CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Romance Dies
The Walk of Shame generated scrutiny and debate, but it wasn’t the most controversial scene in Game of Thrones. Nor was Shireen getting burned alive, the Red Wedding, Theon’s mutilation, or the death of Ned Stark. The show’s most controversial scene was (at least, by the subjective standards of media and fandom uproar) Sansa and Ramsay Bolton’s wedding night.

Arranged marriages are the norm in Westeros (as well as in many countries of the world today). Parents typically brokered unions between their children to gain money and power. Even Ned Stark and Catelyn Tully had an arranged marriage, with Catelyn gradually growing to love her husband.

So in season five, in an effort to consolidate his alliance with the Boltons, Littlefinger arranged a marriage between Sansa and Ramsay (he claimed Sansa wasn’t legitimately married to Tyrion since their union wasn’t consummated). The master manipulator persuaded Sansa that uniting the Stark and Bolton houses would be the best way for her family to regain Winterfell and protect her from the Lannisters, who still falsely blamed her for Joffrey’s death.

There was just one problem: Ramsay was a psychopath. And despite Littlefinger’s “knowledge is power” proclamation, Baelish was unaware of Ramsay’s nature when he made the deal.

The result provoked a fierce debate over whether the arc was right from a story and character perspective, as well as whether it was handled in an appropriate way.

In Martin’s book, Ramsay’s wedding night is more shudderingly explicit (Theon is forced to participate), but the bride is someone else. Ramsay marries Sansa’s friend Jeyne Poole after Littlefinger managed to trick him into believing she was the long-missing Arya Stark.

GEORGE R. R. MARTIN (author, co–executive producer): Jeyne Poole was included in the pilot—she’s shown giggling next to Sansa—but she’s never seen or referred to again. I actually wrote Jeyne into “The Pointy End,” my first script, when Arya killed the stableboy. I had some stuff with Jeyne running to Sansa being all hysterical and dialogue in the council chamber with Littlefinger saying, “Give her to me, I’ll make sure she doesn’t cause any trouble.” That was dropped.

DAVID BENIOFF (showrunner): Sansa is a character we care about almost more than any other. We really wanted Sansa to play a major part in that season. If we were going to stay absolutely faithful to the book, it was going to be very hard to do that. There was a subplot we loved from the books, but it was a character not involved in the show.

GEORGE R. R. MARTIN: I was trying to set up Jeyne for her future role as the false Arya. The real Arya has escaped and is presumed dead. But this girl has been in Littlefinger’s control for years, and he’s been training her. She knows Winterfell, has the proper northern accent, and can pose as Arya. Who the hell knows what a little girl you met two years ago looks like? When you’re a lord visiting Winterfell, are you going to pay attention to the little kids running around? So she can pull off the impersonation. Not having Jeyne, they used Sansa for that. Is that better or worse? You can make your decision there. Oddly, I never got pushback for that in the book because nobody cared about Jeyne Poole that much. They care about Sansa.

Thrones producers say Martin’s reasoning—that fans cared about Sansa, not Jeyne Poole—was also why they chose Sansa to marry Ramsay instead.

BRYAN COGMAN (co–executive producer): You have this storyline with Ramsay. Do you have one of your leading ladies—who is an incredibly talented actor we’ve followed for five years and viewers love and adore—do it? Or do you bring in a new character to do it? You use the character the audience is invested in.

GEORGE R. R. MARTIN: My Littlefinger would have never turned Sansa over to Ramsay. Never. He’s obsessed with her. Half the time he thinks she’s the daughter he never had—that he wishes he had, if he’d married Catelyn. And half the time he thinks she is Catelyn, and he wants her for himself. He’s not going to give her to somebody who would do bad things to her. That’s going to be very different in the books.

BRYAN COGMAN: Our Littlefinger is a bit more brazen than the backroom dealer in the books—not to say that one is better than the other. And Ramsay’s not known everywhere as a psycho. Littlefinger doesn’t have that intelligence on him. He just knows the Boltons are scary and creepy and not to be fully trusted.

DAVID BENIOFF: The interesting thing about Littlefinger is he seems to have almost no weaknesses aside from his affection for Sansa. He’s been obsessed with her. You could see he’s got an unhealthy interest in her since that early episode at the joust. But as much as Littlefinger might care for Sansa, he cares for nothing more than power and sees this as an opportunity to gain more power for himself.

