joannalannister:

George R.R. Martin for Time Magazine, July 13th, 2017

TIME: Your female characters stick out for their strength and complexity, but their treatment at the hands of male characters, often becoming victims of sexual violence, has raised umbrage over the years. Has that reaction surprised you?

GRRM: Yes, it has, actually. And I take issue with some of it. I don’t think the criticisms are true or apt. I know everyone has a right to their own opinion but… whatever. I’m writing a war story, essentially — the Wars of the Roses. The Hundred Years’ War. They have “war” right in the title of each of my inspirations here. And when I read history books, rape is a part of all these wars. There’s never been a war where it wasn’t, and that includes wars that are going on today. It just seems to me that there’s something fundamentally dishonest if you write a war story and you leave that out.

[source]

I feel very frustrated when GRRM attributes all of the sexual violence in the books to war, because there are so many examples in the books of sexual violence that wasn’t the result of a war. 

There was no war happening in Westeros when Tysha was gang raped. Cersei was raped by her own abusive husband, Robert. Tyrion raped Sunset Girl in a brothel, not on a battlefield. Rhaella was raped by her own husband, while under the “protection” of the Kingsguard. Drogo didn’t rape Dany on their wedding night, but he raped her on the nights that followed (and it’s really weird to me how GRRM never addresses this, and by “weird” I mean “not weird at all”). Donella Hornwood and Jeyne Poole were raped by Ramsay. There are more. And that’s just the women; let’s talk about Tyrion and Theon and Petyr.

Here’s a list of rapes in the books, and a lot of them don’t occur as a result of war. Just going by the numbers, the books have a higher rape count than the show. 

I would really like an interviewer to bring this up. GRRM’s been asked this question before and he gives this same answer, but no one ever asks the follow up question, “What about all the rapes in the books that can’t be explained by war?”

What about Tysha, George? We hear about her gang rape in book 1, but you didn’t even bother to give her a name until book 2. What about that, George?

Where are the journalists asking these questions?

“Daenerys Targaryen. I do not seem to be able to separate my feelings towards her story and my feelings towards her.” Can you talk more about your problems regarding her story, please?

Um, well, this is not a subject that I like to delve in tbqh. My frustration and aversion to the way GRRM write huge chunks of this story often trips me up and I find myself mostly unable to be as coherent as I’d like to be, and as the subject deserves. I’ll do my best with it but I’d recommend reading @valiantnedspreciouslittlegirl’s post on the subject because it puts into words a lot of what I dislike in Dany’s story.

My problem is that Martin employs a lot of racist tropes in constructing Dany’s story. We’re introduced to Dany as she goes into her marriage to Khal Drogo and experience Dothraki culture, making her the one to shape our view of said culture, aided by Jorah Mormont who serves as her advisor from the very beginning. Not only is there a problem in having our sole view of one of few prominently non-white societies filtered through the eyes of white characters, but the narrative sets Dany up as the white girl coming to civilize and gentle the savage POC, and oh aren’t the Dothraki so savage and uncultured, they do not even have a word for thank you!!!

While the Dothraki culture is definitely one that needs lots of reforms, Martin’s depiction of them in general is deeply racist. He falls back on stereotypes and dehumanizing portrayals to carry the story, reducing them to a monolithic society built on violence, subjugation and sexual submission. He never bothers to flesh them out, he never bothers to give distinction for different characters that isn’t built on brutality (can you tell me what differentiates Irri from
Jhiqui, or Aggo from
Rakharo from
Jhogo, or any of the khals from each other?), he never bothers to give them substance. He stomps all over them because they are mainly set up to
contrast Dany’s own views and beliefs, and to bring her to the point
where she “births” her dragons.

He leaves them undeveloped and then uses that to make them bow down to the white, western-coded, civilized girl that has earned their loyalty to the point of them going against their deeply-believed and upheld social norms because she walked out of a pyre unburned, even though the Dothraki loath witchcraft. Sure Jan.

