Game of Thrones (HBO) TV Show • Page 382

Get into the con circuit and this too can be yours.

 

honestly at this point you should probably just leave it alone... lol

 

None of the show’s larger (and not insignificant) issues with gender double standards were part of the original discussion, though. The issue that I and others have with what you and others are saying is entirely to do with this one specific instance and how strange the original complaint sounds (grown woman shouldn’t decide what to do with her own body because it makes me uncomfortable). That’s all. I can (and have) criticize the show for doing things in an unequal way while also believing that in this instance they got it right and I (especially as a man) have no right to tell Maisie Williams what she can and can’t do with her own body. It’s not about being a “prude”, frankly I don’t even know why you’d bring that up. It’s about a woman having autonomy over her image and her performance as a professional actor.

 

I guess I’m struggling to understand your larger discontent with Arya as a whole. Her internal struggle with becoming a faceless man and not being able to leave her identity as Arya Stark, aka her humanity, behind has been the core arc of her entire story. There are tons of characters who we accept as ruthless killers that are capable of love (or, at the bare minimum, sexual desire). Jaime pushes a kid out a window in the very first episode for love. Bronn is incredible ruthless and is always with a woman. Arya being in training and largely failing at it for a few years and having “human” desires afterwards is way more believable to me than Grey Worm forgetting years and years and years or the form of torture he went through to turn him into an Unsullied.

 

I think the inherent inequality in portrayals of nudity affects the autonomy women in this field have. There’s a different expectation and normalcy for women.

 

Feel free to block me.

 

Again, this is a very valid point about both this show and the industry at large but none of this was in any way part of the original conversation.

 

of all the things this show has done and shown, it's baffling to me that this one scene is causing this much discussion.

 

Rewatching season 2 right now.
Forgot how much I liked Yrgritt (or however you spell it)

Her making fun of Jon while she is his prisoner is still funny.

 

I think it goes hand in hand with the original conversation, especially when an actress is 12 years old at the start of a series that she eventually portrays nudity in. I probably didn’t express myself 100% as clearly as I would have liked, I’m out and about posting on my phone, but I really didn’t think it was that crazy a stance to have conflicting feelings about the nudity of a woman who was 12 when we all first met her (portraying a character who was 10). Is that discomfort so difficult to understand? Not that I think everyone should feel that discomfort, but I think it’s reasonable, no?

 

yeah im gonna go ahead and go out on a limb and say it's v weird how uncomfortable and how defensive about being uncomfortable you are about this one scene that's probably one of the few actually consensual, non coerced, non incest, sex scene that lasted probably 1/10th of the time their other far more violent and gross sex scenes from earlier seasons did. like did we watch a different episode?

 

I’m baffled that people think it’s weird to be uncomfortable or feel awkward seeing a character we’ve mostly seen as a young child appear half nude in the same series.

 

I’ll say once more: it’s not about the characters having consensual sex. It’s about explicit nudity of a character who is 18 and an actress who was a 12 year old child when we met her, who we knew as a child. Nudity does not equal adulthood, and nudity in the context of this show and nudity in entertainment as a whole should be held up to critical scrutiny.

But I’ll bow out. My take is affected by the books, where the characters are younger, and by my trepidation towards the nudity of young actresses across all film and television. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with someone who didn’t feel that discomfort, I just think it’s a misdiagnoses to peg anyone who did feel discomfort as having an issue with the character or Maisie Williams’ agency.

 

Yeah my feelings towards the scene was it was uncomfortable for me personally, BUT I’m not saying it was anywhere near as gross as other sex scenes in the show. I’m very happy with her/Gendry hooking up, but it’s just hard for me to see someone I’ve mostly viewed as a child to all of a sudden explore sexuality. It’s completely fine with her wanting to do so. Again more of me just personally being weird about it, but the discussion that’s being had has gotten out of hand.

 

You literally said:

I don’t think this statement or position is reasonable, no. Neither you nor I nor anyone else gets to make that call. Also I read the same books you did and I’m not having any problem separating them from this. This infantilization of Maisie is so bizarre to me so forgive me for not understanding.

 

Don’t want to take away from the conversation but I’m curious to see everyone’s predictions for next week in terms of who dies

I got: Jorah, Missandei, Gendry, Beric, Edd, Ghost, Lord Royce, Pod and Theon.

 

I am not a fan of Bronn or his portrayal with women. The scene with him in the first episode was peak unnecessary nudity and sex and women as objects for this show.

