I feel like HBO's done a great job of making it a big deal from the start (says a non-reader, or at least one who *tried* and failed during the first book). But it's definitely a bigger deal now.
I doubt many people will stop watching because of it, and who knows--the noise may attract new viewers.
Not my co-worker, though. He doesn't watch TV, and was trying to tell me about a show popular amongst his friends "Something about a chair?" It was quite endearing coming from a hip (but not ster) thirtysomething.
Is it recency why this seems to have a bigger response than Khal/Dany
Rape culture 101 I think. Audience LIKES Jamie and don't want to think this character could do something like that.
Of course the savage man would do that on his wedding night.
I thought Amanda Marcotte's take on the episode was exactly on point: [link]
Having finally read it, I think it's absolutely not. I don't think you can flatly diagnose assholishness of people because they enjoyed seeing a despised character get narrative comeuppance (he's not effectively a child), and "it puts you in a position to do exactly what you just spent the last hour judging others over" is nothing if not an exaggeration. For a start, we haven't done anything or been reacting to real people, as they all have, in universe.
“You are all terrible people, sitting there on your couch, enjoying the sight of a child dying a painful death.”
Yeah, no.
“You are all terrible people, sitting there on your couch, enjoying the sight of a child dying a painful death.”
That bugged me too. I wasn't enjoying his death; I was transfixed, thinking what a terrible way to die that would be. Based on limited experience, choking/not being able to breath is a very terrifying feeling.
I'm glad he's dead, and I do wonder if maybe he should have suffered more for the things he did (jesus, those prostitutes), but there's some distance between that and being a cheering throng at a gladiatorial throwdown between slaves, or something.
Marcotte and I part ways on a whole host of things. I used to really like and respond well to her writing. Since pandagon fell, not so much.
that was her old site: pandagon.net she had with another main co-author. They blogged about 1-2x a day between them. Good posts back in the day.
They forgot to renew the domain name, so a squatter took it and wanted to charge them $10K to get it back.
Marcotte was and is one of my gateways into feminism, so I'm still a fan. And you know, if the piece didn't speak to you or your reaction to the episode, then it didn't. I didn't feel like it was telling me I should feel bad about feeling good about Joffrey's death. I don't know, maybe I should go back and read it again.
As for Pandagon, I miss Jesse Taylor (one of the other bloggers from Pandagon) as a blogger, frankly. I don't know if he's writing anywhere any more, but if he was, I'd love to read his stuff again.
I was thinking some more about the Sept sex scene, and I think I figured out what bothered me. Without having read the books, all i had to set up that scene was the past few episodes. In each one they emphasized poor woobie Jaime, who murdered people!, and lost his hand!, and never stopped trying to get home to Cersei!
Only to arrive and have her a) string him along for weeks, b) reject him, and pretty cruelly, too, and c) stand over the body of their dead child and ask him to murder his brother. Especially after he moans about the gods "making him a love a hateful woman," you could construe the whole chain of events as Cersei's fault, which is really loathsome victim blaming.
I think part of it was the way some of those scenes were shot and framed -- the earlier one, where Jaime is trying to woo her and she rejects him, ends (if I remember right) with him heartbroken and stunned, putting the focus on his reaction to it.
In the Sept scene, instead of ending on Cersei's expression (which, granted, would have been pretty grim), it ends with ... her hand clutching the fabric draping the table where Joffrey is laid out.
But someone elsewhere pointed out how much is stripped from her in the Sept even before Jaime arrives -- her father is methodically prying Tommen out of her grasp before she can even begin to influence him, unlike Joffrey, and making some pretty nasty allusions to what a shit Joffrey was at the same time (as well as her drinking, whoring, rapey husband Robert). She has nothing left now, and if the scene with Jaime had ended with a focus on her face, it would have really driven that home instead of how angry Jaime was at her for being a bitch. Does that make sense?
