I’m sorry, but can someone explain to me how Talisa is a stereotype, and explain without making yourself look like a sexist or racist jerk.
K, thanks.
Alright, since you keep posting about it. The problems with Talisa have been much discussed by the fandom. I don’t loathe Talisa, but she is a problematic character, because she is a cliche, and A Song of Ice and Fire is very much about subverting the usual boring cliches we see in fantasy stories.
Talisa is the plucky nurse who randomly challenges the king and intrigues him. She’s immediately set up to be “not like the other girls!” and therefore somehow better than them because she was not content to sit home in Volantis. So she has this life-changing experience where a slave saves her brother, and she decides to not help slaves in her native Volantis, a major slave city, but to go off to Westeros, which does not have any slaves. So she can help random wounded people. Why didn’t she just help people in Volantis, like the slaves? It makes no sense. It’s just a dumb story.
Also, Westeros is an incredibly violent continent and it is never explained how a young female noblewoman with zero fighting skills and apparently lacking the support of her family in this endeavor managed to get safely from Volantis (very far away- another continent), and is traveling Westeros’ killing grounds without any help.Sure, she can buy passage on a ship, but traveling around unescorted? Look how well that’s worked out for Arya, Brienne, Jaime, etc. Again, no sense.
The books establish that characters like Arya and Brienne are risking great danger by traveling alone, as females, because rape and murder usually awaits solo females in Westeros. It’s a sexist and violent society, and those two particular women adopt masculine clothing and have learned fighting skills to survive. Arya passes herself as a male much of the time. So Talisa stretches our belief incredibly because everything about her violates what we know of the struggles women in Westeros have to work against.
In the books, Jeyne Westerling is a simple young woman that we don’t know much about. She seems like a nice girl, who loves her husband. Maybe she has a stubborn streak, and some spirit to resist her mother sometimes. Seems that way, but we’re learning. But the story with her and Robb was much more believable. In trying to craft an onscreen love story for Robb Stark, Benioff and Weiss created a cliche-ridden mass of plot holes that includes the bundle of tropes that Martin has always been so good at subverting.
Oona Chaplin is a talented actress. I was extremely excited about her casting, and I hate that she got stuck with a lame plot. I don’t like it when people extend their dislike of Talisa to her, and anyone who complains about Oona not looking right for the part because she’s Latina or however they couch their phrasing is indeed racist. But I haven’t seen those complaints on tumblr- just on other sites that will remain nameless.
In trying to create a feisty modern-seeming character, they created a mess that just didn’t fit in with Martin’s world. It didn’t help that they also botched Robb this season and had him treating Catelyn poorly. It didn’t make me invested in the love story. Again, not Richard Madden’s fault. He’s gorgeous and talented, and I loved the Robb/Cat dynamic in season 1.
There are plenty of reasons to dislike the creation of Talisa that aren’t sexist or racist. The very creation of Talisa suggests that a simple lady like Jeyne, who is happy to stay at home, to be a more domestic type, and be a queen was not interesting for Benioff and Weiss. And to me, that is sexist of them.
