#bc she doesn’t get as much uncomfortable misogyny directed her way

[bloody-wonder]

It would be really interesting to hear your thoughts about Aaron being homophobic. Also why don’t you agree with Nora that Andrew is bipolar?

wow thanks :))) then here it goes

(i’m not at all an expert on bipolar disorder but as far as i understand a person suffering from it should have both depressive and manic episodes - that’s why it’s called bipolar. while andrew’s apathy can be interpreted as an ongoing depressive state, manic episodes aren’t there. books 1 & 2 don’t count obviously, because his manic behavior in those is drug-induced. nora did say in the extra content that andrew is supposed to be bipolar, but what she also said is that the whole situation around andrew’s pills is in her opinion the least plausible aspect of aftg: she just needed andrew to be manic for plot reasons and didn’t bother with researching the whole mental illness theme in depth. so, if we return to the text, what we have is either a very poor portrayal of bipolar disorder or simply absence of it. i personally choose the latter, i think andrew just has a very severe ptsd).

unlike andrew’s misogyny i can’t just dismiss aaron’s homophobia out of hand. however, i am increasingly dissatisfied with how the fandom sees it and how we choose to engage with it. full disclaimer: what follows are all very personal takes and they are to be understood as venting of a person whose hcs are unpopular and not as criticism of anyone.

so, problem one: how people see aaron’s homophobia. i have a feeling that every aaron’s interaction with nicky or neil in which he’s being harsh or rude are interpreted as displays of his homophobia. this approach totally ingnores all the character-related and context-specific aspects of those interactions: for instance, that aaron has a thousand reasons to hate neil and neil being not straight wouldn’t even make top five of those reasons, and that half of the times aaron tells nicky to shut up, nicky does need to shut up because he’s being inappropriate. aaron vs nicky discourses frustrate me especially, because they tend to overfocus on aaron’s perceived homophobia and overlook nicky’s more problematic sides (bcs aaron is a ‘big meanie’ who can and will be bad, and nicky is a ‘gay cinnamon roll’ who can’t possibly be bad). 

that being said, aaron is indeed homophobic - as in ‘has prejudice against gay people’, which is very internalized and is showcased in subtle ways. for example, the biggest tell in my opinion isn’t him being rude or whatever, but this: imagine nicky’s straight and keeps saying all the stuff he says in the books - but about girls (makes me very uncomfortable) - would aaron call him out on it still? i believe that no he wouldn’t because, unlike me who thinks nicky’s behavior is inappropriate at times no matter what gender it’s directed at, aaron probably thinks it’s okay in hetero contexts and would totally let it slide. he calls nicky out not because he’s concerned about the people who his words affect, but because he’s ashamed of his flamboyant gay cousin. and that is the realest kind of homophobia because we may never/seldom meet a person who will want to beat up a gay or call them a f… but this deeply seated internalized prejudice is something we’ll find in many people in our immediate surroundings, and maybe even in ourselves.

problem two: how people engage with aaron’s homophobia in fics. so, aaron’s homophobia in the books is written in a really subtle way, but when translated into fan works it becomes a caricature. people will overblow it with additional facts and stories and then make aaron learn the error of his ways, redeem himself and apologize to andrew and nicky. which is fine. i get that a lot of people just need the emotional catharsis of having a relative figure go through this didactic story and accept ‘lil gay me’ in order to sublimate what will hardly happen to us in real life. but aaron is one of my favorite characters exactly because of his complexity and i just hate to see this complexity being sacrificed, so that he can become a hate sink, a boring trope or a didactic plot device.

for the thing is, whereas andrew’s alleged misogyny comes up relatively seldom and only in discussions of andrew’s flaws, aaron’s homophobia has sadly evolved to be his definitive characteristic - it comes up every single time whenever aaron has a role to play in a fic. but aaron has so much going for him - he’s a person trapped in other people’s stories, constantly overshadowed by his brother who also seems to define his life for some fucked up reasons, who seems to strive for ‘normality’ a lot more than other characters and yet his past doesn’t let him go. there’s so much stuff to work with and yet i have to read an obligatory ‘aaron learns to be less homophobic’ plot line every single time.

so yeah, these are my thoughts on aaron and his big evil homophobia. i’d like to reiterate what i said at the beginning - that this isn’t meant to be a criticism for example of the people who write those fics so much as venting my sadness that there are obviously few to no people who see aaron as i do.

