Cinema has long struggled with representing women as actual complex human beings. Writer Kelly Sue DeConnick once noted that a disturbing number of female characters in modern stories (including movies) fail to pass The Sexy Lamp test. This means the majority of female characters in Hollywood can pretty much be replaced with a “sexy lamp”, as they don’t accomplish anything and only serve the purpose of being a good-looking prop for men to fight over.

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CAPTION: Pictured: Hollywood’s idea of an empowered, independent woman.

What you might not know is that some of these women were far less lamp-like in the original stories that their movies were based on. A lot of times, a TV or movie adaptation of a story will go out of it’s way to make the leading lady more passive and give her accomplishments to a male character

There can be multiple reasons for this and generally all of them are dumb. It could be that the producers wanted to take away the lady’s screentime to give the male lead more time to flex his bulging biceps; it could be they felt they absolutely had to have a helpless woman to tug at the audience’s tender heartstrings or in some cases, they simply could not even fathom the idea of a woman actually accomplishing anything.

These seven examples explore all the weird and dumb ways women can go from an active characters in the original to alluring light fixtures in the film version.

Violet Baudelaire in A Series of Unfortunate Events

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Caption: Just an innocent tale about a creepy old guy relentlessly pursuing three children.

Lemony Snicket’s bizarre children’s books, A Series of Unfortunate Events, followed the macabre adventures of three orphan siblings as they were tormented by the evil Count Olaf. The orphan siblings in question were Violet, who was basically MacGyver with a bow; Klaus, the character who tricks kids into buying up the series when they see him on the cover and think he’s Harry Potter, and Sunny, a baby with freaking shark teeth who will haunt your nightmares.

The books were pretty popular, proving what everyone already knew: kids are sadists who love to consume stories about suffering. So in 2004, a movie based off the first three books was made.

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Caption: AKA “Jim Carrey’s Twitchy Eyebrows the Movie”

The climax of the movie was based off the climax of The Bad Beginning, the first book. In a scheme to gain the inheritance that will go to Violet when she turns eighteen, Count Olaf threatens to kill Sunny (who he’s trapped in a tower) unless Violet marries him. Yes, that’s right, this book was about an adult man forcing a fourteen year old girl to marry him by threatening to murder her infant sister. You can see how this was considered great material for children.

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Caption: Pictured: Violet climbing something in an entirely different book. She climbs things a lot.

Violet responds as any responsible older sister would: by building a grappling hook out of spare parts and scaling that damn tower. She does get to her sister, but is caught by the bad guys up in the tower. But even with that setback, she still manages to save her family in the end. She signs the marriage contract, but after Sunny is released, she reveals that she had cleverly exploited a technicality in the contract and is therefore not legally married to Olaf. As the book puts it “Count Olaf’s plan was defeated by Violet signing with her left hand instead of her right”.

Which is good, because all the adults around her were totally willing to accept a fourteen-year-old being threatened by an adult into signing a marriage contract as legal unless there was a some technicality that made the ceremony void.

However, in the film’s version of the climax? Violet gives up and resigns herself to life as a child bride, leaving it to her brother, Klaus, to pull her fat out of the fire. He finds….something…in a convenient trash heap that he modifies so he can scale the tower. He rescues Sunny and once again very conveniently happens upon an improbable light-refracting device up in the tower, so he uses that to burn up the marriage contract.

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Caption: Maybe he should also try setting the bad guy on fire. That might be useful.

To understand the full ridiculousness of this change, you need to remember that Violet is supposed to be the inventor of the family. Her brother is a twelve-year-old bookworm and his big skill is he’s a walking encyclopedia-slash-thesaurus because all he does is read all day. If confronted with a huge, imposing tower, he’s going to be able to recite the entire history of towers and give you twelve synonyms for the word and so on until you want to clobber him, not miraculously gain inventing skills.

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Caption: Also, movie Klaus doesn’t even wear glasses. How are we supposed to tell he’s a nerd? Fuck this guy.

