Television|For 'Game of Thrones,' Rising Unease Over Rape's Recurring Role
For 'Game of Thrones,' Rising Unease Over Rape's Recurring Role
Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and Lena Headey as Jaime and Cersei Lannister in "Game of Thrones."CreditCreditNeil Davidson/HBO
By Dave Itzkoff
From its very beginnings, "Game of Thrones" has been riddled with sexual brutality. The franchise, which started as a series of fantasy novels by George R. R. Martin about a bleak, feudal world, has at various times included a warrior king who claims his child bride on their wedding night, and the gang rape of a young woman by "half a hundred shouting men behind a tanner's shop."
These scenes and others have raised concerns, but this discussion was confined to readers and critics of fantasy fiction.
Now the debate about the series's sexual violence has spilled into the mainstream and grown vehement, fueled by the explosive growth of HBO's "Game of Thrones" series. In its fourth season, the show, which airs on Sunday nights, averages more than 14 million viewers and has become its cable network's most watched series since "The Sopranos."
In the latest episode, women held captive in a wintry shelter are sexually brutalized. In the deeply controversial episode that preceded it, a scheming noblewoman in an incestuous relationship with her brother is forced to have sex with him, despite her cries of no.
Rape is often presented in television plotlines, where it has far-reaching and lasting consequences for the affected characters. But critics of "Game of Thrones" fear that rape has become so pervasive in the drama that it is almost background noise: a routine and unshocking occurrence.
Many viewers were roiled by the television episode containing the rape of the noblewoman, Cersei Lannister, by her brother Jaime, and protested on blogs, Facebook and Twitter.
The outrage was further fueled by comments from the director of that episode, who told the website Hitfix.com that the characters' coupling became "consensual by the end."
That left audiences wondering if the show's producers truly understood what they had depicted. "That is not what I saw, and that is not what many people saw," said Maureen Ryan, a television critic for The Huffington Post, who wrote that the scene was unequivocally a rape.
Mr. Martin's "Game of Thrones" novels, known collectively as "A Song of Ice and Fire," have more than 31 million copies in print, and have been translated into more than 25 different languages, according to his publisher, the Bantam Books imprint of Random House. The HBO series is broadcast in more than 150 countries and is the most pirated show worldwide.
It's also perhaps the most popular entertainment property to depict sexual violence frequently and throughout its incarnations on page and on screen. The latest issue of the Game of Thrones comic book, released last week by Dynamite Entertainment, graphically depicts, by the fourth page, a barbarian preparing to rape a nude woman after conquering her village.
In response to email questions, Mr. Martin wrote that as an artist, he had an obligation to tell the truth about history and about human nature.
"Rape and sexual violence have been a part of every war ever fought, from the ancient Sumerians to our present day," said Mr. Martin, 65, who lives in Santa Fe, N.M.
"To omit them from a narrative centered on war and power would have been fundamentally false and dishonest," he continued, "and would have undermined one of the themes of the books: that the true horrors of human history derive not from orcs and Dark Lords, but from ourselves."
David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, the show runners of the HBO series and responsible for its day-to-day operation, declined to be interviewed.
Michael Lombardo, the president for programming at HBO, said in an email that "The choices our creative teams make are based on the motivations and sensibilities that they believe define their characters. We fully support the vision and artistry of Dan and David's exceptional work and we feel this work speaks for itself."
Other television shows like "Downton Abbey" and "Private Practice" have had story lines about rape, but they were singular events that explored the repercussions.
"The best depictions don't just leave it at the dramatic device of the rape itself," said Scott Berkowitz, president of the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, an anti-sexual violence group. "They use it to tell a deeper story about recovery and what effect it has on that person."
But "Game of Thrones" does not seem to be doing that.
"To have sexual violence treated so cavalierly, it's very difficult to see that," said Mariah Huehner, a writer and editor of comic books who has contributed repeatedly to the online debate. "It's too upsetting to see, and I just don't know that I can keep going with that."
As for the books, readers say that Mr. Martin's presentation of rape underscores the harshness of his world, but some question what they say is his overreliance on it and an often lurid tone when writing about sexual matters.
"The 'no means yes' thing is there in the books," said Sady Doyle, an essayist who often writes about "Game of Thrones." "The sexualized punishments are there. It's in the text and it's vital to the text. It's something that comes up, over and over again."
But, she added, "At a certain point, you get the feeling that you can't walk through a chapter without expecting something horrible — almost always to a female character — just to prove that this is indeed a very scary and dark piece of literature."
Mr. Martin said that his philosophy as a writer is to show and not tell, and doing so requires "vivid sensory detail."
"When the scene in question is a sex scene, some readers find that intensely uncomfortable," he said, "and that's 10 times as true for scenes of sexual violence. But that is as it should be. Certain scenes are meant to be uncomfortable, disturbing, hard to read."
As the books are adapted for other media, sequences that were described obliquely in the novels have become more explicit, more outrageous and more problematic. Mr. Martin said that the "Game of Thrones" television and comic-book adaptations "are in the hands of others, who make their own artistic choices as to what sort of approach will work best in their respective mediums."
Ms. Ryan of The Huffington Post said in an interview that "Game of Thrones" possesses "an incredible ability to make you care about people who really have done terrible things — repeatedly, it's done that, and I think that's its great strength."
"Sexual assault happens in the world," Ms. Ryan said. "It's something that we process through popular culture. The people making it should really take it upon themselves to bring out all the aspects of that experience — make it at least as much about the person who survives the attack as the person who perpetrated it."
"That's how you respect the experience," she said. "That's how it's not exploitative."
A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: For 'Game of Thrones,' Rising Unease Over Rape's Recurring Role. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe
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