User talk:ArticXiongmao/Jaime/Cersei scene


 * This is a sub-page branching off from the "Notes" section of the main article for the third episode of Season 4, "Breaker of Chains".

Controversy arose from the sex scene between Jaime Lannister and Cersei Lannister in the third episode of Season 4, "Breaker of Chains". A near-universal interpretation of the scene was that it seemed to portray Jaime raping Cersei, ranging from io9 and the A.V. club, Entertainment Weekly and Time magazine  , to the front page of Yahoo News and The New York Times.

Even more polemically, the same sexual encounter in the books is usually interpreted as consensual. While TV-first viewers were offended, book-first readers didn't understand why the TV show was apparently turning the act into a rape —particularly because, arguably, it didn't fit Jaime’s character and redemptive story arc. Unhelpfully, the TV writers were largely quiet about the issue.

This article's contention is that neither the actors, the director, nor the writers ever intended for the scene to depict a rape, and that said implication came about as a result of mistakes in camerawork and film editing. It is also concluded that the writers became worried that publicly stating that it wasn't supposed to be rape would gravely offend viewers who thought so, hence their laconic responses on the issue. Finally, it is surmised that HBO's best course of action would be to re-edit and re-release the scene and episode.

Since "Jaime Lannister" is a fictional construct produced by the interaction of actors, directors, and writers, the pertinent question should not be whether Jaime raped Cersei but whether that was the intent of the creators, and whether the audience perceived it as such. The latter is self-evident —a large number of viewers thought that Jaime was raping Cersei in this scene. The showrunners themselves, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, later acknowledged how stunned they were that even the front page of The New York Times was reporting on the accusation, yet they did not deny that it looked like rape to a large number of viewers and critics. As for the former, all evidence indicates that the creators did not intend to depict a rape. That being the case, what is the audience to consider "actually happened" within the TV continuity, as a persistent fictional universe?

Context: The Jaime/Cersei sex scene in the books
In the A Song of Ice and Fire novels, Jaime only returns to King's Landing soon after Joffrey dies. The TV series shifted his return to weeks earlier, so he is present for Joffrey's death, changing the dynamic. In the book version (A Storm of Swords, Chapter 62, Jaime VII,) when Jaime encounters Cersei in the Great Sept for Joffrey's funeral it is the first time that they have seen each other in over a year. Cersei is worried that people will see them having sex, in front of their son's corpse no less, yet Jaime does not stop his advances, which also makes the scene troubling and problematic. However, in the end Cersei does consents quite emphatically:


 * "She kissed him. A light kiss, the merest brush of her lips on his, but he could feel her tremble as he slid his arms around her. “I am not whole without you." There was no tenderness in the kiss he returned to her, only hunger. Her mouth opened for his tongue. "No," she said weakly when his lips moved down her neck, "not here. The septons..."


 * "The Others can take the septons." He kissed her again, kissed her silent, kissed her until she moaned. Then he knocked the candles aside and lifted her up onto the Mother's altar, pushing up her skirts and the silken shift beneath. She pounded on his chest with feeble fists, murmuring about the risk, the danger, about their father, about the septons, about the wrath of gods. He never heard her. He undid his breeches and climbed up and pushed her bare white legs apart. One hand slid up her thigh and underneath her smallclothes. When he tore them away, he saw that her moon's blood was on her. but it made no difference.


 * "Hurry," she was whispering now, "quickly, quickly, now, do it now, do me now. Jaime Jaime Jaime." Her hands helped guide him. "Yes," Cersei said as he thrust, "my brother, sweet brother, yes, like that, yes, I have you, you’re home now, you're home now, you’re home." She kissed his ear and stroked his short bristly hair. Jaime lost himself in her flesh. He could feel Cersei’s heart beating in time with his own, and the wetness of blood and seed where they were joined."

Meanwhile, in the TV version, Cersei doesn't consent verbally:
 * Jaime: "You're a hateful woman. Why have the gods made me love a hateful woman?"
 * Cersei: "Jaime, not here, please. Please."
 * Cersei: "Stop it. Stop it. Stop. No. Stop it. Stop. Stop. Stop. It's not right. It's not right. It's not right."
 * Jaime: "I don't care."
 * Cersei: "Don't. Jaime, don't.
 * Jaime: "I don't care. I don't care."

What George R.R. Martin had to say
Author George R.R. Martin suggested that including some of Cersei's consenting dialogue from the books might have left a somewhat different impression, and that Benioff and Weiss never discussed the scene with him, to the best of his recollection. The lack of discussion over this apparently dramatic change points to the likely prospect that the showrunners did not write the sex scene as a rape in the outline that Martin read, nor in the finished scripts.

What the Scriptwriters initially had to say
Once the controversy arose, writers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss remained conspicuously silent for months on the question of what their intent in this sex scene was. However, in HBO's "Inside the Episode" featurette for "Breaker of Chains" filmed months before and released the same day that the episode aired, Benioff did briefly comment on the scene:


 * "It becomes a really kind of horrifying scene, because you see, obviously, Joffrey’s body right there, and you see that Cersei is resisting this. She’s saying no, and he’s forcing himself on her. So it was a really uncomfortable scene, and a tricky scene to shoot."

Both TheMarySue.com and Vulture.com expressed the view that Benioff's statement was too brief and vague to be sure what he meant by it, especially weighing it against interviews that the episode's director Alex Graves gave. When Vulture.com interviewed Alex Graves within a week of the episode's premiere, they reached out to HBO to contact Benioff or Weiss so they could clarify what exactly their public position was, but a representative for the network said they were unavailable. In fact, they did not made any further statements on the content of the scene until just before Season 5 began Pointedly, the Blu-ray boxset for Season 4 had a commentary track for every episode except for "Breaker of Chains", as if the writers were making a very concerted effort to avoid discussing the scene in question.

Staff writer Bryan Cogman did not work on the script for "Breaker of Chains", but as part of writers' room discussions (which only involve himself, Benioff, Weiss, and Dave Hill), had Benioff and Weiss intended it as a rape scene they would have told him about it - particularly because he wrote the immediately following episode "Oathkeeper" and would have to know how Cersei and Jaime were interacting in the aftermath of such a scene. In an interview with Observer just before Season 5 began, Cogman was asked about the Jaime/Cersei sex scene, but declined to comment, except to say that he didn't write it, his superiors Benioff and Weiss did, so it would be out of place for him to comment on it instead of them - given that, as he put it, they had not "publicly" made a significant comment about it since it aired in early Season 4.