It’s true that getting off on a legal technicality isn’t exactly the car-chase-and-explosion style climax Hollywood prefers, but if the movie version absolutely had to have things resolved with a daring tower climb, there’s no reason that Violet couldn’t have been the one to do it, like she was in the book.

The change was so obviously sexist that the author of the book, Daniel Handler (Lemony Snicket is shockingly not his real name) snarked about it in the DVD commentary to the movie. “And now Klaus is apparently running off to go and save Sunny. In the books of course it is Violet, but I know that Hollywood prefers its female actresses to do very little”. We’ve noticed.

A Series of Unfortunate Events is set to be adapted as a Netflix series, which Handler is going to much more involved in as a producer. Hopefully this means Violet won’t be shunted aside for her younger brother this time around.

Kitty Pryde in X-Men: Days of Future Past

The most recent X-men movie saw Wolverine traveling back in time to team up with 1970’s era Magneto and Professor X to prevent a horrible future.

This movie was actually based on a two-parter from the X-men comic book series written in 1981 by Chris Claremont. In the original Days of Future Past, it is Kitty Pryde who is sent back in in time by mutant Rachel Summers to stop an assassination attempt on a senator and prevent a nightmarish future where all mutants are hunted down by murderous robots called the Sentinels. (Rachel Summers is the future child of Cyclops and Jean Grey. You are now haunted by the knowledge that Cyclops will reproduce.)

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Caption: Comic vs movie! Wolverine should complain that he didn’t get a mattress to lie down on.

But in the movie, Wolverine takes over Kitty’s role. Rachel Summers is written out completely and Kitty is instead the one who sends Wolverine back in time. So Kitty is demoted from the hero of the story to being a Wolverine delivery system.

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Caption: Young Kitty Pryde’s first experience going inside another woman from The Uncanny X-Men #142.

In the original comic, it’s Kitty who saves the senator from being shot and saves all of mutantkind in the process. But in the movie, they instead have Wolverine, Professor X and a bunch of other dudes doing it.

Caption: Sorry Kitty, It’s X-men, after all.

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Producer Simon Kinburg claimed the reason for Kitty’s demotion was that the way time travel powers work in the movie is that a character’s mind travels back in time to possess their younger self in the 1970s… and Kitty wouldn’t have been born then. But that’s a pretty weaksauce excuse. All that keeping Kitty as the lead required was changing the time travel so characters can travel physically back in time instead of just mentally- a far less major change to the original story than switching up the lead character.

So let’s not beat around the bush here, the real reason for the lead character change-up is obvious: Fox wanted to keep milking Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine.

On some level, it’s understandable. Jackman has been the star of every single X-men movie except First Class (and he still managed to cameo in that). The term “Wolverine Publicity" is codified on TV Tropes for a reason

.The character is the ur-example of grizzled antiherodom and incredibly popular and synonymous with the X-Men in the public’s eyes. Fox probably thought their best chance for the movie doing well was to stick with their well-tested lead.

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Caption: Seriously though, Hugh Jackman needs a break. His face must be getting sore from all that snarling.

But really, the studio is limiting itself by sticking only to Jackman and creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. Of course Ellen Page’s Kitty Pryde isn’t going to be as popular as Wolverine if she’s never given the opportunity to do anything or have a story. The franchise can’t milk Wolverine forever, they’ve done close to everything they can with him. It’s noticeable that he has pretty much no character arc in this movie- he didn’t grow or change or need to prove himself, like Kitty did in the original comic. He was pretty much completely interchangeable with anyone else and only served as a plot device.

Fox needs to try something different. More of the same angsty male antihero is just boring at this point.

Noriko Nakagawa in Battle Royale

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Caption: Yeah, that’s pretty much what high school was like.

The Japanese novel Battle Royale caused a lot of commotion when it first came out in 1999 because it featured teenagers being forced to brutally murder each other in a sadistic game dictated by the government. Now you mostly hear about it when nerds argue about whether The Hunger Games ripped it off or not.

The novel was adapted into a cult classic movie in 2000 and it’s pretty noticeable that the female lead, Noriko Nakagawa, got kind of a raw deal.