From the start, Dany’s story relies heavily on the white savior trope
which is fundamentally racist.
It’s a trope that has a white person descending on a non-white society
to reform it and force a societal change that the residents of the
region can’t or won’t force . It often goes hand-in-hand with the
implication that the white person is doing it ~for the good of the
nation they have invaded~. The story of an external white force coming
to correct the injustice or the wrong behavior that exists in a
non-white society is racist, for it often implies that the non-white
society is incapable of reform on its own, that they need the
intelligent white person to teach them and show them how civilized people do it, and it’s something
that has been frequently used in our real world by imperialist forces
to justify their occupation of a region. (Which hits too close for me because Middle-Eastern history is rife with such attempts. When you’re constantly told you’re oppressed and the progressive white people are gonna help you be better, you tend to have a visceral reaction to any fictional work that builds upon the same idea.)

Whether with the Dothraki or in Slaver’s Bay, Dany is the white woman bringing humane reforms to the savage cultures she comes in contact with, she is the enlightenment movement coming to the backwards POC cultures to fix it. This isn’t a defense of either culture because both really need serious reforms, but for that force of change to be the teenage white girl saving the
indigenous people has serious racist connotations, not made at all better by Martin infantilizing the slaves that Dany frees by literally having them call her Mother. Because why not.

And the problem is that Dany does not quite fit the trope, she is not an imperialist despite Martin using imperialist writing in her story. She does not fall upon Slaver’s Bay because she wants to take advantage of the resources of the region, neither does she employ empty rhetoric about helping people to mask her imperialist ambitions or starts from a place of believed superiority. She truly cares about the slaves she frees. She is motivated by how powerless she felt herself and wants to spare others that same powerlessness. She respects the cultures she encounters and isn’t out to replace it with her own (implied superior) culture; on the contrary, she tries to preserve it and work within it to make away with the dehumanizing aspects without forcing a complete cultural shift. For me, Dany is a victim of her story because it is the single most racist narrative in the whole series by virtue of how utterly racist the writing is. That’s on Martin, not Dany. But like I said, I deal with how deeply uncomfortable I am with the story by disassociating from it, which affects how I connect to Dany despite my best efforts :/

How do you think Robert would have reacted had Renly or Stannis brought their suspicious regarding Cersei to him? Do you think he would have believed them or tried to ignore the evidence? And how would he deal with Tywin if he did decide to kill his children and grandchildren?

Well, neither Stannis nor Renly are idiots; they would not go to Robert with some vague suspicions they had no way to corroborate – not necessarily because Robert wouldn’t believe them (and I don’t really believe that he wouldn’t even without an iron-clad case, despite what Stannis thinks. Robert might not have liked his brothers but he at least trusted them to have his back, and his confirmation bias against the Lannisters would have kicked in as well), but because they knew they needed evidence or at least a rather strong case to get the charges to stick legally. The whole situation did not just rely on Robert believing them: though he is the king and so his judgement is the highest indictment, that does not mean that he could throw the law out of the window and go kill his queen and one of his Kingsguard without having a compelling case to present to the nobility and the Faith, the two main pillars that support the authority of the crown.

I think any theory that assumes that Robert might ignore the evidence of Cersei and Jaime’s affair – drawing inspiration from him doing exactly that with Janos Slynt perhaps? – severely mischaracterizes Robert. The guy was foaming at the mouth because Cersei told him not to fight in the melee in public; he definitely is not going to ever let her get away with humiliating him, and publicly insulting and undermining his masculinity and authority: she cuckolded him with one of his own Kingsguard, attempted to usurp his throne and generally made a fool out of him. That’s not something that Robert would ever abide or brush away, especially with his deep hatred of Cersei. And that’s without taking into account the political ramifications of that politically-disastrous affair: Cersei’s affair is a significant hit to the young Baratheon dynasty; Robert came really close to letting the throne pass to a bastard born out of incest compromising the line of succession and threatening to destabilize the realm, something that reflects badly on his abilities as king; some might question how competent he is if his queen and Kingsguard managed to have their affair under his nose and pass their bastards as his trueborn heirs for 13 years. How can he be the Lord of the Seven Kingdoms if he can not even keep his own wife in check? How can he protect his vassals’ interests if he can not even protect his own damn throne? This paints Robert as weak and incompetent.

