Where is the line between an interesting drama that depicts life where the rules and laws of civilized society have vanished and a story line that panders to our perverse interest in rape, cruelty, and violence? Game of Thrones is a sort of Hobbesian State of Nature. Hands are severed. Penises are severed. Prostitutes are target practice. Incest and orgies happen. Children are thrown from high places. Children are torched and crucified. A man gnaws off his fingers, after the skin is flayed. The television show doesn’t really add too much grossness. It’s all in the books.
Until Sunday, when a brother hate-rapes his sister in front of the body of their murdered son. The television show added a new horror to the book. Frankly, I had to look away from the TV, even though I watched a million other gross acts.
This hate-rape may be the final straw for viewers. Some people hate that scene, because it deviates from the plot line. The brother had slowly been redeeming himself. The hate-rape seems out of character. Others think that the show crossed the line into the dirty waters of pandering.
Some reactions — iO9, Medium, Slate.
Apt. 11d 
Aaaahhhhh! Thoughts, I has them. But I have to go teach for 4 hours. I will defend the scene later today (half-heartedly, as I don’t love rape as a plot device plus I don’t think the director has a fucking clue).
PS: I haven’t even seen the ep yet because I was in the car driving home while it was airing, and I put Orphan Black first on my list of things to watch. 🙂
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I am so very tired of the trope of a tv show or movie beginning with a dead, naked woman who has been taped surrounded by men in suits talking about it. True Detective was the last one for me.
It normalizes all sorts of perverse assaults.
Tell me a story. Tell me an engaging story without defaulting to these overdone, tiresome themes.
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I stopped reading this series in because the violence got too extreme (I don’t know where the series is in the movie, so won’t repeat the particulars, but two scenes in particular come to mind).
One of the themes I caught on early in the book is that there didn’t seem to be a “redeeming” plot line anywhere. I was mislead at points, that we were going to eventually join the heroic war/fantasy plot arc, with a variety of different characters, but I was always disappointed eventually. I skip violence in books, so I might have been able to deal with the violence that way, if I’d had any trust that the plot lines were eventually going to be something more than stories of horror and ugliness (which exists, am learning more about Rwanda than I wanted to recently), but I don’t want to read about it in fiction.
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I’m with Sandra. Trollope is out there, and Balzac, and Austen. Dickens, even. I need this shit why?
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By the way, Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her? is really good. A little slow in spots, but super fun!
I was reading it as my bath book this past winter.
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I’m very fond of Lady Glen.
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What mystified me was the way in which many of the people involved with filming the show didn’t see that scene as depicting a rape. What are their ideas about consensual sex? Did they get them from Roman Polanski, fergawdsake?
In the book, the scene came across quite differently for many reasons. Still squick-worthy, as is so much of his twisted, sad and depressing world.
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“What mystified me was the way in which many of the people involved with filming the show didn’t see that scene as depicting a rape.”
Agreed–the interviews with Graves (director) and Coster-Waldau (who plays Jaime) are alarmingly tone-deaf to the whole issue. Have Benioff and Weiss commented yet?
More later.
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Game of Thrones bored me in its first season and that’s why I don’t watch it. House of Cards is as sociopathic and often creepier but the use of sex is more subtle so I find interesting.
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I couldn’t read beyond the first book in Terry Goodkind’s “Sword of Truth” series, although it was a favorite of a friend’s teenager. Many of the characters were sadists; there was a prurient air to descriptions of their actions and thoughts. Thus ended my attempt to read the books my teenagers might like before they had had a chance to read them.
I don’t have the same problem reading history, which often touches on disturbing practices.
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I enjoy GoT the series and have read all the books, although I do agree with many of those who reject its over-the-top violence (in both TV and book versions). I likewise thought the rape was over the top (and agree that it was undeniably rape). Perhaps it adds “edge” but good lord doesn’t GoT have enough already?
I also agree that this changes the trajectory of Jaime, who was one of the more interesting and complex characters on the show and in the books. This may (and should, in my opinion) turn much of the audience away from him. I guess Tyrion is the only potentially good Lannister left.
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Yes, the Terry Goodkind books also became more and more mysoginistically sadistic (it’s there from the beginning, but it got worse. I had to stop reading those books, too). I worry about those books. My middle-schooler has been talking about reading the Crown of Thorns books, ’cause everyone is talking about the show (not sure if some of the kids are watching it, or if they only see things like that excellent opening ad some of the people in costume). I’ve told her she wouldn’t like it and that if she wants to read similar large scope books, there are much better choices.
My worries are the stories for entertainment. History, though it might contain similarly vile sadism and misogyny, is history. My daughter was telling me about rape squads in Rwanda, made up of HIV infected prisoners. I still want to believe the stories not to be true, but, can”t discourage her from learning of the atrocities.
But reading stories of incest/rape/child burning/ . . . . for entertainment? Doesn’t make sense to me.
(mind you, I’m awfully sensitive and can’t tolerate much, so I don’t think the world should have to live to my standards, but I do worry about desensitization.)
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“But reading stories of incest/rape/child burning/ . . . . for entertainment? Doesn’t make sense to me.”
Yeah. I like a nice tame British murder with thatched roofed villages as much as the next person, but it’s generally not gross.
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I’m surprised how many of you dislike GoT. I call it Game of Awesomeness and I love it. Dinklage is so wonderful. I do wonder how it’s going to end up because it is kind of unbearably grim at times, but people loved Breaking Bad and Mad Men, and those are pretty damned depressing, too–and they deal with realistic people instead of fantasy characters. I have tended to avoid the realistic dramas of moral depravity (BB, MM, HoC, Sopranos, Sons of Anarchy) because the sociopathy hits too close to home, but in fantasy lit? Go for it.
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I hate what I’ve heard of Breaking Bad, and, I think Mad Men, too. I like the tame British murder, too and detest serial killer murders. I really hated what they did with the American Sherlock.
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Do you watch The Americans? That show freaks me out because I keep rooting for the KGB spies to kill people, especially the stupid FBI guy I have come to loathe.
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OK, my defense of the rape scene.
They fiddled with the timeline and brought Jaime back to KL sooner than in the book. In the book, he arrives and sees Cersei for the first time when they are in the sept (church, for non-readers). In the show, he has been in KL for a while. My feeling is that they wanted Jaime to hit rockbottom, but they also wanted him to do it in a way that strikes him for the first time that Cersei is a totally different person. He and C have until this point always been as one–twins, lovers. He has always identified himself as totally one with her. But when he rapes her, he has to confront that she is different from him, wants different things. This is huge for him and is important in his character development. It crystallizes for the viewer that Jaime is no longer a part of Cersei but is different from her, a different person from her. It’s not until now that he can actually become that different person. I don’t want to spoil the details of what I think will happen next episode or the one after, but I think this will become very clear very soon.
Just some thoughts.I was surprised they did this but I can see plot reasons why they might have. I am just kind of sick of rape as a plot device, but there are all sorts of horrible things used as plot devices all the time on GoT and other shows, so I’m kind of used to it, sadly.
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So it was written differently than portrayed on the series. http://www.vanityfair.com/vf-hollywood/game-of-thrones-author-weighs-in-on-rape
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