 * Question: The enormous, intense audience brings additional scrutiny, and the reaction can get very vociferous. I’m thinking of “that scene” from last season with Jaime and Cersei in the sept next to Joffrey’s body. Book purists felt the scene altered the character dynamic, people concerned primarily with social justice issues felt it excused sexual assault, and people parsed every word Dan, Dave, director Alex Graves and actors Lena Headey and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau said about it for what the scene was “really” doing. If you can speak to it specifically, what happened there?:


 * Cogman: "My bosses, the showrunners, haven’t publicly commented on it. So while there’s a lot I could say about it and the media’s reaction to it...I don’t feel it’s appropriate."

What the Cast members had to say
Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Jaime Lannister) and Lena Headey (Cersei Lannister) both eventually denied that they ever played this as a rape scene, and also denied that they ever received any instruction that it was a rape scene. This further implies that the script that Benioff and Weiss wrote contained no written instructions that it was a rape scene - the result of which is written proof that even Benioff and Weiss could never have intended for this to be a rape scene.

Coster-Waldau and Headey delayed a long time before answering questions about this sex scene, which led to a large amount of confusion among major reviewer and critics through the rest of Season 4. Coster-Waldau explained months later, in his Entertainment Weekly interview, that they were afraid of offending some viewers who might misinterpret a denial that this was their intent as an attempt to fault viewers for being offended.

In late April 2014, the week after the episode aired, both Coster-Waldau and Headey were asked about the scene in separate interviews, but gave only vague and hesitant responses, seeming to not want to speak for the scriptwriters.

In June 2014, TheDailyBeast.com, Lena Headey said about the sex scene that:


 * "She wanted him. She’s saying “no” for many reasons. She’s saying “no” because of the fucking pain of her loss—she can’t bear what she’s feeling. She was saying, “No, no… not here,” but a lot of stuff was about how, right in that moment, she couldn’t bear to feel what she was feeling and wanted him to take some of that away."

Eventually, in January 2015, both actors appeared in a Q&A panel at the FanX convention in Salt Lake City. When directly asked about this scene in an unprepared question, Coster-Waldau explained that when they were filming the scene, he thought the characters having an intimate moment next to their dead son's corpse is what would cause the outrage, and it never even occurred to either of them that the sex would be construed as controversial. This is the reason why the actors and writers pervasively made stray comments that it was a "tricky" scene to film and they had reservations about it - not because they thought it was a rape scene. Even book readers  who acknowledge that it was consensual in the books still consider it somewhat disturbing that they had sex in front of their son's corpse.

The actors' exact words were:


 * Nikolaj Coster-Waldau: "Maybe I was just being naive, but I never thought of it as rape, I thought of it as two people that had a long, very physical relationship and they were both in a very extreme emotional state and needed something that was expressed in that way.  I didn't see it as rape."


 * Lena Headey: "That sense of loss and not being able to stem your grief. Like Nick said, they've had this long history and it was a moment where she needed him, that's how I was playing it.  The confusion was a just mother who had lost her son. We didn't set out for it to be taken as such [as rape], but I guess people see what they see."

Speaking again in early 2015 with Entertainment Weekly, on the set in Dubrovnik, Croatia during filming for Season 5, Headey again reiterated:

"It’s that terrible thing as a women—talking about something as horrendous as rape and dismissing it, which I’m not. But we never discussed it as that. It was a woman in grief for her dead child, and the father of the child—who happens to be her brother—who never really acknowledged the children is standing with her. We’ve all experienced grief. There’s a moment of wanting to fill a void, and that is often very visceral, physical. That, for me, is where she was at. There was an emotional block, and [her brother] was just a bit of a drug for her.”

Entertainment Weekly also spoke to Coster-Waldau about the scene while he was filming for Season 5 in Spain, and combined it with their report of Headey's comments. He also said:

"Coster-Waldau was initially hesitant to talk about this subject, as is to be expected. Sitting in a bar in Spain, the actor said:


 * “I’ve spoken to a lot of people [privately] about this. I haven’t spoken to the people who got the most upset, because they were online. Most people I spoke to got from the scene what we were trying to show—a very complicated relationship, and two people in desperate need for each other. All these emotions going through them, it was never intended to be something where he forced— it wasn’t a rape, and it was never intended to be. But it’s one of those things where you can’t [publicly] say ‘it wasn’t rape,’ because then everybody goes, ‘How can you say it wasn’t rape?!’ But that was definitely not the intention.”

What Director Alex Graves had to say
Alex Graves was the director for the episode and the scene. He also confirmed that he was the editor, and had final cut on how the scene appeared, and there are no alternate or extended cuts of the scene.

In the week after "Breaker of Chains" aired, Graves gave three separate interview - with HitFix.com, Vulture.com, and HollywoodReporter.com. The interviewers found that at times he made poor choices of words - i.e. that the scene was "consensual by the end" but not indicating if he meant the entire scene or just the sex act - but overall, Graves denied that he intended for this to be a rape scene, and denied that the writers ever instructed him to make it one.

In HitFix.com, Graves said:


 * "Well, it becomes consensual by the end, because anything for them ultimately results in a turn-on, especially a power struggle. Nobody really wanted to talk about what was going on between the two characters, so we had a rehearsal that was a blocking rehearsal. And it was very much about the earlier part with Charles (Dance) and the gentle verbal kidnapping of Cersei's last living son. Nikolaj came in and we just went through one physical progression and digression of what they went through, but also how to do it with only one hand, because it was Nikolaj. By the time you do that and you walk through it, the actors feel comfortable going home to think about it. The only other thing I did was that ordinarily, you rehearse the night before, and I wanted to rehearse that scene four days before, so that we could think about everything. And it worked out really well. That's one of my favorite scenes I've ever done."

