Board Thread:Questions and Answers/@comment-29907559-20161114224921/@comment-5014364-20161114235328

1 - There is rape in the novels and several of them in the TV series directly correspond to the novels, i.e. Dothraki raiders raping Lhazareen women in the background in Season 1.

2 - The TV writers Benioff & Weiss invented several rape scenes not in the books. Usually their go-to defense is "there's rape in the novels" - when in fact our specific criticism is that it makes no sense for a specific situation. Or, if it does (Craster's Wives) that they filmed it gratuitously.

3 - See Breaker of Chains/Jaime-Cersei sex scene. The TV writers got into a lot of trouble for the alleged rape scene between Jaime and Cersei in episode 4.3. Succinctly:


 * The scene was just so poorly edited that what was intended to be a consensual sex scene looks like a rape scene. Yes, they are that woefully incompetent.  Forced between either admitting "we are this incompetent but we're sorry please forgive us, we'll re-edit the scene to fix it" OR "pretend we made a controversial change on purpose so people don't realize we screwed up", they chose the later.
 * Months later, once the DVD release came and went and the writers made zero comment about it, the actors involved started openly stating that they were never instructed it was a rape scene at all, nor did they play it as such.
 * If you freeze-frame the scene, you can even see the actress pulling him in closer to passionately kiss him - for a fraction of a second each. Then the camera pulls behind the altar so you can't clearly see she's consenting or anything.  This was a massive screwup of camera editing.
 * Director Alex Graves specifically screwed up, saying he had final cut on the editing. To his knowledge Benioff and Weiss didn't bother to review a this two minute, sensitive scene.  Instead, as confirmed by the actor who played Oberyn Martell, during filming of that episode they spent a lot of time playing iPhone games with naked female extras in the green room (look it up, it's in the Season 4 behind the scenes featurettes).
 * They were surprised with a question about it during a live Q&A at the Oxford Union panel right before Season 5. Very drunk, Benioff just repeated the question back at the audience member, without really confirming or denying what the heck he meant by it (pathetically fumbling out "we did that because we felt it was a thing he would do").
 * Given that it is blatantly, comically obvious that Benioff and Weiss never intended this, the Admins of Game of Thrones Wiki just plain refused to dignify their cowardly attempt to avoid responsibility for this, and put up a disclaimer saying "in canon, Jaime isn't raping Cersei, the camerawork and editing in this scene is just awful, and we tacitly assume/demand that HBO go over their heads to re-edit and re-release the scene in a remastered version" (particularly on their streaming services and reruns). Cersei doesn't even react as if she was just raped in the next episode, nor is there any indication that was ever their intention.
 * Yes, every major critic and review site up to and including the front page of the New York Times perceived that it looked like Jaime was raping Cersei. This cannot be attributed to poor audience interpretation.
 * This is not denying that it looked like a rape scene - denial would be if we didn't have the disclaimer and demand for a re-edit. As an online encyclopedia there's no "maybe" when it comes to rape, NOR were they trying to be deliberately ambiguous.  And to say otherwise would only help the two of them hide their failure.

4 - They completely omitted Sansa Stark's storyline from book four onwards and instead had her marry and get raped by Ramsay Bolton in the TV show - who rapes a different woman in the novels.

At first, I thought they did this for shock value. I was wrong.

From listening to the DVD commentary, the TV writers have truly lost touch with reality, and genuinely believe that when "Sophie Turner, the actress" is giving a "strong performance" then her character is also "strong" and thus "a player"....even if she's not actually affecting the plot. The division between character and actor broke down for them, you see.

The problem is that an actor can have a "strong performance" even when their character is being marginalized or tortured. Consider that in Season 2, they were criticized for not giving Catelyn Stark enough to do...as in "affecting the plot". So in Season 3, they invented a big scene in which Catelyn Stark is crying about Jon Snow of all people, who she hasn't seen in two seasons. In retrospect....I think that was them genuinely trying to "give her more to do"....but they gave the actress "more to do" in a negative scene. It makes no difference to them anymore.

