evenfalls
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officially done with hotd. how do you read the dance in f&b and go ‘oh yes, let’s add MORE violence against women for shock value’?
the maesters in f&b wrote down every little vile rumour they could get their hands on, but clearly that’s not enough for the hotd showrunners so they have to pull shit out of their asses to make it worse. and the ‘it could’ve happened in secret’ excuse doesn’t work in the books when these characters are constantly under scrutiny by guards and servants. we know about baths characters took in the book ffs, this is a show only creation.
i don’t even like daemon— he’s already a morally reprehensible predator in f&b — but i am SICK of hbo asoiaf shows adding more violence against women to a story that already contains it in multitudes. grrm already succeeds in depicting daemon as a bad person in the books, there is no reason to include more abuse against women in the adaptation. but hbo loves exploiting such violence.
they did it with sansa and other female characters in game of thrones, they did it with alicent and rhaenyra last season, now they’re adding more. the only difference between got and hotd is that the latter has less female nudity. this excessive violence not in the source material serves no purpose but to get reactions from the audience and to highlight the misogynistic writing hotd claims is ‘feminism’.
as a victim, it’s genuinely triggering and i will not be endorsing hbo by watching their torture porn. it’s bad enough that they seem set on showing blood and cheese on screen, i’m not here to watch them add more exploitative violence that doesn’t even exist in f&b to the show. fuck that and fuck them.
evenfalls
@morghuls exactly! hotd had great potential to tell the story of the dance through rhaenyra’s centred perspective and fill in the gaps the misogynistic (and frankly weak) writing of f&b left. i quite like some of the changes the show made initially. but it’s sad that they seem to be following down the same got path of throwing aside developing these characters with any care, in favour of including disturbing, shock value scenes. hbo did the same with sansa and cersei in the original series and they claimed to have moved past that, but clearly they haven’t.
morghuls
this is 100% how i feel as well. by no means is daemon a character i like or can even stand (in fact i can’t wait to see him kick the bucket), but i don’t understand the addition of MORE violence against women that doesn’t exist in the book. they did it with rhea royce and rhaenyra with daemon, they did it with alicent and viserys. the entire dance is already based on the femicide of rhaenyra and is centered around gendered violence so it’s just baffling to me to include domestic abuse that doesn’t even exist in the book (yes, daemon is a predator and a groomer in the book, but he was not a woman beater/killer). and idec that the book isn’t an accurate depiction of the dance because the tellings by mushroom and others were biased— it’s just exhausting to me to see these writers fill the gaps of the inaccuracies with violence against women over and over again. it’s absolutely torture porn and i’m over it.
evenfalls
i don’t care if grrm approved of this addition either (something people on twit are claiming with no verification) — he’s an old pervert who already wrote daemon as ‘morally grey’ despite him being a groomer. he has also stated that the show is a separate canon from the book. none of this excuses hbo inventing this plotline in the first place to add more violence against rhaenyra to hotd — rhaenyra who is already an abuse victim and literally dies by femicide in the end. it’s exploitative. it’s gross. i feel so sorry for emma d’arcy.
and to the daemyras and rhaenicents using this change to fuel their ship wars, defending daemon or else cheering this addition on— screw you. this isn’t about ships or teams, this is about hbo exploiting female suffering for shock value, time and time again.
