This is a bit of a dated controversy, but I’ve just reread ASOS and want to unpack a very common argument about the scene in the sept during Breaker of Chains. Much criticism* of the scene includes the assertion that the show represents a serious departure from the book,** changing a consensual sex scene into a rape. This is not true. Neither encounter is consensual. The difference between book and show is that the lack of consent is much clearer in the show than it is in the books. In order to explain why, and to examine how this misapprehension has gained steam, I believe it is worth deconstructing the scene in the book.

Before getting into it, I want to be careful to emphasize that I don’t think those making this assertion about the sept scene in the book are necessarily uneducated or ill-intentioned. Rape culture is a set of unconscious assumptions which are socialized into all of us, and even those of us with good intentions and a solid foundation of conscious knowledge about the issue will often find that our efforts to uproot those assumptions in ourselves can come up short. I’m engaging with this argument about the book scene even though I don’t have much patience or use for those who deny that Jaime’s actions onscreen are also rape, precisely because of the two, the rape scene which can slip under the radar of even people who I believe are literate on such issues has more power to reinforce rape culture.

She touched his face. “I was lost without you, Jaime. I was afraid the Starks would send me your head. I could not have borne that.” She kissed him. A light kiss, the merest brush of her lips on his, but he could feel her tremble as he slid his arms around her. “I am not whole without you.” There was no tenderness in the kiss he returned to her, only hunger.

This is pretty textbook boundary-pushing. Cersei’s gestures are all non-sexual physical affection, in a situation where non-sexual physical affection is totally appropriate, and Jaime takes that as license to turn the situation sexual.



Her mouth opened for his tongue. “No,” she said weakly when his lips moved down her neck, “not here. The septons…”

This is quite straightforward: Cersei said no.



“The Others can take the septons.” He kissed her again, kissed her silent, kissed her until she moaned. Then he knocked the candles aside and lifted her up onto the Mother’s altar, pushing up her skirts and the silken shift beneath. She pounded on his chest with feeble fists,

“Oh, she didn’t fight back hard enough” is also fairly straightforward rape apologism.

murmuring about the risk, the danger, about their father, about the septons, about the wrath of gods.

Here, Jaime falls into another rationalization – that her protests are just about, like, SOCIETY, MAN, not serious enough to be the kind of no that actually means no.



He never heard her.

This is a very serious sign that Jaime’s inner narration is not only unreliable, but actively dishonest: if he doesn’t hear her, how does the reader get the gist of what she’s saying? It’s not like he actually doesn’t hear it, or we wouldn’t know that Cersei was saying anything; it’s not even like he’s hearing and not registering, or we’d be seeing exact lines. Rather, his narration shows us that he hears and understands her. Jaime is fully aware that Cersei is objecting. He just doesn’t care whether Cersei wants this or not.



He undid his breeches and climbed up and pushed her bare white legs apart. One hand slid up her thigh and underneath her smallclothes.

At this point, Cersei has said “no” multiple times, and Jaime’s narration shows to us that he is intentionally ignoring her. Even under the best of circumstances, that looks a whole lot more like coercion than negotiated consent.



But these are not the best of circumstances. Aside from the brutal emotional vulnerability of this woman standing next to her son’s dead body, there’s also very real danger involved. Remember the stakes of this relationship: If they ever get caught, they both die, and probably Myrcella and Tommen as well. Cersei cannot call for help or draw attention to them in any way. Given the political situation, it won’t matter if she’s fighting him off. Moreover, they’re in a public place which is about to host a state function. Every moment Cersei resists increases the chances that the wrong person will walk in on them and she will die along with her beloved children.

Up until this point, the text from the book is completely consistent with the scene from the show. My question for those who compare the scene in the show unfavorably to the scene in the book on grounds of consent issues is this: is there anything that could have happened after the camera cut away which would change how you interpret the scene? Because again: in the book, Cersei issued multiple refusals, under life-or-death circumstances, which means that meaningful consent is off the table.



When he tore them away, he saw that her moon’s blood was on her, but it made no difference. “Hurry,” she was whispering now, “quickly, quickly, now, do it now, do me now. Jaime Jaime Jaime.”

Jaime takes this as enthusiasm – curious, the way his hearing miraculously clears up when and only when she says something he wants to hear – but, given the context, it’s important that Cersei’s emphasis is on urgency rather than pleasure.



