One other thing

textualdeviance:

eigenjay:

I’m really tired of people giving GRRM kudos for including gay characters, because he ain’t doing so hot on that count. When a significant number of people don’t catch on that your queer male characters are into dudes, and all your instances of f/f sexuality are fanservice-y and male gaze-y?

Nope. You’re not doing it right. Try harder.

FWIW, remember that the first book published in 1997. Yes, the year in which the whole damned country flipped its shit when Ellen came out. Being more explicit about Renly and Loras wouldn’t have gone over well with the publisher at that time. (ACoK came out the next year; things weren’t much better then.)

Also bear in mind that neither of them were PoV characters, and they were hiding their relationship. For any of the PoV characters to be more explicit about them would’ve meant them being a lot more open than they were. Stannis got it, but he wasn’t a PoV character. Cersei’s probably the only PoV character who did get it, and even then, she only mentioned it in terms of her scheming wrt Margaery. Everyone else who’s telling the story is completely clueless.

I think it’s easy to forget, given how many queer characters we have in mainstream pop culture these days, that it wasn’t so long ago that any queer characters at all were considered shocking. I’m old enough to remember the very first f/f kiss on a US primetime show, and what a huge stir that caused. The fact that we got a rather explicit m/m scene in the 2011 TV version for this may not seem like a huge deal (though actually, it is; m/m sexuality is still very chaste in mainstream TV) but yes, in 1997, anything remotely that explicit would’ve been a major atom bomb for any publisher. Even if GRRM had wanted to be more daring about that, his publisher probably would’ve asked him to change it, for fear that it would turn off potential readers.

I’ll definitely give you the f/f stuff, though. Those scenes make me cringe. And I hope he goes somewhere with the Jon Connington stuff.