#aaron minyard #all for the game #the foxhole court #asks #aftg mine #aftg ask

[gotgifsandmusings]

the way you guys handled the racism part of the podcast was just. awful i couldnt even finish the rest of the podcast bc i was so offput. expected better from you :/

I’m so sorry to hear that, seriously.

I don’t want to hide behind excuses; if our tone or words were hurtful, that’s the way of it, and all I can do is apologize for it and learn why. It was not our intent, and as we said at the start of it, we’re more than open to a dialogue.

I’ve received positive and negative feedback for pretty much every portion of the podcast, however (it’s not like “oh yay, person X agrees so we’re fine!” or anything, of course), and I do think there’s some value in digging into that.

Julia and I tend to be more forgiving of Martin, not that we’re asking anyone else to be. And given the virulence with which we go after D&D, I understand how hypocritical this can come across as, and how frustrating this can be too. But the reason we are is basically two-fold:

One is that we believe there’s a value to his books. Now, there’s also a value to the political discussion on Bill Maher’s show, for example, but yet amazingly, decent political commentary shouldn’t come with a side-serving of Islamophobia. I don’t watch his show, so why should I accept and praise books that don’t handle race well? That don’t handle female sexuality that amazingly, particularly in the cause of wlw scenes? That oftentimes do feel like the sexual violence could be easily toned down, or it’s unnecessarily gendered, or it does fall into unfortunate patterns with things like dead mothers?

The answer to that ties into the second reason, which is that his pattern is getting better. FeastDance felt more thoughtful, felt like there was more of an emphasis on female and other marginalized voices, and it felt like there was great intentionality on Martin’s part to do so. I haven’t read all his interviews; I can’t guess at what’s in his head beyond what his body of work shows us. But you can bet that if he was coming across as someone who was unwilling to reflect and engage with his own shortcomings, I wouldn’t be as invested.

I could be wrong about him. I’ve said this a lot before, but I could be really, really wrong. For now, he has my benefit of the doubt. I’m not asking you to bestow yours.

Back to the problems at hand though, and the value of his books. No, they’re not perfect at all. There’s a lot of issues, and these are issues that a more intersectional author likely wouldn’t have. To be perfectly honest, I think we’re starting to have a tendency of expecting perfection in every area from our media now. While I love that we’re finally in a place where our cultural dialogue is pushing for the change we want, and that storytellers are actually listening (look at like, Clexacon’s mere existence, for instance), I think this can easily become a double edged sword, where you’ve got the fandom raising pitchforks about Steven Universe not doing well with butch representation.

ASOIAF is no SU. It’s a book series written by a white dude in his 60s that spans twenty years. Which is why Julia and I put so much stock into the pattern and direction the books seem to be headed, because our social dialogue shifts so much. Well, depressingly not as much as it should, but I think it’s hard to deny that there is far less tolerance for bullshit in our media, and far more expectations of representational media that are not just once again glorifying the white male lens. 

I don’t believe the book series simplistically does that at all. I find there to be feminist takeaways in Martin’s critique of the patriarchy, and in the way Martin holds up a lens to the bullshit assumptions by this society, which is one uncomfortably reflective of our own history (though certainly not highly accurately so). I wouldn’t say my willingness is to forgive the issues in the books, but more like say, “these are here, these are problems, but I still find this text valuable. I still find the close-POV different and worthwhile.”

I can’t speak for Julia, but I can at least say this is what we had hoped to convey in the podcast. I believe we failed spectacularly. I think our tendency not to plan or overly structure our episodes went heavily against us here. Everything we were saying was in a larger context of “and this is a problem,” but wow we really didn’t make that clear.

