I feel really odd posting about this in here, but I feel like I should because it's kind of been bugging me.

First of all, this is my favorite fantasy series ever written. I like George RR Martin's writing. I enjoy reading about pretty much all the characters (with exception to poorly-written ones like Ramsay Bolton). I enjoy the plot, the setting, the writing style. I love it a lot. And that is why it is heart-breaking for me to look back on it and notice a lot of negative portrayals of racial minorities and women.

I have an awfully hard time recommending this series to friends of mine who are women or racial minorities because of how terrible Westeros society treats women and racial minorities and how terribly they are portrayed. Granted, I understand that's true of European medieval society, but I don't know that GRRM really does them much justice.

My biggest problem with misogyny, sexual abuse, and poor portrayal of racial minorities in this series stems from the character of Dany. In the books, Dany is an Aryan savior archetype to the dark-skinned Dothraki who are almost all depicted as brutal and savage. She is also repeatedly and horribly abused by her brother Viserys. True, he gets killed, but later on, Jorah claims to fall in love with her and then forcefully kisses her in ASOS and she's still a 15 year old girl and she continues to have stories focusing on her and having sex while still a minor. Then there's also the issue of ADWD where a majority of her scenes are her being a terribly incompetent ruler and if not that, it's her having sex.

Then in Westeros, we have characters like Ramsay Bolton and Gregor Clegane who are violent, brutal, horrific individuals who abuse women on a whim and every single scene of theirs is extremely unpleasant to read about. Ramsay Bolton ends up being somehow even more monstrous than Gregor because GRRM thought Joffrey and Gregor weren't awful enough. I don't know how any single human being could read Theon's chapters in ADWD and not gag with revulsion at every single thing Ramsay did or just the descriptions of the entire Bolton family in general. (Roose is still at least somewhat well-written and not totally one-dimensional though).

Now, there are a lot of women and racial minority characters I do enjoy. I really liked Brienne (though her POV in AFFC is a chore to read), I liked Catelyn a lot as well, Arya is among my favorites, and believe it or not I actually like Sansa. But, with the exception of Catelyn, all of these POV's have another character acting creepy near them or, in some cases, threatening sexual abuse. And of all those, Brienne and Arya are the only ones who have real agency. I guess Asha also has more agency as well, but she's still only really a minor POV in most the books.

I should also bring up Cersei who seems to be the average sexist's view of what every woman really is deep down: a manipulative, hateful, Machiavellian jerk. And then there's the abuse she suffered from Robert and also how she's paraded naked through the streets of King's Landing in ADwD.

As for racial minorities, Khal Drogo was, for all his flaws, an interesting character to read about. Strong Belwas is also a really cool guy and one of my favorite characters. But, you can see a pattern here right? Those two are supporting and not main characters. (Also, do the Dornish count as racial minorities? It's been a while since I read the books so I don't remember if they were described as such. But if they do, Oberyn Martell was awesome and it's an awful shame such a great character died so early.)

There's also something horrifying I've noticed in myself in that a lot of my favorite characters in the series are misogynistic slimeballs and some commit or almost commit horrific acts of sexual abuse:

Bronn is a... actually Bronn's okay, he's just opportunistic. Jaime is in an incestuous relationship with his sister (which is slowly crumbling at least) and he also repeatedly uses slurs at Brienne. Khal Drogo is a war lord who purchases a 14 year old girl as his bride. Tyrion raped Tysha, granted he was forced to do it but he STILL RAPES SOMEONE. Sandor Clegane almost ALMOST rapes Sansa. ALMOST RAPES? THAT'S NOT OKAY! Yet I still like reading about every single one of these characters and I repeatedly list them among my favorites.

In fact, there are only four male characters among my favorites that didn't actually nor had any intention to commit horrific acts of sexual abuse or misogyny: Jon Snow, Bronn, Strong Belwas, and Bran Stark. And even then, Jon still has sex with an older woman while he's a minor.

Just whenever I look back on this series, I think "holy shit, why do I enjoy reading about such terrible people and terrible events occuring?" And I justify by saying they're deep, complex, and interesting characters, but does that mean I should like them in spite of the awful deeds they commit?

And now that I'm thinking about this, how the hell could anyone ANYONE enjoy reading these books except straight, white, cis, males? I'm certainly not saying it's bad that there are non-SAWCSM's who enjoy this series and I'm in fact very glad there are apparently lots who do because it means GRRM may at least make some sort of attempt to appeal to them. I'm saying how the fuck could they enjoy this series with such poor minority representation and sexual abuse?

I guess what I'm trying to get across is: how the hell is there an SRSASoIaF in the first place? This series contains almost everything SRS is against.