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Spoilers and swearing ahead! You have been warned!
Not too long ago I wrote a blog post welcoming the next season of George RR Martin’s Game of Thrones. Like millions of other viewers I was excited for the return of Westerosi madness; violent kings, venomous royals, twincest, bloody deaths, and the promise of stylized, extravagant medieval intercourse. HBO are Gods when it comes to providing late night television that sates our desire for stories riddled with violence and promiscuity, preferably in fantastical places or bygone pasts. We want it, they provide it. But lately I’ve felt that they’ve been overdoing it in that arena, particularly with its overabundance of rape and prostitution.
I get it, I get it – Game of Thrones embodies the grim reality of human nature, and scenes of this make are a macabre tribute to our gruesome histories and the gritty veracity of rape, torture and misogyny… blah blah. However, there comes a point when as a viewer/reader, you consider how much the adaptation maps the objectives of the novel, and if it has been notably altered, reflect on these amendments and how they have impacted the storyline as a whole. In previous seasons, I have had no qualm with any revisions made by the screenwriters: significant scenes were covered, characters stayed ‘canon’ and any minor changes barely left a ripple on the extensive GoT conundrum. While it remains the case thatDavid Benioff and D. B. Weiss have been superstars when it comes to maintaining the integrity of the books, lately the plots seem to gravitate between violent sexual episodes and other instances where a woman’s body (or man’s – I saw a penis on GoT and it surprised me as much as anything) might logically be displayed. Yes, there is copious amounts of sex in the books: weird sex, incest, sex on your period, rape, sex that leaves me so surprised I have to bookmark it for a second digestion, but they resonate with Martin’s unsentimental realism; the fact that the inspiration for these atrocities are from our own sodden past. The gore, the sexual violence, in Martin’s own words, “pale in comparison to what can be found in any good history book”, and with that in mind we must approach the medium as a vehicle for representing these dark and tremulous truths.
For the books, of course. However, how far is this true for the series? Cautiously at first, HBO consulted the novels as if they were Gospel and followed Martin’s story to a tee, nevertheless, as the show blossomed into this cultural phenomenon, the producers have appeared wedded to the notion that the amplification of sexual undertones prevalent in the books needs to be divulged in every episode. In book-world, it isn’t necessary for every chapter to be riddled with taboos or ride on a constant climax. It isn’t convincing. Yet when it comes to television, where ratings and reviews dictate one’s artistic license, curbing the shock factor in a show indicates that there’s a decline; the writers have run out of spectacle to pump into the franchise, so it’s onto the next best thing. Television has to climb – its plots have to escalate; the sex has to be crazier, the violence more graphic. It isn’t easy to attract and keep a nation’s attention, after all, and if one has to trivialize rape in order to reel in those fat dollas and reverent accolades, so be it.
I am looking at you, guy who decided that having a cripple screw his twin sister while she is on her period next to their dead son, who is currently rotting on an altar, was too vanilla for T.V.
She kissed him. A light kiss, the merest brush of her lips on his, but he could feel her tremble as he slid his arms around her. “I am not whole without you.”There was no tenderness in the kiss he returned to her, only hunger. Her mouth opened for his tongue. “No,” she said weakly when his lips moved down her neck, “not here. The septons…”“The Others can take the septons.” He kissed her again, kissed her silent, kissed her until she moaned. Then he knocked the candles aside and lifted her up onto the Mother’s altar, pushing up her skirts and the silken shift beneath. She pounded on his chest with feeble fists, murmuring about the risk, the danger, about their father, about the septons, about the wrath of gods. He never heard her. He undid his breeches and climbed up and pushed her bare white legs apart. One hand slid up her thigh and underneath her smallclothes. When he tore them away, he saw that her moon’s blood was on her, but it made no difference.“Hurry,” she was whispering now, “quickly, quickly, now, do it now, do me now. Jaime Jaime Jaime.” Her hands helped guide him. “Yes,” Cersei said as he thrust, “my brother, sweet brother, yes, like that, yes, I have you, you’re home now, you’re home now, you’re home.” She kissed his ear and stroked his short bristly hair. Jaime lost himself in her flesh. He could feel Cersei’s heart beating in time with his own, and the wetness of blood and seed where they were joined.
This passage: weird and uncomfortable on so many levels. Television: it’s not weird enough. We need more rape. We’ve turned rape in a leitmotif this season, so let’s keep it up. No one will really mind – it is Cersei after all. I really hope that’s the stream of thought that went into deciding which direction to take this scene.
