And like any new media feminist

It was only at this point that it occured to me that ‘Leigh Alexander’ might be a woman. Up to then, it had seemed rather creepy.

Even if you do not watch Game of Thrones and you never intend to, you’ve heard someone say that there are a lot of naked women, there are a lot of woman-subjugating sex scenes, and there’ss generally a lot of fleshy eye-candy in this show.

That is me, and no, I hadn’t heard that- but now I have. I think this article has made me somewhat less likely to watch the series.

whenever I think of “worse SFF than Dragonlance” I think of Gor, and I don’t want to think about Gor.

Maybe you could think about The Wankh instead?

In the lesbian scene with the two prostitutes and Littlefinger, the fake porno movie moaning was so extreme that  I said “You have to be freaking kidding me” within 2 seconds of that scene starting. As if anticipating this reaction from the audience, Littlefinger then chides the ladies for the obvious fakeness of their moaning, but the scene itself continued to drag on and on to no apparent purpose. It totally killed my immersion in the narrative and threw me back, as if someone snuck up behind me while watching the show and shouted “LOOK! LESBIANS! WAAAAAAAAAH!” in my ear.

When you have 40 minutes to convey a complicated plot, spending 5 to 10 minutes on heavy-handed and gratuitous porno scenes is not only a waste of time, it is positively distracting and immersion-killing. If I want to see porno I can watch a porno movie. I am here for the narrative and the characters. The scenes with Tyrion and Arya are far more intriguing and I don’t want to see either of them naked. A little fan service is okay but seriously.

Some of the violence is also overly heavy-handed, but it is over in a second and doesn’t distract from the narrative unlike the overlong sex scenes. The “zombie movie” scene where the maid has her arm ripped off is obviously manipulative, but served the function of saying “this crowd is really vicious” and was over with in a flash.

Our modern concept of proper behavior and dress is based heavily on the Victorian period. It has been retroactively applied to our view of earlier European history by writers since that time. Our versions of Shakespeare have had the swear words removed etc.  Do you recall reading about the “Shitten Knight” in the Canterbury tales – my school version seemed to miss that bit entirely?
The Victorian era has given us a vision that the past was filled with a massive level of prudery that was in truth missing in many cases.
For instance, during the Napoleonic period, it was common for horsemen such as Hussars, to put their pants – really more like hose than pants – on wet, then let them dry so they tightened up as much as possible. Women who attended Balls could easily tell if a man was circumcised or not.
The level of sexual content in the show (and books) is fine with me.

As for the female characters, it seems to me that the majority of the events that happen in the books, if not all, are the results of actions by female characters. It may be male characters who resolve an issue in many cases but I think in a lot of cases its a female character who is responsible for causing the issue to exist in the first place.

You’re missing out on so much.

But, so it goes with some people.

(PS, several of the strong female characters are also creeps. Which makes them no different from men, so far as I can see.)