have to be strong,there should be all types of characters, weak and strong,smart and dumb,honest and deceitful, etc; there should be variety,and this includes women characters. This is the link to the rest of the interview with Clive Standen: www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/vikings-2013/news/1932781/vikings_clive_standen_you_will_not_expect_some_of_the_plot_developments/
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maidenpools
Junior Member
hyped for a re-read!!
Posts: 50
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Post by maidenpools on Mar 2, 2015 15:10:29 GMT
I had an interesting conversation with one of my followers about the portrayal of women in media. She said she thought there weren't enough girls who used non-feminine-coded abilities to succeed in life being portrayed on television, an opinion with which I strongly disagreed. Ultimately, this is what I argued: You can read the whole conversation here. In short, we don't need more or less of a particular kind of female character, we just need the ones we have to be well-written and 3-dimensional, as you pointed out in your post, eyesofmist. Thought you all might find this poster about representation of women in media interesting as well: Those are some pretty disturbing numbers. There aren't many female characters, and what female characters there are seem to be little more than a pretty face onto which the male viewer can project his desire most of the time.
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Post by katie on Mar 2, 2015 15:44:50 GMT
Well said. Sansa is a conundrum to D&D because she is not either of the following: (a) a warrior, or (b) a sexpot. If a female character doesn't fall into one of those two categories, they are at a loss.
But now that Sophie Turner is 18, guess which trope they are gonna with? :-(
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Post by sillierthings on Mar 2, 2015 16:09:21 GMT
Really nothing to add, except I so agree completely with the original post. I always loved that quotation by George Martin where he says that the reason he writes women well is that he just thinks of them as people. Seems so obvious, doesn't it? And yet, we continue to see the warrior and the sexpot over and over and over again.
Is it really so unique to be strong of mind and spirit but not carry a weapon? Is it so strange to have a vigorous and healthy sexuality that is not on display for everyone to see? It's infuriating, and yes, Katie, I'm so afraid of what is in store for t.v. Sansa in the coming season.
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Post by katie on Mar 2, 2015 18:31:17 GMT
Omg, I had dinner with a few other SanSanites from Tumblr over the weekend, and I brought up the theory of Sansa's season 5 plotline involving her taking Jeyne Poole's place, which I thought they were already aware of, but apparently not, because you could practically hear the "record scratch", LOL! Everyone just stopped cold and stared at me like I had just told them that their parents were dead. Ooops! I quickly changed the subject to current speculation about Sansa's "controversial" chapter in TWoW and that lifted the mood considerably, LOL... Anyway, back on topic. I'm sure y'all have probably seen this by now, a pic of one of the Sand Snakes from Season 5: So, basically, I feel like this just epitomizes D&D's utter cluelessness when it comes to the female characters of ASOIAF. When GRRM repeatedly uses the phrase "as useless as nipples on a breastplate" in the books, I feel like D&D just saw the word "NIPPLES" and completely disregarded the first half of the sentence. Which pretty much sums up everything, doesn't it? Sigh...
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maidenpools
Junior Member
hyped for a re-read!!
Posts: 50
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Post by maidenpools on Mar 2, 2015 19:34:27 GMT
They feel the need to sexualize everything, including Sansa. It's disgusting and it makes me angry. Apparently women have no means to achieve their ends other than behaving in a "masculine" way or by using their bodies.
And yes - it's been shown time and again that armor that conforms to a woman's breasts is in no way useful - real female warriors did not have bodycon armor because it's not a proper means of protection. It's simple as that.
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Post by katie on Mar 2, 2015 19:41:12 GMT
What actually DOES work, though, is the context of that "lady armor" that Cersei wears during the Battle of Blackwater. Whenever I see that, I always chuckle, because it's obvious how it's PURELY for show and not practical in any damn sense. But then you see gals like Asha/Yara and the Sand Snakes wearing similar armor, and it's like... huh?? The only female whom they seem to get it right with is Brienne, but I think that's only because they don't consider her a "real" woman anyway.
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maidenpools
Junior Member
hyped for a re-read!!
Posts: 50
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Post by maidenpools on Mar 2, 2015 20:41:12 GMT
The show doesn't even attempt to discuss Brienne's gender issues. In the books, Brienne is caught between doing what she's good at and being hated for it (i.e. going through life as a warrior - a masculine-coded pursuit) and feeling as though she's missing out on things that highborn ladies normally get to do. In the show, Brienne says to Jaime: "You sound like a bloody woman," rather than "Are you so craven?" They've made her dislike her own gender which is completely out of keeping with canon and misogynistic as it gets. The discussion of gender roles and different forms of strength in Brienne's narrative arc is invaluable to understanding her specifically and one of the work's overarching themes generally and is my favorite thing about her arc, as explained in this bit of meta (which the show fails to convey at all):
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Post by katie on Mar 2, 2015 20:59:29 GMT
Even Gwen Christie has gone on record to say that playing Brienne is so powerful for her personally because it allows her to tap into a side of herself that she has spent most of her life trying to squelch. As an abnormally tall woman, she has made a point to go to great lengths to "feminize" herself as much as possible, but playing Brienne allows her to put that all aside for once. It's just too bad that those gender identity issues are never really addressed with the character herself.
