in HotD, an evil character was portrayed with a foot fetish in a gross/unsettling way. On an object level there's nothing technically wrong with this, but "bad character has weird sexual interest" is a common trope and feels like it dehumanizes ppl with weird sexual interests.
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like, there's ppl out there with foot fetishes who feel ashamed of having a foot fetish (or other fetishes!), who sat down and watched HotD to see their preference portrayed through an evil character as a thing the audience is supposed to be disgusted by. Seems kinda shitty.
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Again - I don't mean to say we should never let bad guys have weird fetishes in our narratives, I just wish when this happened it was done more mindfully, and in balance with times where weird fetishes are portrayed positively!
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HotD isn’t set in todays times with todays sensitivities.
They normalize incest in that show, but they aren’t making political or social statements about it.
A lot of people are still telling stories that don’t, as marvel puts it, “reflect the world of today”
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I think the issue here was more the surprise of it than the fetish. In about 10 seconds they revealed unexpectedly this guy had been trading sexual favors with the queen for years. It was weird, and quite frankly, shitty plotting by the writers.
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Fwiw, the foot fetish wasn’t creepy. It was that the female character was clearly a reluctant participant. You can infer that she has become increasingly dependent on Larys (foot fetishist) for support and information. His price has evolved into a demand for sexual favors. 1/
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A lot of times a taboo subject is shown on tv as something the bad guy does, but the mere exposure precedes it gaining acceptance. Silence of the Lambs had a trans bad guy.
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The creepy part was the implication that this is some sort of exchange/deal between them that she's not comfortable with, not that the exchange involved a foot fetish.
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I interpreted "HotD" as Highschool of the Dead, and thought that given the amount of weird sexual stuff going on, a single evil character with a vanilla fetish like that would be pretty unremarkable.
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The dude's a creep cause he's manipulating Alicent into being involved in his fetish, not cause he likes feet. The whole point of the scene is that she serves the men in her life and it reinforces what Rhaenys told her earlier
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Animated feature films still design bad guys to be ugly, so I think we have a long way to go here
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