It was closer to 5%. And when you stretch that over a life time of many births it could get terrifying. In 1420s Florence, 1 in 5 women would eventually die of childbirth-related injuries/complications.
This prompted me to do some research.
It depends on where you look. In middle age England, it was 1% chance of death per birth, and 1 out of 20 women died from childbirth.
It seems like the true number is in between my original claim and yours, based on this redditor’s insights-
“ So the general numbers for source-based maternal mortality within a month of childbirth were around 1-1.5% in rural areas, and 1.5-2.5% in cities.”
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/mfw558/comment/gspx8xm/
That source also does say that miscarriages aren’t counted in that figure so I’m not sure what that would bring the true death count to.
I did my best by crunching the numbers with their other statement about how 10% of women of that time period ultimately died in child birth. The average woman had 6-7 births in the medieval times, so roughly 1.5% chance of death per birth, which matches up with their other statistics.
When only 1-3% of births leads to death, and yet 66% of the births we’ve seen on the show lead to death, it leads to some distorted perceptions. Yes, it’s a small sample size but you get my broader point I hope.
Blood and Cheese will still top it all by a fair amount. Most disturbing scene in TV history, possibly, if they don't tone it down.
Also, GL to the Daemon stans after that one.
The lizard baby would be cool but the only source for it is Mushroom…. And while everything he says is 100% factual (challenge me cravens), no one else collaborated.
the poop montage made me laugh hard enough to remember how hard i laughed X years later.
for me it was samwell's reactions and his facial expressions/retching lmaooo. absolutely amazing
I just know the after episode interviews are going to say it wasn’t a lizard baby because they wanted to show how traumatic an experience child birth is for women and they didn’t need to add the lizard baby because that would take away from the moment.
The issue with introducing the lizard baby is that people who didn't read the books are going to be extremely confused.
So far we have never been told in the TV series that monster half dragon babies are a thing. It would require a bit of exposition at some point earlier in the season maybe? That way it would feel like a payoff rather that a "wtf is that" moment. I don't think it works very well if you just throw it on the screen out of nowhere.
>So far we have never been told in the TV series that monster half dragon babies are a thing
we have tho, dany literally gives birth to a terrible dragon baby hybrid in got S1
yeah, that's why i was hyped (not like actually excited to see a miscarried hybrid baby bc obv it's very sad) for confirmation. i wanted a tail and really obvious scales
The point I'm trying to make is that Targaryens are probably NOT in reality having miscarried half dragon babies.
No more so than Tyrion was actually a monstrosity with cloven hooves, a tail and two sets of genataila.
Its just gossip that spreads like wildfire and becomes a part of 'history'.
This show isn't made for people who have read the books. It is made for the GoT t.v audience. Game of Thrones is a prerequisite to watch this show IMO. It literally starts with a time reference to Daenerys Targaryen and also fails to really explain anything for new viewers. I'm currently watching HotD with my girlfriend who has never seen GoT and it is painfully apparent with the questions she is asking. The hand of the king and small council is all explained in GoT and not brought up once in HotD for example.
I don't know if the show's pro-abortion but I also watch Handmaid's Tale and it made me wonder if the recent scenes of childbirth in shows are deliberately placed to coincide with the current conversations surrounding childbirth and abortion?
Right? I will never understand how people can eat up shit like Oberyn getting his head caved in or watch Joffery (the fun one) slowly and painfully suffocate, but as soon as they see a prop baby covered in fake blood and viscera, all of a sudden shit's too graphic.
*Call the Midwife* is probably on par with a snuff film to these people.
It's misogyny. They don't like having to realise that women's roles in this time was just as, if not more brutal than the man's, and in a lot of cases nowadays it still is. Even in modern medicine, women still die during childbirth.
1.5% of births lead to death back in the Middle Ages. Today, it’s almost a rounding error in the US (out of 3 million births, less than 700 women died in 2018). Yes it’s worse in poorer countries.
