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Game of Thrones 4.3 - "Breaker of Chains" - Rate and discuss

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Was I imagining things, or did they reedit the scene between 4x02 and 4x03? In 4x02, don't Sansa and Dontos leave while Joffrey is still choking?
 
^They don't, actually, though I would have sworn they did myself. Dontos tells Sansa they have to leave right away, but the action cuts back to Joffrey and Cersei before we see either of them move.
 
GRRM has answered to someone's question (on his blog) about the changes to this scene. It's in the comment section of a completely different scene:

http://grrm.livejournal.com/367116.html?thread=19030284#t19030284

This is off topic here. This is the section for comments about Junot Diaz and Anne Perry and the Cocteau's author program.

Since a lot of people have been emailing me about this, however, I will reply... but please, take any further discussion of the show to one of the myriad on-line forums devoted to that. I do not want long detailed dissections and debates about the TV series here on my blog.

As for your question... I think the "butterfly effect" that I have spoken of so often was at work here. In the novels, Jaime is not present at Joffrey's death, and indeed, Cersei has been fearful that he is dead himself, that she has lost both the son and the father/ lover/ brother. And then suddenly Jaime is there before her. Maimed and changed, but Jaime nonetheless. Though the time and place is wildly inappropriate and Cersei is fearful of discovery, she is as hungry for him as he is for her.

The whole dynamic is different in the show, where Jaime has been back for weeks at the least, maybe longer, and he and Cersei have been in each other's company on numerous occasions, often quarreling. The setting is the same, but neither character is in the same place as in the books, which may be why Dan & David played the sept out differently. But that's just my surmise; we never discussed this scene, to the best of my recollection.

Also, I was writing the scene from Jaime's POV, so the reader is inside his head, hearing his thoughts. On the TV show, the camera is necessarily external. You don't know what anyone is thinking or feeling, just what they are saying and doing.

If the show had retained some of Cersei's dialogue from the books, it might have left a somewhat different impression -- but that dialogue was very much shaped by the circumstances of the books, delivered by a woman who is seeing her lover again for the first time after a long while apart during which she feared he was dead. I am not sure it would have worked with the new timeline.

That's really all I can say on this issue. The scene was always intended to be disturbing... but I do regret if it has disturbed people for the wrong reasons.

Now, if you please, I'd appreciate it if we could get back to Junot Diaz and Anne Perry and the subjects of the original post.
 
People are upset because a) it adapted a scene from the book but totally changed its nature and b) people like Jaime partly because of his "redemptive" arc.

Personally, I think Jaime's redeemableness is overrated. He's done good things and bad things but let's not forget some of his bad things are especially bad--like trying to murder Bran and actually murdering his cousin. I don't think those are moments of moral weakness but rather the essence of his character: he always does what needs to be done to serve his own ends, whether it's preserving himself, escaping captivity, or convincing himself he has something more than shit for honor.
 
People are upset because a) it adapted a scene from the book but totally changed its nature and b) people like Jaime partly because of his "redemptive" arc.

Meh, there doesn't seem to be the same level of angst about deviation from the comics within the fan base for TWD. IMO people need to get over it and let the director tell the story how he wants - and if rape scenes between a brother and sister engaging in a long term incestuous relationship is too heavy there is always the much lighter fair of Dancing with the Stars on regular Network TV.
 
I never really liked Jaime but it seemed to me in the previous season that his character was been pushed into a different light and shown as someone who is not as bad as we think. Again this is Game of Thrones, anything can happen and I don't know about the books but I still have that TV mind set that we are supposed to like him now instead of hating him and not cheering the fact that his hand got cut off but instead that he has to remake himself. It's one thing to manipulate an audience's expectations about story and another to make us confused over a character's motivations when his arc has been clearly a personal one...

In any case, it's one fu*ked up family.
 
The fact that it's a change from the books, and one that muddles a character arc that had previously been clear, is certainly a big factor in the controversy, but it's not the whole story. The thing about being a show that takes huge risks is that in doing so you open yourself up to criticism, and people have always questioned the way Game of Thrones (and for that matter A Song of Ice and Fire) walks the line between portraying violence against women for valid, important thematic reasons and portraying violence against women for the sake of being gritty and shocking. At what point has there been enough rape, murder, and other violation of women's agency for the message to have been fully communicated? At what point does it become grossness for the sake of grossness?