Noriko plays a pretty crucial role in the climax of the novel. She shoots the terrifying murderous antagonist of the story, Kazuo, in the head, saving both the male leads lives in the process. Here’s the passage from the book, narrated by the main character Shuya:

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He opened his eyes.



He wasn’t dead.



There was Kazuo in the diagonal orange light of the setting sun, a red dot by his nose. The gun dropped from his hand. He fell back and crashed to the ground.



Shuya slowly turned his head to his left. Noriko was standing, holding the Smith and Weston .38 caliber revolver in both hands.

However, the movie had one of the male leads defeat Kazuo instead, while Noriko stood around and was shielded protectively by the love interest she was supposed to save.

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Caption: Ah, young love.

Noriko got the short end of the stick in the movie overall. In the book she got more lines and expressed actual personal ambitions, while in the movie most of her dialogue had to do with her romance with the male lead. In the book, she also got a scene where she defiantly stayed by a dying student and demanded a teacher help him even after said teacher shot her in the leg.

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Caption: Silly Noriko, you don’t think the movie’s actually going to let you USE that gun, do you?

But the movie did feel the need to add a plot point about the adult director of the killing games lusting after Noriko that didn’t exist in the book at all. Her boyfriend defeats the creepy guy for her, which means the final battle of the movie is basically two guys fighting over who "gets” this girl as if she were a prop. Noriko really is demoted to being the “sexy lamp” in this scenario. The movie cut out her big moment so she could function purely as an object of desire. Sexy lamps don’t cap a dude’s ass, after all. They’re just there to decorate the windowsill.

Katara in Avatar: The Last Airbender

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Caption: Just some kids and their freaky mutant animals.

Nickelodeon’s popular cartoon Avatar: The Last Airbender featured a world where certain people were capable of controlling (“bending”) one of the four elements with an Avatar existing each generation as the only person capable of bending all four. The show chronicled the adventures of a twelve-year-old Avatar named Aang as he struggled to save the world with the help of his friends, a waterbender named Katara and her brother Sokka.

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Caption: Just some kids and their terrible special effects.

In 2010, M. Night Shyamalan made a movie based off the first season of the cartoon. In what was decidedly NOT a twist, it was terrible in pretty much every way. Katara, the female lead of the cartoon, was significantly weakened in the movie compared to her show counterpart. But it wasn’t just her- every character suffered. And the treatment of Katara and the rest had a racial component as well.

There are literally no white characters in the cartoon. The writing on the show was always in Chinese, the main character Aang is based on Shaolin monk heroes in traditional Chinese stories, the tribe Katara and Sokka hail from is explicitly based on an Inuit tribe,etcetera, etcetera.

Presumably all the white people just went off the form Middle Earth or something.

But no way could Hollywood make a movie without casting a single white person in it. So The Last Airbender became a movie about white people in Asian (and Inuit) clothing, leaving viewers with the sort of second-hand embarrassment you get when you see bad cosplayers at anime convention.

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Caption: Nope, no unfortunate implications here.

But being made white wasn’t the end of Katara’s problems. The first season of the show showed her growth into a powerful waterbender, but the movie decided to basically skip all of that. Gone were the scenes where she struggled and slowly improved with waterbending, gone was her memorable battle against a sexist waterbending master, and unlike in the show, she was shown to be easily knocked out by the mopey teen antagonist Zuko.

But perhaps the change most illustrative of how Katara’s character was screwed over is how her big scene where she leads a prison break in the TV show is given to Aang in the movie.

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Caption: In the season 1 episode “Imprisoned”, Katara puts the coal she got in her stocking this year to good use.

In the cartoon, Katara successfully leads a bunch of earthbenders who were imprisoned on a ship in rebelling against their oppressors, supplying them with coal to fight back with. It makes sense these people would need Katara to help them because they were cut off from using their powers until she came along.

But in the movie, the earthbenders aren’t imprisoned on a ship at all, but they apparently need Aang to come in and point out that they can, y’know, attack their oppressors with the earth they were standing on. It is only when given this deep wisdom from their savior that the earthbenders fight back. And what an epic battle it is.

