George R.R. Martin has broken his silence about the most controversial scene from the Sunday night's "Breaker of Chains" episode of "Game of Thrones."
Many fans of Martin's novels were outraged with how the sex scene between Jaime and Cersei played out on the show. In the novels, Cersei consensually wanted to relations with Jaime as she had not seen him until after the death of their son.
However, in the show Cersei is dealing with the trauma of Joffrey's death and repeatedly tells Jaime to stop, but he continues to force himself on her. Martin addressed the differences in the following statement to Vanity Fair.
I think the "butterfly effect" that I have spoken of so often was at work here. In the novels, Jaime is not present at Joffrey's death, and indeed, Cersei has been fearful that he is dead himself, that she has lost both the son and the father/ lover/ brother. And then suddenly Jaime is there before her. Maimed and changed, but Jaime nonetheless. Though the time and place is wildly inappropriate and Cersei is fearful of discovery, she is as hungry for him as he is for her.
The whole dynamic is different in the show, where Jaime has been back for weeks at the least, maybe longer, and he and Cersei have been in each other's company on numerous occasions, often quarreling. The setting is the same, but neither character is in the same place as in the books, which may be why Dan & David played the sept out differently. But that's just my surmise; we never discussed this scene, to the best of my recollection.
Martin also addresses a point that several book readers (and show defenders) have raised today. Namely that the scene in his book is from Jaime's point of view. A Song of Ice and Fire is a hugely subjective story and that's an aspect the T.V. adaptation hasn't taken on. The comparative length of Martin's epic series and the medium of literature itself allow for much more moral ambiguity and nuance.
Martin added in his novels the reader has a better point of view than the camera in the HBO series.
I was writing the scene from Jaime's POV, so the reader is inside his head, hearing his thoughts. On the TV show, the camera is necessarily external. You don't know what anyone is thinking or feeling, just what they are saying and doing.
If the show had retained some of Cersei's dialogue from the books, it might have left a somewhat different impression -- but that dialogue was very much shaped by the circumstances of the books, delivered by a woman who is seeing her lover again for the first time after a long while apart during which she feared he was dead. I am not sure it would have worked with the new timeline.
That's really all I can say on this issue. The scene was always intended to be disturbing... but I do regret if it has disturbed people for the wrong reasons.
"Game of Thrones" airs on HBO Sundays at 9 p.m. EST.
