Like the title says, I'm not going to recap Game of Thrones anymore.

It's because of rape.

More after the jump.

Cmon, Ned. Lets get out of here.
  • C'mon, Ned. Let's get out of here.

A big part of why I have been consistently excited to recap Game of Thrones is because for a long time it felt like an innovative series. Tired fantasy tropes were subverted, common narrative devices were dispensed with, and common tropes seemed thin on the ground. Ned Stark, a man who would have a heroic death in other series, dies ingloriously beneath an executioner’s axe. Magic, which is a dying force is so many fantasy worlds, is making a comeback in Westeros. Robb Stark, who would be the main character of a lesser series simply because he is noble and has a dead father, is dispensed with violently. I hated the Red Wedding when I first read it, but now I think of it as the series dispensing with clichés along with its characters. I thought for a long time that Game of Thrones was going to be a new kind of genre series that was over and above the clichés of its kind of narrative. Politics, for instance, were more important than just another tired hero’s journey. Characters would not be just stock types, but deeper and more conniving.

I thought, for a long time, that Game of Thrones was more than just an ordinary fantasy series. And, for the most part, it is. For the most part, it remains an excellent example of the genre, even as it critiques and dispenses with the fantasy genre’s most tired conventions.

However, this past week Game of Thrones proved itself to be very horribly and troublingly ordinary. There is nothing new, innovative, or groundbreaking in how the series has handled rape. If anything, the show’s depiction of sexual violence is downright retrograde as viewers are invited to be shocked and titillated by images of women being sexually brutalized on multiple occasions.

I am not a prude. I enjoy watching violent spectacles (obviously, since I’ve been recapping this show for years) but there is something fundamentally different about how people view depictions of violence in entertainment from how they view depictions of rape.

We live in a society where we (more or less) have a clear moral understanding that violence is wrong. There are outliers and exceptions, but for the most part pretty much every consumer of media knows that you should not shoot people with guns, stab people with swords, or burn people with dragon fire, provided that dragon fire was a thing you could burn people with. Violence, even the bloodiest of violence, can be entertaining in part because there is an absolute consensus that it is unacceptable, and we can allow it to live safely within the realm of fiction.

This not the case with rape.

Game of Thrones creators have been unwilling to call the scene between Jaime and Cersei from last season a rape scene. In an interview with Vulture last year director Alex Graves said the following about Jaime raping his sister in season four:

What was talked about was that it was not consensual as it began, but Jaime and Cersei, their entire sexual relationship has been based on and interwoven with risk. And Jaime is very much ready to have sex with her because he hasn’t made love to her since he got back, and she’s sort of cajoled into it, and it is consensual. Ultimately, it was meant to be consensual. [The writers] tried to complicate it a little more with her rejecting his new hand and the state of things.

In a recent Entertainment Weekly interview writer Bryan Cogman was similarly evasive about what just happened between Ramsay and Sansa. He said:

This isn’t a timid little girl walking into a wedding night with Joffrey. This is a hardened woman making a choice and she sees this as the way to get back her homeland. Sansa has a wedding night in the sense she never thought she would with one of the monsters of the show. It’s pretty intense and awful and the character will have to deal with it.

Depictions of rape in popular media invite rationalizations for rape. Apologies for rape. Explanations for rape. Hand-waving of rape.

In the making and viewing of fiction, we accept without reservation the unacceptability of violence. Depictions of violence are, for the most part, just depictions. Depictions of rape too often invite apologetics for sexual violence from the viewers. Game of Thrones has, sadly, turned into the bit of media that invites more ugly rhetorical prevarications about rape than anything else. In that area, it is no longer a groundbreaking show. It is infuriatingly ordinary.

I’m still going to watch the show and talk about it with my friends. If The Winds of Winter ever comes out, I’ll read it. If anyone wants to play one of the several Game of Thrones board games, I’m into it. But, I’m done giving this show special attention on this blog. I don’t want to put my byline next to it anymore.