ALFIE ALLEN (Theon Greyjoy): There’s a common theme with both [Sansa and Theon’s] storylines of leaving Winterfell and having these delusions of grandeur about where they’d end up. Theon thought he was going to become prince of the ironborn, and Sansa thought she would end up queen. Then they both ended up together back at Winterfell.

The show’s writers, along with director Jeremy Podeswa, discussed how best to handle Sansa’s wedding night. On the production’s schedule breakdown the scene was called “Romance Dies.”

BRYAN COGMAN: The way we work is that David and Dan choose the episodes they want to write, and [Dave Hill and I] get the pick of the rest. I could have had poor Dave write it, but I felt a responsibility to Sophie. I felt and feel protective of her. I wanted to make sure it was sensitively handled, and I knew I would be the producer on set if I wrote it.

So originally the pitch in the room was that Ramsay takes her arm and we just shut the door. I made the argument that if we don’t at least take it a bit further and stay with her and Theon’s point of view a bit longer and get the enormity of the horror of what’s about to happen, then we’re doing a disservice to the story and to the subject matter.

JEREMY PODESWA (director): None of us went into that sequence lightly. We fully understood that the audience had so much invested in Sansa and saw her grow up on this show. This was something that would be shocking and upsetting, and we were all aware of that.

When filming season five, Turner was excited about the scene, as it represented a dramatic turn for her character and provided an acting challenge. “Alex Graves was saying, ‘You get a love interest,’” she said at the time. “So I get the scripts and I was so excited and I was flicking through and then I was like, ‘Aw, are you kidding me?!’ I thought the love interest was going to be Jaime Lannister or somebody who would take care of me. Then I found out it was Ramsay and I’m back at Winterfell. I love the fact she’s back home reclaiming what’s hers. At the same time, she’s being held prisoner in her own home. I felt so bad for her, but I also felt excited because it was so sick, and being reunited with Theon too, and seeing how their relationship plays out. I think it’s going to be the most challenging season for me so far just because it’s so emotional.

“I like getting my teeth into scenes,” Turner added. “There are scenes that are quite emotional and quite terrifying and uncomfortable, but I love doing them. If you can start with the uncomfortable and make the audience feel like that, that’s great.”

The filming of the sequence, at least, did not have the darkly intense mood backstage that one might have expected.

MICHAEL MCELHATTON (Roose Bolton): The wedding in the snow. Alfie was sniffing and dribbling and crying, and Sophie was practically crying and shaking, and I’m gloating and smiling. It was so Machiavellian, so dark, and so horrific, what we were doing to Alfie and Sophie, that it just tipped into laughter on a number of occasions.

JEREMY PODESWA: We were very careful in the way it was shot, and we were very careful in making sure that Sophie was comfortable with everything. She understood the complexity of what was happening and the horror of it, but she was never in a situation where she was made uncomfortable.

ALFIE ALLEN: I knew there was going to be a huge reaction to it, and I thought that everyone involved did a fantastic job. It was a horrible day to shoot. Iwan was having a real tough time with it. But Jeremy Podeswa smashed it. Sophie was amazing, and the way she handled it was admirable. It was pretty light in between takes.

For the bedroom scene, Ramsay bent Sansa over the bed and tore the back of her dress. Then the camera cut to an emotionally wrecked Theon for a protracted moment as he was forced to watch. The filmmakers wanted and expected an emotional reaction from viewers, but they were stunned when the episode generated an unprecedented amount of uproar.

JEREMY PODESWA: We were all taken aback by the reaction. We knew people would be upset but not so specifically in the way that manifested. From the reaction you would imagine the scene was explicit and insensitive. You see virtually nothing. You see the beginning of something about to happen and then we cut away. It was unthinkable to actually show what was happening.

Focusing on Theon’s face for the scene’s final twenty seconds as Sansa’s cries are heard off camera was specifically cited as promoting “the male gaze,” a term used to describe art that focuses on a man’s perspective while women are portrayed as objects. “Encouraging the viewers to feel sympathy for Greyjoy rather than the young woman being violently raped was a woefully misguided choice,” Nina Bahadur wrote in Self. The filmmakers thought cutting to Theon was the least exploitative, yet still dramatic and visual, way to convey the horror of what Sansa was experiencing.