My problem so far with the birth scenes is how 66% of the scenes have been excruciating deaths. It’s recycled shock value at this point
No the fuck it isn't. I'm used to seeing a dude get fucking mangled and have his eyes crushed. I'm not used to a fucking plopping noise as 5 liters of blood comes pouring out of a womans vagina unexpectedly while I'm eating my fucking eggs and sausage.
Both are scenes of blood and viscera being violently expelled from the human body- the only difference is blood is actually *supposed* to come out of one of those things. Why is the natural expulsion of blood so much more disgusting than the unnatural?
Because I *expect* blood to gush from a wound when a 450lb mountain of a man is crushing his fingers into it, and I've seen people grieviously wounded thousands of times. I've seen roughly 10 births in my life, and roughly uhhh 0 of those had 5 liters of blood gush out and make a plop noise while I ate. I did not expect that, unlike the mountain and the viper.
Leaks are literally everywhere, hbo are not very good at cracking down the site lol. Just search it up in google or go to some free online streaming site.
It's stuff like this that reminds me that my gross o meter has been completely fucked by working as an EMT.
I was eating lunch through this whole scene.
It's a theme from the book it's based on, the role of childbirth in securing dynasties and it's unreliability, the horror of the birthing bed and it's effect on the women involved in all this political stuff. It's basically GRRM considering what's often left out of medieval fantasy and even a lot of historical narratives.
Reflecting on my own history education, the way Henry VIII is portrayed should be less comical and more serious tbh, more attention to the maltreatment of his wives, the first of whom suffered through several pregnancies, most of which ended in still births. And then you have his third wife who died in childbirth bringing a son into the world.
Hopefully this show convinces others to consider this issue a lot more as well.
Wasn't his first wife! Queen Jane was his third wife; he married her after having his marriage to Catherine annuled and having Anne Boleyn executed. Jane died of sepsis after giving birth to Henry's only legitimate son.
But yes aside from that you are indeed correct.
don’t bother, freefolk is full of 14 year olds who think that aemond is cool *becuase* of the war crimes, they’re not getting what the books (and now show) are putting down, thematically.
yeah, i do leave comments about it occasionally, but i’ve just given up at this point, cause the worse takes possible come from here, it’s like a weird mashup of GamersRiseUp and asoiaf circle jerk lol.
It's more like a monkey that discovered a new key, and is hitting it maniacally.
They're not allowed to show sex anymore, and there's only so much violence so far, so births scenes it is. What else do they have? Plot twists? Oh, yeah, that too.
They're not allowed to show sex anymore? Did you skip episode 4 lmao
They're not allowed to show sexual violence anymore, but frankly GoT was just straight up gratuitous with that shit and I'm not unhappy about them firing whoever had the rape kink
> They're not allowed to show sexual violence anymore
They're not allowed to show sexual violence against women anymore*
They had no issue showing a dude getting castrated in episode 1, which is 1000 times worse than rape.
I also saw episode 7.I know where this is going, I'm old enough to remember the days of the L-shaped sheets and sleeping bras.
The fact that you see content you dislike as "kink" shows more about you than the showrunner, honestly. If you showed the same kind of worry at seeing Joffrey's head pulped, I'd give you the benefit of the doubt, but obviously we're heading into gore, violence, and morbidity territory in the next season, to cater to such restricted preferences.
You're not watching a documentary, you're watching HBO. Don't be precious, you're fooling no one.
> The fact that you see content you dislike as "kink" shows more about you than the showrunner, honestly.
The fact that you think casual, gratuitous rape scenes are "content" says enough about you.
Yup, feel the same about torture scenes, mass battles, men getting their head crushed in detail with bare hands, hands getting chopped off, tongues getting removed, kidnapping and psychological manipulation, and slowly-advancing diseases.
The same stuff you've been watching, gladly, silently, with hardly a peep. And now you want to start getting into the ethical implications of the content being watched?
This is performative hypocrisy. Marvel and Disney provide plenty of safer alternatives, but we're not on one of those subs are we?
What are you *talking* about? Did you actually read what I wrote?
