It's all about the perverted sex -_-

[dragonimp]

The show has been elaborately made to the point that producers turned to a professional at something called the Language Creation Society to design a vocabulary for the savage Dothraki nomads who provide some of the more Playboy-TV-style plot points and who are forced to speak in subtitles. Like “The Tudors” and “The Borgias” on Showtime and the “Spartacus” series on Starz, “Game of Thrones,” is a costume-drama sexual hopscotch, even if it is more sophisticated than its predecessors. It says something about current American attitudes toward sex that with the exception of the lurid and awful “Californication,” nearly all eroticism on television is past tense. The imagined historical universe of “Game of Thrones” gives license for unhindered bed-jumping — here sibling intimacy is hardly confined to emotional exchange.

The true perversion, though, is the sense you get that all of this illicitness has been tossed in as a little something for the ladies, out of a justifiable fear, perhaps, that no woman alive would watch otherwise. While I do not doubt that there are women in the world who read books like Mr. Martin’s, I can honestly say that I have never met a single woman who has stood up in indignation at her book club and refused to read the latest from Lorrie Moore unless everyone agreed to “The Hobbit” first. “Game of Thrones” is boy fiction patronizingly turned out to reach the population’s other half.

From here.

:|
As a woman who's been reading fantasy since she discovered reading, I ... don't really know what to say to that. So many wrong assumptions I don't even know where to start.

Comments

[binaryalchemist.livejournal.com]

Have you read the books yet? I've read all but the last in the series and have loved them--they are riveting and has more than its share of strong female characters, especially Arya Stark and Danerys Tagaryen...and plenty of honorable male characters like Eddard Stark and Jon Snow. I am hoping that HBO does not fuck it up.

[militsa.livejournal.com]

I totally agree that Martin writes strong female characters; it's one of the things I like so much about Ice and Fire.

I'm totally fine with that reviewer saying the production is confusing and dense, it may well be, I haven't seen it yet, and that's a valid opinion-- but I am still seething about her statement that basically women should not like this because it's based on a fantasy series, which is for guys. Grrr.

I left a comment by the way but the Times seems to be screening them first, there are no comments posted. However, the fact that the article's review button has it rated 1.5/5 with 48 hits gives us a clue.

[dragonimp.livejournal.com]

And on top of that, the implication that the sex was only put in there to appeal to "the ladies" - because, no, it really, really wasn't.

[militsa.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's utterly ridiculous. She just comes across as someone who hates the genre, and that comment was gratuitous.

[dragonimp.livejournal.com]

I've read up through A Storm of Swords and I thought they were great. Heavy reading, but wonderful books. (Which is why this reviewer annoys me by calling it a "male fantasy" that "no woman alive would watch" if it weren't for the sex. Uh, no.) I hope HBO doesn't screw it up, either, but I am glad it's being turned into a mini-series instead of trying to squash it into a box office movie. Though I'm going to have to wait for it to be out on DVD.