BRYAN COGMAN: What’s always bothered me about any criticism of David and Dan is a presumption of bad faith on their part—the idea that David and Dan, or I or George, or any of us, are playing fast and loose with these characters that we love and have lived with and lost sleep over a hell of a lot more than anyone else has.

One of the main reasons we cut over to Theon was so it would not be graphic. Then that was criticized. I understood that criticism when thinking about it. I still understand our reasons for doing it.

JEREMY PODESWA: I understand the issue around the male gaze—that we’re away from Sansa’s experience in that moment and with Theon. The intention was to be as sensitive as possible. I think from a storytelling point of view it was very strong. And I think from a performance point of view it was very strong.

The filmmakers also wondered if there would have been less protest had viewers known the rest of Sansa’s journey in advance, just as book readers had known about the Red Wedding and other traumatic twists. Martin’s readers often defended tragic story moves online after they aired in the show because they had a clear sense of how such events fueled the story moving forward. Producers say the lady of Winterfell’s triumphant turn in the later seasons was always the show’s secret plan (and not, as some speculated, a reaction to the wedding-night uproar).

BRYAN COGMAN: We knew where we were going with Theon and Sansa for the next three, four seasons. The viewer didn’t know that. And the nature of a lot of criticism these days is reactive. You write something as you’re experiencing it for the first time and then you publish. Once you have experienced the full arc, the reasoning behind that scene made more sense.

DAVID BENIOFF: That was the thing that was slightly frustrating, was the idea we were responding to the criticism and beefed up the female roles—that’s blatantly untrue. We can take criticism, and certainly we’ve gotten our share of it. But what happened later was not a response.

SOPHIE TURNER (Sansa Stark): Everybody was just sympathetic. I had more “You’re my favorite character” than ever before, which is amazing, because before I used to get, “You’re my least favorite character.”

Critics of the scene counter that the victorious outcome of Sansa’s storyline didn’t address their primary concerns. Actress Jessica Chastain made headlines by tweeting about the scene, “Rape is not a tool to make a character stronger. A woman doesn’t need to be victimized in order to become a butterfly.” While Slate’s Inkoo Kang wrote, “There was something brashly truthful about season one’s reminder that royal wombs have historically always been currency and the dehumanization of the women attached to them considered collateral damage, as well as season two’s candor-via-Cersei during the Battle of the Blackwater that women’s bodies are considered spoils in wartime. . . . In its inspirational or sympathetic modes for its female characters, Game of Thrones could be powerful storytelling. But sexual assault is a storyline (or spectacle) that the show’s never gotten right—because rape, or the threat thereof, is used as an instrument to get from Point A to Point B, rather than an event deserving its own focal point.”

BRYAN COGMAN: For many, the scene will never work and they’ll never like it. But the scene led to a larger cultural conversation that I think was very important.

That broader discussion focused on the depiction of violence against women in Hollywood productions in general, as well as on Thrones in particular. It was a topic that had circled the show ever since Daenerys’s wedding night in the series premiere. It was likewise a growing topic in media circles, as TV critics increasingly called dramas out for showing sexual violence in ways they felt were exploitative or unnecessary. “Martin, Benioff, and Weiss could conjure dragons, but not a world in which men could be the targets of female desire,” wrote Esquire’s Gabrielle Bruney in 2019. “They brought White Walkers to terrifying life, but couldn’t consider sexual assault as anything more than a provocative plot point. This failure has thrown a pall over seven seasons of otherwise great television, and it’s a sin that threatens to limit the show’s watchability in future years, as audiences tolerate less and less chauvinism in their entertainment.”

Thrones insiders felt one reason their show received such criticism was, ironically, because they had so successfully created and evolved so many strong female characters in the first place. Daenerys, Cersei, Brienne, Arya, and Sansa had all become pop culture icons with their own dedicated and protective fandoms. Each was fully realized and nothing like the other, as well as unlike any other characters on TV.

