Why Can’t ‘Game of Thrones’ Love a Hateful Woman?
HBO’s hit fantasy show has a problem, and it’s tied up the treatment of its most complicated villain.
HBO’s television show Game of Thrones is no stranger to sex, or violence, or sexualized violence. Unapologetic nudity and unconstrained death have become what many people expect from the series, which is now in its fourth season. The turn that Sunday night’s episode of Game of Thrones took was one of the most disturbing and upsetting moments on the show so far that didn’t involve somebody’s head being sewn to a wolf’s body: Jaime Lannister, the recently one-handed reluctant knight, raped his sister Cersei.
The scene, which takes place in the Westerosi equivalent of a church next to the body of Cersei’s recently murdered eldest child Joffrey, bore little resemblance to the moment in the books. In George R.R. Martin’s novel, Jaime and Cersei do have sex in front of Joffrey’s altar but the sex is without question consensual. The show depicts Jaime, clearly acting on anger towards his lover, throwing Cersei to the ground and ignoring her pleas for him to stop, even her sobs. It’s the culmination of a series of changes in the Lannister’s storyline this season (and, one can argue, across the arc of the show) that have painted Cersei Lannister as a villainous, corrupting, hateful woman and Jaime Lannister as a victim to her wiles who has finally had enough.
The thing is, no matter what problems anyone may see in Cersei and Jaime’s relationship, they love each other. This scene was supposed to show that. It was supposed to be the pinnacle of a 30-year-long relationship between two people who would tear the world inside out for each other. The show turned it into rape.
It was a scene that many fans of the Lannisters (myself included) had been waiting for with baited breath. It’s a desperate and very bittersweet scene where Jaime and Cersei are reunited at long last to no happy tidings at all. It’s supposed to be touching, a little twisted and sexy, a moment where the twins feel connected for the first time in a long time. And it fell prey to what we might call the “David Benioff and D.B. Weiss (Game of Thrones’s showrunners) curse”; sexualized violence with little or no purpose.
This scene is certainly not the first rape scene the series has shown in Game of Thrones, nor is it the most shocking or graphic. There was one particularly brutal scene in the middle of season three where Ros, a prostitute, is butchered by Joffrey Baratheon; her half-naked dead body is pinned to a bed with crossbow bolts and the camera takes its time panning over her. (It’s a scene, I might add, that never occurs in the books). Women’s bodies are frequently on display in the show, sometimes in consensual sexual relations and sometimes not; the showrunners seem to be afraid that if an episode passes without a pair of bare breasts in it viewers will quit watching. But this particular scene is so horrifying because it is such a change from the original storyline, because it fundamentally impacts who Jaime Lannister is and because it, and the director’s response to it, come very close to how rape is handled in real life.
Jaime Lannister’s character is solidly morally grey. Nobody in the series truly is a good person (nobody surviving, anyway) but Jaime has some moments that really illustrate his disregard for people who are not Lannisters. Our first impression of him is that he pushes a child out of a tower window to protect himself and Cersei, blithely shrugging and claiming, “the things I do for love.” He makes a joke about flinging a baby out of a trebuchet. When Cersei is grieving for Joffrey Jaime’s response is along the lines of, “Joffrey was pretty messed up anyway, here, let’s make another one!” He has some heroic moments too, particularly when he rushes in to save Brienne of Tarth from being eaten by a bear. But in general his character remains somewhere between self-centered pretty boy and reluctant hero, and in general he doesn’t think much about people outside of himself. With two exceptions.
Jaime loves Cersei, and Cersei Lannister isn’t an easy woman to love. He is perhaps the one character who loves Cersei while seeing her terrible temper, her ambition, her petty love of revenge. When he’s kidnapped, thinking of her gives him a reason to live He loves her, respects her, wants to marry her. He confesses that he even has more honor than “poor dead Ned” Stark, because even Ned Stark brought home a bastard from war and Jaime was never unfaithful to his sister.
Jaime is also one of the few male characters in the series to recognize how horrific being raped would be. He professes to Brienne that if he was a woman he’d rather die than be raped and he has nightmares about the rape and murder of Elia Martell. Part of the reason why he loses his hand is because he tries his best to prevent Brienne from being raped. It’s pretty telling of Jaime’s character that a man who doesn’t think twice before shoving a child out of a tower and considers putting a baby in a catapult can recognize how horrifyingly wrong sexualized violence is in the society he lives in. Very few other characters with the exception of Oberyn Martell (who is pretty minor) and Ned Stark hold that conviction. And last night’s episode destroyed that.
I’m pretty upset the show has butchered the moral principles of one of my favorite male characters. I’m upset they seem to not care at this point what did or did not happen in the book series they’re adapting. And I’m horrified this show has, once again, violated a woman’s sexual agency for cheap thrills. But this isn’t even the last of it; the showrunners have turned a scene that is supposed to be a shared moment between two characters who have 30 years of history between them into rape, and they won’t even admit they did it.
Alex Graves, who directed the episode but didn’t seem to have actually watched it, had this to say about the scene between Jaime and Cersei:
“Well, it becomes consensual by the end, because anything for them ultimately results in a turn-on, especially a power struggle.” (from this interview)
This the explanation of this scene, where Cersei is very clearly heard saying “No” and “Stop,” is disturbingly similar to things rape survivors are told. ‘It isn’t really rape. They’ve been together forever, why would he rape her? That’s just the kind of sex they have. You’re blowing it out of proportion’. Phrases like this are used to silence victims of rape and undermine the impact of sexual assault, and the real world implications here are clear. A woman’s right to say no stops somewhere, because it’s ultimately a turn-on. Right?