In Vulture.com, Graves said:


 * Question: "What kinds of things did you talk about with the showrunners in terms of how to play the sex scene between Jaime and Cersei, and why was it changed from how Martin had written it in the book?"
 * Graves: "There wasn't a lot of talk about it, to be honest. Everybody knew and then confirmed with each other this is a sort of animalistic, desperate escape moment in the middle of a tragedy that is twisted enough that only Jaime and Cersei could pull it off. That was all that was really discussed besides laying out the scene physically, and what would and wouldn't happen in terms of protecting the actors. The biggest focus was how to evolve out of the larger scene with Tywin into that. Going from a kidnapping of Cersei’s only living son, into Jaime’s “Hey, I came to visit, and I’m starting to feel like we could have sex” and they have sex. It’s the last place you think anyone's going to have sex. So it was working from Tywin’s exit to that first kiss, which is met with rejection, complicating things for him. It was very tricky.


 * Question: "There’s a lot of chatter about it online this morning. Have you read the books?"
 * Graves: "I have read a lot of the books, but I didn’t read that scene because I wasn’t doing that scene; I was doing the scene our writers wrote. Lena is very conscious of wanting to focus on what the show is doing rather than worrying about something in the books that may or may not affect her.


 * Question: "The reason I ask is because many of the people who have read the books are questioning why the scene was changed. As described in the book, told from Jaime’s point of view, Cersei initially resists but quickly gives her consent."
 * Graves: "I see, I see. What was talked about was that it was not consensual as it began, but Jaime and Cersei, their entire sexual relationship has been based on and interwoven with risk. And Jaime is very much ready to have sex with her because he hasn’t made love to her since he got back, and she’s sort of cajoled into it, and it is consensual. Ultimately, it was meant to be consensual. [The writers] tried to complicate it a little more with her rejecting his new hand and the state of things."


 * Question: "One of my colleagues suggested that the tweak, making Jaime the kind of person who might force himself on Cersei, might have happened to remind viewers that he’s not a morally upright guy, pouring out his heart to Brienne notwithstanding. Was that part of the decision to your knowledge?"
 * Graves: "No. It’s a very, very complicated scene. The thing about it is that Jaime has come home and is trying to convince himself that things are the same: that he and Cersei are a unit, they’re in love, they have sex, everything comes out of that bond. And he’s desperate to reinvigorate that and it has not been working. That’s part of what’s behind him, that lie he’s telling himself, that seasons two and three didn’t happen. So it’s a last act of stupid clinging to what’s been home for him, because it will never be the same. It’s also setting up something that happens in the finale. For Cersei, she is so blindsided and in the middle of the audacious murder of Joffrey at his own wedding, she’s standing there pondering all this with her other son, her sweet son. And her father comes in and basically says, “There is no way you’re going to have control over this kid” and takes him away. So she’s just empty. She’s decimated. What I said is what we just talked about. It’s just fleshing it out.


 * Question: "You say it “becomes consensual by the end.” I rewatched the scene this morning, and it ends with Cersei saying, “It’s not right, it’s not right,” and Jaime on top of her saying, “I don’t care. I don’t care.” It leaves some room for debate. Were you involved with cutting the scene? Was there a longer version of the scene that might have read more like they were both consenting?
 * Graves: "It’s my cut of the scene. The consensual part of it was that she wraps her legs around him, and she’s holding on to the table, clearly not to escape but to get some grounding in what’s going on.-- And also, the other thing that I think is clear before they hit the ground is she starts to make out with him. The big things to us that were so important, and that hopefully were not missed, is that before he rips her undergarment, she’s way into kissing him back. She’s kissing him aplenty."


 * Question: "Right, and part of what she’s resisting is that this is all happening next to Joffrey’s body.
 * Graves: "It’s bizarre, and I highlighted that in how I shot it..."


 * Question: "How does this interaction change Cersei? She’d been raped by Robert. How does Jaime’s aggression in this moment affect her?"
 * Graves: "She needs Jaime to deal with Tyrion. That’s really what that scene is about. It’s her saying, “I want you to kill him,” and Jaime saying, “I don’t see why I would kill him.” That’s probably the main reason she consents, is to pull him in, because she’s results-oriented, period. The only man she really feels any respect and admiration for, and authority for, is her father. Beyond that, she loves her children. I think — and I say this personally — she’s largely using Jaime and he hasn’t figured it out yet."

Weighing these two interviews, TheMarySue.com concluded:

"OK. So going by these two statements it could - could — be read as a case of Graves genuinely intending to film consensual sex but just screwing it up royally. He needed to get some outside eyes on that incredibly sensitive scene and ask their owners “Hey, just curious, you’re getting that Cersei’s consenting, right? No? Crap, back to the editing room.” It’s not like he walked into work that day thinking “I’m going to film one of the show’s fan-favorite characters raping his sister.”"

Several key points were therefore established by these first two interviews:


 * 1) When specifically asked if the showrunners Benioff and Weiss told him anything specific about how to film the scene, Graves stated that "There wasn't a lot of talk about it, to be honest." -- they gave him no specific verbal instructions.
 * 2) Graves stated that he didn't read the book scene (intentionally, due to the ongoing fear of accidentally mixing it up with how the TV version of the storyline is at times slightly different). Graves stated that he was purely working off of the scene as written in the script (and, again, he stated that he received no verbal instructions from Benioff and Weiss that were not in the written script).  This does mean that some of the nuances of the scene from the novels might have been lost on him - or not, depending on how well Benioff and Weiss conveyed written instructions through their script.
 * 3) Graves only really gave the actors instructions on physical movements in the scene (blocking), and said he really didn't discuss with them what their characters were thinking or their emotional states (i.e. meaning he didn't specifically tell Lena Headey, "Cersei is terrified, not consenting to this, and being raped".
 * 4) Graves's phrasing was that "the scene" (not necessarily the sex act) was not "consensual when it began"...but he repeatedly emphasized that it was consensual "by the end" (again, not clear if he meant before or after they were actually having sex). His phrasing is vague, but if he meant emotional consent when Cersei first warns Jaime that they will be caught in such a public place, it is not that different from how the book scene generally played out.
 * 5) Graves also adamantly insists that three things were intended to show Cersei's consent: wrapping her legs around Jaime, that she should be visibly kissing him back, and that at the end she clutches the tablecloth to balance herself to continue to have sex.  This raises two other issues:
 * 6) First, are these actions visible enough in the final cut? Can the audience tell that Cersei is actively kissing Jaime back and consenting?
 * 7) Second, the point is that regardless of whether they were visible or not, at the least, Graves publicly stated that he intended to have Headey perform physical actions in the scene to affirm that Cersei is consenting to it.
 * 8) Graves flatly denied that this was an attempt to make Jaime seem like a morally grey character again, to balance him out after he had been on a redemptive arc for the past season, and make him a more complex character who is not always morally upright. (This is important because before Season 5, Benioff specifically claimed that this was his actual intention when he wrote the script, but that will be addressed in turn below).
 * 9) Graves was the editor of the scene, not a secondary cameraman, and not Benioff or Weiss. He stated "It's my cut of the scene".
 * 10) Graves points out that the idea was for the scene to mirror another scene that occurs in the Season 4 finale...occurred seven episodes later, and airing two months later, which viewers had no way of anticipating. In "The Children", the roles are reversed, and Cersei sexually advances on Jaime while he is in the White Sword tower, and he is telling her to stop for fear they might be caught, but he then gives in to her and consents.
 * 11) Graves stated in as many words that "the main reason Cersei consents" is because she is manipulating Jaime, or rather, she knows that she needs him on her side if she is going to succeed in convincing him to kill Tyrion for her.

