George R.R. Martin Addresses Game of Thrones’s Controversial Rape

Anyone spending time on social media today have probably seen a blog post that’s making its rounds today, asking questions about whether HBO’s Game of Thrones is inherently more misogynistic than the novels on which it’s based.Specifically, they’re using a rape that occurred in last night’s episode of the show to justify the position — one that doesn’t exist in the novels. It was a shocking and disturbing sequence, but with the furor, it’s hardly unexpected that fans and creatives are both chiming in…While HBO and Game of Thrones producers have declined to comment, Martin (who wrote not only the novels, but also the previous week’s episode) weighed in on the matter on his blog:“In the novels, Jaime is not present at Joffrey’s death, and indeed, Cersei has been fearful that he is dead himself, that she has lost both the son and the father/ lover/ brother. And then suddenly Jaime is there before her. Maimed and changed, but Jaime nonetheless. Though the time and place is wildly inappropriate and Cersei is fearful of discovery, she is as hungry for him as he is for her.“The whole dynamic is different in the show, where Jaime has been back for weeks at the least, maybe longer, and he and Cersei have been in each other’s company on numerous occasions, often quarreling. The setting is the same, but neither character is in the same place as in the books, which may be why [producers] played the sept out differently. But that’s just my surmise; we never discussed this scene, to the best of my recollection.“Also, I was writing the scene from Jaime’s POV, so the reader is inside his head, hearing his thoughts. On the TV show, the camera is necessarily external. You don’t know what anyone is thinking or feeling, just what they are saying and doing.“If the show had retained some of Cersei’s dialogue from the books, it might have left a somewhat different impression — but that dialogue was very much shaped by the circumstances of the books, delivered by a woman who is seeing her lover again for the first time after a long while apart during which she feared he was dead. I am not sure it would have worked with the new timeline.“That’s really all I can say on this issue. The scene was always intended to be disturbing… but I do regret if it has disturbed people for the wrong reasons.”