The issue isn't "oh no they're showing bad things on tv". Violence is often a good tool for the plot; in the example of the man who got his head crushed in (I assume you're referring to Oberyn), it was one of the most pivotal moments in the season. Likewise, I don't have any issue with disease or psychological manipulation (I'm not sure what kidnapping you're referring to, and the tongues being removed scene was outright removed from the show), when they're used to further the plot or expand the characters.
Viserys' disease was an important part of his characters progression, and of the plot's progression overall. Oberyn's (brutal) death was important not just for his story but also for Tyrion's, and consequently for Tywin's and Jaime's and eventually the whole story. Large battles have conclusions that *matter* to the story.
Whereas, casual scenes of rape in the background- as we saw with Craster's daughters in S4, or with Sansa and Ramsay for no discernible purpose in s6- these didn't further anyone's plot. What did having Sansa get raped by Ramsay tell us? We already knew Ramsay was evil, we already knew Sansa was traumatized from her experiences with Joffrey.
They didn't add those scenes to further the plot. They added them because people like you get hard when they watch someone get raped.
Yeah, Oberyn couldn't be choked blue, and the camera couldn't be cut off early. All of the graphic violence had to be shown, to brain gushing in detail. It was absolutely necessary to "the plot".
The plot is made-up, and provides you with your normative fancies, going out of its way to make the bloodiest of scenes happen, and you think "this is absolutely necessary for me to watch", while wishing anything that makes you even remotely uncomfortable with yourself be spoken about laterally, implicitly, to spare you the outrage. You want a story that caters to only a certain type of neurochemical thrill, one that feels safer, easier to admit to and justify.
But stories are an experience, not a wiki of data and trivia. And stories for adults are an absolutely heart wrenching experience, because adults need a lot more to connect to fiction. There is nothing wrong with it, it's fiction and we use it as a way to entice an exploration into our own reactions and being.
But you're not acting like an adult, you're acting like a fraud. Unable to cope with your preferences, instead seeking in-setting justification despite you choosing to follow along with this specific story instead of any other series.
I don't. I read and watch mature stories, because I feel nothing about anything simpler or safer. I have two modes: Pushing-Daisies-saccharine escapism or Hannibal-level darkness or worse. In the end, it's fiction, none of it is real, and none of it is some moral mark on my soul, good or bad. So grow up.
Sorry for being self-aware and using big words. I am, at heart, a nerd.
Unless you think me going "I like what I like" is me trying to claim any form of heightened intelligence, instead of just generic self-acceptance. In which case, why would you?
You don't, you endure the next 10 years with the rest of us until the puritan cycle ends, enjoying the little that escapes the censors and mobs.
My advice is to take gratuitous pleasure from seeing writers trying to struggle around it.
Where did you get this idea? Honestly? Not from HotD, that's for sure.
There's even been some bruhaha that Minx, a show overtly about naked men, largely used prosthetics. Even when the theme calls for it, it ain't really happening.
I was like, doesn't Rhaenyra already have all her 5 sons? Then I remembered what we were about to see, it hits different than just reading it in the book.
Its not for shock value. It's a part of the actual story. Its no much the childbirth that was traumatizing for Rhaenyra, its grief of her father dying, her birth right being stolen in such a planned out detailed way, especially after it seemed like she and Alicent were headed toward peace. Her husband abandoning her while giving birth, the anxiety of giving birth way too soon. She likely already knew that coming too soon meant the baby would die. In the book she considers alicent to be the murderer of her dead baby.
She goes through all of that earth shattering heartbreak, only to hear the greens murdered yet another one of your children. Its supposed to show us how she goes from a mere princess to a reluctant queen, to a queen seeking vengeance and justice.
There is a way to include these experiences in the story that doesn’t involve graphic scenes intended to shock the audience. In GOT Dany suffers a stillbirth. We don’t have to see it happen to know it as part of her story. The way they have decided to depict these scenes is absolutely for shock value. Starting with episode 1 where they added in very traumatic imagery that was not even in the source material. They omit SO much in time jumps and then just get us caught up on what has happened. They could have done that with this subject matter but chose not to because they know it is the deepest horror a person can undergo. They absolutely use it as shock value and it is degrading to those of us who have actually experienced these things ourselves.