But they're not just awards-baiting, its worse than that. They didn't see the other character Jeyne Poole being raped by Ramsay in the book and go "wow, this is a great dark moment, what drama!"...they looked at it with the eyes of TV producers, who experience the show as it is filmed on-set, and apparently though "wow...someone is going to act the hell out of this! better give it to Sophie as a gift!" --- Given the choice between having a giant crying scene, or being marginalized as Loras Tyrell was after Season 2....would an actor honestly say no? Not that they had much choice.

In the Season 6 DVD commentary, Brygan Cogman (who got forced into this by the 2 showrunners) is repeating stock excuses you can tell they fed him, about how "Sansa isn't weak in this, she's strong, she's never broken and is resisting Ramsay the whole time!"....instead of rising to be a political leader in the Vale as in the novels.

Remember when they kept saying in the buildup to Season 5, "Sansa is a big player this season"? What the heck did that mean? They kept saying she was "a player", and by that I assumed "politician or mover in the war".

....well Cogman's excuses that Sansa was still "strong" fell flat when minutes later, he says, and dear god I'm quoting this verbatim:


 * "Theon and Sansa are both strong players in Season 5"

The terms "strong" and "player" lost all meaning, you see.

And again, they said they consider Theon "a player" in Season 5....when he wasn't "fighting back" against Ramsay at all, was indeed "broken" beyond the point of resistance...they're just describing Alfie Allen's performance.

The joke I use is that just as "hold the door" morphed into "hold-door" and then "hodor", the phrase "strong" morphed for them as well: they think that when the actors are giving a strong emotive performance, the character is automatically "strong".

This is why they increasingly have scenes with non-verbal acting: to better show off the actors' emotive talents. It's not that they can't think of good dialogue without the novels - they've had good dialogue before that wasn't in the books. It's that they're so in awe of their own Emmy-level cast that they're reordering the TV show to give them giant "dramatic" scenes....even if its crying or being raped or being tortured. Just empty histrionics.

But again, they're not awards-baiting: repeatedly, they've genuinely expressed that they feel they're responsible for their own actors' non-verbal emotive performances. Word for word, Jon Snow in the Battle of the Bastards. Many reviews (such as BryndenBFish of Reddit) criticized that Jon Snow is acting like an idiot and his actions make no sense, other than to give Jon Snow an amazing unbroken one minute long tracking shot charging headlong into battle. In the "Inside the Episode" featurettes, Benioff and Weiss openly praise, quote, "and it's got minimal dialogue!" --- but they weren't putting the camera on "Jon Snow" the fictional character but on "Kit Harington" the actor. Jon's actions make no sense - because Jon Snow isn't a real person. The whole point of rewriting the story like this was "how do we put the camera on Kit's facing doing heavy non-verbal acting?"

The fictional story doesn't exist for them anymore, you see. They're just showing off their actors. And worst of all, in the insane DVD commentary, they do really think this is "a storyarc": "Of course Sansa has a storyarc in Season 5, look how strong Sophie's performance is when she's crying in the finale".

So their two principles became, not consciously:


 * 1 - If an actor is giving a "strong emotive performance" the fictional character they are portraying is also "strong" (even if they're being tortured, raped, or seeing their loved ones die)
 * 2 - If the non-verbal acting/character is thus "strong", the scene is strong - and therefore we the produces made "strong writing", worthy of awards of artistic merit such as the Emmys.

Strong emoting --> strong character --> strong story --> strong writing.

Hold the door --> Hold-door --> Hodor

Basically after the success of the Red Wedding at the end of Season 3 they started resting on their laurels, were emboldened by sudden international fame, thought they could do no wrong. But also pressured to match their previous success. As with many chart-topping musicians we've seen too many times, they started drinking heavily under the stress. Benioff and Weiss have only made two major public appearances in the past two years: Oxford Union panel 2015 and San Diego Comic Con 2016.

They showed up openly drunk to both of them.

