Jess. Mid-twenties; married; geek. No one fandom defines me. Be warned: I am a fan of problematic and incestuous ships. For more of an idea about what you're signing up for if you follow me, check out my about me page.
My hubby Rob. My tumblr family.
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#I hope that sometime this season they have to ask Danny for help #and they come up for some stupid cover story for why and then when they ask Danny’s just like #’is this another werewolf situation?’ #and when their all flabbergasted and amazed and confused #Danny will just be all #’you guys are not discreet. Chemistry is like watching the Syfy channel for me really. #so what did you need?’ #because Danny is gr8
Yeah gizoogle is super fucking racist and I’d appreciate it if people stopped reblogging things relating to it
Using things associated with black americans as a source of mockery isn’t cool
Here, have some more word vomit on the whole Ros situation:
I have seen some people respond to criticism of Ros’s death by complaining that feminists don’t seem to care about Theon being tortured because he’s a man and instead we’re all upset over Ros’s death just because she’s a woman.
This is so untrue and it completely misses the point of WHY we’re upset over Ros’s death. First of all, I actually am a huge Theon fan. He’s one of my favorite characters in the series and I find the scenes where he is being tortured difficult to watch.
But the issues with Ros go so much deeper than just “she was killed in a brutal manner”. It’s not about the gore. It’s about what her role in the show had been over the three seasons and the manner in which she was killed and the purpose of her death.
Ros was a character that did not exist in the books and initially was only supposed to exist in the pilot, but the writers liked her, so they kept her on beyond that. Unfortunately, throughout most of season 1, she was generally used for sexposition. She wasn’t really a character in her own right, but rather she was there (often in various states of undress) for various characters to talk at in order to exposit things.
In season 2, Ros still endured being brutalized and abused in order to make points about how awful Joffrey was. However, there was some hope for her character as she decided to work for Varys. I began to be even more hopeful for her as a character in an early season 3 scene where Ros explicitly drew attention to the fact that she worked her way up in the world. Finally! Ros was getting some attention as a character! She wasn’t just a sex worker character there to be naked or abused! She warned Shae about Petyr and although I’d previously been annoyed that Ros, an original character was pointlessly taking up screen time, I began to hope and think that Ros might actually become an interesting character.
But then she was killed in the most recent episode. Why was she killed? I don’t know. Maybe the writers realized that they had written themselves into a corner with this original character they’d introduced. Maybe there was some other reason. But the really awful part of her death was the fact that she was basically killed JUST to illustrate how awful Petyr and Joffrey were WHICH IS SOMETHING WE ALREADY KNOW. Her purpose in death was to underline things we already know about other male characters. How gross is that?
And then you have the manner of her death. Poor Ros was just tied up and shot through with arrows- including arrows aimed at her breasts and genitals. And of course she was scantily clad, her breasts nearly exposed, which the camera picked up as it panned up her body.
So there you have it. People aren’t mad because of the gore. We (or at least I am) are mad because she was a character who was used for sexual titillation and to help exposit and develop male characters and was abused by Joffrey and then just as she started to get some REAL characterization, she was killed off to make points about male characters and was killed off in a manner that had STRONG undertones of sexual violence.
Theon, on the other hand, DOES suffer some pretty brutal torture that I find horrific, and I hate that too. BUT as a character, he’s been given plenty of development. Even in the torture scenes, he’s getting a voice and characterization. Ros, however, was just there. Already dead. Silent and strung up.
YES THIS.
And for the record, I could not watch Theon’s scenes without covering my face with my hands. I peeked through my fingers when the gross stuff wasn’t on, IT DID BOTHER ME INCREDIBLY.
But Theon gets to be more than just torture porn, he has a legit storyline, and the entire objections to Ros is consistent with that requirement.
I mean personally, no I did not need Ros to exist at all, but that doesn’t mean it’s okay to just whatever with her. Once they created her they took on responsibilities.
But the disunity can be delightful, and nowhere was it stronger than in the episode’s closing minutes. At first, Lord Baelish’s voiceover, and the accompanying score by Ramin Djawadi, came across overheated and unsubtle. Sansa’s tears helped sell it, though, through another powerfully wordless Sophie Turner performance. So did the sad death of Ros, the rags-to-riches prostitute-turned-advisor-turned-double-agent who at long last crossed the wrong sociopaths; the staging of her corpse, riddled with bolts from King Joffrey’s crossbow, radiated the fervid sex-and-death fetishism of medieval martyr portraiture. (BTW: Two and a half seasons spent building up a character the show effectively invented, and they can’t even give her an on-screen death?)