That same week, however, Alex Graves also did an interview with HollywoodReporter.com. On reading it, TheMarySue.com pointed out that he bizarrely shifted to describing the scene as "forced sex" and "rape" -- even though the other two interviews (particularly the length one with Vulture.com), Graves emphatically and repeatedly stated that it was "consensual".

Alex Graves's specific statements about the scene in his interview with HollywoodReporter.com were:


 * Question: "This feels like Tywin's episode. What was filming his scene with him and Tommen like?"
 * Graves: That was one of the greatest days I've ever had filming. To film Charles (Dance) kidnapping Lena's son with words for three minutes of monologue -- and to have Lena keeping up with him at the highest bar of acting possible with no words at all -- was a joy. It was directorial crack to do that scene. It was one of my favorite scenes I've ever shot. It's almost like a build from Ordinary People meets a Hitchcock movie, because you're sitting here going, "This is so dysfunctional and bizarre." She's a wreck. Tywin is really going on about this historical stuff, and you slowly start to go, "He's kidnapping her only boy," because she's not going to have him anymore. And then he succeeds, and then Jaime comes in and he rapes her. That was like -- you read the scene and go, "Wait, who's directing this?"


 * Question: "That whole scene has to be one of the most taboo, disturbing things that has happened on the show."
 * Graves: "I'm never that excited about going to film forced sex. But the whole thing for me was about dead Joffrey lying there, watching the whole thing. (Showrunners) David (Benioff) and Dan (Weiss) loved that, and I was like, I wanted to make sure I had Jack in there as much as I could. Of course Lena and Nickolaj laughed every time I would say, "You grab her by the hair, and Jack is right there," or "You come around this way and Jack is right there."

These statements seem vague and contradictory, however, it does seem that Graves is speaking more loosely in the HollywoodReporter.com interview - that is, he seems to have considered the scene to be Jaime emotionally "forcing" himself on Cersei, but really didn't keep good track of where the lines blurred between "emotional pressure", "forcing himself", and "rape"...to the point that he uses these terms interchangeably. Judging from his lengthier and more direct answers to questions about this in his Vulcture.com interview - in which the questions were both more numerous and much more specific - Graves's comments were at times vague or bizarrely misusing sensitive language, but he did repeatedly make it clear that the sex scene was meant to be "consensual".

The week after the episode aired, Elio Garcia, owner of Westeros.org and co-author of the World of Ice and Fire sourcebook with Martin, appeared on Sky Atlantic's Thronecast to discuss it. He summed up the comments of Graves and others on the scene, saying:


 * "It seems that what they wanted to convey is not what shows up on the screen in the end. There have been interviews with the director in particular, Alex Graves, and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau as well, where they said, they wanted to do something ambiguous, more ambiguous than what's in the novel, but they still wanted the ambiguity of, well, maybe this is how they're interacting, that it is forceful and its rough and its dark, but it's in the end a consensual relationship.


 * But a lot of people couldn't see that on the screen, and they've missed some of the sexual scenes between them prior to this point, because a lot of it is in flashback. They don't have that.  In fact in the books the dynamic between the two characters is actually kind of like that:  Jaime initiates, and Cersei  kind of always says "stop that, uninterested" - and then she gives in to it.  And it's not intended as "rape", that is their sexual dynamic, and it's worth remembering these are siblings, these are twins, this is not a normal sexual relationship by any stretch of the imagination."

The Atlantic also surmised:


 * "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.

As TheDailyBeast.com more bluntly put it: "The rape wasn't supposed to be a rape. It was supposed to look consensual. The filmmakers messed up."

Therefore, as surmised by the editorial staffs of Westeros.org and TheMarySue.com, it seems that Alex Graves became so eager to turn up the level of how "dark and edgy" the scene was that he – quite unintentionally – made it look like a rape scene to any new viewer who had no idea what the book scene it was attempting to portray was like. In a lamentably poor direction choice, Graves chose to shoot and then edit the scne in such a way that it seemed needlessly "dark and ambiguous", but it honestly never occurred to him that viewers would not take the matter of rape and sexual assault as an ambiguous and unanswered question, but arrive at the logical conclusion (based solely on the scene as it aired) that they were actually attempting to show a "rape scene".

Footage analysis
Analyzing the footage of the scene, frame by frame, confirms's Graves earlier statements that he gave the actors set directions to indicate that Cersei was consenting to this sexual encounter. These actions are indeed visible, but only for a fraction of a second or out of frame. This indicates that the director and actors were attempting to portray consensual sex, while at the same time poor camerawork and editing result in them being barely visible in the finished cut of the scene without watching it in slow motion.