Her hands helped guide him. “Yes,” Cersei said as he thrust, “my brother, sweet brother, yes, like that, yes, I have you, you’re home now, you’re home now, you’re home.” She kissed his ear and stroked his short bristly hair. Jaime lost himself in her flesh. He could feel Cersei’s heart beating in time with his own, and the wetness of blood and seed where they were joined.

Note that Jaime narrates Cersei doing and saying things which are either (a) equally suited to non-sexual affection, which is what she seemed to have wanted at the beginning of the scene, or (b) her “help[ing] guide him,” which is also consistent with the interpretation that she wants this over with rather than actually wanting this.

We also need to contextualize this paragraph with her history with Robert.



Those had been the worst nights, lying helpless underneath him as he took his pleasure, stinking of wine and grunting like a boar. Usually he rolled off and went to sleep as soon as it was done, and was snoring before his seed could dry upon her thighs. She was always sore afterward, raw between the legs, her breasts painful from the mauling he would give them. The only time he’d ever made her wet was on their wedding night. (Cersei, AFFC)

Despite fannish insistence that “nobody rapes Cersei Lannister” and “Jaime better say goodbye to his other hand/other appendage” and what have you, we know that Robert raped Cersei for years, and she didn’t make her move against him until and because she realized the jig was about to be up on her children’s parentage. The fact that this disappears in fandom conversation generally is discomfiting because it plays into a lot of “strong women don’t let themselves get raped” rape culture narratives, and it’s just not okay to say that a character who’s a rape survivor isn’t a rape survivor. But there’s also a specific issue in understanding the sept scenes in both book and show: Cersei, like many if not all women in sexually abusive marriages, has had to develop not just the ability but the habit of enduring sexual assault with minimal injury, both physical and emotional. Often this means something like clinging to that emotional connection she was reaching for at the beginning of the scene.



But no sooner were they done than the queen said, ”Let me up. If we are discovered like this…”

This last line emphasizes that Cersei’s focus is on the risks of this particular encounter.

Relevant to this interpretation is in the next Jaime POV chapter:



“His son was dead, his father had disowned him, and his sister … she had not allowed him to be alone with her once, after that first day in the royal sept where Joffrey lay amongst the candles. Even when they bore him across the city to his tomb in the Great Sept of Baelor, Cersei kept a careful distance.” (emphasis added)



Is it possible that Cersei immediately started moving into another phase of grieving her son and/or sliding into valonqar-related paranoia? Sure. But this is also consistent with an interpretation that she’s freezing Jaime out because he hurt her during that incident in the sept.

Adding all of this together, we have a situation where it is, at best, plausible that Cersei herself might subjectively consider this encounter to be sufficiently consensual. But we are not reading or discussing this scene from Cersei’s perspective. We read the scene through Jaime’s perspective, and Jaime is no more a reliable narrator than any of our other POV characters. Because he has been socialized into Westerosi assumptions about sex and sexuality, we can be relatively certain that he is especially unreliable in how he interprets and describes sex acts, and because we know the characters’ history together, we can be relatively certain that he is invested in a dramatically romanticized construct of their relationship. These two factors mean that we should be very skeptical of his descriptions of her words and actions.



Moreover, conversations about the scene do not come from Cersei’s perspective or Jaime’s perspective, they come from our external perspective. We (one hopes) have an understanding of the concept of consent that goes beyond mere acquiescence and includes such expectations as: “while negotiated consent is possible in healthy relationships, negotiation requires backing off when one person says ‘no’” and “’meaningful consent’ is an extraordinarily dicey concept when people are under reasonable fear for their lives.” Perhaps we can have a conversation about the degrees of different types of coercion in this encounter. But I do not think we can claim unequivocally that this incident involves consensual sex.







*After consideration, I have decided not to link to or answer directly any commentary which includes this assertion. I’m aware that a vague “SOME people” citation has a little bit of an “IT IS KNOWN” credibility problem, but I decided against because I assume that a reader with an interest in this post has also read the commentary about the episode and has come across an example.

** My argument here is not to say that the scene of the show was objectively good insofar as it matches up with the scene in the books, nor is it to say that viewers should subjectively like or dislike the scene. Personally, I would have preferred for Benioff and Weiss to go in a different direction with the encounter, or eliminated it entirely. I am discussing the inaccuracy of the claim that the encounter in the book is “clearly consensual” or involves “enthusiastic consent” on Cersei’s part.