Now, the passage was hard for me to read without blushing and wriggling in my chair. Martin reigns supreme at making his readers squirm and avert their eyes; the vivid sensory detail that comes from POV chapters results in your being unable to escape the gravity of any circumstance. You are too close to the characters to be immune to their endeavors. At the same time, there remains the stoic realization that this is a natural course for these personalities – like Joffery skinning a cat, or Sansa crying somewhere in a tower. I can handle the spectacle because there is sustenance behind it – books worth of events that dictate that x, y z, are reasonable occurrences to have, because the interactions between a and b warrant it. For Jamie and Cersei, their debased acts are shocking, yet fathomable within the framework of their characters. However, it no longer becomes comprehensible when the writers train Jaime against the progressions made in the novel(s) (can’t stress the plural enough – do you know how long this character development took?). I won’t waste e-paper expounding how many alterations were given to Jamie during the Baratheon Red Wedding (I mean, he wasn’t even meant to be there until after Joff kicked it), but will focus on the paradigm shift that occurs by capturing Jaime as a rapist. From pushing a child out of the window of a high tower, to saving his undesirable warden from a bear, Jaime’s development from a self-worshiping bastard into a likeable leading man took time, effort and many subtle changes that culminate in his turning over a new leaf when he returns to King’s Landing. Seeing his sister and dead son after months of separation climaxes in a frantic passage that sees him reunited with his other half. The – dare I say it – sweetness of their union is brief, and from that point on we see the seeds of distrust and dislike fester in Jamie for Cersei, isolating him from the Lannister brood and giving him time to consider what aspects of his character he would like to remedy, without inflections from his family’s aspirations. This fissure between his family’s goals and his own encourages him to keep his oath to Cat Stark, yada yada yada, and so on and so forth.
It appears that the series has gotten back on track. Jaime feels remorse for having made a sacred promise to return Sansa to her mother, and assigns Brienne the task of finding her before his sister does. I want to love him for these grand steps – I really do – nevertheless, having witnessed only one episode ago how ruthlessly he treated his sister, it is hard for me to ignore his deviance and concentrate on the development at hand. Consequently, it was not the sex or implicit rape that directly afflicted me, it was the loss of character continuity. Having Jaime rape his sister alienates him from the growth and improvement that takes place in the novel, all for the sake of delivering a shocking scene that would leave the internet buzzing for weeks.
During Episode 4 and 5, another bout of rape occurs. Back in the dingy and putrid hell-hole that is Craster’s Keep, the gang of deserter crows enjoy their reign of terror; raping Crastor’s daughters, burning through his supply of alcohol and food, and tormenting Ghost, Jon Snow’s Direwolf. The image is bleak; dirty corpses, violent beatings, drunken slurs and profanity enough to blacken the snow. Evidently, it is an uncomfortable place. Karl regales the drunks with stories from his time at King’s Landing while they rape women left, right and center. For a good five minutes he splutters on screen, informing us viewers of his dastardly deeds – at least, I think that’s what he was saying. To be honest, I was so transfixed by the rape in the background (right beside his head so you can’t miss it) that I blanked on whatever dialogue was shared. I understand these are terrible people. Every crafted gesture and word from Karl is geared towards generating Joffery-level hate. The first instances of rape and abuse were enough for me to gather that they ain’t one of the good guys, and yet the series insists on mulling over the sexual deviance and violence exacted by these thugs until they’re beaten off the stage. There are other ways of expressing moral abandonment than having men smacking around the closest available wench, but as of late, it appears that ceaseless violence and rape is the only way to convey the insipidness of particular villains. Perhaps there is a sex quota that Game of Thrones has to meet, and random periods of sex and rape is the only way to fill this measure. Let’s not forget the show’s capitalization on Dornish Prince Oberyn’s arrival – bisexual and from place laden with orientalist tropes? That’s too good an opportunity to pass up.
Unsurprisingly, Martin disagrees with the social backlash the adaptations have warranted, and though much of the series appears to be left in the hands of Benioff and Weiss (particularly that scene between Jamie and Cersei) he believes that his caustic realism is being accurately portrayed in their variation.
"To omit them (sex and violence) from a narrative centered on war and power would have been fundamentally false and dishonest, and would have undermined one of the themes of the books: that the true horrors of human history derive not from orcs and Dark Lords, but from ourselves. We are the monsters. (And the heroes too). Each of us has within himself the capacity for great good, and great evil," the author said.
To some extent I must agree. The series does a fantastic job at capturing the entire spectrum of human existence. Martin doesn’t shy away from the bad, but revels in it, and if he believes that the series manages to capture the nuances of strife and horror through an overexposure of rape, so be it. Nevertheless, in my humble opinion, condensing an eight-hundred page novel into ten hours of visual aid with a surplus of sexual content, diminishes the story and their characters. I love GoT for its risqué and titillating plots wrought with violence and salacious sex, however, somewhere after the third season the balance between storytelling and spectacle took a turn for the worse.
Game of Thrones: A Summary: this summarizes how I feel quite perfectly.
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