/a song of ice & fire/? so very gay! also feminist!
(don't bother with this entry unless you're familiar with george r.r. martin.)
ok, so i'm re-reading martin's a song of ice and fire, which, despite its faults (notably the incredibly boring iron island plot and the only slightly less boring stannis plot), i love with a passion. specifically, i'm at a clash of kings. aCoK is, as many of you will recall, the only book in which renly baraethon is seen or discussed at any length.
now, i think i've said this on LJ before, but i became convinced the last time i read /ice & fire/ that loras tyrell is gay and was in love with renly (remember, he goes mad with grief when renly is killed and kills two other knights). martin is subtle about it, but the hints are there, at least for people used to spotting gay subtext -- though i would argue martin is being a little too overt for it really to be "subtext". but anyway. i don't think i'd realized that renly himself is very likely gay (or queer, anyway). there's a moment where he's at a parley with stannis, and renly's wedding to margaery tyrell is brought up. renly remarks to stannis: "you'll be pleased to know she came to me a maid," to which stannis snarks, "in your bed she's like to die that way". hee! i'm surprised i didn't notice this before. anyway, more evidence for my theory about loras (remember, when he takes the white as a member of the kingsguard - in a later book, but i forget which - people find it odd that he should commit to celibacy so young). i think renly and loras....? totally knockin' boots. just sayin'. (on a side note, martin actually veers towards the cliché slightly in making both loras and renly so goddamn pretty, according to all the descriptions - but hey, at least loras kicks ass and takes names.)
but this isn't why i'm posting. i'm posting because i just realized, to my immense amusement, that renly's rainbow guard....? dude, their cloaks are gay flags! if you look in the appendix of /aCoK/, you'll see the colours assigned to each member of said guard: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple. yep. there are many different rainbow flags used by various groups around the world, but that particular colour combination is the gay pride flag. HA! george, i love you.
on a more serious note... it's so nice to see queerness included in an epic fantasy series. yes, i know other authors have done it - RJ did like his lesbians - but something about the way martin does it just makes me happy. like the renly/loras thing. it's subtle; he's not knocking anyone over the head with it; and it's visible enough for gay readers to see it. to make things better, he doesn't just relegate queerness to semi-subtext -- he makes the viper of dorne (what's his name? oberyn?) explicitely bisexual in a way that appears to be meant to make oberyn just seem kind of cooler. at the same time, he shows cersei having a really pretty ick encounter with that bisexual myrish woman - so he's not stereotyping; he's showing queerness as what it is... something natural that happens and is part of life and nothing to be treated any differently than anything else. i hope i'm making sense.
i think this is the kind of thing martin does best. it's sort of like his feminism, which i think is very, very deep-rooted. RJ ended up betraying me (that's how it felt), because it seemed to start out feminist - women could do kick-ass things too - and then his women turned into one-dimensional shrews who were punished over and over and over (ridicule of the aes sedai, much? egwene being the notable exception). martin's women are just as human as the men. he's already superb at characterization. even cersei lannister - cersei! - has one or two moments where i catch myself being slightly (only very slightly) sympathetic towards her. he treats his female characters just like the men on this score... and he makes it very clear what women in that world have to suffer through, and equally clear that he understands and sympathizes with them just as he sees their faults (hello, catelyn stark, who is both a kick-ass feminist icon /and/ a total bitch to jon snow who can't get her head around the stupidity of thinking tyrion tried to kill bran).
also... i have never seen any other work of fiction - at least, certainly not anything remotely falling into fantasy or sci-fi - involving a woman like brienne of tarth. i love that character. love love love. because you know what? they are rare indeed, but there /are/ enormous brawny ugly women in this world with buckteeth who can beat the shit out of most men, and he doesn't make her a superwoman, either (she can barely keep up with one-handed jaime). and arya stark is a tomboy after my very own heart. i too wanted to beat people with sticks when i was eight.
so yeah, anyway, here's to george martin and his treating both gay/queer people and women like fully-fledged, worthy people to make interesting characters out of. i can forgive him even the iron isles for that.