The same bullshit happens with Arya. D&D have her spew lines like "Most girls are idiots". As opposed to Arya's #1 girl power anthem, "The woman is important too!" I don't think you can possibly get more opposite in terms of gender ideals... Wow.
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Post by eyesofmist on Mar 2, 2015 22:04:34 GMT
All of you have said very interesting things,the conversation has become so interesting. There is something that bothers me too.Why do female characters have to be strong? Why do they have to be morally flawless unless they are the cartoonish femme fatale or shrewish hag in the story?
Not all male characters are strong, or honourable, there are many flawed characters and also characters with weaknesses and that's OK. A character doesn't need to be a paragon of virtue or an example of moral and/or physical strength to be an interesting character people want to watch. Why should it be different for women, why can't they be flawed and still interesting and valued as characters?
Martin did try to show different types of female characters and they made mistakes, and they were flawed. What happened? They attracted an enourmous amount of irrational hate. Sansa is a child, she makes the mistake to trust the wrong people, a mistake all of us, and I say all because it is true, have made in our lives,and she is hated with an intensity that borders on insanity when it doesn't fall directly into that category. Cat tries to save her girls when her son is not willing to do anything to rescue them, because they are women and therefore not considered as valuable as Jaime, a great warrior and a male. So she makes her bet and perhaps she fails, or perhaps not,because Jaime really wants to keep his word,unlike Tyrion,and give the girls back. She gives the right advice to Rob,he dismisses her opinion and all of them end up dead. And the readers don't forgive her because she doesn't love Jon,when love is not something one can feel on demand,you just feel it or not. Do you think all these people who hate Cat for being mean to Jon would expect a male character to raise, accept and love as his, a boy his wife had from another man when they were already married. What if Rob was fathered by another man while Ned was at war? What would readers say and what would they expect from him?
I'm sorry to say that when I was a teenager I thought mysogyny and unequality between the sexes would be a bad memory of the past by the time we are living now but I was completely wrong. And perhaps I am pessimistic but I think that when there are economic or politica crises,male chauvinism rears its ugly head once again and even strong than in times of abundance and optimism. We want to think it is old fashioned and very sparse but unfortunately it is not uncommon. The problem is that even nice men find it difficult to realise the ugly monster is still there in things like the roles women get in movies or TV shows. You can have a look at society and you will see the same and probably worse. Unfortunately we can't say it is being defeated. I wish I could say that but there are still too many things that need to change.
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Post by katie on Mar 2, 2015 22:17:31 GMT
I think we mean "strong" in terms of complexity and depth, not necessarily "strong" in a physical or emotional sense. At least that's how I have interpreted it. Many of the female characters in ASOIAF experience moments of weakness (Sansa and Cat in particular) but the way their characters are constructed and built up by GRRM is what makes them so compelling... and "strong". ;-)
At any rate, institutional misogyny is so deeply ingrained in our society and psyches, going back thousands of years, that it's not surprising that it's taking so long to recover. You can't just undo a millennia's worth of "programming" within a few decades. It will take some time, but at least it's being acknowledged and addressed, and that is the very important first step!
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Post by eyesofmist on Mar 2, 2015 22:32:46 GMT
Yeah, I know katie, but the problem is that some things are going backwards,at least in Europe or this is what I feel and may be different in the US, I don't know. I have two children, a boy and a girl, and I am worried because I see two much violence against women reported on the news and there are threads on Westeros.org,for instance, that are so mysogynistic my jaw goes slack when I see what they are saying. Men like my husband,born in the sixties,are too often less agressive towards women and less mysogynistic than others who are younger and this makes me very sad, because something is going very wrong if this is happening.
Some attitudes are hidden,things like disliking charactes with feminine traits, thinkig women are boring and what is interesting for women is less important. This may seem unimportant but it isn't. Nice men don't even recognise mysogynistic attitudes for what they are when they see them,they don't think they are so important but they are wrong,they are the point of the iceberg. Even the female characters we see in movies are an example of this or the age of the actresses and their looks. There are roles for older not so handsome actors but not for older or less attractive women. And even the roles they can get are usually predictable and not rich or interesting. I am sorry to say my view on this is pessimistic because I don't think this has improved enough in my life. More often than not it is just the opposite.
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Post by katie on Mar 2, 2015 22:40:11 GMT
That's what happens when people try to change things so ingrained in our society. That's why people like JFK, RFK, and MLK are assassinated -- because they are the ones that stand up and say "No, this is wrong and this needs to change", and the cowards out there who are so pitifully afraid of change react violently. So this does not surprise me that there is so much resistance; but in the end, the just cause will win out. Maybe I'm naive to say that, but I don't think so. Goodness, love, and compassion always wins. Which Sansa will prove in ASOIAF!!! ;-)
It may not happen in our lifetime, true, but the wheels are turning.
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Post by eyesofmist on Mar 2, 2015 22:54:01 GMT
I really hope you are right,but all the good people will have to join efforts for that,and keep an eye on what is happening,because sometimes we don't realise there is a real problem we still have to fight.
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