After yet another rape scene, I no longer trust the creators to bridge the gap of thoughtful conversation between action and intent – so I've given up on Game of Thrones for good

Last summer, in the finale of Game of Thrones' third season, mother of dragons Daenerys Targaryen stood outside the walls of Yunkai waiting for the slaves she just freed, hoping to convince them to join her army as free men. Daenerys, the white-blonde queen traded moons ago to the Dothraki by her brother, moves into the crowd of outstretched brown arms as they chant “mhysa”, which, we learn, means “mother” in their native tongue, and is carried into the crowd as the camera pulls back to show her floating in the middle of this sea of arms like the bright planet in a constellation of darkness.

I turned to my husband and said: “No one at HBO remembers the visual impact of slavery, I guess?” It was at that moment I decided to stop watching it.



I’m aware that Game of Thrones is a TV show, a work of fiction, but having invested in it for three seasons, I no longer trusted the creators to bridge the gap of thoughtful conversation between action and intent. How much misogyny and racism are we expected to put up with in the name of entertainment? And what does it mean when those systems of oppression are crafted not solely by the author, but by television executives looking to create a heightened sense of drama?

It’s strange to quit a show after putting so much time into it. I also decided to skip this final season of Mad Men, having long ago lost interest in the weekly display of misogyny and ill will that main character Don Draper visits upon everyone around him. Sure, he’s a man of his time, but that doesn’t mean I have to engage in the weekly assault on my eyeballs as he denigrates his wives and stomps around as a titan of industry, a master of the universe.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest 'I'm exhausted by the triumph of men at the expense of women'. Photograph: Michael Yarish/AMC.

I’m exhausted by the triumph of men at the expense of women as a narrative device. It’s not only boring, but also a little too tied to my real-world experience as a woman and person of color for me to look at these shows objectively and give them a pass – not when the television industry is so criminally underdeveloped in hiring or telling the stories of minority populations. I certainly don’t expect that every good story will omit difficult subject matter or be perfectly balanced and fair, but I do need to trust that the direction of a TV show isn’t rooted in a violence or misogyny that seems excessive.

The misogyny of Game of Thrones has always seemed so gratuitous as to pull me out of the story. For every woman with authority, there are five more being disparaged, and most women come to their power through physical and emotional humiliation (Daenerys) or a cool detachment from reality (Cersei). Fans are quick to defend the sexism of the books, but the artistic direction of the TV show has cleaved itself from the artistic intent of the books lately in a way that has everyone asking: “What’s really going on?”

In last week’s episode, Breaker of Chains, Jaime very clearly raped Cersei in the tomb of their dead son, and fans of the books immediately noted the difference in tone, saying that this scene was more nuanced in the book, and it was clear that Cersei wanted to have sex after a brief hesitation. The scene created such an uproar that creator George RR Martin released a statement, saying that the dynamic was different in the show, and while it was meant to be disturbing, was not meant to be disturbing for “the wrong reasons.”

But this week, in Oathkeeper, the showrunners went off-script again, in increasingly disturbing ways that once again included gratuitous rape, this time of Craster’s daughters by the mutinous members of the Night’s Watch.

“There’s so much about this episode that is off-book,” says Sarah Jackson, a creative director for a TV company, and the biggest Game of Thrones fan I know. “The first big departure is that it looks at though they’re setting up a Stark reunion between Jon and Bran at the Craster house. I can see how that would work from a TV drama standpoint, but it’s a huge difference. But there’s also the introduction of the White Walker city, population one weird King White Walker, and the fact that they can turn babies into White Walkers. That could have been in the works, but was never in the books.” When I asked her about the rape scene in Oathkeeper, she said it was "particularly horrible. That scene wasn’t even in the book, and was so over the top.”

Though I had given up, I decided to watch the last two episodes to place the sexual violence in context and form my own opinion about these controversial scenes. In her column last week, Jessica Valenti discussed the qualifiers we attach to rape, and the danger of not calling it rape when we see it, calling out Game of Thrones director Alex Graves for his comment that the sex between Jaime and Cersei was consensual. In this case, his artistic decisions reflect a real world aversion to even noticing rape as violence.

Having two back-to-back episodes which depict rape creates an environment of distrust, and greatly impacts both the arc of the story and the willingness of some viewers, me included, to remain on board. If we can't trust the showrunners to reflect the spirit of the story any more, then what's left?