There's also the fact that no one involved in making the scene seems to have intended it as an unambiguous rape even though that's how it reads to a lot of audience members and by most standards of consent. Which raises further questions about how elevated the show's sensibility really is, and how good it really is at respecting female perspectives and making female viewers feel included. It may be that there's some kind of follow-up that will clarify everything, but for right now it's not surprising that old discussions have been rekindled. Especially since the show's a hot media topic, and everyone wants to get attention by talking about it. No shocking murder this week, so the Jaime/Cersei scene is the biggest talking point.
 
The fact that it's a change from the books, and one that muddles a character arc that had previously been clear, is certainly a big factor in the controversy, but it's not the whole story. The thing about being a show that takes huge risks is that in doing so you open yourself up to criticism, and people have always questioned the way Game of Thrones (and for that matter A Song of Ice and Fire) walks the line between portraying violence against women for valid, important thematic reasons and portraying violence against women for the sake of being gritty and shocking. At what point has there been enough rape, murder, and other violation of women's agency for the message to have been fully communicated? At what point does it become grossness for the sake of grossness?

The story is set in a fictional mid evil setting. Women had virtually zero rights in this fictional time period. But I still don't get why this is any more disturbing then say, Lord of Rings which averaged one violent death after another on average every 4 minutes of the film

Rape scene = bad
Mass murder = well that's entertainment.
 
The story is set in a fictional mid evil setting. Women had virtually zero rights in this fictional time period. But I still don't get why this is any more disturbing then say, Lord of Rings which averaged one violent death after another on average every 4 minutes of the film

Rape scene = bad
Mass murder = well that's entertainment.

You are making a false analogy. An excess of either sex and violence is not good. Also see the thread on Man of Steel to see people not tolerating excessive violence.
 
People are upset because a) it adapted a scene from the book but totally changed its nature and b) people like Jaime partly because of his "redemptive" arc.

Meh, there doesn't seem to be the same level of angst about deviation from the comics within the fan base for TWD. IMO people need to get over it and let the director tell the story how he wants - and if rape scenes between a brother and sister engaging in a long term incestuous relationship is too heavy there is always the much lighter fair of Dancing with the Stars on regular Network TV.

I don't know what's more irritating, your constant need to compare everything to some other completely unrelated property (but hey, at least you're branching out from only comparing things to Star Trek), your arrogant dismissiveness of fans discussing this issue, or the fact that you've been watching the show for all of five minutes but have already started telling other fans to get lost if they want to talk about something you don't like.
 
I guess that's mid evil as opposed to early evil or late evil? ;)

It's exactly the problem with Game of Thrones (and A Song of Ice and Fire isn't blameless in this regard either) that it makes some people confuse "Women had fewer legal rights in the past than they do today, generally speaking, and sometimes suffered for it" with "Women were brutalized at every opportunity in the most awful ways imaginable." An audience doesn't need to be shown the latter to grasp the former. I very much doubt that anyone who has watched the first 32 episodes of Game of Thrones finally smacked their foreheads after last night and said, "Wow, women were oppressed in medieval Western Europe!"

The Lord of the Rings trilogy is, of course, not trying to be disturbing in the visceral way that Game of Thrones is. So naturally people are less disturbed by its comparatively higher body count. Which is a problem in itself, but it's not a surprising one. Scale is a factor too: something that happens between two established characters generates more emotional response than something that happens to a bunch of CGI-duplicated extras.
 
I don't know what's more irritating, your constant need to compare everything to some other completely unrelated property (but hey, at least you're branching out from only comparing things to Star Trek), your arrogant dismissiveness of fans discussing this issue, or the fact that you've been watching the show for all of five minutes but have already started telling other fans to get lost if they want to talk about something you don't like.

Robert, chill. I'm not trying to be dismissive of anyone's opinion but rather discuss it. I'm more surprised there is so much chatter about this issue on more main stream news media sites then in here.

But apparently among GoT fas there is a much bigger expectation to adhere to the books whereas within the TWD fan base it's OK to wander completely away form the comics.

Again in my opinion this scene was no or more less disturbing than any other of the shock scenes we've seen thus far. Theon's castration was equally as 'disturbing,' in terms of a shock value.
 
I don't know what's more irritating, your constant need to compare everything to some other completely unrelated property (but hey, at least you're branching out from only comparing things to Star Trek), your arrogant dismissiveness of fans discussing this issue, or the fact that you've been watching the show for all of five minutes but have already started telling other fans to get lost if they want to talk about something you don't like.

Robert, chill.