Graves claimed that:
 * 1) Cersei wraps her legs around Jaime to embrace him consensually
 * 2) Cersei shows her consent by grabbing the table to steady herself
 * 3) Cersei is indeed passionately kissing Jaime back

Relevant screenshots from the scene, with descriptions:

From analysis of the footage, it can be determined that:


 * 1 - Yes, Headey does appear to be consensually kissing Coster-Waldau back and even drawing him in for a deeper kiss - and thus does appear to be acting off of set directions which told her to play the scene as angry but consensual, not rape (instead of hitting Jaime throughout). However, this is visible for under one second, not in focus because both actors are sinking to their knees and the camera is jostling around to follow them, and then the camera quickly pans down to their waists so their heads aren't even in the frame.
 * If Headey actually was actively returning Coster-Waldau's kisses, the camera angles Graves chose to use in his final edit can barely catch it - particularly because many shots only show the back of Cersei's head. There are several shots in which Headey stops hitting Coster-Waldau and by her body poster might be returning his kisses (thus signalling consent) but the audience can't see through the back of Cersei's head.
 * 2 - If it was Graves's intent to show Headey consensually steadying herself against the table, before she is laying on her back on the ground, he failed for the same reason: there are a few shots in which judging by her body posture/arm position Headey might be leaning back against the table (to steady herself as she actively presses forward into Jaime) - but the camera cannot see through Joffrey's corpse to see what Headey's hands are doing.  In the shots from the other camera angle that did make it into the finished shot, we can only see Headey pushing Coster-Waldau (or, for a fraction of a second, embracing his head for a deeper kiss).
 * Also note that in this same shot, from the other side of the table looking across Joffrey's corpse, is another shot in which the camera simply can't see through Cersei's head, because she is standing between Jaime and Joffrey's corpse, and thus facing away from the camera. Headey might have switched to actively kissing Coster-Waldau again, just as she has stopped pushing him, but once again, but this camera angle cannot show it.
 * Once Headey is on the ground, the scene ends with her gripping the altar cloth tightly in her left hand - though she doesn't need to that that for balance at this point. This gesture is so vague that it could be taken either way:  Graves could have intended this to indicate Cersei was feeling consensual pleasure, but the shot's meaning is so vague that the audience was just as likely to interpret it as Cersei gripping the altar cloth in pain and terror.
 * 3 - Graves claimed that the camera shows Headey consensually wrapping her legs around Jaime once they are both on the ground. While Headey might indeed be doing this - her legs do seem to be up in the air - she is wearing so many heavy layers of skirts that it is difficult to see what her legs are doing at all.

A point that this does reveal is that the actors were attempting to show a consensual sex scene, not rape, and that in tandem with his comments to Vulture.com, director Alex Graves was also attempting to show a consensual sex scene. This further implies that they were not instructed in the scripts - or by the scriptwriters themselves - to film it as a nonconsensual sex scene.

The Jaime/Cersei scene was subsequently ignored for the rest of Season 4
Multiple professional reviews and critics were confused that for the rest of Season 4, even in the next episode, Jaime and Cersei do not seem to act as if Jaime had raped her. They concluded that if it had been the writers' intention to portray this as a sexual assault, it was extremely incongruent that it is not reacted to as such in subsequent episodes. Instead, several reviewers took this as further evidence that this had never been the writers' intention in the first place, and that the impression that it was nonconsensual was just a result of poor camerawork and poor editing.

TheDailyBeast.com produced an article titled "Why We Should Pretend the ‘Game of Thrones’ Rape Scene Never Happened":


 * "In short, despite the fact that virtually nothing onscreen suggested “giving in,” neither the director of the scene nor the two actors who played it seem to think that Jaime raped Cersei—and the story itself is continuing to chug along as if the rape never happened and Jaime is still a character we're supposed to root for.


 * As a viewer, this is a very strange situation to find yourself in: a character has clearly done something horrible—but the show doesn't realize it. Maybe a consensual line was cut. Maybe Graves thought Cersei's body language was enough. Maybe everybody assumed that what was going on in their heads on set somehow materialized on screen. But it didn't. So how should we react?


 * We could continue to insist that Jaime is a rapist and spend the rest of the series complaining about his inconsistencies every time he's depicted in a relatively flattering light—thereby allowing a single instance of unintentionally ham-fisted filmmaking to jaundice our entire impression of his character.


 * Or, we could ignore the rape — at least from a narrative perspective. Pull the clip from the show. Play it in sex ed class. Use it as a teachable moment. Insist that it's as clear an illustration of rape as you're going to see on cable TV—because it is. That said, as you watch the rest of Game of Thrones, you might also want to consider pretending that Benioff and Weiss had adhered to George R.R. Martin's original scene instead of botching it."

In response to TheDailyBeast.com ' s article, YesMagazine.com produced an article titled "The Game of Thrones Rape Scene: Why We Can't Pretend It Never Happened" said:


 * Pretending that a rape never happened is a problem—regardless of whether it took place in fiction or reality. For the record, I’m not convinced by this argument. The showrunners may or may not have intended to write the scene as it unfolded, but as a viewer, that’s irrelevant. In the HBO series Game of Thrones, Jamie raped Cersei. Whether that was intentional or just bad filmmaking, Graves filmed and edited a rape scene. It happened; now the show’s creators have to write these characters with the consequences. No take-backs.


 * It's also clear that Alex Graves, the director of this episode, did not intend to film a rape scene. Graves’ defense winds through power struggles and turn-ons and consent, but his take on this scene is that Jaime and Cersei had, by the end, consensual sex. He did not intend to orchestrate a rape scene.

Bustle.com surmised:


 * "The fear that was plaguing so many of us has been confirmed: Game of Thrones forgot about Jaime’s despicable rape scene. The show continued Jaime Lannister’s storyline as though he never laid an unwanted golden hand on his sister-lover, Cersei. The Kingslayer continued on his path of redemption, and even more so, seemed to be one of the only people in the episode who displayed a touch of humanity. This was an episode that hailed Jaime Lannister when just last week, we wanted to spit on him.


 * It was like the rape never even happened. It was as though the show didn’t take a cue from its previous sexual assault that, oddly enough, wasn’t a rape scene in the book. (What’s up with these showrunners forgetting to add in a line in these sex scenes that indicates consent? Facial expressions of terror do not indicate consent — a “yes” does. You cannot say that a sex scene is consensual if there is no consent.) Sure, Cersei scowled at him, but never once did she mention the rape. Never once did we see Jaime trying to apologize. Instead, we saw Jaime doing nothing but good — like the Jaime we had gotten used to, except this time, it seemed oddly discordant.


 * We saw the Kingslayer talk to Tyrion and assert that, contrary to his sister-lover’s wishes, he would never slay his brother. He then — in a moment that would have been more poignant had he not forced himself upon Cersei last week — gave Brienne of Tarth the Valyrian steel sword formed from Ned Stark’s sword, a kick-ass suit of armor, and Podrick Payne as a squire. We saw in Brienne’s eyes that she truly has feelings for this man. She admires him and respects him. This episode seemed to be dressed in the notion that Jaime is, in fact, a good, respectable guy — and a whole lot of other problematic issues.


