Ben Adams, Peter Fenzel, Shana Mlawski, and Matthew Wrather join together in several rousing choruses of “The Bear and the Maiden Fair” as they overthink “Walk of Punishment,” Season 3 Episode 3 of Game of Thrones.
Let us know what you thought of the recap and the episode in the comments!
I’m surprised you didn’t mention the main gender overlap in this episode. Where Jamie and Brienne are on the horse, he says that they are going to rape her and she asks him what he would do if he were a woman. It recognises that there are still the fundamental differences between man and woman, in that one has the near certainty of being raped in that situation, whilst Jamie will remain unharmed, as long as he doesn’t completely misjudge who he is dealing with and be a condescending tool.
I feel that’s where the a lot of the impetus for the show/books discussion of gender comes from. There are very entrenched gender norms for Westeros in general, and its because of this rigidity that makes the departures from what is expected more powerful and poignant.
While this is true at the beginning of the story, we’re at the point in the story where the departures from entrenched gender norms are getting bigger and bigger.
It’s not for nothing that the situation plays out exactly opposite to the way Jaime says it will (after he speaks up, the captors think Brienne is too rich to harm, and that he is too tempting to not violate — and that it sounded like Brienne would have made them kill her, whereas he just got degraded without a fight). Everything in Jaime’s warning is flipped.
My point in relation to this, is that it’s not that Jaime (my own name is Jamie, hence I tend to spell it correctly) is a man or that Brienne is woman that determines their fate. That is the original fate of each at the start of the scene but it is Jaime’s ‘silver’ tongue, which eventually becomes his fatal flaw, which more closely correlates to both their eventual outcomes. I don’t believe anything that happens to him is a retaliation for him opposing the rape or his being a man.
Transcripts for those of us who can’t watch these would be fabulous. :)
They would indeed. Getting someone to transcribe an hour of audio, however, is prohibitively expensive. If you click through to the YouTube video page, there is an automated speech-to-text button that will give you at least some semblance of what we were saying.
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