Then we emerge from the squalid, tear-streaked, blood-soaked hellscape of Littlefinger’s monologue montage into the cold open air atop the Wall. We watch Jon and Ygritte collapse onto their backs, exhausted, looking up at the sky. We watch them stand up and take in first the view of the frozen forest to the north of this massive, magical structure; then of the comparative paradise to the south, a boundless world full of possibilities and danger for them both. As the camera cuts across the 180-degree line to flip their positions in the frame, they kiss. Alright, they straight-up make out, silhouetted against a glorious sky and magnificent view. Eventually, even as the camera keeps pulling back, they run out of steam and just stop and hold each other and gaze. It’s a feverishly romantic image – and without Littlefinger’s nasty speech, it wouldn’t have hit like such a blast of fresh air.
That’s the way to watch Game of Thrones, I think – to watch all the little pieces moving in all those directions and see how each new move affects your view of all the others.
I reviewed last night’s Game of Thrones for Rolling Stone, and sort of advanced a grand unified theory of watching this show in the process.
Excellent review, and bolding mine, btw… that’s possibly what gets me more than anything else about Ros’s death. Two seasons of the showrunners insisting their invented character is more than boobs, more than sexposition, more than nudity to establish personalities of male characters… and what does she come down to in the end? An artfully arranged sexualized body to hammer down the facts, again, that Littlefinger is a vengeful sociopath and Joffrey is a brutal psychopath.
Honestly. With this, the invented Joffrey-brutalizes-two-sex-workers scene (one of them Ros btw), and Doreah’s also invented monologue about auto-erotic-asphyxiation over Irri’s murder (that thankfully was cut, yet nevertheless written, filmed, and included as an extra deleted scene)… there’s something to analyse here regarding how the showrunners choose to invent (not adapt) scenes with women (especially sex workers), and I wish someone in media would have the guts to do it.
Kudos to Esme Bianco for her role and for her keeping a straight face throughout all the pre-season promos, btw. I honestly think she handled herself even better than, say, Richard Madden.
You know, at least Theon got to speak while he was being tortured. We as viewers were encouraged to empathize with him.
Ros wasn’t even afforded that. She was already dead by the time we saw her. Her body was a prop, a set piece, an EWW FUCKING GROSSS murder scene very much in line with the dead hooker props of every crime procedural ever.
Once again, a female character is killed—offscreen, on the sidelines—to further a plot line. A plot line that didn’t really need that sort of expansion, I might add. If you weren’t already well aware that Joffrey is a real sick puppy and that Littlefinger should not be fucked with, I don’t know what show you’ve been watching.
It’s not that Ros was killed that really bothers me, although it is disappointing, given that she was finally being given something interesting to do in the last few episodes. It’s that her death was not really about her in any way. It was a cheap reveal and a cheap end to a character who clawed her way up from nothing.
And at the end of the day, that’s apparently all that a woman like Ros is worth on this show.
And at least Theon has a function larger than being a prop for sexualized violence and a stand-in for Sansa’s boobs.
remember how theon is an important side-character who is not a prop in his torture scenes for ramsay to be shown as evil and mean
remember how the show sexualizes female bodies many times more than male bodies
remember context of the society d&d and hbo and we fucking live in rather than the context of the society of westeros and beyond
remember how westerosi people are not coming and writing their own stories here, but d&d and other writers are
Honestly one of the things that grates me most about Ros’s death is that she wasn’t given a voice in it.
She was just a dead, brutalized corpse, posed in a highly sexualized way.
Ros wasn’t given any humanity in her death. She wasn’t treated like a person. She was treated like an object.
(and I’m not talking about her treatment in the context of the plot - obviously Joffrey would treat her like an object, that’s a given. I’m talking about her treatment BY THE NARRATIVE.)
so i’m assuming when we get the scene with tyrion giving joffrey the book, and joff cuts it up
that someone will put grrm’s head over tyrion’s, and d&d’s heads over joff’s, and an asoiaf set over the book that’s chopped up
because if that doesn’t happen the internet will have failed me
Okay so if anyone tells me something like oh Baelish is just misunderstood or in any way tries to defend show!Baelish now so help me I will not be responsible for my actions
What I think a lot of people are missing here is the difference between a sexist SETTING and a sexist NARRATIVE.
The books, for the most part, do a good job of displaying a sexist setting without the narrative itself being sexist. There are a variety of female characters with their own wants and needs and agency.
The show, however, has issues with this in that it often degrades the female characters, removes their agency, and often even pits them against each other, which is an extremely common trope in sexist narratives. There are other, better metas on how the show has adapted these character arcs, though. I’m here to talk about Ros.
Killing off Ros like this is sexist because the death itself is sexualized, and she is essentially being reduced to a prop that helps characterize the male character. The same characterization could’ve been displayed in a way that didn’t fridge Ros (and in the books, it WAS). Instead of letting Ros continue to develop as a character, or even give her a dignified and well-written death, they killed her off to characterize a male character so that they wouldn’t have to deal with her plot.
And that’s a sexist narrative.