Don’t forget that this also exposes the rot in the Baratheon regime: Jaime was allowed to keep his post after killing Aerys based on Robert’s pardon, which compromised the Kingsguard as an institution in the eyes of many. Cersei was made queen to cement an alliance with Tywin Lannister, the man who sacked King’s Landing and got away with it on Robert’s decree. Is it really surprising that the people that Robert allowed to get away with serious–and destabilizing –crimes have now tried to usurp the crown?

The magnitude of Cersei and Jaime’s crimes – that is, treason, cuckoldry, attempted usurpation, incest, and the added oath-breaking of Kingsguard vows in Jaime’s case – necessitates a swift crackdown and punishment, not that Robert would need much incentive or even a political motivation: his response to the murder of Elia Martell and her children, and his furious fights with Ned over the fate of Daenerys in canon show that his vengeful drive was still alive and well even over a decade after killing Rhaegar. His fury would not stop at Jaime and Cersei but would encompass the rest of the Lannisters, as previous kings had done before him when they suspected their queens of adultery. Indeed history tells us of the awful fate of House Harroway that was completely extinguished by Maegor the Cruel based on the belief that Queen Alys Harroway had an affair that resulted in a deformed stillborn, and of how Aegon the Unworthy punished his mistress Bethany Bracken for her affair with Ser Terrence Toyne of the Kingsguard by executing Bethany and her father, and having Toyne tortured to death. Robert would go after the other Lannisters which really does not bode well for Tyrion with his residence in the Red Keep (or the rest of Lannisters in court: Lancel, Tyrek, etc). While I have hope that the combined efforts of Stannis and Jon Arryn might spare the children’s lives, I do not foresee anyone speaking up for Tyrion, or believing that he did not know about his siblings’ affair.

Of course Tywin would not take any of that lying down. This does not only lose him any political standing he might have hoped to gain – which is significant, going from expecting to see a half-Lannister king one day to having his golden twins declared unnatural and his grandchildren abominations, as the Faith would be quick to do – but it completely destroys the image, credibility and authority of House Lannister for years to come. The House that Tywin was obsessed with propping up and declaring supreme would become the laughing stock of Westeros: his daughter disparaged as a whore and a brother-fucker, his chosen heir disgraced and spit upon, and we know how Tywin feels about people laughing at him. And the thing is that he would not believe it; he’d think it a conspiracy by Stannis or Renly to seize the throne, or an excuse by Robert to get rid of Cersei, but he would not believe that his golden twins would ever do that. In his mind, it would have to be vile slander. I’d imagine the narrative from the Rock might just be that the Targaryen madness had manifested in Robert and that he was pulling an Aerys, or an Aegon the Unworthy, the latter of which invokes the history of the falsified charges mounted against Queen Naerys – and likens Cersei and Jaime to the pious Naerys and the esteemed Dragonknight respectively which is a useful political image to try and put out there, though I might be ascribing more levelheadedness to Tywin than he’d be able to exert in the situation because if there is one truth about Tywin Lannister, it’s that he reacts violently and often carelessly in his haste to stop the laughter.

Unfortunately for Tywin, he’d be surrounded and without any natural allies. He simply does not have the means to withstand the combined strength of the Baratheon-Stark-Arryn-Tully bloc, joined by the Tyrells in their eagerness to cast off the Lannisters and install Margaery as Robert’s queen as per their plot with Renly (while Doran and Oberyn Martell sit back and laugh their asses off at what’s happening.) With these odds, not even the shadow of Castamere would keep Tywin’s own vassals loyal, and his legacy would be exposed as decadent just a little earlier than in canon.