 * Ignoring the rape could be indicative of the fact that the showrunners do not believe last week’s scene to constitute as rape, which is why of course Jaime would continue on his redemptive path of doing good and earning love and respect. This also suggests a scary subtext of, “hey, maybe Jaime raped his sister, but that doesn’t take away from the rest of his life!” which is gross.


 * His constant acts of goodness also suggests that maybe the showrunners do see something flawed in that sex scene’s execution, and therefore decided to dunk Jaime in a pool of atonement, hoping that if the audience saw him do enough good this week that we’d move on and forget about last week. That’s quite an assumption to make of an audience — we’re not that quick to buy anything.


 * We can analyze this until the White Walkers take us, too, and we can come up with a plethora of theories, but the emphasis on Jaime’s redemptive qualities in this episode just seemed far too out of place, and it truly appeared as though the series decided to just move upward and onward, assuming the rape scene was forgotten. It was not, and as Brienne looked longingly in Jaime’s eyes, I thought, do you even know what he did to Cersei?"

TheMarySue.com also concluded that not really referring to the scene again, instead of as a long and developed subplot, trivializes rape - if, in fact, it was ever their actual intention to portray it as a rape scene.

Benioff's comments at the Oxford Union on the eve of the Season 5 premiere
On March 20, 2015, David Benioff, D.B. Weiss, Kit Harington, and David Bradley appeared on a panel discussion at the Oxford Union, in anticipating of the premiere of Season 5 which was only three weeks away. The panel took place over 11 months after "Breaker of Chains" had aired containing the Jaime/Cersei sex scene - and 11 months after the firestorm of attention it received among critics and in the mass media, the time period when director Alex Graves and actors Lena Headey and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau had spoken about it in several interviews. In that entire 11 month period, Benioff and Weiss gave no public comment on the controversy to clearly state what their intent was. During the Oxford Union panel's ending Q&A section, however, they were publicly asked about the scene for the first time, at a live event. A young female audience member directly asked them about the scene - which she specifically described a "a rape scene" - asking both why they had included it (what their intent was), and what sense it was supposed to make in the context of Jaime's overall storyarc:

University-age female audience member:
 * "I had a question about, well in general, about how women are represented in the show, because I think on the whole the show does a pretty good job. You've got a lot of female characters that aren't just stereotypical 'Strong Female Characters', you've got a real range of personalities.


 * But with that in mind, I was wondering specifically about a scene from Season 4, specifically, um, what I call 'the rape scene', which is where Cersei and Jaime, well, where Jaime forces Cersei to have sex next to their son's grave. Now people have interpreted this differently, but it did cause a lot of controversy when it came out.


 * So I was sort of wondering what your thoughts were on that? Why you included it?  What you felt it contributed to the character arcs, specifically Jaime?  And what your thoughts would be on dealing with this kind of material in the future, because this caused so much of a controversy?"

D.B. Weiss:
 * "Jon?" (Weiss tried to defuse the tension in the room from the heavy question by turning to John Bradley (Samwell Tarly), who was also at the panel - the joke being that Bradley wouldn't be in a position to know anything about it, and she was directly asking Benioff and Weiss). [room laughs]

David Benioff:
 * "Just to take the last question first, I would hope that it would not affect at all our future writing on the series, the fact that it created controversy, because I would hope that we have the courage to write what, you know, the show demands for that particular scene, regardless of what the reaction is going to be.


 * As far as the scene itself, it's, I think it's, I think it's - you're right to be disturbed by it. I think it was a brutal scene, I think it was, um, incredibly well acted by both Lena and Nikolaj, and it's, uh, it was a very very difficult day, it was a difficult thing to shoot, it was difficult, um, to, to - you now, be with the actors that day.  I mean, Lena's someone who gets so into the role, she's, part of the reason she's such a brilliant actress is because she becomes Cersei, you know, as soon as the director calls 'action', she becomes Cersei, and so it was a really rough day for her, and I thought she performed it brilliantly.  And it's, uh, it was a brutal thing to watch."


 * [Note: Benioff frequently paused in thought in the preceding paragraph, in a way difficult to transcribe, so it took him about 60 seconds before he started trying to directly answer the question. See the linked video below for full context.]


 * "But you know, it felt to us, when we were writing it, like this was, this is something the character was going to do at that moment. And it's a, it's a horrible thing, to do, and, and at the same time, I think, you know -


 * - I think part of the reason it was so hard for some people is because Jaime's had this kind of redemptive arc, and it feels like he's becoming a good guy, you know, and uh, and that's true, he did a lot of heroic things in previous seasons, and he saved Brienne, and all sorts of stuff. But we also can't remember that this is a guy who in the very first episode shoved a little boy out a window, you know.  He's not a good guy, he's a very complex guy.  He's not - and one of the things we loved about the books from the beginning, is that there are so many characters like this, that are not so easily aligned, you know, you can't put them in Dungeons & Dragons alignments of Lawful Good and Chaotic Evil, I don't know where you would align Jaime Lannister.


 * And in that particular scene, given what he had been through in the past, and his tortured relationship with his sister - this felt like something he would do. And, uh, it's a, it's again, you know, not bringing judgement on it, but that's - so we're going to write it, you know, without regard for whatever - furor, it might create.


 * And to our kind of, amazement, it actually, that scene led to a front page article in The New York Times, you know, which is the paper of record in the country where we're from, and also a newspaper which in four seasons has never failed to pan our show. So it was kind of amazing to see that, um, the fictional interaction between two fictional characters became front page news."

Kit Harington (Jon Snow, who wasn't in this scene and wasn't on set that day), then interjected with his opinion after Benioff finished (Weiss continued to remain silent):
 * "I think, if I might add, that one of the things that I think is exciting about our show is that it does cause controversy and it does cause discussion. And also, rape does happen on a daily basis in marriages, between apparently good people and bad people, and I think it is right to write scenes like that, and for people to view it.  I don't know, that's my opinion."