My issue with Arya is that unlike lots of other characters who have suffered and changed and come out on the other side, the writers spent years wasting her character (like all of S5) or portraying her trauma as something cool and shocking and often comic even relief. I don’t feel that she is a “bad” person any more than anyone else on the show, but her return to Winterfell and life as completely Arya Stark has been so poorly written that her internal journey just feels like it skipped to the end. She deserves to gain as much of her own life as she can back, assuming there is a life at all by the end, but they haven’t given her enough of a story as anything but a super cool assassin to delve into her personal tragedy, and it makes it ring false.

It would be similar if Bran lost his connection to the 3ER and a bit of time passed and he was just Bran again with no real process how he got there. No one would be sad that he returned to himself, but it wouldn’t make much sense to cut the hard part out.

 

i know this was hours ago but i would absolutely be uncomfortable if we saw/would have seen bran or rickon's dick or ass. they were like 8 when they started the show lol.

it'll be weird if they show that shit in like season 8 of stranger things too. bad take.

 

I’ve never really considered Arya’s arc from this perspective, to be honest. I’ve looked at everything she’s done since escaping from the Hound as her finally rejecting the role society proscribed for her and taking control of her own narrative. Seizing the dream she always wanted for herself since the first episode of the series: to be a warrior and to right the wrongs in her life. And all the developments in her life between then and now have molded her into the person she always wanted to be, even though it probably wasn’t exactly the kind of warrior she originally had in mind.

And I don’t think she’s fully returned to being the same Arya Stark she was since she’s been back in Winterfell. Her whole conflict with Sansa last season was because she was acting strangely and not like the girl anyone remembered. And having Jon back this season may have softened her up somewhat, because she and Jon were always close, but she’s still the Arya she developed into. I interpreted the scene with Gendry not as the writers trying to immediately revert her back into a non-assassin, I saw it more as a brief moment of humanity that is almost necessary to distinguish Arya’s personality from something like Bran’s at this point.

But yours is an interesting different perspective on her arc for sure. When I do a rewatch I’ll definitely keep it in mind.

 

I’m sorry for the lack of clarity, that wasn’t what I intended to ask was reasonable. That is my personal stance, prefaced with “I think” and “probably” because I understand it gets into murky territory, my tendency towards being anti-nudity at all is informed by actresses I’ve known, producers/directors I’ve known, and basically all of Hollywood history. I know that’s not a widely held stance, I meant to ask whether or not any discomfort at seeing a woman you have known primarily through ages 12-17 naked is reasonable. I think it’s fair, especially against the context of Hollywood nudity.

I get that you don’t feel the same about this scene. I get where you’re coming from. I am glad Maisie has autonomy in the scene and understand she’s an adult, as is the character (though Cogman himself said it’s useless trying to place her age and I find it slightly telling that HBO twitter accounts made sure to explicitly say she’s 18 in joke tweets). It’s not my intent to infantilize her, it’s a caution that comes from this show and Hollywood’s history. I think painting any discomfort with the scene as discomfort with her agency as a character or actress is unfair and inaccurate. I don’t think we’ll agree, or that we have to agree. I get that I was being reactionary, I regret some strong wording I used initially, but I won’t back down on hoping audiences become more critical of onscreen nudity and the very real power dynamics behind it, and that it’s fair if someone feels slightly weird seeing someone naked when they were introduced to them as a child.

Not that you’d want to, but if you want to discuss further I don’t want to annoy the thread. Maybe it’s a question that can be posited in the sexism thread, perspectives there would likely be more valuable than mine. But otherwise, I’ll leave this thread alone now.

 

I think Edd, Ghost, and Bronze Yohn survive. But that also may be wishful thinking on my part.

Pod....ugh it pains me to say this but I agree.

I’d swap Missandei with Grey Worm. I’m adding Bran to the list, for now. Wavering back and forth on that.

Arya....yeah. I’m adding her on.

Fuck.

Lady Mel and Varys I am also adding on.

 

Ugh everything with Sansa is a huge part of why it was poorly done. They had so much time to explore both of them understanding where they’ve been and who they are and instead they just had awful scene after awful scene that only made sense from
a TV perspective to keep the twist about Littlefinger going. It was such a disservice to both characters.

 

Yeah I don’t often wish for flashbacks in things but it would’ve been cool to see the rest of that last scene between them before Littlefinger’s death just to see how they worked through everything.

 

Maisie is basically doing the “kid star does an adult role to tell the world they don’t get to treat her as a child forever” thing in the SAME role that made her famous to start with, and that’s a unique situation. I can think of maybe a few other examples where children have become total adults over the course of a show, but not usually this long running or completely.