More Like "Game of Rape"

As you may have heard, last week on Game of Thrones twincest took a dark turn: Jamie Lannister raped his sister over the corpse of their dead son in the Sept of Baelor. The weird thing is that the scene plays out almost the exact same way in the A Song of Ice and Fire books with one notable difference: the rape. It was already a disturbing scene and for whatever reason the show's writers chose to add a rape element to the proceedings. While this creative decision did not really bother me, what did bother me is that nearly everyone involved with the scene had no idea that they were portraying a rape (I say "nearly everyone" because we have yet to hear from the one female involved: Lena Headey who plays Cersei Lannister). And regardless of what all these men may believe, regardless of what they intended, what the audience got was a rape scene. If they were trying to evoke the same sense of ambiguity that happens in the book, well then they failed miserably. Because oopsy-daisy, that was a clear cut rape. And it wasn't the first time the writers have interpreted the book with a twist of sexual assault.

The very first episode of Game of Thrones, Daenerys and Khal Drogo consummate their new marriage with Drogo forcing himself on Daenerys. Meanwhile, in the books, Drogo makes a point to wait for Dany to consent. (Yes there was some seductive manipulation of a 13 year old, but at least he waited for a "yes.") The show version of Daenerys fell in love with her brute of a rapist while the book version of Daenerys fell in love with her affectionate husband. That is a huge difference. A difference that could greatly inform how we perceive a character's development. But it has been largely forgotten.

Back to last week's accidental rape. I put off writing about this particular change hoping the show's creative team would realize they at least introduced a complication to the lives of Cersei and Jamie (And according to the team's statements over the past week, they did intend the scene to at least play ambiguously...or so they claim). I thought perhaps they would deal with the fallout in the weeks to come. I waited a week and absolutely nothing was addressed or even seems like it will be. Instead Jamie was portrayed in the best possible light. He was sympathetic, honorable, and showed positive growth. And because this is where Jamie has been headed since last season, I thought that Benioff and Weiss added a darker element to the sept scene to possibly complicate his redemption arc. But that's not the case. (Nor have we seen how Jamie's sexual assault could exacerbate Cersei's downward spiral.) It seems like, to me, it has already been forgotten. They simply chose to punch up a scene with a little harmless rape. But could we have at least acknowledged this hurdle to Jamie's growth? At the very least, could we have not made him the good guy at the end of his latest scene with Cersei?

And as if Cersei/Jamie and Daenerys/Drogo weren't enough, this Sunday's episode also diverged greatly from the books. Most notably the events happening with the Night's Watch and the mutineers at Craster's Keep. And what was happening at Craster's? Some serial rape. Listen, I know that the Night's Watch is largely made up of thieves and rapists. We all know it. My issue with the scene is related to my issues with the Cersei/Jamie scene last week: that these circumstances were disturbing enough without that added explicitness of sexual assault. I didn't need to see a brother of the Night's Watch going to town on some poor girl throughout the entire duration of the scene. Meera witnessing a brother drag a shrieking girl through the snow was plenty. Drinking out of Jeor Mormont's skull was plenty. "Fuck them till their dead" was plenty. We know these poor girls were raped repeatedly by Craster and they are now being raped repeatedly by the Night's Watch. It's an awful thing that was treated cheaply for some background scenery. This was a gratuitous and cavalier use of rape by the show's writers after a whole week of debating whether they can even recognize rape when they see it. It was distasteful, disturbing, and unnecessarily explicit. The show filmed and scripted a gang rape with the same nonchalance they do a brothel scene. But someone should let Benioff and Weiss know the two aren't interchangeable.

Whether it is excessive sex or violence, Game of Thrones thrives in excess period. Audiences have come to expect a certain degree of explicitness from their HBO fair, and from Game of Thrones especially. Ask someone who's never watched the show what they know about Game of Thrones and they'd probably say that it is violent and pornographic (and that there are dragons). But lately the show has been pushing the envelope at the expense of character and story. And the scene at Craster's was exactly that. It was the show trying to outdo itself and it was beyond overindulgent.

Let us not forget the whole mutineer plot and rape scene were made up for the show. In a similar way to how Cersei and Jamie's sept moment was changed for the show. Likewise Dany and Drogo. George RR Martin never shied away from rape in the books, but he never needed to be explicit about it either. We got the point through subtext. GRRM always made it clear that women simply are not safe in the world he created. That Cersei was broken and had turned to alcoholism and bitterness to cope with the regularity at which Robert raped her. Sansa has had more than one near rape experience. As has Brienne. GRRM was never cavalier about any of this. He made it a point to color his world as depraved, chaotic, and dark through the overwhelming presence of violence, death, and loss of innocence. If anything, the threat of sexual assault added weight and consequence to his world. But what we got on Game of Thrones this past Sunday was cheap. It was distasteful. And most disturbing of all, it made a game of rape.

