Misogyny Is Not a Background Decoration

All too often when engaging with fantasy worlds, female characters are hard to come by. Sadly, when they are introduced, they’re often nowhere near as well written as their male counterparts. Female characters tend to have less agency than other characters, and their motivation and development as a result can be rather unrealistic. There are most definitely numerous reasons for this. One of them, though, is the use of misogyny as a background decoration. What I mean by this is that writers are often too busy including pointless misogyny to spend any actual time developing their female characters, because misogyny simply offers them an excuse to include gratuitous sexism without considering what message their story is going to send.

Trigger warning for rape and sexual violence ahead.

Ramsay Might Be Dead, but Game of Thrones Is Still Awful

Game of Thrones’s sixth season ended up being a vast improvement on the series after the abysmal catastrophe that was Season 5. However, being better is not the same thing as being good, and if Season 6 is any indication, the show still has a long way to go. While many of the scenes throughout the season were fun to watch, the plotlines that we get fall apart the second you really start to think about them. Thankfully, the silver lining to all this is that the misogyny is less apparent. The downside to that, however, is now there’s review after review proclaiming Game of Thrones to be a feminist masterpiece, and I find myself once again questioning: are the other reviewers watching the same show I am?

Spoilers and a trigger warning for suicide and discussions of rape and sexual assault up ahead.

Return to Westeros: “Hardhome” Review

Oh, somehow, we’re nearly fifty episodes into a show where a zombie apocalypse feels like a huge relief after weeks and weeks of sexual violence. Hooray?

Okay, this looks bad.

“Hardhome” is about more than just the title location, but it swallows up nearly all the oxygen in the room this week, capped by a long, slow, and nearly dialogue-free battle between the Night’s Watch, the wildlings, and a growing horde of skeletons, zombies, wights, and ultimately, White Walkers. There were very few survivors.

Return to Westeros: “Kill the Boy” Review

Well, Game of Thrones is really heading into darker territory this week. While Jon Snow weighs his options at the Wall, Daenerys responds to Ser Barristan’s murder with murder of her own, and Ramsay Bolton uses Theon to torment Sansa, because you know, the Sansa-Theon-Ramsay storyline is still something that everyone really wants to see and isn’t creepy and unnecessary at all.

Trigger warning for abuse, assault, and gore after the jump.

Trailer Tuesdays: Game of Thrones Season 5

Well, everyone, it’s that time of year again. Game of Thrones’s fifth season is almost upon us. Beware, book readers. Inconsistencies are coming.

Many of us are already aware that the television show is quickly catching up to where the books are, so it comes as no surprise to me that Game of Thrones is going to start heavily deviating from the source material. We’ve already started learning about things that haven’t even happened in the book yet—such as what the White Walkers are doing with Crastor’s babies. And quite obviously, the show has done things the books haven’t. Certain characters who are alive in the books are dead on the show, other characters have been cut entirely, and then there are the characters on the show who have no book counterpart at all, such as Ros.

Game of Thrones is going to end after the seventh season—and let’s face it, the last book in the series will not be out by 2017—and as such, this season is going to mark some pretty drastic changes from the source material. It’s also going to start killing off characters who aren’t supposed to be dead yet.

Spoilers ahead.