Er, okay. I didn’t really mean to offer any advice. Just typing some thoughts on what you said earlier. It sounded like you preempted relationships based on expectations about the role you’d be asked to assume, and I was only offering an alternative that one person taking on one role didn’t necessarily mean the other person had to take on another. Parental relationships would be a whole different category, IMHO, but I thought you were talking about your relationships with other adults.
Glad it all worked out for you. I don’t really see adult interpersonal relationships as games with complex rules beyond be polite. I’ve always just been myself. Maybe that’s naive, but it’s worked well enough for me.
True, and poorly worded on my part. I was groping for a word other than happiness, but couldn’t think of anything. What I mean is, has your study of relationships as games changed how you interact with others, or do you pursue it simply out of curiosity?
Caveat: I admit that when you first talked about games, I thought perhaps you were one of those people who childishly talks about relationships as The Game, as in Got Game, and such. But I’m very happy my suspicion was baseless.
This attitude is what I find insulting to my intelligence: the idea that I (or anyone else) feel that I must be rewarded with eye candy for sitting through a complicated, Byzantine political plot. I’m straight, and I guess for the sake of argument I’m a “dude,” but I don’t believe that I’m “being catered to in such a patronizing way.” I don’t for a second feel that Martin, Benioff, Weiss, or HBO thinks a spoonful of titties will help my political drama go down, or that many of its viewers over the age of fourteen sit through Cersei Lannister’s small council meetings with impatiently tapping foot, waiting for the next spurt of blood or glimpse of pubes. Like I said earlier, I don’t doubt that somebody on the show gave that instruction to Neil Marshall, but I don’t believe that there’s any formula, formally calculated or otherwise, that the GoT showrunners employ to make sure that there’s enough nipple to keep the perv segment of the audience coming back week after week.
I watch the show because I like the writing, enjoy most of the performances, and find the photography and locations breathtakingly gorgeous. I like the scope, I like the depth, I love the score, and I find the nudity (both male and female) generally fits the scenes in which it is employed. I don’t get mindless boners every time somebody’s tit pops out, and I’m not made uncomfortable by how often it happens, even in those (relatively uncommon, I’d say) instances when that pervy executive producer is getting his pervy two cents in and we spend a minute or two watching Littlefinger train his higher-end employees without the plot advancing noticeably.
Are we straight dudes supposed to watch with our eyes half-covered, since we never know when the scene will next cut to Loras Tyrell putting the sausage to his current male lover? Will we need a quick dose of titty afterward to cleanse our palates? Uh, no, because we’re no longer thirteen years old?
If I sound uncharacteristically annoyed, it’s because I think it’s unnecessarily cynical to assume that all (or even most) of the nudity in GoT is cynically placed there to help boost the viewership more so than the writing and cinematography and casting are. Some of it? Yeah, probably. And I think I have a bigger problem with the general attractiveness of the entire cast, which is a fundamental problem with movie and TV casting going back to the dawn of the medium. For heaven’s sake, when casting Tyrion Lannister, the famously ugly Imp, they cast Peter Dinklage, probably the handsomest actor of his stature in living memory. That is a problem with every show on TV, the near-total lack of average-looking (or downright unattractive) actors in non-villainous roles, or roles that don’t fundamentally have something to do with not being conventionally attractive. But the conventional wisdom in casting is that audiences prefer to look at pretty people, and so no doubt there’s a sense on shows like GoT that fantasy audiences include a lot of fellas that like to look at naked chicks.
But is it a problem worth addressing? Will the show somehow be better, less insulting, more wholesome, more valid, if the merely decorative nudity is diminished? Would the show be better if all its nudity were eliminated? Would it be better if they simply had a 1:1 ratio of naked men to naked women?
I don’t think so. I’d still watch it, and I’d still enjoy it under all those conditions, and I guess some part of my subconscious would be vaguely gratified that people no longer thought my intelligence was being insulted, but I really don’t think it would make any cultural difference.
But… but… would writing about it generate lots of comments and pageviews?
I personally have no problem with either of those things, provided it’s entertaining, civil at all times, and most participants at least pretend to entertain the vague possibility of evolving their thinking on the matter.
(I didn’t say very far, but hey: evolution takes millions of years. And all publicity is good publicity.)
When the show had first started and I had sort of heard of it, the very first scene I ever saw was Danaerys getting raped(?) at the beach by the big Dothraki guy from Stargate Atlantis. I immediately rolled my eyes and didn’t give it another chance until the 400th “Have you fucking seen fucking game of fucking thrones, it’s fucking brilliant,” whereupon I decided to give it another chance, hasty judgements being a bugbear of mine.
I guess I got hooked by the concentrated unfairness, probably a core motivating factor in the rape scene I had dismissed as SKY (Rupert Murdoch’s main channel over here in the UK, known for producing trash (I guess I thought it was another ‘made for SKY’ piece of crap)) sensationalism for views.
Anyway, many elements of the show please me, but I often feel they make production decisions for what seems like no reason. Like they are sticking to some formula, filling some quota. 3 ‘cunts’, 4 ‘fucks’ we’ve still got an allotment of tits to deploy and our ass quota is backed up all to hell.
My theory is that it’s like American portion sizes, everyone else is keeping up with the joneses, we’re going to look unprofessional, or at least, like we’re not trying, if we don’t push the envelope in every possible area. More strong cheekbones, more smashing of those cheekbones, moar tits, moar ass, if we don’t use our quota, next year the budget will allow for less and then we’ll be stuck up shit creek… Ahem. running away with myself there.
Anyway the story telling is awesome and carries me through, I could care less about the violence, I can willingly suspend my disbelief at the handsomeness of the actors after many years of training as a viewer of entertainment but gratuitous unsubtlety of any kind always distracts me from the elements I do enjoy.
I’m probably just not sophisticated enough to grok that everything on screen doesn’t always need to be a Chekov’s gun but I guess I’m not really addressing the distinct lack of dicks in the show. One schlonger does not an environment of pervasive debauchery make.
*I’m up for 24 hours now and reserve the right to later disavow these views.
