I stopped reading the books after #3 (after 5 years, I just didn’t care anymore) and I stopped watching the show after like 2 episodes and decided I’d never come back when they made Danys first night with her husband a rape. The sex in the book is complicated — and of course she doesn’t have the power to say “no” — but the fact that her husband asks her “no?” at almost every turn suggests that he’s not a monster and explains why, after dealing with her brother, she could love her husband enough to literally decide to take over the world after he dies. (Her power is, of course, much more complicated than that).
The “mother loves her children” is one of the great bastions of sexism in art. Give the mom a kid she cares about, and she’s humanized (see, for example, “the Bride” in Kill Bill. I’d have loved that movie a lot more if her baby had died — a 100% pure revenge flick, no softening of her, with the “lioness” comparison at the end). Aliens did it, too, though Ripley wasn’t particularly problematic, just a slightly different version of the “last girl.”
The thing is, you can’t show a mother not caring about her kids and have her remain human. She automatically becomes a monster. This certainly isn’t true of men. While care for children is used to accentuate the “goodness” of men, its absence isn’t enough to make them unsympathetic. Deliberately slaughtering children, particularly their own, makes a guy evil — but even then, I think he can recover. The only way a child-killing woman can recover is to die saving her kid, or a stand in.
It’s another part of the “women have to be likable” problem that is faced when creating female characters. I know two authors who added kids to “soften” their female protagonists.
As an aside, an apropos of Cersei’s comment to Sansa — I’ve always thought that Cersei might have been very much like Sansa when she was a girl. The belief that her world, because of who she was — both in family name and as the beautiful, feminine woman — would be good. That was crushed out of her, and so she decided to not be an object and to punish the world that did it to her. How does she do that? Power. Sansa could turn into Cersei, and I think that would be one hell of an interesting plot line.
