#but the fact that the *narrative itself* refuses to interrogate their dynamic from his pov is what frustrates me

[twelvemartha]

the doctor's dynamic with his companions is like the beating hearts of the show, yet for some reason the doctor is so tightlipped about his feelings for martha in particular. it's maddening. sure, the narrative will give us tiny moments of the doctor showing his appreciation of her and acknowledging her presence. martha jones i like you. martha jones you're a star. but what does he think about her? how does he view her? what is her significance to him?

we learn a lot about what martha thinks the doctor thinks about her. he's not seeing me he's just remembering. sometimes i think he likes me but sometimes i just think he needs someone. he doesn't even look at me but i don't care. it's never outright confirmed, but so many signs point to this being the case. the doctor is constantly putting up walls between the two of them, which martha tries so hard to break through. and there are times where it seems like she manages to, where the two of them have genuine moments of connection! only for the next episode to come along and destroy that progress, as if it never happened, and the doctor goes back to being distant and overlooking her.

this wouldn't be as big a deal as it is if there was some sort of comeuppance or catharsis at the end of s3. but in the final speech martha gives to the doctor before she goes, the focus is put on her unrequited love. again. the issue, rtd wants us to believe, is that the doctor doesn't reciprocate martha's romantic feelings for him. but that's not it. the real issue is that the doctor doesn't even treat martha as a proper person, a companion in her own right, a friend who he cherishes and wants to travel with because she's martha jones. instead, he acts as if she's just someone to keep around because he gets lonely on his own.

and so instead of the doctor rightly being called out for his callous treatment of martha, we just have the show brush this under the rug and act like the matter is resolved come s4. because at the end of the day, neither martha nor her relationship to the doctor matter. they never did to the show or its writers. they were just a vehicle to tell the true story, which has nothing to do with martha at all. (this is absolutely rooted in misogynoir btw.)

[moonlitgleek]

Is it Martin's intention to make fire and blood a critique of misogyny?

This is a point of discussion in the F&B post that I’m still working on so I don’t know how exhaustive this is going to be. But I’ve received many variants of this same question and I don’t want to put it off for too long.

I obviously can not speak to GRRM’s mind, but I personally don’t see how Fire and Blood can be constructed as a critique of anything. Leaning into sexist tropes in not a critique of them. Doubling down on existing problems like death by childbed, child brides and the use of sexual violence as a plot device is not a critique of them. Depicting any problematic element isn’t inherently critical just because said element exists in your world. You’re not inherently critiquing rape just because you’re using it in your story. You’re not inherently critiquing racism just because you have people being racist in your story. That stuff needs to be called out, or it’d only function as an embellishment or a plot device or an uncritical use of established tropes. What distinguishes showing misogyny and critiquing misogyny is the presence of a challenge to prevalent problematic tropes and to in-universe misogyny. If that challenge does not exist, then what’s the difference between problematic material and critical material? It’d all look the same.

But even if I allow that this book was meant as a critique of misogyny, it didn’t work. Martin often nails it when he wants to critique something or deconstruct a trope or interrogate a bias. Think Cersei’s walk of shame. Think Arianne’s struggle against the possibility of being replaced by her brother. Think Catelyn’s refusal to allow that having an emotional response hinders a woman’s judgement. Martin’s critiques are often loud and clear. They allow for the bias of the in-universe characters but include a resounding rebuffs to it, whether by proving them wrong or deconstructing the bias itself. That rarely happens in F&B, and when it does, it’s often undermined simply to tell us that the men involved are sexist, which tells us nothing new about any of them. F&B could have included a real critique, even allowing for the in-universe author’s prejudices. It didn’t. It minimized dynamic and strong women instead and treated us to a parade of broken and/or sexualized bodies in the name of so-called historical accuracy and making a point about the awfulness of male characters, at least according to Elio Garcia.