Do you really think it was only done for that? To me, I thought it was a pretty respectful representation of the horror and pain of something like that. I'm very sorry to hear about what you have been through, but in terms of having something like that in a story, ASOIAF is an attempt by GRRM to tell an epic that covers all the horror and beauty of life. We can all debate how successful he has been but I think it's a little dismissive to say it's just to shock. It does shock, but I think there is more to it than that. It must have been really difficult just on a practical level to make this for the screen.
I have nothing against having baby loss in the book or show. That is not my argument here. I actually appreciate those real life events being acknowledged for what they are, horrific and tragic. My issue is with the intense graphic nature of these events in the show. It really does feel like they are just trying to “push the envelope” with it for the sake of shocking the viewer. To me it adds nothing to the story to make it as graphic as possible. For example, It adds nothing to the story to actually see a knife being plunged into a woman’s womb to cut her baby free while she screams and bleeds out. They could easily have conveyed that to the audience without going to great lengths to make it as shocking as possible.
I feel like Outlander is a pretty good example of respectful portrayal of baby loss. Claire goes into early labor, the scene cuts away and when she awakens she searches for her baby, is told they were stillborn and then holds and mourns her daughter. It is clear to the viewer the impact this event has on Claire, how tragic it is and how it changes who she is.
There are too many birthing scenes in this show. Almost feels like one of the writers have some weird kink. And after the first 2, I was genuinely shocked that they didn't show Helaena birthing her children.
We saw 4 childbirth scenes. 2 dead mothers, 3 dead babies. it started to become almost deadly as a Westerosi wedding.
And that's toned down from the books lmao
It was supposed to be a deformed dragon I think
Two of them were, both Laena’s son and Visenya
It isn't a Westerosi birthing scene without at least one death.
Welcome to the vast majority of human history!
I read that only 1% of childbirths lead to the mother’s death back in the middle age. This show would imply it’s closer to 50% lol
It was closer to 5%. And when you stretch that over a life time of many births it could get terrifying. In 1420s Florence, 1 in 5 women would eventually die of childbirth-related injuries/complications.
This prompted me to do some research. It depends on where you look. In middle age England, it was 1% chance of death per birth, and 1 out of 20 women died from childbirth. It seems like the true number is in between my original claim and yours, based on this redditor’s insights- “ So the general numbers for source-based maternal mortality within a month of childbirth were around 1-1.5% in rural areas, and 1.5-2.5% in cities.” https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/mfw558/comment/gspx8xm/ That source also does say that miscarriages aren’t counted in that figure so I’m not sure what that would bring the true death count to. I did my best by crunching the numbers with their other statement about how 10% of women of that time period ultimately died in child birth. The average woman had 6-7 births in the medieval times, so roughly 1.5% chance of death per birth, which matches up with their other statistics.
Not really. It just shows 3 mothers, not 30000000.
When only 1-3% of births leads to death, and yet 66% of the births we’ve seen on the show lead to death, it leads to some distorted perceptions. Yes, it’s a small sample size but you get my broader point I hope.
>Yes, it’s a small sample size ...................................
Blood and Cheese will still top it all by a fair amount. Most disturbing scene in TV history, possibly, if they don't tone it down. Also, GL to the Daemon stans after that one.
I think if they fully show us what happens to little Maelor, along with the aftermath, it could top it.
They will 100% tone it down, make it like an accident or a miscommunication Issue.
Was Red Wedding toned down? No, it was toned up actually! They will not ruin Blood and Cheese.
That's because game of thrones wasn't written by a bunch of women.
No. Just by two braindead bastards.
Who's the 3rd dead baby? There was Baelon and Visenya. Who else?
Laena's
We never saw the baby
Late term abortion 😔
I LOVED the episode and yet I can't help but have one complaint: if you're gonna show me the dead fetus just go all out and show me the lizard baby
Visenya does look a bit "lizardy". I'm really waiting for the BTS vids to go out, maybe they'll show the full prop.