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Caption: Behold their terrifying power.

And what does Katara get to do during this scene she was originally central in? Run forward and shove an enemy soldier like she’s on a playground, then stand around with a slack expression on her face, only to get rescued by Aang when the soldier dares try and shove her back.

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Caption: Superpowers? What superpowers?

This scene doesn’t just hurt Katara’s character. It’s a terrible scene for everyone involved. The movie may have chosen to give Aang Katara’s scene to build him up as the inspiring “savior of the world”, but thanks to their casting decisions, all they’ve done is turn him into a perfect example of a boring “white savior”.

Like seriously: a scene where a woman of color leads other people of color into battle is changed to a scene about a village of poor oppressed Asian people who are too dumb to figure out they can use their earth powers to MOVE THE EARTH until some random white kid comes along and preaches to them. Definitely not a good movie, even it weren’t for the sexism.

A mysterious female avenger in Sherlock Holmes (and Irene Adler)

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Caption: An illustration of the mysterious female avenger. She teams up with the Punisher in the sequel.

In Arthur Conan Doyle’s original short story “The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton”, Sherlock and Watson are unable to defeat the blackmailer Charles Milverton. They are reduced to hiding behind his curtains for fear of being caught by him. But a woman, one of Milverton’s victims, shoots the man. Sherlock identifies the woman, but decides not to turn her in, as she was simply serving justice to a terrible villain.

BBC’s hit television show Sherlock, a modern reinterpretation of Doyle’s classic, decided to adapt the story for the final episode of the show’s third season, “His Last Vow”. However, in their version, the mysterious female avenger is cut out completely and instead it’s Sherlock who murders the villain.

Well, surely the writers at least have a reasonable explanation to offer for leaving out one the rare female characters who got to do something in Doyle’s original stories, right?

The explanation is that writers Steven Mofatt and Mark Gattis found it simply unbelievable that a random woman could be the one to take down this villain where the hero couldn’t, to the extent where they were convinced that a fictional character was trying to trick them. I’m not kidding, that’s what they said.

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Moffat: Also, if you read [The Adventure Of] Charles Augustus Milverton, Dr. Watson in the opening paragraph tells you that he’s about to tell you a porkie. He says, ‘I even now must be very reticent.’ I think what Doyle is hinting at is that Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson sat in Baker Street and said, ‘Right, we’re going to have to go and kill him, aren’t we? That’s the only way we can do this.’ So they break in, kill him, and then Dr. Watson writes up a version of the story that puts the murder [on someone else].



Gatiss: They’re hiding in their burglar masks behind the curtain, and this random woman comes and shoots Milverton in the face and then grinds her heel into his face. It’s odd, isn’t it? So I mean really, it’s just an extrapolation of saying, ‘Well, he probably did it, I think.’

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Caption: Sherlock totally killed that guy. If The Sun said it, it must be true!

Regardless of what these guys say, though, there’s no evidence within the story Sherlock killed the guy. There’s really nothing at all unbelievable about a victim of a crime coming to exact revenge on someone who wronged her. Watson also clearly states exactly what he’s being “reticent” about in the narration- he says Holmes knew the women’s identity upon looking at her, but they’ve chosen not to reveal it.

The sad fact is Moffat and Gattis probably just couldn’t handle the idea of a female character outperforming their heroes, so they pretty much decided the author was “lying” and did a fix-it fic. Maybe the TV Guide summary for the episodes should have said “no flames plz!”

Another female character from the original Sherlock Holmes stories, Irene Adler, didn’t do too hot in Sherlock either.

In the original story A Scandal in Bohemia Holmes is hired to retrieve a picture a woman named Irene Adler is using to blackmail a king. But Adler outsmarts Holmes and gets away with the picture. The story ends on the quoteQuote

And that was how a great scandal threatened to affect the kingdom of Bohemia, and how the best plans of Mr. Sherlock Holmes were beaten by a woman’s wit.