We live in a world where 80% of rape victims are assaulted by somebody they know. One in three women will experience rape, physical violence or stalking by an intimate partner in their lifetime, and two thirds of rapes and sexual assaults go unreported. And fiction does not exist in a vacuum.
It isn’t easy to adapt a five-book series with hundreds of characters and convoluted storylines into a television show, it’s true, and Benioff and Weiss haven’t always done a bad job. But this isn’t the first time sexual assault has been shown in this show and I doubt it will be the last. The show’s sexism is reflected in smaller ways too, changes in dialogue (at a pivotal moment in season three Brienne of Tarth is supposed to tell Jaime he’s ‘craven,’ and he reacts in horror because nobody has ever described him that way before, instead she calls him ‘a girl’), gendered slurs from characters that would never use them, sexualized comments directed towards children and the near omission of interesting female characters (who’s Asha Greyjoy again?). The changes and additions from the source text at first seem somewhat arbitrary but on a larger scale reveal what this show really is: an hour a week of beautifully shot, wonderfully acted, exquisitely costumed misogyny.
Calling A Song of Ice and Fire a feminist work is giving George R.R. Martin too much credit; the series is too preoccupied with deconstructing and shedding light on traditional fantasy tropes and too many women are raped, murdered and fridged in order to do tell the story and prove the point. It does, however, have feminist aspects and some incredibly feminist characters. Martin’s books do have one of the most complex, varied and fascinating array of women I’ve seen in a long time. Though they’re extraordinarily different, they collectively struggle against the society they’re forced to exist within and they handle this in fascinatingly varied ways. They mother the dragons gifted to them in a wedding they did not ask for. They learn to fight with a sword gifted from a brother. They play into the system, holding on to their humanity and waiting for a chance to escape. They use their sexuality to manipulate the men around them because it’s the only power they have. They manage, with the exception of Catelyn Stark, to avoid getting their heads chopped off. And we sympathize with them, pity them, root for them. They struggle. They don’t thrive.
But of course none of Martin’s characters thrive, and the ones that do usually find themselves dead a book later. What Martin does do is give his female characters’ storylines, even when they contain trauma, the autonomy and respect they deserve, something that would never happen in a more traditional fantasy series. It would be easy to write Cersei Lannister off as a villain, and in another series I think that’s probably all she would be. But Martin’s world is not that simple or black and white. It takes several books before we see the world from Cersei’s perspective, but when we do we get into her head it is as her life is falling to pieces. Cersei’s chapters in A Storm of Swords might not necessarily change your mind about her but they show the motivation behind her actions, her fears, her increasing paranoia, one of the worst cases of internalized misogyny I’ve ever read about, her relationship with her children and her brothers. We can hate her (I don’t but I can understand if you do), but we are also meant to pity her because she is a villainess and a victim at the same time. Martin writes Cersei (and his other women too) into some very bad situations. But he also gives us space to understand her, to sympathize with her, to love her if we can.
Martin loves his female characters. Benioff and Weiss do not. It’s dangerous to wonder why the changes in content have been approved by the writers and directors of Game of Thrones, because the answer is horrifyingly obvious. Women’s suffering attracts attention. Women’s suffering is a tool to be used to get higher ratings. It isn’t always easy to relate the suffering of the women in Game of Thrones to that of women in the real world because the violence is so extreme and the situations distant enough from our day to day lives that we can feel as though it’s happening, literally, in another world, and doesn’t happen in ours. But the sex in last night’s episode (Cersei saying “I don’t want this” and Jaime responding “I don’t care”) feels like it could be a moment in one of the lives of the thousands of women who experience rape a year. Two women every minute.
Writing about rape is always difficult, because sexualized violence is something our society has a very strange relationship with. I’m hesitant to say that stories involving rape should never be told, but they should be told correctly, and using rape and sexualized violence to get a reaction of shock from an audience is the exact opposite of how scenes like this should be handled. A woman being raped is not something that should ever be used for laughs, for sensationalism or to further a man’s character development. There’s a very fine line between gritty realism and exploiting sexual assault. It’s a line that George R.R. Martin toes with the contents of his books (one that, some people argue, he has already crossed, and I can’t necessarily say I disagree), and it’s a line that Benioff and Weiss have never even paid attention to. I wish I could say that the content of Sunday’s episode will turn audiences off from the show, but on a large scale it probably won’t because Cersei simply isn't very popular.
That’s the real crux of the matter, of course. Not that the change was made, not that the change is being defended by its creators, but that the change happened to these characters. To Cersei Lannister. To arguably the least popular female character in the series, the character who is set up to be a villain because all she knows is manipulation so that is all she does. Cersei isn’t an easy character to love; she’s dangerous, temperamental, vicious, spiteful and unbalanced. Martin tries to help us understand her by giving us her point of view. The showrunners do no such thing; they try to tell us, in fact, that Jaime Lannister feels the same way about Cersei that they do. “You’re a hateful woman,” he says, right before he rapes her. “Why have the gods made me love a hateful woman?”
The show has demonstrated time and time again that it doesn’t particularly care about coherent storylines or following the plot or sexual agency or consent. It cares about a few specific characters (Tyrion comes to mind), about dragons and half-clothed women and explosions. It does not care about Cersei Lannister. None of the writers or director ever stated this out loud but it’s implied; that this is Cersei’s punishment, that this is her fault. She’s a hateful woman, so Jaime deserves this and so does she.
For many long-term fans of the book series, myself included, this could be the final straw. This insidious misogyny, constant references to rape and disregard for women’s well-being isn’t shocking or sensational or clever or interesting; it’s real life. It’s what women and female presenting people slog through and battle against every day of their lives, and it’s time this show realizes that their fanbase includes women too. Cersei is hateful, yes, but the society she lives in helped to make her that way. She believes she has a reason to be hateful and now, thanks to this adaption of her story, so do I.