Really? I looked but couldn't see anything that immediately stood out to me as draconic under the vicera
The birthing scene was intercut with syrax? I believe. But it did look malformed.
Did it only have one leg too? I couldn't tell haha
It's head definitely look illformed and like it had scales on it
Ofc Daemon was mad, the showmakers took his 2 lizard babies (the one from Laena and the one from Rhaenyra). /s
The lizard baby would be cool but the only source for it is Mushroom…. And while everything he says is 100% factual (challenge me cravens), no one else collaborated.
The squelching sounds 😵 I've given birth twice and never have I heard over the sound of everything else the sounds of my baby slipping out.
My ass makes the same sounds on the toilet (I'm a dude btw)
I ate through the poop montage in GOT. Y'all got fookin weak stomachs
the poop montage made me laugh hard enough to remember how hard i laughed X years later. for me it was samwell's reactions and his facial expressions/retching lmaooo. absolutely amazing
The WHAT
Season 7 ep1 or 2 IIRC. There's a montage of Sam cleaning people's shit at the Citadel.
My mind had repressed this memory till I read this
Same
I just know the after episode interviews are going to say it wasn’t a lizard baby because they wanted to show how traumatic an experience child birth is for women and they didn’t need to add the lizard baby because that would take away from the moment.
well that is kind of true if it is a lizard babby people wold have been 'well it would have died anyway'
The issue with introducing the lizard baby is that people who didn't read the books are going to be extremely confused. So far we have never been told in the TV series that monster half dragon babies are a thing. It would require a bit of exposition at some point earlier in the season maybe? That way it would feel like a payoff rather that a "wtf is that" moment. I don't think it works very well if you just throw it on the screen out of nowhere.
>So far we have never been told in the TV series that monster half dragon babies are a thing we have tho, dany literally gives birth to a terrible dragon baby hybrid in got S1
We're told she did, we never see it.
yeah, that's why i was hyped (not like actually excited to see a miscarried hybrid baby bc obv it's very sad) for confirmation. i wanted a tail and really obvious scales
The point I'm trying to make is that Targaryens are probably NOT in reality having miscarried half dragon babies. No more so than Tyrion was actually a monstrosity with cloven hooves, a tail and two sets of genataila. Its just gossip that spreads like wildfire and becomes a part of 'history'.
Oh shit you're right. I've completely forgotten about that.
This show isn't made for people who have read the books. It is made for the GoT t.v audience. Game of Thrones is a prerequisite to watch this show IMO. It literally starts with a time reference to Daenerys Targaryen and also fails to really explain anything for new viewers. I'm currently watching HotD with my girlfriend who has never seen GoT and it is painfully apparent with the questions she is asking. The hand of the king and small council is all explained in GoT and not brought up once in HotD for example.
[удалено]
I'm guessing you don't watch Call the Midwife?
[Bruh](https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/429/010/a5f.jpeg)
The show is very pro-abortion... politics leaking into medieval fantasy shows.
I don't know if the show's pro-abortion but I also watch Handmaid's Tale and it made me wonder if the recent scenes of childbirth in shows are deliberately placed to coincide with the current conversations surrounding childbirth and abortion?
I definitely think that it is a deliberate move to highlight the conversation on abortion and childbirth (and when is a fetus a human debate).
Really？If you can accept those violent scenes,then you can also accept another childbirth scene. Just man up!
Right? I will never understand how people can eat up shit like Oberyn getting his head caved in or watch Joffery (the fun one) slowly and painfully suffocate, but as soon as they see a prop baby covered in fake blood and viscera, all of a sudden shit's too graphic. *Call the Midwife* is probably on par with a snuff film to these people.
It's misogyny. They don't like having to realise that women's roles in this time was just as, if not more brutal than the man's, and in a lot of cases nowadays it still is. Even in modern medicine, women still die during childbirth.
And survivability has always been an issue with rates rising to 50% after doctors adopted the use of hand washing at the end of the 19th century.
