George RR Martin Has Defended Last Night’s ‘Game Of Thrones’ With A Weirdly Poetic Statement
"We have reached the point where the beat of butterfly wings is stirring up storms ... Sometimes butterflies grow into dragons."
If you haven’t watched last night’s episode of Game Of Thrones you shouldn’t read this. In fact, if you don’t want any spoilers, you probably shouldn’t be on the internet at all today. See ya!
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Continuing on in its valiant journey to viscerally upset as many people as possible, Game Of Thrones has this week taken one of the few remaining characters who aren’t irredeemably awful, married her to the worst of the bunch, immediately dashed all the independence and strength she’d been gaining over the past season, and raped her. Theon was there too because heck, if you’ve gone this far, what’s a bit more family trauma?
Understandably, people are having a hard time with this. While some fans are arguing the scene placed a new level of gravitas on the show’s often gratuitous depictions of sexual assault, others are arguing it was just another example of the show-runners trying to shock audiences for no good reason. In a way, this view is backed up by the fact this crucial scene isn’t even present in the books. Though Ramsay Snow does rape his new bride — apparently, in much worse detail — she is a minor character.
“It’s right in line with the Game of Thrones approach to storytelling that Sansa would have the rug pulled out from under her,” Joanna Robinson wrote for Vanity Fair. “But did it really have to be rape that brought her low? Is that really the only horror Game of Thrones can imagine visiting on its female characters?”
Mostly it's just boring. "Oh dear. We need to show a woman's vulnerability. How do we do it? I know! Rape her!"
— roxane gay (@rgay) May 18, 2015
#GoT's major flaw is a lazy reliance on Who Will Rape Sansa as a narrative engine. (Joffrey? Peasants? The Hound? Tyrion? Littlefinger? Etc)
— Spencer Ackerman (@attackerman) May 18, 2015
These concerns about the scene were not shared by Sophie Turner, the 19-year-old actress who plays Sansa, as she told Entertainment Weekly she “kinda loved it”. “I love the way Ramsay had Theon watching. It was all so messed up,” she said.
Similarly, the show’s producer Bryan Cogman has no reservations. “This is Game of Thrones,” he said, gleefully awaiting his next opportunity to orphan innocent children or pop someone’s skull open like a balloon. “This isn’t a timid little girl walking into a wedding night with Joffrey. This is a hardened woman making a choice and she sees this as the way to get back her homeland. Sansa has a wedding night in the sense she never thought she would with one of the monsters of the show. It’s pretty intense and awful and the character will have to deal with it.”
In an attempt to sound a little less like a sociopath, George RR Martin has now released a separate statement on his blog. In a predictably poetic style, it very much avoids the whole WHY DID YOU RAPE SANSA angle to focus more on the end of authorial sovereignty and the subtle artistic differences between the page and the screen.
Let me reiterate what I have said before. How many children did Scarlett O’Hara have? Three, in the novel. One, in the movie. None, in real life: she was a fictional character, she never existed. The show is the show, the books are the books; two different tellings of the same story.
There have been differences between the novels and the television show since the first episode of season one. And for just as long, I have been talking about the butterfly effect. Small changes lead to larger changes lead to huge changes. HBO is more than forty hours into the impossible and demanding task of adapting my lengthy (extremely) and complex (exceedingly) novels, with their layers of plots and subplots, their twists and contradictions and unreliable narrators, viewpoint shifts and ambiguities, and a cast of characters in the hundreds.
There has seldom been any TV series as faithful to its source material, by and large (if you doubt that, talk to the Harry Dresden fans, or readers of the Sookie Stackhouse novels, or the fans of the original WALKING DEAD comic books)… but the longer the show goes on, the bigger the butterflies become. And now we have reached the point where the beat of butterfly wings is stirring up storms, like the one presently engulfing my email.
Prose and television have different strengths, different weaknesses, different requirements.
David and Dan and Bryan and HBO are trying to make the best television series that they can.
And over here I am trying to write the best novels that I can.
And yes, more and more, they differ. Two roads diverging in the dark of the woods, I suppose… but all of us are still intending that at the end we will arrive at the same place.
In the meantime, we hope that the readers and viewers both enjoy the journey. Or journeys, as the case may be. Sometimes butterflies grow into dragons.
In short: you should watch more Ashton Kutcher films, ya jerks.
