So Game of Thrones is the most torrented show in the world and a best selling novel series, and it features swords and bits of magic and dragons and lots of rape and sex and mutilation, incest and castration, and at least one guy turning into a dog to get fucked by an alpha wolf. And it's really popular and everyone has heard of it.
Has it influenced tabletop gaming though? Have any companies taken note and released products with an 'edginess' like Game of Thrones, not shying from barbarians raping everything or have druids get banged by their animal companions?
Here's some of George RR Martin's writing as an example:
“Once, so tormented she could not sleep, Dany slid a hand down between her legs, and gasped when she felt how wet she was. Scarce daring to breathe, she moved her fingers back and forth between her lower lips, slowly so as not to wake Irri beside her, until she found one sweet spot and lingered there, touching herself lightly, timidly at first and then faster. Still, the relief she wanted seemed to recede before her, until her dragons stirred, and one screamed out across the cabin, and Irri woke and saw what she was doing.
Dany knew her face was flushed, but in the darkness Irri surely could not tell. Wordless, the handmaid put a hand on her breast, then bent to take a nipple in her mouth. Her other hand drifted down across the soft curve of belly, through the mound of fine silvery-gold hair, and went to work between Dany's thighs. It was no more than a few moments until her legs twisted and her breasts heaved and her whole body shuddered. She screamed then. Or perhaps that was Drogon. Irri never said a thing, only curled back up and went back to sleep the instant the thing was done.”
"Tears aren't a woman's only weapon. The best one's between your legs."
And you have scenes from the show like adding an extra prostitute character who ultimate ends up a crossbow ridden corpse in the freaky teenage king's bed chamber. If this was White Wolf, they'd find a way to make it sound retarded, but GRRM is a pretty good writer and HBO's got slick producers.
Last edited by OgreBattle on Mon Jul 22, 2013 5:28 pm, edited 2 times in total.
I'm not sure why this is here, but as long as we're in this thread let's talk about sex, rape, bestiality and gaming.
Roleplaying games are no longer marketed primarily to the twelve-to-fifteen year old age bracket, just as fantasy fiction and comic books are no longer primarily considered kids fair - and indeed, any look at the history shows that pretty much every medium that was considered "kid's entertainment" in the 1950s-1970s that has survived has been getting progressively more mature in terms of both presentation and content. However, in many cases the material for a tabletop roleplaying game is still less sexually explicit than what you get in the short stories and novels that they draw from. Why is that?
Well, at the most basic level you have self-censorship. D&D originally have the occasional nipple and demon, but because this was a product specifically marketed to kids it fell under parental oversight and eventually the market started censoring itself to avoid official censorship - much like what happened to comic books in the 1950s, but less organized because, let's be honest, RPGs are a much smaller industry.
At a slightly higher level, sexuality in particular and rape in general doesn't go over well in normal tabletop interaction. There are specific venues where people let their guard down and roleplay sexytimes, especially taboo-breaking sexytimes, and it requires a group of like-minded people that have more often than not specifically come together to roleplay sexytimes with specific kinks in the forefront. Your average gaming group is not generally down for sexually interacting at that level, and these days people prefer to do that kind of thing over the internet where you can both indulge your kink vicarously with other people /and/ remain relatively anonymous.
That said, there is very little sexually new under the sun. GRRM might have written about a druid with a "special" relationship with their animal companion, but I guarantee you he isn't the first - hell, I think Phil Foglio beat him out on that one in an issue of Xxxenophile, and I'd have to check the dates but Terry Pratchett did something not too far off in Witches Abroad, albeit Sir Terry didn't use quite as much explicit language.
Really, GRRM isn't even that unusual; people have been writing weird sex into fiction since before Lovecraft and getting explicit about it since at least Philip Jose Farmer. What's bizarre these days is that the Anita Blake series can get away with the kind of cervix-bumping werewolf cock you expect in bad anime and sillier hentai manga.
