When “Game of Thrones” first premiered on HBO in 2011, I was immediately drawn in. The show combined a world reminiscent of Medieval Europe with a fantasy world that had things like dragons, strange creatures and magic. It became the show that everyone was watching, from my friends to my high school English teacher.
The show, which is based off of the successful book series “A Song of Ice and Fire,” by George R.R. Martin, premiered its sixth season Sunday. For the past five years it has been on the air, it has met nothing but success. “Game of Thrones” has been nominated for and has won many awards, including Golden Globes, Emmys and Screen Actors Guild awards. According to Nielsen, 8.11 million viewers watched the season five finale in 2015 — a new record for the show.
Naturally, there is much anticipation, myself included, for tonight’s premiere, but I also feel some apprehension in enjoying the show.
Throughout the show’s five seasons, it has shown many sexually explicit and violent scenes, which, beside making things awkward when my dad and I were trying to talk about the episode the next day, has been a source of controversy for the show.
The hubbub around the sexual scenes led Martin to famously say, according to Reuters, “I can describe an axe entering a human skull in great explicit detail and no one will blink twice at it. I provide a similar description, just as detailed, of a penis entering a vagina, and I get letters about it and people swearing off. To my mind this is kind of frustrating, it’s madness.”
Yes, it is true that people’s reactions to sex scenes compared to their reactions to scenes that are violent and gory are somewhat hypocritical, and when people first started to raise their pitchforks against the show’s displays of sexuality, I was completely on the side of “Game of Thrones.” However, as the show progressed, its sex scenes became less merry and more unnecessarily violent, deviating away from the plot of the books.
In season three of the show (spoiler alert), evil teenage king Joffrey Baratheon — who may have been the most hated character on TV — mercilessly murdered a prostitute named Ros. I won’t go into the gory details here because it makes me sick to my stomach, but Ros died in an extremely sexualized and objectified way.
In season five, in a break from the book’s original plot, Sansa Stark was married to Ramsay Bolton, the illegitimate and power-hungry son of Roose Bolton. When the show introduced Ramsay, he was overtly sadistic through his numerous acts of torture. When Sansa and Ramsay were married, the executive producers decided to include part of the couple’s wedding night in which Sansa was raped, and although we could not necessarily see what was happening, we could hear it.
There are many other scenes and characters that exhibit this sexual violence, and they are part of the reason why the show has lost part of its originality and innovation — reasons why the show was so popular in the first place.
I understand the need for creative liberty from the show’s producers, especially now that the timeline of the show has charged ahead of the timeline of the books, but it seems like the only tool the producers have been using is violence aimed especially at women. Why is it that the only way the producers can emphasize a character’s wickedness is by showing them taking part in some kind of sexual violence against a woman?
Especially in the cases of characters like Ramsay and Joffrey, the sexual violence they took part in did not provide an “aha moment” for viewers. Everyone already knew how horrible these characters were, and the extra violence was just redundant.
This sexual violence is especially aggravating when thinking about all the storylines from the books that could have instead been included in the show. My personal favorite is (spoilers again) the story of Lady Stoneheart, a resurrection of the beloved Catelyn Stark who was murdered in the infamous Red Wedding scene.
All in all, I agree with Martin that people take too much offense to sexuality in comparison to straight violence, but this isn’t just sexuality. The sexual violence in “Game of Thrones” is not shocking or imperative to the plot of the show. It is excessive and, if anything, has only desensitized viewers to a problem that is incredibly persistent in the world today.
I am excited for the season premiere tonight, but I hope the producers have drawn back from using sexual violence as a plot device. It is a tired tool and will not just negatively affect the show overall, but will have lasting effects in our present culture.
I agree exactly! This describes my feelings about the series perfectly.
I also think there’s a considerable difference between the books and TV series. While Martin does describe sex scenes in detail, sexual violence is much less commonly depicted (and references to it, if grim, quite realistic for the time period). I would, however, agree that the TV series can go overboard for the sake of so doing. The storylines of Sansa and Ramsay, as well as Joffrey’s killing of Ros, were both added by the producers, never appearing in the books.