MICHAEL LOMBARDO (former HBO programming president): Dan and David have never been two people who pushed nudity or sexual content to titillate or increase viewers. This was also a show that had more kick-ass, unique female characters than anywhere in the television landscape. So I think the reaction struck us as, “Oh, could we be more mindful of this? Let’s learn from this and ask hard questions.” I think it was partly because the show became so successful and widely watched that it began to draw viewers who came to the show for great drama and it didn’t feel right to them, and I understand that. It was wounding and at the same time started a conversation that we continue to have about how we deal with nudity and sex on-screen.

Many of the scenes that provoked controversy also stemmed from a fundamental challenge faced by Thrones’ writers—how to balance an authentic depiction of savage medieval times with the ideals of a modern television audience. How much should Game of Thrones reflect our world versus a fantasy realm based on Europe’s Dark Ages, with all its accompanying historical horrors, which Martin sought to illuminate? Other dramas in warlike settings, such as Starz’s Outlander, have wrestled with the same issue. Turner told Rolling Stone in 2019 that she thought “the backlash [to the scene] was wrong” given that the show was staying true to its medieval inspiration. Several of her costars similarly said that Thrones was sometimes unfairly criticized for the handling of its female characters.

GWENDOLINE CHRISTIE (Brienne of Tarth): A lot of this show is inspired by actual historical events, and that’s what’s occurring with the women. Women have been treated appallingly in history. Men have too. Human beings have. The show shines a light on women with an exploration of female characters that has rarely been approached before, and I applaud that. Yes, those scenes are difficult, and they should be difficult.

EMILIA CLARKE (Daenerys Targaryen): It pained me to hear people taking Game of Thrones out of context and doing an antifeminist spin. It showed the range that happened to women and depicted real scenarios. Ultimately it showed that women are not only equal but have a huge amount of strength. Game of Thrones showed women in so many different stages of development, from having zero power or rights to women who are queens and are literally unstoppable.

NATALIE DORMER (Margaery Tyrell): The female characters are three-dimensional, fleshed out, often antiheroines as well as heroines. They are as complex and contradictory as the men are. In characterization, yes, Game of Thrones is completely feminist. What might occasionally be lost sight of is there’s a lot of the darker elements of human nature in the real world. Physical violence, misogyny, and rape are not fantastic issues. The reason Thrones is such a strong show is because it’s so real. If you want pure escapism, that’s fine, but then you probably should not be watching Game of Thrones.

MAISIE WILLIAMS (Arya Stark): It’s always been a constant debate because women are treated badly on the show, but it’s the same as the boys and the girls and the men and the animals. I get it that people don’t want to watch scenes like that. But that’s the show we’ve made. . . . I get upset when animals get slaughtered. People are like, “But this is worse than that!” and I never understood that. I think everybody’s allowed to be upset about what they’re upset by.

Though Martin wasn’t on board with season five’s changes to Sansa’s storyline, the author has long defended the inclusion of sexual violence in A Song of Ice and Fire as a necessary story element.

GEORGE R. R. MARTIN: The books reflect a patriarchal society based on the Middle Ages. The Middle Ages were not a time of sexual egalitarianism. It divided people into three classes, and they had strong ideas about the roles of women. One of the charges against Joan of Arc that got her burned at the stake was that she wore men’s clothing—that was not a small thing back then. There were, of course, strong and competent women, but that didn’t change the nature of the society they were in.

There are people who will say to this: “Well, he’s not writing history, he’s writing fantasy, he put in dragons, he should have made an egalitarian society.” But just because you put in dragons doesn’t mean you can put in anything you want. I wanted my books to be strongly grounded in history and show what medieval society was like. I was also reacting to what a lot of fantasy was like. They do what I call the Disneyland Middle Ages—princes and princesses and knights in shining armor—but they didn’t want real consideration of what those societies meant and how they functioned.

To be nonsexist, does that mean you need to portray an egalitarian society? That’s not our history. That’s something for science fiction. Even twenty-first-century America isn’t egalitarian. There are still barriers against women.

And then there’s the whole issue of sexual violence. But if you’re going to write about war—which I’m writing about, and which is what almost all epic fantasy is about—and you just want the cool battles and heroes killing a lot of orcs and don’t portray [sexual violence], there’s something fundamentally dishonest about that. Rape, unfortunately, is part of war today. It’s not a strong testament to the human race, but I don’t think we should pretend it doesn’t exist. I want to portray struggle. Drama comes out of conflict. If you portray a utopia, you probably wrote a pretty boring book.