Since Martin not only seems to have good input for the show, but awesome respect by the show runners, I'll assume he's copacetic with the change.

ita, it didn't go down that way in the book. I...I am increasingly less sure of the second point. I have spent a significant amount of brainpower today thinking about the psychology of rape in two specific circumstances, and I'm not especially pleased about that. I'll post once I have coherent thoughts.

I'll assume he's copacetic with the change.

He said he wasn't consulted.

It just looks like Something Red all over again, but this time I'm David Fury.

Huh!

He said he wasn't consulted.

Jesus fuck.

Ok, I have spent all day having Thoughts (cross-posted from Tumblr). This is the current state of them. They are deeply disjointed, and it is entirely possible that they will change again over the next day.

I don’t want to have to be thinking about shades of rape. This is not a conversation I wanted to be having with myself. So, you know, thanks for that, showrunners.

As a caveat, I am a strong proponent of the “enthusiastic consent” standard, in real life and in fiction. I don’t believe in “sort of rape” vs. “actual rape-rape” distinctions.

So, when Breaker of Chains aired (or, rather, I watched it on HBOGo), I went in with a vague idea, based on things people were saying on Tumblr, that Problematic Changes had been made to the Sept Scene. Given the changes in the timeline, changes were inevitable, but I tried to go in with as open a mind as I could.

And I was fucking pissed. For all the reasons every other book-reader was pissed, and I won’t go over again. I went to bed pissed.

I woke up in the morning thinking about the chapter as written. And, by any modern standard, despite her later active participation, Cersei starts out at “not here,” which, roughly, translates to “no.” So, lack of consent. Yeah, Jaime rapes Cersei in the book, as well.

And, yet, it reads very differently from the scene as filmed. I still maintain that, in some sense, the scene as filmed breaks the character of Jaime. Not in the sense that Theon is broken, but in the sense that his arc stops working in the way that it did. Whether this is intentional, only future episodes will tell (see the final paragraph for further thoughts)

Which lands me at that first sentence up there. And, from this point, I will be talking about distinctions within Jaime’s own head and decision-making.

From a character perspective, these are the salient distinctions I see:

In the chapter as written:

Jaime is just back in King’s Landing. This is, quite literally, the first time he sees Cersei in months and months. Love of his life, mother of his children, person he has been trying to get back to this whole time. I think Martin points right at the crux of this scene with Cersei’s line. Jaime’s home.

(My brain does keep tossing up the fact that he has always wanted more from her than she from him, from the time they were teenagers and he wanted to marry her. I don’t know quite how that fits in, but it seems like a piece of this, somehow, especially with the line I seem to remember about making another son. That was in this chapter, right?)

And she says, “Not here.” Which implies that, were they elsewhere, the answer would be different. This is not someone who doesn’t want him. This is someone who is being sensitive to the time and place. At the very least, that’s true in his head.

And, yes, she does get to “yes” in the end, although that has less to do with his internal decision-making. I also wonder if this encounter isn’t part of the distance that develops between them going forward.

It’s also worth noting where this comes on his character arc. All those other scenes he’s had? With the book of the Kingsguard and not returning to Casterly Rock? Those happen AFTER this, I am pretty sure. His honor, internally speaking, is on a vaguely upward trajectory from this point.

In the scene as shot:

We already had the reunion scene. Last season, even. Weeks or months ago, from the characters’ perspective. We’ve had the “I murdered people to be here with you” conversation. He’s home; he’s been home. Home sucks, and doesn’t want him (note the conversations with Joffrey and Tywin, as well).

Her rejection is not of the time and place. Her rejection is of him. Specifically of his (lack of) hand, but it is the same rejection she has been giving him since he got back.

And he is reacting very directly to that rejection. That rejection (on top of her asking him to kill Tyrion) is the proximate cause of his choice to disregard her lack of consent. If the (continued...)

( continues...) other scene was “I’m home, and home means Cersei, and fucking her is one thing I can still do, godsdammit” this one is absolutely about him being angry AT Cersei. Yes, his feelings of uselessness may play into it (there’s a reason we got Jaime telling Tommen he’ll see that he’s safe at the top of the scene), but he starts out the scene in a pretty reasonable and honorable place (the conversation about Tyrion). And you can see Nikolaj play the entire transition between when Cersei recoils and his second line (“Why did the gods make me love a hateful woman?”)He has said that he struggled with this scene, and fuck if he didn’t make the best sense of it he could. His rape of Cersei is intentional, weaponized in a way that it was not in the books. And I don’t see how he can distance that from the behavior he so abhorred in Robert and Aerys.

Now, you can argue that he has just realized the extent to which she is and has been using him. She is a horrible person, which has been increasingly clear to him over these three episodes. Perhaps, in the next episode, we will find that, yes, this was him breaking up with her. Maybe we’ll find out that his actions have literally made him sick, and this will propel his arc forward (Wouldn’t that be a completely different spin on the “rape as character development” trope, if a deeply problematic one?) (Note: I’m not touching on the effects on Cersei’s end of the relationship, even though I think they are well worth discussing. This was enough for my brain today.)

And the point in the timeline is hugely different. He’s been trying, gods love him, to be a better person, to repair the tattered remains of his honor. This is a major backslide for him (Note his repetition of the line, “I don’t care.” I wonder if he’s trying to convince himself.)

Spoilers for presumed future events, based on the books: I really wonder how this will affect his process of deciding to send Brienne out after Sansa. Perhaps the most interesting choice would be that he wants her away, where she can’t see him turn to shit again.

If this is him breaking up with Cersei, then it basically puts him in a holding pattern up till burning her letter. I wonder how fast they can get him out of KL…not till after Tyrion’s trial, surely. If they get rid of the jailbreak, I’ma be pissed.

And maybe that is the most interesting character arc they can give him. Not the one where he’s a good guy now, but people don’t realize it, but the one where he isn’t the man he was, true, but he’s not really the person he wants to be, either. And, in this act, I think he was a worse person than he was at the beginning of the show; I think this is a line that he wouldn’t have crossed. Jaime’s arc maybe is best read not as one of redemption, but identity. Who is he now, when everything he was is lost to him? And in trying to figure that out, he struggles and fucks up (and, for Jaime Lannister “fucks up” generally involves dead bodies…and, apparently, raping your sister). What I’m not sure of is how far how much of the audience is willing to stick with him, especially since we can’t see inside his head. The writers have made their job—and the actor’s—a lot harder with this choice.

t curls up comfortably in Debet's brane

Jesus fuck.

But there's a lot of stuff he's not consulted on. I think Jezebel had the explanation of why it looked more consensual in the book, but I've read so many people saying it looked consensual TO JAIME and she does protest at first there too. Also, the director said that she was supposed be be active in it at the end of the scene.

I just...wasn't he always a horrible person? Can you weigh pushing a child out a window one one side against raping the sister you're in love with?

For all the reasons every other book-reader was pissed

Ok, speaking as just one book-reader, I'm not pissed. My knee-jerk reaction last night was to be pissed, but having processed it overnight, I've completely changed my mind.

In the book, the chapter is written from Jaime's POV, and if you ignore how he feels about it and just look at the events, it is pretty damn clearly rape. She is telling him to stop and pounding against his chest, which he ignores. In the book, he "doesn't hear her" (because he's too busy ripping her clothes off). In the show he says "I don't care." Yeah, the scene from the book didn't look like the scene in the show to Jaime, but to an outside observer I don't think there's as big a difference as the internet seems to think.

Yes, what ita said. I type too slow.