GovernmentYard wrote:
Ice and Fire's quite rapey too, I suppose. It's not entirely without purpose, for that is the sort of world it's set in, and the punishment for those not of noble birth caught at it is knob off or go to serve at the Wall. Plus certain interventions in said circumstance serve to effectively redraw characters and add depth. Mostly it's (mostly) women being threatened with it... and I suppose that makes a better dramatic tension ratcheter than yet another 'certain death' peril scenario. Plus you've got flaying, beheading, burning, drowning etc so it's just one of the many horrible colours Martin paints with.
I find his writing about things like that excruicatingly painful. Especially the "...and then they had lesbian sex" bits. it seems to exist purely to attract teenage boys to the series. I find it quite unnecessary. It seems he feels the need to stick sex of some kind in it every so often just to keep them reading.
EDIT: For instance, tehre's a whole chapter in one of the books about some bloke being on a boat and the various sexual stuff he has done to the captaibn's daughter. It didn't really advance any plot, in any way at all, and was, to boot, shitly written.
EDIT 2: This isn't me banging my "Martin can't write books for shit" drum, it's a common problem I have with books. iain M Banks is also guilty of this.