Given that they did not invent antiseptic and anesthetic until about halfway into the Victorian Era. I'm very doubtful that it happened at all.

See people, this is how you troll properly.

Sorry it took the gifs being shared at the other Gawker sites for anyone at Gawker to give a shit about Jezebel.

Okay. So can we also do a thing where if a commenter's history clearly shows a commitment to thoughtful commentary, they get approved by GM? Because this grey nonsense is really tiring to those of us who comment regularly, and whenever kinja updates, have to prove ourselves time and time again like we're trying to…

Screw apologizing for this shit spreading to other parts of Gawker Media. You have to functionally be a moron to think this would not spread.

I kind of think this entire discussion is ridiculous. There are many, many books out there that don't include any gay sex scenes or any major minority characters - and there are also books (I'm looking at you Tolkien!) where there are barely any women. Martin has actually created a world where there are well-realized…

Well, since this is a medievalish fantasy, even if he did include a gay character in the POV bits, the character would likely not identify as "gay" as we've come to expect. Same sex relationships/sex have been around as long as we have, but identifying as gay is a much more recent phenomenon (less than two centuries…

They aren't. There are actually far fewer explicit sex scenes in the books than on the show, which I think has contributed to some confusion.

I don't know if any of what you wrote necessarily contradicts his point? Dany and Cersei are POV characters. The sapphic scenes you're talking about happen in their POV chapters. None of the male characters you've mentioned are point of view, nor do I personally think it would have improved the story if they were…

So even though it would not advance the plot in any way, you want GRRM to force a POV with a gay character just so they can have gay sex? How many types of gratuitous sex scenes with gratuitous POV characters will he need to add to please everybody out there who feels left out before he can get back to FINISHING THE…

Why should he have to? It's not like there aren't gay characters in the books at all, and none of them are treated in a "LOOK YOU GUYZ! GAY ONE HERE!" manner. Their sexuality is just a part of them, but not the entire essence of them. I'm all for representation of minority characters, but it doesn't have to be…

The scene with Cersei and Taena is also decidedly unsexy. Cersei is angry and bored and totally distracted. So if he's writing it as performative, he's doing a pretty bad job at it.

Unpopular opinion alert:

I'm a bit confused here. The question wasn't "Why aren't there gay characters in your books?" it was "Why aren't there gay sex scenes in your book?" And his answer was, because there are no gay characters, which makes sense.

I agree. Lots of books don't have gay characters, or female characters, or black characters, or Asian characters, or male characters, or trans characters, or (x) characters). Since when do we get to tell artists what their works must contain?

He's a fiction writer.

What about Renley? He was fairly main, as characters go, in the first book/season, and the fact that he was having gay secks was a major subplot.

I've written fiction a long time and, to be honest, it DOES feel like the characters exist fully formed in another realm. Deliberately writing characters to fit my politics makes for some heavy handed storytelling, in my experience.

I kind of hate how people are trying to tell him how the story should go (not necessarily this instance, but in general). Make your own book/movie series, then you can control what's going on. Stay out of his mind.

"It is not a democracy. If it was a democracy, then Joffrey would have died much earlier than he did."