[Trigger warning for rape]
[Potential spoilers for Game of Thrones S04 E03, as well as for A Storm of Swords]
I mean, I got what was happening — most reasonable people watched that scene and were, like, “I get what’s happening here.” But I just don’t, like… get it. So if you have insight on what’s going on there, jump on in.
So Jaime absolutely raped Cersei in the sept, right next to the dead body of their son/nephew. No reasonable person, and I include the director and actors in that scene when I say that, didn’t watch her struggling and see that not just as rape but as the very stereotype of violent rape.
But my understanding — and I haven’t personally read A Song of Ice and Fire, so I’m only working with what I’ve heard — is that in the corresponding scene in the book, the sex was semi-consensual. (“Dubcon,” I suppose, if you’re a fanfictioner.) Cersei did protest in the beginning — not here, what if people see us, anyone could walk in — but by the time the deed was actually consummated, she was up to hurry, quickly, do me now, yes yes yes. (The Atlantic provides the relevant passage from the book.)
That passage does reinforce the common trope of “she didn’t want it until she wanted it,” and for him to continue kissing and undressing her despite her objections is of course problematic. But if the scene in the book is an example of dubious consent, unfortunately only acknowledged by some as nonconsensual, it’s still a far cry from the struggling and the stop it, stop it, it’s not right, don’t, Jaime, don’t seen on the show. It’s as if Alex Graves, the episode’s director, wanted to make absolutely sure the audience knew Jaime was raping her.
But in Graves’s mind, that final “don’t, Jaime, don’t” was actually a part of consensual sex, saying, “Well, it becomes consensual by the end, because anything for [Cersei and Jaime] ultimately results in a turn-on, especially a power struggle.” Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, the actor who plays Jaime, also said there were “moments where she gives in, and moments where she pushes him away,” making it kind of rape but also kind of not. Reports the Atlantic:
It’s possible that Benioff and Weiss, after spending the better part of two seasons making Jaime more likable, have decided to take his character down a darker path than the one he follows in Martin’s novels. I haven’t seen beyond this episode, so I can’t say off certain. But given the responses by Graves and Coster-Waldau, it seems more likely that everyone involved somehow believed they’d constructed a scene that was more unpleasant than the book’s but still at least moderately ambiguous, rather than the not-at-all ambiguous scene that viewers saw.
This isn’t the first time the showrunners have turned consensual(ish) sex into rape. On the night of Danaerys’s wedding to Khal Drogo, the book has him obtaining explicit consent from her — she’s ultimately the one who moves his hand to her body and says “yes.” Again, it’s not without issue; the idea that a 13-year-old can give informed consent to a nearly 30-year-old man is beyond problematic. Saying, “But it’s fine, because she wants it” doesn’t change the fact that she’s 13. (The show addresses this by aging her up to 16, but, um, still a teenager, folks.) But on the show, we watch Drogo rape her as she cries. In this, there’s no darkening of Drogo’s character or victimizing of Dany’s to advance the plot or change its course. The show continues in parallel with the book; the only difference is that book-Dany comes to love her husband, while show-Dany comes to love her rapist.
Of course, adding rape to make a story darker and more dramatic is a common tactic for writers. (Think of the times a hero’s mother or sister will be raped simply as a tool to spur him to action, or the times a woman is raped as a tool to turn her into a heroine, or the times a rape is used to create sympathy because it’s seen as worse than murder.) And rape and abuses of women are hardly a nonexistent factor in Westeros, in the show and the original books. When she’s fleeing King’s Landing, Arya disguises herself as a boy for safety. During the Battle of Blackwater, Cersei entertains Sansa with predictions of what would be done to her if the castle were to be overrun. To demonstrate his ongoing descent into evilness, the show has Joffrey torturing and murdering several sex workers. Jaime himself rescued Brienne from rape during their return to King’s Landing. But it would appear that such reality wasn’t enough for the showrunners, and they felt the need to add it where it wasn’t originally.
What do you think? Do you think the director really did see the Jaime/Cersei scene as consensual? Or did he, and those higher up than he, just think a rape scene would make the story more exciting, more poignant, more entertaining, more titillating to viewers? Can anyone guess why it was so important that Danaerys be raped on her wedding night? Or is this just yet another verse of, “Hey, you know what we should do to this character? Rape!“