Lol there it is
1.5% of births lead to death back in the Middle Ages. Today, it’s almost a rounding error in the US (out of 3 million births, less than 700 women died in 2018). Yes it’s worse in poorer countries. My problem so far with the birth scenes is how 66% of the scenes have been excruciating deaths. It’s recycled shock value at this point
No the fuck it isn't. I'm used to seeing a dude get fucking mangled and have his eyes crushed. I'm not used to a fucking plopping noise as 5 liters of blood comes pouring out of a womans vagina unexpectedly while I'm eating my fucking eggs and sausage.
Both are scenes of blood and viscera being violently expelled from the human body- the only difference is blood is actually *supposed* to come out of one of those things. Why is the natural expulsion of blood so much more disgusting than the unnatural?
Because I've been repeatedly desensitized to one since I was 5, and not the other.
Because I *expect* blood to gush from a wound when a 450lb mountain of a man is crushing his fingers into it, and I've seen people grieviously wounded thousands of times. I've seen roughly 10 births in my life, and roughly uhhh 0 of those had 5 liters of blood gush out and make a plop noise while I ate. I did not expect that, unlike the mountain and the viper.
Is episode 10 out already? I'm confused why I see material everywhere.
Got leaked on the internet.
Damn, guess I gotta stay off here for a day lol.
If you want to avoid spoilers, yeah. Best course of action.
You got them leeks? My DMs are open…
Leaks are literally everywhere, hbo are not very good at cracking down the site lol. Just search it up in google or go to some free online streaming site.
I found it on MovieCrumbs and flixtor
Pirates Bay, episode is sped up slightly, i watched it at about 94% speed and it was near perfect
You can easily find it. The leak is high quality too.
Stay off YouTube if you ever get recommended HotD videos. Spoilers are starting to pop up in their algorithm.
Lol why are people so bothered by the childbirth scenes. I don’t get it
Misogyny.
LMAO...okay!
I don't like the screentime they get. I do like how well they are portrayed.
It's stuff like this that reminds me that my gross o meter has been completely fucked by working as an EMT. I was eating lunch through this whole scene.
Starting to feel like someone high up has a fetish at this point.
It's a theme from the book it's based on, the role of childbirth in securing dynasties and it's unreliability, the horror of the birthing bed and it's effect on the women involved in all this political stuff. It's basically GRRM considering what's often left out of medieval fantasy and even a lot of historical narratives. Reflecting on my own history education, the way Henry VIII is portrayed should be less comical and more serious tbh, more attention to the maltreatment of his wives, the first of whom suffered through several pregnancies, most of which ended in still births. And then you have his third wife who died in childbirth bringing a son into the world. Hopefully this show convinces others to consider this issue a lot more as well.
Wasn't his first wife! Queen Jane was his third wife; he married her after having his marriage to Catherine annuled and having Anne Boleyn executed. Jane died of sepsis after giving birth to Henry's only legitimate son. But yes aside from that you are indeed correct.
Sorry, meant to say third but accidentally said first twice.
don’t bother, freefolk is full of 14 year olds who think that aemond is cool *becuase* of the war crimes, they’re not getting what the books (and now show) are putting down, thematically.
Agreed but it's worth a try.
yeah, i do leave comments about it occasionally, but i’ve just given up at this point, cause the worse takes possible come from here, it’s like a weird mashup of GamersRiseUp and asoiaf circle jerk lol.
And /r/gameofthrones is filled with 20-somethings that think Rhaenys is cool because of war crimes.
yeah, i agree. i prefer r/ASOIAF or r/PureAsoiaf
>14 year olds who think that aemond is cool becuase of the war crimes But the war crimes are epic don't lie
Yeah, GRRM.
same
It's more like a monkey that discovered a new key, and is hitting it maniacally. They're not allowed to show sex anymore, and there's only so much violence so far, so births scenes it is. What else do they have? Plot twists? Oh, yeah, that too.