But you're unlikely to see that in an RPG. Don't get me wrong: the tropes are there. You're not going to get half-orcs, half-ogre, and tieflings from a bunch of loving, caring cross-species households. Rape and bestiality (which gets Larry Niven complicated real quick) is just a part of the generic fantasy universe that rarely get a lot of wordcount because seriously, you might have it in the background of your character and in your fanfiction, but not many people are going to want to put "Addict (Worg Pussy)" on their character sheet any more than they're going to put down "Profession (fucksmith)."
Now, World of Darkness, Shadowrun, and a couple other games have addressed the subject with different amounts of obliqueness - my ghost, the questions about shapeshifter sex going into Runner's Companion - but it boils down to the fact that not every player in Werewolf: the Shagging wants to be a dog-fucker, and while dog-fucking might be culturally accepted (even mandatory) in Werewolf, they don't want to do that in-game at the table.
Fucks wrote:Which character got turned into a dog?
Varamyr Sixskins is a warg. It's a power set which includes projecting your consciousness into the bodies of animals (and sometimes people). He does not actually 'turn into' anything.
So far, the show has sort of glossed over the whole warg thing, only dropping hints that Jon Snow even is one, though bran finally started to get his infodump. It will probably be more relevant next season.
To address the original question: rape isn't even vaguely new as a thing in either mainstream fiction or RPGs. I kind of wondered how far away a person would have to be to have not heard about the Exalted rape ghost fiasco, and now I know it's Taiwan. Also, there are whole flame wars on this board about how White Wolf included implicit pedophilia and explicit dog rape in their games.
To be clear, a skin changer who got 95% of his screen time prior to the end of Storm of Swords, but who still hasn't shown up even once in the TV show because the that character doesn't exist.
So... Yeah, Bestiality in the books that was removed from the show means that everyone who watches the show loves bestiality because... Ogrebattle is an idiot.
Pretty much. Not to mention, people have the capability to distinguish reality from fiction so if they really need to back away from an icky idea and note that Lena Headey and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau are both attractive unrelated people who are only pretend banging that is totally an option.
Ancient History wrote:
Really, GRRM isn't even that unusual; people have been writing weird sex into fiction since before Lovecraft and getting explicit about it since at least Philip Jose Farmer. What's bizarre these days is that the Anita Blake series can get away with the kind of cervix-bumping werewolf cock you expect in bad anime and sillier hentai manga.
But you're unlikely to see that in an RPG. Don't get me wrong: the tropes are there. You're not going to get half-orcs, half-ogre, and tieflings from a bunch of loving, caring cross-species households. Rape and bestiality (which gets Larry Niven complicated real quick) is just a part of the generic fantasy universe that rarely get a lot of wordcount because seriously, you might have it in the background of your character and in your fanfiction, but not many people are going to want to put "Addict (Worg Pussy)" on their character sheet any more than they're going to put down "Profession (fucksmith)."
Now, World of Darkness, Shadowrun, and a couple other games have addressed the subject with different amounts of obliqueness - my ghost, the questions about shapeshifter sex going into Runner's Companion - but it boils down to the fact that not every player in Werewolf: the Shagging wants to be a dog-fucker, and while dog-fucking might be culturally accepted (even mandatory) in Werewolf, they don't want to do that in-game at the table.
What makes GRRM stand out is his popularity though. Folks that never read Lord of the Rings are watching his show, maybe picking up his books too. That's what I'm wondering about.
A broader, less dog focused question would be "How much does trending media affect RPG trends?" A lot of people got into D&D with the expectation they were going to be Conan or Aragorn. When Japanese stories became popular in the US, a lot of people then wanted to be Ninjas and magic swordsmen with huge swords. Now Game of the Thrones is the (not actually that new) big thing. Is there a rising demand for gritty low-to-absent magic settings now? Dog pounding optional.
I don't think so- most of the people who are getting into GoT are people whose knowledge of TTRPG's is limited to the moral panic back in the eighties, and maybe a few bemused questions asked to a relative.
OgreBattle wrote:What makes GRRM stand out is his popularity though. Folks that never read Lord of the Rings are watching his show, maybe picking up his books too. That's what I'm wondering about.