What we did was basically raise the problems in turn, talk about what we think his intent was and what its function in the story has been, and then conclude on “this could have been better,” which after you know…like ten minutes of what probably sounds like rationalizations was not exactly going to come across as particularly meaningful. Had we structured more, I think we could have been clearer about “and it did not land.”

Showing Dany as completely unable to comprehend the political situation she was in, and being over her head with the complexity, did *not* require a lack of Essosi POVs, even if we suspect that’s partially why Martin made that choice, for instance.

But of course that didn’t come across, especially when there were some downright flippant things said that we also didn’t clarify. Like Julia mentioning she didn’t want a Dothraki POV, probably because it’d be very close to one as distressingly violent and patriarchal as Vic, which is simply unpleasant to read (and I’m also not sure I agree; I would have loved Dany eating the heart from a POV of someone in the Dosh Khaleen, for instance).

We know each other well, and we know the intent and place we’re coming from when we’re saying something, so I think that led to us not explicating stuff that absolutely needed to be explicated. Again, there’s no excuse. I wish we had planned  and presented everything differently, and it seems pretty obvious now how badly we needed to do that. I’ve learned a lot just in the past day, and all I can do is try to be better.

However, I will say…I suspect there’s also going to be content disagreements in the conclusions Julia and I land on. I’ve seen this with the fandom dialogue about the issues of sexism in the books before, and we’ve often received criticism for defending how he writes the patriarchy and women. Or for how women in the past basically are these pure, idealized victims, or they’re forgotten. We believe that’s to a point most of the time, that being one that provides a fuller picture of Westeros’s bullshit patriarchy (unnammed Mama Martell as an exception because there’s no reason for that at all), but we know it’s a point that doesn’t land.

Then there’s stuff like Arianne’s ‘hypersexuality’, which I simply don’t agree with. In my view, and something Gretchen and I were just discussing, Cersei is far more sexualized (she just tends to view sex from a manipulative standpoint always, instead of deriving pleasure from it, Jaime aside which is clearly unhealthy), and the degree to which this is a problem for a Dornish POV to have these traits (which I think is played up in the fandom) is one where I part ways with a lot of people. I can’t answer how I’d feel about it if I weren’t white, so I do my best to acknowledge that lens whenever I can. But in general, from what I can tell, my lens is also just a bit less Doylist than where some land.

And that’s fine, too. We’re all just engaging with the books how we like to do, and taking from it what’s there for us. There’s no objective takeaways, and not to belabor the point, but I could be so wrong about these books.

Why am I all Doylist with D&D? Because Watsonian analysis is useless in GoT, sure, but because they’ve violated my trust and my benefit of the doubt so thoroughly. I’m not there with Martin, and maybe that’s a problem. I suspect I might even be too Watsonian for my own good because of how engaged I find myself with certain aspects. Half of why we recorded that podcast was to kind of slap ourselves in the face with some Doylist realities, but I do now think the tone ended up being too dismissive, and I don’t feel good about it.

Anyway, this is just a super long-winded apology, as well as a meek explanation I suppose. Certainly not an excuse. This episode was requested a lot for us, probably because of how defensive of the books we get, and I feel like in our attempt to talk every angle of the issue, we ended up just coming across as doubling down on that defense. Moving forward you can bet your ass I’m going to be far more cognizant of this.

What’s funny is, feeling defensive actually wasn’t my experience at all recording it. Hell, even just pulling your asks for it, I was like, “wow this all really sucks,” and found myself getting a good deal more nervous for TWOW coming out. Because…god…I think I might be wrong. I’m back in that place I was in during season 5 where I was wondering if Sansa was going to get raped by LF (obviously a different context than the show), or if we’re not supposed to see Tyrion’s misogyny.

I’m not ready to give up on Martin yet, but I’m sure as hell not asking anyone else to forgive him. And if nothing else, I know now that at least a few takeaways we had were certainly not his intent, but the result of our own engagement and projections onto the media. I think I might be wrong (and where’s TWOW).

#I'm so sorry guys #asoiaf #got #anonymous #asks #rape mention tw