Warning: more extensive
discussion of violence, including torture, sexual abuse and gore
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GoT had reached peak escalation by season 5. Season 4 already featured detailed and extensive torture scenes (torture in earlier seasons happened mainly off-screen if it happened at all). The focus of these scenes was to establish Ramsay Bolton as the new person to despise (worse – of course – than Joffrey ever had been) and to raise sympathy for the previously much disliked Theon Greyjoy. The audience wanted to see him punished – I wanted to see him punished, I freely admit. But not like this, the audience (and I) cried, not like this. Here, we are forced to reevaluate our own stance towards violence and I’m not saying that people who want to see a fictional character get punished would condone similar in the real world, because I assume that most of us have a healthy fiction/real world divide and are capable of distinguishing between the two.
Therefore,
you could technically argue that the torture scenes have their justification;
that they’re shown not to simply satisfy a growing lust for blood and the
shocking. And I’m sure that the writers do think about what types of violence
they want to include and how and why (I’m willing to give them that much
credit). It’s just that in some cases they seem to have thought not very hard
about it (e.g. why did we need this scene of Jaimie practically raping Cersei
by the body of their dead son?) and in others they might originally have had a
valid reason for the violent scenes but still manage to go overboard.
In season 5
they burn a child alive and kill another. GoT has always broken the taboo of
killing children (no one likes to see children die, it is generally too
upsetting to show, even Criminal Minds will not show you the murder of a
child). A main character (a young woman, barely a teenager), who has had to
suffer for the past 3 seasons, gets raped and is now forced to be the wife of a
sadist (who they established just last season to be very into torture and
hurting people for funsies). Two people we were rooting for get imprisoned by
religious fanatics (I’m also not here to talk about the horrific treatment of
Loras as a gay character, although I really want to… maybe as an aside at the
end). A woman we weren’t rooting for gets punished in such a way that make her
actions a season later understandable. Cersei’s Walk of Shame in particular was
very jarring for me.
The
violence here wasn’t as obvious as Theon’s torture had been, but still
off-putting in a similar way. It was also very glaringly sexualized. A thing
GoT loves to do. Violence against women in GoT is most often sexual and even
when it isn’t, it’s still in most cases upsettingly sexualized. (And while the
books aren’t quite as bad, one thing I bemoan about Feast for Crows is that every third page the reader is reminded
that, yes, women are raped all the time.) Nearly no female character is exempt
from it. Daenerys is a main victim of this, starting with her introduction
scene, over to her ‘marriage’ and even later when she is a queen, men are
constantly sexually threatening her. Sansa, too, is a major victim of multiple
forms of sexual harassment and abuse. At the hands of Joffrey, Ramsay, Petyr
Baelish and others. But even Arya – who is indisputably still a child – is
threatened with sexual violence. You could fill a whole term paper with how GoT
treats its female characters re: sexual violence, but for now I’ll leave it at
that. To get back to my main point: while GoT had always been notoriously bad
at subjecting every female character to sexual violence, that, too, got amped
up in season 5 with Sansa and Cersei as most prominent victims respectively.
TWD
combines boring stretches of time where next to nothing happens with intense –
and intensely violent – episodes. The Governor was pretty bad, wasn’t he? Torture
and murder and insanity were right up his alley. What could be worse? I got it!
Cannibals. At the end of season 4 the group reunites at Terminus. A place that
unsurprisingly is not the sanctuary they hoped it would be. Instead, they are
imprisoned and set to be slaughtered and eaten. All of the Terminus
sequences are chilling and gruesome, even though they are not the most explicitly
violent scenes. The half-hearted attempt to give the cannibals a justification
at the beginning of season 5 is just. odd. As a justification of the
horribleness that was Terminus it just falls incredibly flat, both in-universe
and narratively (I admit to not having read the TWD comics so maybe it works
much better there, but it really doesn’t in the show).
Of course,
we need things to be even worse. This “even worse” comes in the form of the
‘wolf gang’ (is that their name?), a group of people only vaguely recognizable as
people, so completely deranged that even the show admits that they’re not worth
saving, and later in the form of Negan and ‘the Saviors’. Both groups don’t
even have survival as their main goal but hurting others as cruelly as
possible. They’re mainly there to uphold the show’s ‘no one is safe’ premise
and to provide a new form of violence that the rotting corpses cannot anymore. Our
heroes, too, are now forced to be more violent than they have ever been before
to save themselves. Consequently, what the show has come to is a more or less
senseless escalation (there seems to be some plot again in season 7, so maybe I’m
wrong about this assessment, but I’m so tired and won’t continue watching past
season 6).
Another
thing both shows have in common is the apparent justification they offer. That
being: ‘Well the world our show is set in is just so horrible. All this
violence is just realistic, you know.’ GoT’s medieval-fantasy-world-at-war
setting and TWD’s post-apocalyptic zombie-ridden environment are both breeding
grounds for violent human behavior, I don’t doubt it. However, I would counter
it with: A) People can infer that something is horrible without being
explicitly shown every few minutes. And B) This is still a world you’re making
up. You are 100% in control of what happens. And both of these worlds are more
or less fantasy worlds. Dragons and zombies both are impossible in the real
world. Therefore, using ‘realism’ as a blanket explanation is a cop-out.
The
interesting thing is, that no matter how much people might enjoy the grittiness
of both shows, it has become apparent that an escalation of violence alone does
not make for good TV. As I already mentioned before, people have continuously expressed
disappointment over TWD’s uneven pacing. And from what I gathered online most
fans of GoT were unhappy with how season 5 had turned out. So, even though the
audience still expects the accustomed level of violence, it would be a mistake
to pretend like that alone is responsible for the shows’ fame. Sadly, this is
what a lot of media creators seem to take away from TWD’s and GoT’s success.
The formula seems to be: make it bloody, make it gritty, make it violent. Amp. It. Up.
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Add-on: re:
the horrible treatment of Loras as a gay man in season 5: I’m gonna keep this
short since it digresses from my main argument. There’s much to say about the
portrayal of gay characters in general (like how the GoT show needlessly
perpetuates stereotypes), but because my topic here is violence I’ll just
quickly talk about the religious fanatics. Yes, the religious fanatics exist in
the books, too, but, no, they are not actively homophobic (the way I remember
it, and correct me if I’m wrong, I haven’t picked up the books in a while). So,
the writers of the show actively changed some of the things that happened in the books so that they
would include violent homophobia. The hearing that
ends with Loras and Margaery dragged off was awful to watch. And unnecessary
since the book went a completely different route. The change suggests that, of
course religious fanatics who preach about purity would be homophobic and it thus
rehashes the old and awful claim that being gay is ‘impure’.
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This is the promised part 2. I hope you liked it. If you want to discuss some of the things I mentioned or you found a mistake I made, come contact me.