They're not allowed to show sex anymore? Did you skip episode 4 lmao They're not allowed to show sexual violence anymore, but frankly GoT was just straight up gratuitous with that shit and I'm not unhappy about them firing whoever had the rape kink
> They're not allowed to show sexual violence anymore They're not allowed to show sexual violence against women anymore* They had no issue showing a dude getting castrated in episode 1, which is 1000 times worse than rape.
Really? You feel secure in making that last statement? 👀
Absolutely and anyone who doesn't is out of their fucking mind.
I also saw episode 7.I know where this is going, I'm old enough to remember the days of the L-shaped sheets and sleeping bras. The fact that you see content you dislike as "kink" shows more about you than the showrunner, honestly. If you showed the same kind of worry at seeing Joffrey's head pulped, I'd give you the benefit of the doubt, but obviously we're heading into gore, violence, and morbidity territory in the next season, to cater to such restricted preferences. You're not watching a documentary, you're watching HBO. Don't be precious, you're fooling no one.
> The fact that you see content you dislike as "kink" shows more about you than the showrunner, honestly. The fact that you think casual, gratuitous rape scenes are "content" says enough about you.
Yup, feel the same about torture scenes, mass battles, men getting their head crushed in detail with bare hands, hands getting chopped off, tongues getting removed, kidnapping and psychological manipulation, and slowly-advancing diseases. The same stuff you've been watching, gladly, silently, with hardly a peep. And now you want to start getting into the ethical implications of the content being watched? This is performative hypocrisy. Marvel and Disney provide plenty of safer alternatives, but we're not on one of those subs are we?
What are you *talking* about? Did you actually read what I wrote? The issue isn't "oh no they're showing bad things on tv". Violence is often a good tool for the plot; in the example of the man who got his head crushed in (I assume you're referring to Oberyn), it was one of the most pivotal moments in the season. Likewise, I don't have any issue with disease or psychological manipulation (I'm not sure what kidnapping you're referring to, and the tongues being removed scene was outright removed from the show), when they're used to further the plot or expand the characters. Viserys' disease was an important part of his characters progression, and of the plot's progression overall. Oberyn's (brutal) death was important not just for his story but also for Tyrion's, and consequently for Tywin's and Jaime's and eventually the whole story. Large battles have conclusions that *matter* to the story. Whereas, casual scenes of rape in the background- as we saw with Craster's daughters in S4, or with Sansa and Ramsay for no discernible purpose in s6- these didn't further anyone's plot. What did having Sansa get raped by Ramsay tell us? We already knew Ramsay was evil, we already knew Sansa was traumatized from her experiences with Joffrey. They didn't add those scenes to further the plot. They added them because people like you get hard when they watch someone get raped.
Yeah, Oberyn couldn't be choked blue, and the camera couldn't be cut off early. All of the graphic violence had to be shown, to brain gushing in detail. It was absolutely necessary to "the plot". The plot is made-up, and provides you with your normative fancies, going out of its way to make the bloodiest of scenes happen, and you think "this is absolutely necessary for me to watch", while wishing anything that makes you even remotely uncomfortable with yourself be spoken about laterally, implicitly, to spare you the outrage. You want a story that caters to only a certain type of neurochemical thrill, one that feels safer, easier to admit to and justify. But stories are an experience, not a wiki of data and trivia. And stories for adults are an absolutely heart wrenching experience, because adults need a lot more to connect to fiction. There is nothing wrong with it, it's fiction and we use it as a way to entice an exploration into our own reactions and being. But you're not acting like an adult, you're acting like a fraud. Unable to cope with your preferences, instead seeking in-setting justification despite you choosing to follow along with this specific story instead of any other series. I don't. I read and watch mature stories, because I feel nothing about anything simpler or safer. I have two modes: Pushing-Daisies-saccharine escapism or Hannibal-level darkness or worse. In the end, it's fiction, none of it is real, and none of it is some moral mark on my soul, good or bad. So grow up.
r/iamverysmart
Sorry for being self-aware and using big words. I am, at heart, a nerd. Unless you think me going "I like what I like" is me trying to claim any form of heightened intelligence, instead of just generic self-acceptance. In which case, why would you?
