Viewers’ outrage over Game of Thrones may be misplaced
Plenty of viewers have declared themselves done with Game of Thrones after the May 17 episode in which Sansa Stark (Sophie Turner) was raped on her wedding night by her new husband, Ramsay Bolton (Iwan Rheon). They join the ranks of defectors who quit the show in seasons past even as new audiences rose up to take their places.
Among the prominent dissenters:
The science fiction and fantasy site The Mary Sue said, “We will no longer be promoting HBO’s Game of Thrones” in a piece that seemed to fatally misunderstand the difference between doing journalism about and criticism of a show and acting as a publicity subcontractor for HBO.
Sen. Claire McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat, mentioned she was finished, too, because “Gratuitous rape scene disgusting and unacceptable.”
Yes, the scene of Sansa’s rape was tremendously unpleasant to watch. But the care taken in the staging, acting and shooting of the scene made it impossible to regard it as lazy or slapdash. Instead, this scene felt like a story about the consequences of rape and denial of sexual autonomy.
Let me point you to the essay on the subject I contributed to the 2012 collection Beyond the Wall:
The marital rape of Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey) by her husband, Robert Baratheon (Mark Addy), undoes the fairy-tale narrative of Robert’s reign, the idea that he freed Westeros from the depredations of the Targaryen dynasty gone mad, not least because of the family’s historical practice of incest.
Daenerys Targaryen’s (Emilia Clarke) rape on the night of her wedding to a man her brother sold her to in exchange for an army suggests the Targaryen closeness was no more humane for its participants than the Baratheon-Lannister marriage.
Tyrion Lannister’s (Peter Dinklage) murder of his lover, Shae (Sibel Kekilli), after he learns of her betrayal is a stark reminder that even male characters we’ve come to love are capable of sexualized violence.
Jaime Lannister’s (Nikolaj CosterWaldau) sexual coercion of his sister Cersei, an event that takes place in the crypt where their son’s body lies in state, illustrates the ways in which furtive relationships can make women vulnerable to men who claim to love them. (The gap between what showrunners said they intended and what they put on screen is the exception rather than the rule for this series.)