Analysis of the Writers' comments
'All evidence seems to imply that the writers did not intend this to be a rape scene, and it only seemed to be due to poor camerawork.
 * 1 - They have consistently avoided discussing the scene at all.
 * 2 - When pressed at a live Q&A to explain what was going on, Benioff hesitated to even use the word "rape", but simply repeated the question back at an audience member.
 * 3 - Even when directly asked, Benioff made no attempt to explain how Jaime "raping" Cersei would fit into his overall character arc.
 * 4 - Had it been the writer's intention to make this a rape scene, they should have been able to quickly recite the explanation they gave to each other in the writers room, and also gave to the director, actors, and fellow writer Bryan Cogman. Instead, they avoided giving any coherent answer - strongly implying that they cannot easily produce such an explanation because they never actually intended it.
 * 5 - The director and actors said they never received instructions that it was a rape scene - meaning either verbally or in the scripts. Martin said the script outline he saw made no mention of it.  Taken together, this also strongly implies that this was never scripted as a rape scene, it was never the intention of the writers to make it a rape scene, and they cannot explain "why" it "is" a rape scene, because they never tried to make it one in the first place.

Cutting out all of the time Benioff spent waffling, avoiding the question, or reciting talking points about "the cast works very hard", the only specific answers he made at the Oxford Union panel were: "But you know, it felt to us, when we were writing it, like this was, this is something the character was going to do at that moment...And in that particular scene, given what he had been through in the past, and his tortured relationship with his sister - this felt like something he would do."

Benioff didn't actually answer the first question: he simply restated the question back at the audience member.  He offered no explanation of what Jaime's specific motivations are in this scene. Benioff simply avoided answering the second question at all: how would this make sense in Jaime's character arc? When, as multiple critics above noted, Jaime has been in a redemptive arc since losing his sword hand up until this moment - and also Jaime's character arc after this scene, when no reference is made to it again throughout the rest of Season 4, and multiple major critics noted how bizarre it was that the very next episode had Cersei and Jaime interacting as if he had not raped her. Benioff was hesitant to use the word "rape" in his response - yet when the questioner used the word "rape", and even Harington used the word "rape", Benioff did not interject to correct them. Thus Benioff did not make an effort to confirm or deny that he intended to write a "rape" scene, but avoided the question.

Benioff's most substantive claim - other than restating the question as "we felt it was something he would do" - was to essentially put forward the claim that they were trying to remind the audience that Jaime is a very morally grey and complex character. This could not be an attempt to portray Jaime as a morally grey character, because when he was asked, Graves specifically denied this possibility in his interview with Vulture.com. In comparison, given the rambling nature of Benioff's spur-of-the-moment response to a question he was unprepared to answer, it seems more like Benioff was falling back onto a familiar talking point of "the characters in this series are morally grey and complicated", without really addressing the specific question.

Nor does Benioff provide any explanation for why the rest of Season 4 seems to ignore that Jaime raped Cersei. If they had intended to show Jaime raping Cersei as part of a planned character nuance, they would have had Cersei reacting to it in any way during the subsequent episodes. If it was an accident (from sloppy camerawork and editing by Graves), we would expect to see basically what we saw: the next episode not acting as if the previous episode included a rape scene. When directly asked about how having Jaime "rape" Cersei fit with his storyarc, Benioff simply avoided the question.

At the Oxford Union panel, over two minutes pass from when Benioff started talking, but during most of that time he simply waffled around avoiding the question, or turning to tangents and talking points such as "the cast works very hard" or "that was a disturbing scene". D.B. Weiss could have said something but simply didn't (after his joke to John Bradley at the beginning). The original question directly asked the writers why they included what the questioner described as "a rape scene" and "Jaime forcing Cersei to have sex", as well as how that was supposed to fit within Jaime's overall character arc.

'''Benioff and Weiss have never presented this scene as the result of an intentional or thought-out change. If they had intended this as a change and thought out how it fit into Jaime's storyarc, they would have been able to quickly launch into a detailed explanation - they could not.''' Importantly, however, the Oxford Union Q&A panel did confirm for the first time that Benioff and Weiss were not ignorant of the massive media outcry over the Jaime/Cersei sex scene. Benioff even specifically cited his shock that The New York Times itself ran a reaction to the scene on its front page. Given the writers' past comments that they generally avoid reading critics (for fear that they would overreact to subjective complaints), as TheMarySue.com pointed out there were some suspicions that Benioff and Weiss were simply unaware of how controversial this scene was (or perhaps, the editing of this scene as it appeared in its final form). This interview confirms that the opposite was true: they were painfully aware that the scrutiny of the entire mass media was on them, up to The New York Times itself - which may go a long way to explain why they were hesitant to give any specific response, which would be further scrutinized.

Both actors have said they didn't play it as a rape scene. The director said he didn't intend it to be a rape scene. Physical actions the actors can be observed making (albeit only through freeze frame) do seem to indicate that when they were acting out the scene on set, it looked more consensual (Headey passionately pulling Coster-Waldau's head closer to hers - which was only visible for a fraction of a second in the final edit). Both the actors and directors have said they received no "instructions" to play it as a rape scene, indicating that the actual script contained no such instructions nor was it ever the intention of the writers. From this it can be concluded that Benioff and Weiss did not intend this to be a rape scene at all, and the impression that it was is purely an accident of poor camerawork and poor editing. The position that Benioff and Weiss apparently see themselves in seems to be very similar to what Coster-Waldau described in his later interview with Entertainment Weekly, the attitude that:


 * "...It's one of those things where you can’t [publicly] say ‘it wasn’t rape,’ because then everybody goes, ‘How can you say it wasn’t rape?!’ But that was definitely not the intention.”

Therefore they strictly avoided discussing the scene at all for months. When caught off guard with a direct question about the scene at a live Q&A, Benioff and Weiss could only restate the question, and not provide any thought-out rationale for how this made sense within Jaime's storyarc - which they easily could have produced, had they intended it as a rape scene, by simply repeating what they would have told the actors and director had it truly been meant to be a rape scene.

All of Benioff and Weiss's subsequent comments are consistent with the position that they actually never intended for this to be a rape scene and didn't script it that way, but were so afraid that any attempt they made to clarify their actual intentions that it was consensual would be criticized even more as rape-denial.