Wrong guy. :p
 
Christopher Orr at The Atlantic has a good write-up on how Game of Thrones got here:

Christopher Orr said:
[Given] the responses by Graves and Coster-Waldau, it seems more likely that everyone involved somehow believed they'd constructed a scene that was more unpleasant than the book's but still at least moderately ambiguous, rather than the not-at-all-ambiguous scene that viewers saw. How does a mistake like this occur? My best guess is that Benioff and Weiss indulged in their longstanding penchant for ramping up the sex and violence of their source material, and this time they did it so carelessly that even they didn't recognize where it had taken them.

...

It's a tendency I've often complained about -- really, the one area where Benioff and Weiss's instincts seem consistently off -- and judging from viewer reaction to the Jaime-Cersei scene, it seems finally to have caught up with them. My assumption is that the showrunners took a look at the scene in the book and thought, well, this is depraved. (Which it is: two twins having sex over their son's corpse.) They further assumed that we viewers already knew that the Jaime-Cersei relationship was grotesque at its core. (Which it also is: decades-long incest resulting in three children, while Cersei secretly aborts pregnancies by her husband.) And they decided -- as they so often seem to where sex and violence are concerned -- let's take this up to 11. As a book reader, my immediate response to the scene was not an astonished "Oh my god, I can't believe Jaime did that," but a resigned "Here they go again, taking something horrible and making it even worse."

The problem is that in this instance Benioff and Weiss's alteration wasn't merely one of degree, but one of kind. You can take Joffrey the sadist and make him 20 percent more explicitly sadistic and it doesn't meaningfully alter audiences' impressions of him. Ditto with Ramsay the super-sadist. But this is different. Yes, Jaime and Cersei's relationship is wrong and transgressive in innumerable ways. But this tweak didn't make it wrong-er or more transgressive. Instead it fundamentally altered impressions of Jaime, who had until now gradually emerged as one of the most sympathetic characters on the show. I sincerely doubt -- though again, I could be wrong -- that this is what Benioff and Weiss intended to do.
 
I don't know what's more irritating, your constant need to compare everything to some other completely unrelated property (but hey, at least you're branching out from only comparing things to Star Trek), your arrogant dismissiveness of fans discussing this issue, or the fact that you've been watching the show for all of five minutes but have already started telling other fans to get lost if they want to talk about something you don't like.

Robert, chill. I'm not trying to be dismissive of anyone's opinion but rather discuss it. I'm more surprised there is so much chatter about this issue on more main stream news media sites then in here.

Whatever surprise you feel is really no one's issue but your own. And yeah, that was Locutus, not me. ;)

But apparently among GoT fas there is a much bigger expectation to adhere to the books whereas within the TWD fan base it's OK to wander completely away form the comics.

That's not the issue at all. This show stopped following the books closely in the second season and it's only diverged further since. People don't generally complain about the show being different from the books, as they realize it's a different animal. Rather, one of the questions is whether yet another depiction of rape was necessary here. I don't think one can easily argue it's not in Jaime's character to do it, but is it necessary to show it? As Brendan Moody said, both the books and the show draw flak for their repeated portrayals of violence--especially sexual violence--against women. Martin claims he's just being "realistic" but that justification only allows for so much. The show has actually avoided some of the worst excesses of the books, if you can believe that. The storyline with Arya at Harrenhal, for instance, was much worse in the books, with the Tickler performing far worse tortures than portrayed on the show and Gregor Clegane and his men pretty much raping all the women at their leisure. The riot that followed Myrcella's sendoff was worse in the books, too. Instead of Sansa being nearly raped, another character (not featured in the show) actually was raped, repeatedly and graphically. There are quite a few moments like that in the books and I've come to just skimming past them because I don't feel like reading yet another description of one or more women being brutally raped for absolutely no reason.

Again in my opinion this scene was no or more less disturbing than any other of the shock scenes we've seen thus far. Theon's castration was equally as 'disturbing,' in terms of a shock value.

Clearly, some people disagree, and no one is particularly obligated to justify their disagreement to you.
 
RE: Allyn Gibson's posted article:

Good write up, but I don't really find Jaime all that sympathetic. Which is not to say he's not an enjoyable character, mind you, but every time the slightest bit of sympathy for his situation creeps up, I just remind myself that he pushed a kid out of a high window and paralyzed him to conceal his sister-fucking ways.
 
I think the problem is that a lot of people plain forgot him pushing Bran from a window. One of my friends admitted just that. She had grown to like him and didn't really care for Bran so she unintentionally overlooked that detail.

But yeah, this is a guy who tried to hide an incestuous affair by attempting to murder a child. The true irony of his character is that his greatest badge of shame--being the Kingslayer--is probably the single most noble act he ever took.
 
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