But in the Sherlock episode that adapted this story,“A Scandal in Belgravia”, Moffat just couldn’t stand the idea of ending a story with a woman defeating Holmes and getting away with it. No, that just wouldn’t do for the invincible hero, he had to be the one to get the better of HER in the end.

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Caption: In which Irene is about to be executed by scary terrorists who apparently dressed her up for the occasion.

So in Moffat’s version, Sherlock ultimately outsmarts Irene in the end. He successfully gets the information she was trying to keep from him, in direct contrast to the original story. The worst thing? What ultimately brings Irene down is she couldn’t help falling in love with the emotionally stunted sexy beast that is Sherlock Holmes. And her silly little crush is her undoing.

“You could have walked out today with everything you worked for, but you couldn’t resist, could you?” Sherlock says smugly to the defeated woman. “I’ve always assumed love was a dangerous disadvantage, thank you for the final proof”.

Oh, women and their feelings, always getting them in trouble. It’s even grosser when you consider Moffat decided to have his version of Irene identify as a lesbian. So apparently Sherlock Holmes is sexy enough to make gay women stop being gay (god forbid any TV show say the word “bisexual”).

And to put a cherry on top of the shit sundae that is the episode, Irene has to be rescued by scary Muslim terrorists by Sherlock at the end of it too, so we get some racism to go with our sexism.

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Caption: Moriarty/Sherlock is Irene’s OTP.

Moffat’s version of Irene Adler actually has a lot in common with the Irene in the Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes movies. Both of them fall in love with the dashing hero, both of them are ultimately outsmarted by him in the end and both are revealed to be mere henchwomen to the actual real threat of the story, Holmes’ archnemesis Moriarty.

It’s pretty stunning that these modern day adaptations repeatedly make female characters more disempowered than they were in a story written in the freaking nineteenth century. Irene goes from a smart, independent woman who defeats the hero to a damsel-in-distress pawn of a bigger bad guy who just can’t help making stupid mistakes because she’s fallen head-over-heels for the hero.

It seems modern adaptations are intent on making a Sherlock Holmes a more cookie-cutter hero who gets all the sexy ladies and poor Irene is bought low so she can play his swooning damsel. It’s kind of unfortunate that modern writers are determined to turn a character who wasn’t even interested in women or romance in the original stories into their heterosexual male fantasy.

Coraline in Coraline

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Caption: You can tell this will be a fun book from the cover.

Neil Gaiman’s 2002 children’s novel Coraline was a cheerful tale about a little girl getting trapped in an alternate dimension where an evil version of her mother wanted to rip her eyes out and sew the buttons on her face instead.

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Caption: Get it, eye-popping 3-D! Because the villain wants to rip out your eyes.

In 2009 they decided to make a animated movie version of the story, so children didn’t have to rely on the inevitable nightmares they would have after reading the book as their only way to visualize the characters.

In the book, Coraline journeys to the other world by herself and defeats the evil antagonist, dubbed “the Other Mother” with some assistance from a talking cat. The Other Mother’s disembodied sentient hand follows her back to her world, though, and Coraline has to come up with a way to defeat it.

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Caption: Coraline shows a little girl’s tea party can be deadly trap for monsters in this page from the Coraline graphic novel illustrated by Craig Russel.

Coraline comes up with a really clever plan and tricks the devious hand into falling down a well, then seals it in there. Now the hand will just scrabble around the inside of the well forever….clawing ceaselessly…seriously, who thought this book was okay to include in my elementary school’s book fair?

The movie added an entirely new character that didn’t exist in the book to Coraline’s story, a little boy called Wybie. The kid mostly seemed to exist to give Coraline someone to talk to since she was alone most of the time in the book and a movie needs dialogue. Of course, Coraline has a talking cat she can converse with, so it was still kind of a puzzling decision. Like why would she need to talk to this boy when she has a cat that can speak? My cat can’t even talk and I’d rather talk to him than converse with most people.