About That How I Met Your Mother Ending

NOTE: The following post contains SPOILERS concerning Monday night's series finale of How I Met Your Mother.

Usually I think people put too much stake in endings. But when the ending is the title of your freaking show, then you should probably get it right.

Here's my issue with the How I Met Your Mother finale: none of it felt earned. The scene with Ted and his kids was filmed all the way back in season two. So the writers knew how they wanted HIMYM to end and orchestrated everything to get to it. And while I personally have nothing against Ted and Robin, that entire ending was a slap in the face. Show runners Craig Thomas and Carter Bays literally had years to build to the Ted/Robin ending in a satisfying way. But instead they wasted our time for the sake of misdirection and "classic" HIMYM hijinks.

Knowing since the pilot that Robin and Ted would not--and premise-wise, could not--be together, the show instead tried making Robin and Barney into a plausible couple. We spent a large part of the later seasons cultivating this relationship. The entire final season revolves around their wedding weekend. And whether you bought the pairing as realistic or not, it was pretty clear the show was committed to this coupling, so the audience had no choice but to accept it as fact. The wedding was literally seasons in the making, yet the finale tore it apart as quickly as you can say, "We got a divorce." I was dumbfounded at the audacity of it all.

Similarly, we spent this entire final season getting to know The Mother, Tracy. She became a character. She became a pretty great character. Someone perfect for Ted. And someone his friends and fans were happy to see him end up with. Everything involving Ted and Tracy were the best parts of the finale, particularly the titular meeting under the yellow umbrella (which cast a great, warm glow over the couple). Towards the end of the season it was implied The Mother would be sick in the future and we all began speculating that she might end up dying. Because why else would Ted be telling the story of how they met? But what was really concerning was how she was only in a ninth of the story Ted was telling his kids. If she was in fact dead in 2030, how horrible is it that Ted spent all that time talking about Robin and every other random woman he dated/loved/proposed to? When asked, Thomas and Bays, as well as the mother herself--actress Cristin Milioti--assured fans this was not the case. But it was the case.

I'm actually not upset that The Mother dies. And I'm not upset that post-divorce Robin and widow Ted get together. And I realize the show was really never about The Mother. But what does upset me is that we spent an entire season getting to know The Mother as a great character. And her death gets glossed over just like Robin and Barney's divorce. The Mother's death gets sidelined. And the tone immediately after in the scene between Ted and his kids, is just straight up weird. They gleefully encourage their father to call Aunt Robin and ask her out. I realize in the world of the show it has been six years since Tracy's death. But in the real world of me watching this show, her body is still warm. Hot even. The transition was abrupt. And the subsequent scene of older Ted recreating the blue French horn moment for older Robin felt cheap, shallow, and cold. And its not because Ted shouldn't be with Robin. It's because it all happened way too quickly and awkwardly.

No one told the writers they had to waste an entire season on Robin and Barney's wedding. I don't understand why that couldn't have been half the season. Because everything that happened in the hour-long finale could have easily filled the other half. Take your time. It's already been nine seasons, we're in no rush. Spend a couple of episodes on Robin and Barney's marital issues, on Barney's regressive man-boyhood and fatherhood, on Marshall and Lily having another baby and moving out of the apartment, on The Mother getting sick, and on saying goodbye to Tracy. One thing the finale did really well was make me believe in Ted's love for his wife. And I would have loved to see more of that. Because she deserved a goodbye and Ted's character deserved time to grieve. And we should have seen Ted care of her and later his melancholic widower years. And I would have even liked to see Robin reenter Ted's life to help him through his grief. So that the audience could see what Ted's kids see. Because Ted wasn't just telling this story to his kids, he was telling it to all of us. We might as well have been on the couch right along next to them. And so we might as well have been nodding along when they encouraged Ted to move on.

If we saw all that. If we took the time to build towards it. Then maybe when we realized what the last minutes of the finale were doing, we would have smirked rather than cringed. We wouldn't have felt like the love of Ted's life, the mother of his children, was being sidelined. Maybe we would have realized Ted's heart was big enough for two big loves. Tracy's was. And our hearts would have warmed because maybe we would have been rooting for this ending to happen. Because it would have felt earned. We would have been okay with it. And it would have been legen...wait for it...dary(ish). But we got none of that. The asinine structure failed us. We got awkward pacing, frustration, and disappointment. If things were more carefully structured we could have gotten an "I got off the plane" moment instead of HIMYM's version of a sad trombone: the blue French horn.