Moreover, we keep getting reports...by which I mean, major publication interviews with cast and crew....who mention in passing what big party animals the showrunners are or have become. Wasting hours getting drunk and playing iPhone games with naked women when they could be writing or reviewing scenes. Indeed, Benioff and Weiss's opening comments at the SDCC 2016 panel were "we're very drunk from doing vodka shots right before the panel, we're having difficulty even speaking coherently, please don't ask us any questions". This happened. It's like Tim Cook showing up to his own Apple rollout announcement. You do not show up openly drunk to your own SDCC Comic Con panel. I haven't seen these men explicitly sober at a public event since Season 3. And on top of that they're surrounded by Yes Men, same old story: "Surely this must make sense so we'll go ahead filming it, the showrunners must be going somewhere with this".

Though push comes to shove, they're not. When the fan Q&A at SDCC 2016 openly asked "Why doesn't Sansa just tell Jon about the Vale army, this makes no sense in any scenario"....Sophie Turner just sheepishly said no one ever explained that to her either, she was just acting out the lines, but hey, you know, it was necessary for the "dramatic satisfaction" of her delivering those angry lines and building up the tension about it. Benioff and Weiss just sat there with a sheepish look, too drunk to interject anything, though I doubt they wanted to anyway.

So they pretty much admit "the characters' actions make no sense, we did it to be dramatically satisfying; even the actors don't know why the characters do this".

well, they had Sansa not tell Jon about the Vale army purely because they wanted to see Sophie Turner, the actress, emoting the tension of that scene, particularly the non-verbal emoting she does with her fact with angry looks.

Basically the rape scenes they increasingly started inventing were the same principle: there is no in-universe explanation for what Littlefinger could possibly hope to gain from marrying Sansa off to the Boltons, they were just maneuvering Sophie Turner into a position where she could give a stunning Emmy-level non-verbal emotive performance during a rape scene. The fact that this made no sense for her character or ongoing story arc was irrelevant - "but you know, dramatic satisfaction".

They didn't invent a scene of Sansa getting raped because they think rape is drama. They invented it because they wanted to shill Sophie Turner's acting ability.

This extends to other invented rape scenes....Gilly and the Night's Watch springs to mind as the only other major one, given that it literally happened in the episode immediately following the Sansa/Ramsay rape.

Thinking on it, this didn't happen "because we wanted to show that the Night's Watch has rapers in it" (they already did with the return to Craster's Keep arc invented for Season 4). It wasn't even so much "we wanted to give Gilly and Samwell something to do"....given that they do have sex in the novels, but it's just a quiet scene where they get drunk mourning Maester Aemon's death.

...They invented a near-rape assault for Gilly and had Samwell defend her from it....because they wanted to give a big emotive scene for their actors. Wow, look, Hannah Murray and Bradley were acting the hell out of that scene. What purpose does it serve? The emotive performance justifies everything, it's "dramatically satisfying".

These changes increasingly happened in Season 5, because it was immediately after the Red Wedding. I that sounds weird because the Red Wedding was in Season 3, remember the overlap between seasons: by the time each new season airs, they've already written the scripts for the next season, then film them in summer. So the Red Wedding in Season 3 became a major hit in Spring...but they'd already written all of Season 4, and filmed it the following Summer. Yes there is a scene here or a scene there that they tweaked during the actual filming process, fitting the pattern, but the point they outright started rewriting major plotlines was in Season 5....because that's the first season they truly "wrote" after the Red Wedding, and were emboldened by their success to think they are invincible.

Thus their entire driving concern became "how do we maneuver the actors into such a position where they will give big emotive performances?" -- regardless of the fictional characters, characterization, character arcs, story arcs, etc.

NOT JUST for invented rape scenes. That was the most obvious. You see they don't have multiple bad decisions about the TV show: Dorne being terrible, too many rape scenes, Jon acting like an idiot - it's all one cause:  "how do we push the actors into positions where they have big emotive scenes?" - all of these bad decisions are just different symptoms of one fundamental flaw in the head writers, repeating itself over and over again.