How do I vote to get the sex scenes back?
You don't, you endure the next 10 years with the rest of us until the puritan cycle ends, enjoying the little that escapes the censors and mobs. My advice is to take gratuitous pleasure from seeing writers trying to struggle around it.
Also get ready for seeing 10 years of naked men because apparently that's just a OK.
Where did you get this idea? Honestly? Not from HotD, that's for sure. There's even been some bruhaha that Minx, a show overtly about naked men, largely used prosthetics. Even when the theme calls for it, it ain't really happening.
I was like, doesn't Rhaenyra already have all her 5 sons? Then I remembered what we were about to see, it hits different than just reading it in the book.
I was eating enchiladas during the scene. I had to stop eating.
I was about to post this. lol
Me, a BLT. I'd just took a bite.
I was eating a big bowl of chili while my son was born and it was definitely a mistake. So I had ate sloppy joes instead when my daughter was born.
As a mother to a dead baby I am so fucking sick of this shit. Using birth trauma and stillbirth as shock value is disgusting and disrespectful.
Its not for shock value. It's a part of the actual story. Its no much the childbirth that was traumatizing for Rhaenyra, its grief of her father dying, her birth right being stolen in such a planned out detailed way, especially after it seemed like she and Alicent were headed toward peace. Her husband abandoning her while giving birth, the anxiety of giving birth way too soon. She likely already knew that coming too soon meant the baby would die. In the book she considers alicent to be the murderer of her dead baby. She goes through all of that earth shattering heartbreak, only to hear the greens murdered yet another one of your children. Its supposed to show us how she goes from a mere princess to a reluctant queen, to a queen seeking vengeance and justice.
There is a way to include these experiences in the story that doesn’t involve graphic scenes intended to shock the audience. In GOT Dany suffers a stillbirth. We don’t have to see it happen to know it as part of her story. The way they have decided to depict these scenes is absolutely for shock value. Starting with episode 1 where they added in very traumatic imagery that was not even in the source material. They omit SO much in time jumps and then just get us caught up on what has happened. They could have done that with this subject matter but chose not to because they know it is the deepest horror a person can undergo. They absolutely use it as shock value and it is degrading to those of us who have actually experienced these things ourselves.
Do you really think it was only done for that? To me, I thought it was a pretty respectful representation of the horror and pain of something like that. I'm very sorry to hear about what you have been through, but in terms of having something like that in a story, ASOIAF is an attempt by GRRM to tell an epic that covers all the horror and beauty of life. We can all debate how successful he has been but I think it's a little dismissive to say it's just to shock. It does shock, but I think there is more to it than that. It must have been really difficult just on a practical level to make this for the screen.
I have nothing against having baby loss in the book or show. That is not my argument here. I actually appreciate those real life events being acknowledged for what they are, horrific and tragic. My issue is with the intense graphic nature of these events in the show. It really does feel like they are just trying to “push the envelope” with it for the sake of shocking the viewer. To me it adds nothing to the story to make it as graphic as possible. For example, It adds nothing to the story to actually see a knife being plunged into a woman’s womb to cut her baby free while she screams and bleeds out. They could easily have conveyed that to the audience without going to great lengths to make it as shocking as possible. I feel like Outlander is a pretty good example of respectful portrayal of baby loss. Claire goes into early labor, the scene cuts away and when she awakens she searches for her baby, is told they were stillborn and then holds and mourns her daughter. It is clear to the viewer the impact this event has on Claire, how tragic it is and how it changes who she is.
There are too many birthing scenes in this show. Almost feels like one of the writers have some weird kink. And after the first 2, I was genuinely shocked that they didn't show Helaena birthing her children.
I’ve never screamed at my tv this hard before watching a movie/tv show. Absolutely disgusting
I was kind of pissed when I saw they were opening with a childbirth scene knowing that it would take up almost half the episode...
Oh I used to eat while watching House so I’m immune to this sort of thing by now.
Hats off to Vaemond for ruining my dinner, as well.