saezutte:16ruedelaverrerie:Before the actual answer to this ask, I do need to reiterate that this is

saezutte:16ruedelaverrerie:Before the actual answer to this ask, I do need to reiterate that this is not a GoT / ASoIaF blog and it will never become one, because that’s not what I want– but since GoT is midseason, posts related to it are the most time-sensitive and that is why I am making so many of them lately! Thus I apologize for either 1. currently throwing a lot of GoT stuff in your face despite your lack of interest, or 2. a future dearth of GoT stuff despite the past few weeks here making it almost seem like that’s my primary fandom.And because this post got rather unwieldy in the wake of last night’s episode, let me attempt to save you some time and give you a TL;DR I TAKE THE PHRASE “NARRATIVE ECONOMY” TOO LITERALLY so that you can scroll right on past it. This post is just a lot of narratology talk. It’s much less about how things make us feel and much more about why things might be shaped the way they are. I am aware that this is understandably boring for a lot of people, because the popular dream is to write a novel, not to become an English major THOUGH THANK YOU FOR THAT, IT’S HARD ENOUGH TO GET INTO GRAD SCHOOL AS IT ISThere are spoilers behind the cut, as well as an argument about why I didn’t want to put the spoilers behind the cut, and 2400+ words of me saying the exact same thing a lot of people have said much better alreadyKeep readingNat!! Omg!! HELLO this is one of the smartest things I’ve read about GoT as a show and written so engagingly, I am like jealous of your ability to put words together. Combined with this (older but almost disturbingly prescient) piece by Emily Nussbaum, I think we can see the central duality of the show, where the plot it’s adapting is very much about inequality in political systems and how much people get screwed by lack of power, but the medium itself must uphold those systems. This duality is present in the novels as well, of course, but the production system of TV + its visuality (which enables sexualization & objectification to a much higher degree, much more incidentally-on-purpose, i.e. “no, sexualization is not the purpose of this random naked woman but we’ll reap the benefits of audience titillation anyway”, than the novels do) means that the show maintains audience investment (therefore money) through this game of shock and sympathy alongside a narrative which still contains the remnants of a critique of inequality — but they’ve become weird through the intervention of television and its constraints. This criticism applies to TV as a whole, where even when there are superficial allowances for progress, it’s still an inherently conservative medium; maybe this can/will change or is changing, but the turn towards prestige television is not the agent of that change. This also connects to my recent thoughts on the MCU, where superheroics, the existence of superheroes, is used to elide any real message about world issues, any potential advancement in political agency for the oppressed classes of that universe in stories that are ostensibly about saving those people. It lassos audience sympathy into a position where we must support superheroes even when they are clearly causing more damage than they fix, because superheroes are the brand which must be defended.Caitlin!! HELLO!!! Jesus that Emily Nussbaum piece is great, thank you for linking to it– “a real Uroboros of titillation” is exactly it. And thank you for crystallizing the issue of duality in these artifacts of pop culture, this is so smart and so well put and you are a treasure!“but we’ll reap the benefits of audience titillation anyway” also reminds me of Maiden Rose and the fetishization of rape kfl;hgfldh the world is such a complicated place -- source link

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