Then you are a fucking idiot. People who never read Lord of the Rings still watched the Lord of the Rings movies. And then they still didn't read Lord of the Rings. And now they are watching the show which has absolutely no bestiality and only one scene of the incest that is so essential to the plot that it defines the main conflict of the series in three seasons. And are they reading the books? No, because they are the same TV watching reading is for losers assholes they were when the Lord of the Rings movies came out.
infected slut princess wrote:So, to illustrate how dog-fucking and rape is mainstream, the OP cites a lesbo finger-banging scene.
Yeah, I was totally confused. I've never watched the show or read the books, so I had to Google Image both of them to see which was a dog, and was puzzled to see two hawt chicks.
Fucks wrote:Which character got turned into a dog?
Varamyr Sixskins is a warg. It's a power set which includes projecting your consciousness into the bodies of animals (and sometimes people). He does not actually 'turn into' anything.
And if memory serves, the dog-fucking thing is considered a really Bad Thing to do.
Game of Thrones is popular for a number of reasons: Titties, soap opera-esque plotlines, good casting, some good storytelling, and the utter willingness to kill off major characters. He's pulled most of the intrigue and individual plot threads from history and wove a bunch of magic and scandal.
I still don't get the point of this thread. Yeah sure there's some kinky sex shit in the books but as AH pointed out, that's nothing new. Have you even *heard* of The 120 Days of Sodom? Justine? That shit was written nearly 250 years ago.
Also, you're not paying attention to Game of Thrones if you think it's a no/low magic world. By the end of season 3, you have inhuman ice creatures that can bring the dead back, fire breathing dragons, a woman who is basically immune to fire/heat, dark healing magic, a chick who gives birth to shadow demon assassins, a dude whose blood can catch a sword on fire, a priest who has brought a man back from dead *six* times (and will bring him back a few more times), an assassin who can change his face at will, and an entire *family* of people who can project their minds into animals. And I'm sure I'm missing a few things like wildfire.
The entire point of the story according to GRRM is that this is a world where magic is returning, suddenly and swiftly. So in that respect, it shares more in common with Shadowrun than with a no/low magic game.
Last edited by TheFlatline on Mon Jul 22, 2013 6:22 pm, edited 1 time in total.
The mainstream of rape, bestiality and incest comes from the fact that it is well written, even artfully written.
That is the biggest difference between "uuuh nipples" fiction that appeals to the occasional horny teenager, and mature fiction which broadens your perspective and forces you to thing about different aspects of what is being described.
My prediction is that rape and bestiality increase in RPGs is going to be zero because HBO doesn't have to worry about social justice mobs boycotting it on kickstarter, but Tabletop publishers do.
Last edited by Dogbert on Mon Jul 22, 2013 8:04 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Ghremdal wrote:The mainstream of rape, bestiality and incest comes from the fact that it is well written, even artfully written.
That is the biggest difference between "uuuh nipples" fiction that appeals to the occasional horny teenager, and mature fiction which broadens your perspective and forces you to thing about different aspects of what is being described.
I usually skim/skip through the more graphic scenes anyway. Not because I'm squeamish, but because I get bored. The plethora of detail to make us scandalized or titillated or somehow otherwise engaged falls flat and I would rather get back to the real story.
Fucks wrote:Which character got turned into a dog?
That would be Bran, who's like twelve nine or ten at the time.
And he doesn't turn into a dog. He possesses his direwolf, which is about the size of a small horse.
All members of his family have a talent for Warging, that is throwing their mind/spirits out of their bodies and possessing animals. His is strongest because he was in a coma for some time after breaking his back. He possesses Summer on multiple occasions and eventually learns to possess people and to communicate with plants. He's being set up to be a rather powerful shaman.
But I don't think he's the one that fucked the wolf. He did eat a person, though.
Last edited by hyzmarca on Mon Jul 22, 2013 9:18 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Unnecessarily graphic and detailed scenes of sex and violence are really dumb and, well, unnecessary. In my opinion, they detract from the story, no matter how well they're written; they just turn the story into The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 93: Exploding Boobs in Your Vagina.
Is this wretched demi-bee
Half asleep upon my knee
Some freak from a menagerie?
No! It's Eric, the half a bee