ok, so i'm re-reading martin's a song of ice and fire, which, despite its faults (notably the incredibly boring iron island plot and the only slightly less boring stannis plot), i love with a passion. specifically, i'm at a clash of kings. aCoK is, as many of you will recall, the only book in which renly baraethon is seen or discussed at any length.
now, i think i've said this on LJ before, but i became convinced the last time i read /ice & fire/ that loras tyrell is gay and was in love with renly (remember, he goes mad with grief when renly is killed and kills two other knights). martin is subtle about it, but the hints are there, at least for people used to spotting gay subtext -- though i would argue martin is being a little too overt for it really to be "subtext". but anyway. i don't think i'd realized that renly himself is very likely gay (or queer, anyway). there's a moment where he's at a parley with stannis, and renly's wedding to margaery tyrell is brought up. renly remarks to stannis: "you'll be pleased to know she came to me a maid," to which stannis snarks, "in your bed she's like to die that way". hee! i'm surprised i didn't notice this before. anyway, more evidence for my theory about loras (remember, when he takes the white as a member of the kingsguard - in a later book, but i forget which - people find it odd that he should commit to celibacy so young). i think renly and loras....? totally knockin' boots. just sayin'. (on a side note, martin actually veers towards the cliché slightly in making both loras and renly so goddamn pretty, according to all the descriptions - but hey, at least loras kicks ass and takes names.)
but this isn't why i'm posting. i'm posting because i just realized, to my immense amusement, that renly's rainbow guard....? dude, their cloaks are gay flags! if you look in the appendix of /aCoK/, you'll see the colours assigned to each member of said guard: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple. yep. there are many different rainbow flags used by various groups around the world, but that particular colour combination is the gay pride flag. HA! george, i love you.
on a more serious note... it's so nice to see queerness included in an epic fantasy series. yes, i know other authors have done it - RJ did like his lesbians - but something about the way martin does it just makes me happy. like the renly/loras thing. it's subtle; he's not knocking anyone over the head with it; and it's visible enough for gay readers to see it. to make things better, he doesn't just relegate queerness to semi-subtext -- he makes the viper of dorne (what's his name? oberyn?) explicitely bisexual in a way that appears to be meant to make oberyn just seem kind of cooler. at the same time, he shows cersei having a really pretty ick encounter with that bisexual myrish woman - so he's not stereotyping; he's showing queerness as what it is... something natural that happens and is part of life and nothing to be treated any differently than anything else. i hope i'm making sense.
i think this is the kind of thing martin does best. it's sort of like his feminism, which i think is very, very deep-rooted. RJ ended up betraying me (that's how it felt), because it seemed to start out feminist - women could do kick-ass things too - and then his women turned into one-dimensional shrews who were punished over and over and over (ridicule of the aes sedai, much? egwene being the notable exception). martin's women are just as human as the men. he's already superb at characterization. even cersei lannister - cersei! - has one or two moments where i catch myself being slightly (only very slightly) sympathetic towards her. he treats his female characters just like the men on this score... and he makes it very clear what women in that world have to suffer through, and equally clear that he understands and sympathizes with them just as he sees their faults (hello, catelyn stark, who is both a kick-ass feminist icon /and/ a total bitch to jon snow who can't get her head around the stupidity of thinking tyrion tried to kill bran).
also... i have never seen any other work of fiction - at least, certainly not anything remotely falling into fantasy or sci-fi - involving a woman like brienne of tarth. i love that character. love love love. because you know what? they are rare indeed, but there /are/ enormous brawny ugly women in this world with buckteeth who can beat the shit out of most men, and he doesn't make her a superwoman, either (she can barely keep up with one-handed jaime). and arya stark is a tomboy after my very own heart. i too wanted to beat people with sticks when i was eight.
so yeah, anyway, here's to george martin and his treating both gay/queer people and women like fully-fledged, worthy people to make interesting characters out of. i can forgive him even the iron isles for that.