What response should be taken to this scene?
There were three questions raised by this scene:
 * 1 - Did "the creators" intend it as rape?
 * 2 - Did a large portion of the audience perceive it as rape?
 * 3 - Accepting that the creators did not intend to portray a rape scene, but that they failed to convey this intent so that many viewers perceived that it was a rape scene, how are we to react? What is the audience to consider "actually happened" within the TV continuity, as a persistent fictional universe?

The previous evidence indicates that it was never the writers' intent for this to be a rape scene, and that Benioff and Weiss are hesitant to publicly deny it simply for fear of being accused of rape-denial.

At the same time, Benioff and Weiss actually never denied that it was rape. For several months, due to their total silence on the matter, it wasn't clear if they were simply shrugging off criticism and not paying attention to it. Benioff revealed at the Oxford Union panel, however, that the writers were horrified to find that even The New York Times was discussing the scene on its front page, and they were in fact painfully aware that a massive portion if not majority of the viewer base perceived it as a rape scene.

The question therefore is: Given that the creators never intended to imply that this was a rape scene, but much of the audience did perceive it as rape, what should be done?

A related question for which an answer cannot immediately be found is also: Why didn't the producers notice this in post-production and attempt to fix it in the editing room? Did they only notice right before it went to air, as they were filming the "Inside the Episode" featurette? What was the internal chronology at the studio of how they reacted to this?

YesMagazine.com took the view that audience perception is all that matters, and even though it acknowledged that the scene was just badly edited and not intended as a rape scene, felt that the TV series had to follow up on it as if it was, based on audience perception. Bustle.com was annoyed that even if we are to understand that this was merely a filming error, the creators made no efforts to fix the video, to redress what happened. TheDailyBeast.com felt that there were two options:

1 - "Pretend it never happened" from a perception viewpoint: that is, Jaime actually raped Cersei within the narrative, but the audience should just forget about it because it doesn't match the overall character or his subsequent actions.

2-"Pretend it never happened" from an intent viewpoint: bitterly pretend that the director never filmed the scene so badly, which TheDailyBeast.com bluntly said was "ignoring the rape" because it would ignore how viewers were offended.

Given the intense media scrutiny they were under, it is easy to see that Benioff and Weiss were horrified. As Benioff noted, he was stunned that the front page of The New York Times itself reported on it. What generally seems to have happened is that Benioff and Weiss feared that anything they said would only make matters worse, and end up offending one side or the other...so they avoided talking about the controversy at all, and hoped it would eventually fade away.

The Oxford Union panel was the whole year-long situation in microcosm: Benioff didn't want to offend the questioner by denying that it was written as a rape scene, when she stated she viewed it as such and was offended, but at the same time he avoided calling it "rape" in his comments. All he was left to do was cycle around saying it was hard to film - but without confirming or denying that it was ever "a rape scene" because someone would be offended no matter what he said.

Benioff and Weiss are in a very difficult situation. They are coordinating one of the largest projects in television history, with a massive cast, which in Season 4 was filming simultaneously in three separate countries (Northern Ireland-UK, Croatia, and Iceland). No human being could plausibly coordinate such a massive undertaking without making a few mistakes, as they simply could not be everywhere at once.

Why wasn't the scene simply re-edited and re-released?
It is now clear why Benioff and Weiss did not simply issue a statement making it clear that they never intended this scene to be depicting rape: they feared they would be accused of denying that it greatly resembled rape and was perceived as such by many viewers.

What is very confusing is why the executive producers did not simply re-edit and re-release the scene, such as overdubbing Lena Headey's voice in so that off-camera Cersei is shouting "Yes! Yes! Yes!" as she did in the scene from the novels it is based on.

This would not be the first time that the production team redited the re-release of an episode because viewers were offended due to an unintentional filming error. In the Season 1 finale, "Fire and Blood", one of the heads on a spike next to Eddard Stark's head is actually a dummy head of U.S. President George George W. Bush in a wig. In the Blu-ray commentary, the writers stressed that this was not a political statement, but happened simply because the props team bought stock heads, and famous political figures are more likely to have dummies made based on them, and this is simply what was available. Enough viewers were offended, however, that they later digitally altered the head in re-releases of the episode (in the Blu-ray set and when it is re-aired through HBO and its streaming services), changing the shape of the chin so it doesn't look like Bush anymore. HBO released a statement when they made the change, saying: "We were deeply dismayed to see this and find it unacceptable, disrespectful and in very bad taste.  We made this clear to the executive producers of the series who apologized immediately for this inadvertent, careless mistake. We are sorry this happened and will have it removed from any future DVD production."

The most that can be discerned is that somehow, Benioff and Weiss became so afraid of being accused of rape denial, that they somehow became convinced that even re-editing the scene to make it overtly consensual, would somehow be seen as a "rape-denial" - that the original version seemed to be a rape scene, and as if they were trying to "cover it up". If anything, re-editing the scene in a re-release would be expunging and undoing the previous error, not an attempt to hide it.

Television audiences are generally intelligent and forgiving people who respond positively to quality entertainment and fair treatment. Re-editing the scene in a future re-release to emphasize that Cersei is consenting to having sex with Jaime would not "offend fans for trying to deny that they were offended when they watched the original version". Rather, it would be an acknowledgement that viewers were upset, the production team then recognized their error, and then they took steps to address their complaints and fix it. As for the extreme view that there can be no "take-backs" ever, by that logic, even scenes with technical problems like having microphones accidentally in the shot shouldn't be remastered. Purely technical problems stemming from unintentional editing mistakes can and should be addressed.

What "really happened" in the TV show
In terms of what happened “in the TV continuity”, as a persistent alternate fictional reality and not merely within the frame of the camera in a single scene, Jaime did not rape Cersei in “Breaker of Chains”. This was never the intention of the actors performing the scene or of the director. While they have yet to confirm or deny it in as many words, the writers also clearly never intended for Jaime to be actually raping Cersei.

The exact intentions of the director Alex Graves remain vague, but it seems that he just kept pushing for "dark and edgy" camerawork that went too far until it was misleading - in any case, the creators' intent supersedes mistakes in camerawork.

Therefore, throughout the "Game of Thrones TV continuity" as documented in Game of Thrones Wiki, Jaime and Cersei were having disturbing, rough, angry sex next to their own son's corpse - but consensual sex.

It is also tacitly assumed that the production team will eventually remaster or redub the scene (perhaps years from now) to make its intent more clear.