And that is the argument being offered for F&B being what it is. Neither Martin nor Garcia tried to say that this book was meant as a critique of misogyny as far as I know, only that these things did happen in medival times and that the intended point was to show the prejudice and villainy of male characters. So Alysanne is victimized and silenced to tell us that Jaehaerys is sexist and cruel. Alyssa is victimized and silenced to tell us that Rogar is sexist and cruel. Unwin Peake’s 12-year-old daughter is victimized and silenced to tell us that Peake is sexist and cruel. Coryanne Wylde and seven Lyseni slaves are victimized and silenced to tell us that Rogar and/or his brothers are sexist and cruel. Numerous girls are married off too young to tell us that their fathers and husbands are sexist and cruel. Numerous women are sexualized to tell us that Gyldayn is sexist and a pervert. One question though: why do all these women need to be sacrificed for the characterization of male characters? Why is women’s sexual suffering the most convenient plot device Martin can find to frame Westerosi misogyny? What does that tell us about Westeros that we don’t already know? What’s the upside of any of it? Because that upside is the only reason Martin’s narrative doesn’t devolve into a grimdark world. His challenges to the dark, the unjust, the nihilistic and the cruel are what makes reading this series worthwhile. F&B sorely lacks that. For god’s sake, This is a book that took “are there no true knights among you?” and made it about Maegor. From Duncan the Tall and Baelor Breakspear to Maegor. Think about that for a second.

It’s a fundamental misunderstanding to think that we’re arguing that Martin totally intended for us to take Gyldayn’s biases at face value because that’s not the issue at all. We’re questioning the necessity of making Gyldayn a sex-obsessed pervert which unavoidably mars the depiction of female characters in the only material we’re ever going to get about them. I’ll allow that this was supposed to make a deliberate point about biased PoVs or how prejudice affects historical accounts on women …. first off, to quote @pretenderoftheeast, deliberate doesn’t necessarily mean good (or, you know, critical). So Martin wanted to show us that Gyldayn’s misogyny has affected how he portrays women. Fine. It remains that the only account we’re ever going to get on so many women was filtered through the lens of a dismissive, misogynistic, victim-blaming, sex-obsessed maester who centered the personhood of multiple women on their sexuality and/or fertility. That so-called critique doesn’t change the fact that we’re never getting any characterization for many of these women. It doesn’t change the fact that it’s built on furthering the dismissal of women as little more than sexual objects and/or walking wombs. It doesn’t change the fact that many women exist in the narrative to give birth, be abused and die. It doesn’t change the inherently gendered method of death and/or abuse.

Furthermore, whether the argument for F&B holds to the idea that Gyldayn’s position as unreliable narrator offers a critique of misogyny in and of itself, or to the idea that Gyldayn’s prejudices shouldn’t be taken for the narrative’s own and thus as an authorial problem, the fact that none of the problems of F&B are new and that there is no conceivable way to hold Gyldayn responsible for some of the problems in the book undermine both arguments. Gyldayn is not the one who decided to kill off 12 women in childbed, nor was he the one marrying off all those child brides. There is something to say about Gyldayn’s perspective in reporting on Jaehaerys’ dismissal of Alysanne’s wishes but he isn’t the one who made Jaehaerys do it in the first place. Gyldayn didn’t make Maris Baratheon join the silent sisters as a punishment for her words to Aemond. He didn’t make multiple women isolate themselves to grieve, leaving behind their kids, their political duties and even their own war councils, while the men proved proactive or vengeful. He didn’t make jealousy a main element in several women’s relationships. And that’s besides the fact that Gyldayn is GRRM’s creation so he is only what Martin wrote him to be. To what purpose, I have no idea.

The crux of this issue, to me, is that F&B is a historical book that relies information to us through Gyldayn making him the source of any information that we have. His own characterization matters only insofar as his function as an in-universe tool of authorial exposition. In making him so overly misogynistic and sex-obsessed then using his characterization to justify the problems in the narrative, GRRM not only crippled our knowledge of a slew of more narratively important women and deprived them (and us) from getting a sense of their personhood, he also prioritized Gyldayn’s characterization over these women, despite the fact that it’s their stories and their conflicts that drive the narrative forward. I’m not sure how I can see that as a critique of misogyny.