And the worst part is they often outright admit to this in the DVD commentary. I went back and checked: with growing horror, every time there was a major change from the books to the TV show, they gave the motivation in terms of giving the actors "more to do", not ''the fictional characters'. And when I say "every change" I don't mean most -- I mean every change. Dear god, I stumbled onto the single key to explaining everything that was ever changed in the entire TV show:


 * Why does Robb Star have an invented love subplot with "Talisa", when in the books he married Jeyne Westerling out of honor because he had sex with her; it wasn't a love story? ---Well, I checked, and they explained it as "we really liked Richard Madden in Season 1 and wanted to give him more to do in Season 2" -- they think in terms of Richard Madden, the actor, not Robb Stark, the fictional character.
 * They actually wrote bigger roles for Grey Worm and Missandei starting in Season 4 because they wanted to give the actors more to do. I have this quoted on their character pages.  Not "we think Grey Worm is an interesting character" but "we think Jacob Anderson is a great actor, let's write more scenes for him!" -- which is sort of the right thing for the wrong reason.

Yes I actually thought Grey Worm and Missandei were also interesting characters, and that the romance they wrote for them was a good idea. At times it's a good idea to expand a role based on a good performance - so long as you don't rewrite the entire plot to accommodate it. Grey Worm and Missandei could be having a romance "off screen" if it doesn't affect Daenerys. Have Ellaria kill off the rest of the Martells? Yeah, that affects the plot -- and notice that such massive changes only started happening in Season 5 after they got emboldened by "we're international celebrity TV producers for making the Red Wedding which GRRM wrote first!"


 * Why is Ellaria Sand being treated as the main character of the Dorne arc? Not just condensing her with Arianne?  And bizarrely wanting "revenge" by killing everyone and walking around yelling at lot? -- Well, D&D openly admit, verbatim quote, "we're huge fans of Indira Varma from HBO's Rome, so we reconceived the role starting in Season 5 to better show off her acting talents".  Which, again, is "look at Indira Varma reading off angry dialogue and emoting it heavily with empty histrionics" -- the actual "plot logic" or "characterization" has ceased to exist.  What matters is "heavy emoting".
 * Having Stannis Baratheon in a farcically condensed subplot ending with his death in Season 5 (for all we know, Stannis might defeat and kill Ramsay in the books) - in the DVD, they keep fawning over "in the script we wrote 'Stephan has an 'F my life' look on his face"; later, Stephan Dillane said he had no idea why any of this was happening to Stannis, why Stannis was acting like this, nor did the writers explain it to him. It was because they fell in love with the mental concept of showing off Dillane's non-verbal acting ability when Stannis gives an "oh crap!" look on his face as the Bolton army comes.  The fact that it required multiple implausible or comedic things to happen to get there? ("all I need is 20 good men!") was irrelevant.
 * Theon having yet another scene being tortured by Ramsay, long after it became redundant - wow, look at Alfie Allen's acting ability
 * Sansa Stark being raped by Ramsay - wow look at Sophie's strong acting performance

And this extends to other changes, some we can infer:
 * They consistently praise invented for TV character Olly....even though he has no speaking lines and his actions aren't often logical. Because their emphasis is on the non-verbal acting ability of their cast members, not "plot" or "scripted dialogue".  "Wow, doesn't everyone think Olly is a great dark character?" --well how would we know? He has no speaking lines! (okay he has a few with Sam in one episode in Season 5, but none in Season 4 and none in Season 6....so it was weird when they continued to praise him in interviews in Season 6, a character who literally does not talk).
 * Why is Locke suddenly sent to kill Jon Snow in an invented return to Craster's Keep arc which was kind of poorly written? They said, "we really liked the actor in Season 3 and wanted to bring him back"
 * Why is Catelyn Stark having a big scene crying over Jon Snow in Season 3? -- "Wow, look at Michelle Fairley's amazing acting performance"

And it just goes on; every decision. They're not avoiding scripted dialogue because they can't write - that's the goal! Rely heavily on the over-acting of the cast members' non-verbal performances!

So while yes, we can tell HBO yelled at them "no more invented rape scenes" starting in Season 6 (as Podeswa admitted but D&D immediately denied).....that's only the most egregious case of the same thing.

Everything short of rape - Ellaria nonsensically killing off the other Martells,