But at the end of the movie it becomes clear that Wybie’s purpose isn’t just to be a sounding board, but also to charge in and save Coraline’s bacon. He rescues her from the disembodied hand she defeated on her own in the original story.

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Caption: Wybie rescues Coraline in the movie, but how the hell can he see with that thing on his head?

It seems like the studio just couldn’t fathom the idea of having a movie with a female lead who defeats all the threats on her own with no male heroes needed. Nope, there had to be some characters for little boys to look up to and he had to prove his worth by saving our fair leading lady.

This is all kinds of silly. If you have the idea boys won’t like a movie without any dudes doing stuff in it because they can’t possibly “relate” to girls (not like little girls have been asked to relate to male heroes in movies for, well, forever), there’s the talking cat! He seems to be a dude! I personally find cats pretty relateable to begin with, they’re lazy assholes who just want everything to revolve around them. I imagine a lot of little boys feel the same way.

Cersei in Game of Thrones

In George R.R. Martin’s acclaimed A Song of Ice and Fire book series, Cersei Lannister reigns as the amoral queen regent, mother to the sadistic teenage King Joffrey. Even if you’re not familiar with the series, you’ve probably heard of her, even if only under the appellation of “that woman who bangs her twin brother”.

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Captain: Some sibling are just closer than others!

In the television adaptation of the series, Game of Thrones, Cersei is still shown to be a morally corrupt woman. But it’s pretty damn noticeable that the TV show leaves out a lot of her more cruel and murderous actions, making the character softer and more sympathetic overall. In a lot of case, her crimes will even be given to male characters.

For example, in the A Song of Ice and Fire series, Cersei orders all her late husband’s bastard children murdered. But the TV series has her son Joffrey make that order.

In the books, Cersei is also said to have spitefully aborted the child she conceived with said hated husband, but in the show it’s changed to a tragic stillbirth that she still mourns.

It may not seem like a big deal to give Cersei’s spiteful actions to others to make her more sympathetic, but just like the other examples, it ultimately does make her a more passive character. Rather than a woman who fought back against her husband in any way she could, she’s either a tragic victim of circumstance or someone who can’t control her son’s evil actions.

It’s also not a coincidence that the actions of Cersei the show erases are all related to being cruel towards children or uncaring about children. Women are seen by society as inherently motherly and nurturing. A woman murdering children or being unwilling to have a child is seen as the worst possible betrayal of that.

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Caption: Telling your child not to trust anyone ever is okay though.

So, it’s understandable to have Cersei indirectly cause tons of deaths by being too indulgent to her sadistic child because that’s at least driven by those motherly instincts she’s supposed to have. But not caring for children is apparently unfathomable. That’s pretty screwed up.

But by far the worst thing about “make Cersei motherly and sympathetic at all costs” is that it results in a gratuitous rape scene.

In the third book of the series, Cersei willingly has sex with her brother next to her son’s corpse. This is obviously not a very kind and motherly action, so the show decided to fix this by having Cersei’s brother rape her in the episode of the fourth season that adapted it.

In the book A Storm of Swords, Cersei initially protests “we shouldn’t” when her brother Jaime kisses her, but then gives her enthusiastic consent with “quickly, quickly, now, do it now, do me now", leading to the sex scene.

But in the fourth season episode “Breaker of Chains”, Cersei cries “Jaime not here, please. Please. Stop it!” as her brother has sex with her. Apparently this scene happened in part because the director didn’t understand having sex with a protesting woman cannot “become” consensual, but that’s what the scene was regardless.

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Caption: That is not the face of a woman who is in the mood.

It’s pretty screwed up that the show would rather have Cersei subjected to rape than show her as an amoral and uncaring mother. It shows that stereotyping women as inherently more soft and nurturing than men really is just as disempowering and limiting as any other gender generalization. Women can be just as shitty as men, dammit, and I’d rather see a woman choose to have morally wrong consensual sex than have to endure watching yet another rape scene any day.

Read more:

http://www.cracked.com/forums/topic/186647/finished-7-female-characters-who-were-screwed-over-in-adaptations-due_12_17_14#ixzz3QiBtDKQU