Warning: Spoilers for Game Of Thrones ahead
The fourth episode in Game Of Thrones eighth season included a lot for fans to complain about.
Jon Snow’s (Kit Harrington) abandonment of his beloved direwolf Ghost; Jaime’s (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) ultimate d*ck move in sleeping with Ser Brienne (Gwendoline Christie) then leaving to return to Cersei (Lena Headey) the next day; Missandei’s (Nathalie Emmanuel) borderline racist death.
Then of course, there was Sansa’s (Sophie Turner) admittance that she is no longer the ‘little bird’ she once was because of all that she had been through. Namely, rape.
After both surviving the Battle of Winterfell, The Hound (Rory McCann) and Sansa are reunited once again at the celebration feast. ‘It used to be that you couldn’t look at me,’ he says, to which she explains she is no longer afraid of him as she’s seen ‘much worse’ than him.
It’s a tender moment between the gruff warrior and the oldest Stark girl, and one to cherish because it quickly turns sour. With the best intentions, The Hound tells Sansa that none of the bad things – Ramsay Bolton, Littlefinger (notice no one will say the word rape out loud) – would have happened to her.
‘Without Littlefinger and Ramsay and the rest, I would have stayed a little bird all my life’, she says.
And so, Game Of Thrones trudged itself down a path which has been trodden by the entertainment industry far too deeply, far too often.
TV and films love to use rape and sexual abuse as a vehicle for revenge, whether it’s a woman recovering at remarkable speed with no lasting negative consequences other than an impressive thirst for vengeance or a dad/brother/husband/miscellaneous male relative seeking retribution for their poor, defenceless woman.
It happened in Scandal, when Mellie was raped by her father-in-law, and in the BBC’s supposedly gentle Downton Abbey when Anna was raped by Mr. Green. In both cases, the women are seen eating a meal and playing power games with their attackers in a very short space of time.
Of course, those shows ended a while ago and so in 2019 it feels even more two-dimensional and irresponsible to use a violence – that one in five women in the UK have experienced – so lazily.
As well as offering a skewed view of what rape is, it also repackages the myth that rape only happens to ‘weak’ women.
Though Ser Brienne of Tarth (famously, a strong woman) is captured twice, she is never raped; firstly because her captors believe they can hold her to higher ransom is she is spared and a second time because she bites off the ear of her attacker.
Cersei on the other hand is raped by her own brother at her lowest point, following the death of her beloved firstborn son, Joffrey.
Sansa is fast becoming a fan favourite thanks to her wits, leadership sensibilities and dedication to the people of the North – but it feels like writers are simply relying on outdated tropes all so that so we, as viewers, can be satisfied with her character development.
The problem, as pointed out by many angry tweeters, is that the show is almost entirely devised, written and executed by men.
Men who are normally very good at their jobs, but can in no way accurately represent the lives, never mind the trauma, of a woman – especially one who has been raped.
For a show that has run for eight years and lived through Hollywood’s Time’s Up movement, it is an abhorrence and a disgrace that such a seminal piece of television will end having employed one woman director and only two women writers.
After all, it’s not at all hard to believe Sansa’s arc would have followed the same trajectory had she not been attacked by the vicious men who exerted their power over her.
She took it upon herself to plead for her father’s life; endured Joffrey’s oppression; escaped King’s Landing; murdered a number of people who had wronged her family; led the North as its lady while her brother was gallivanting around with his girlfriend/aunt.
If you believe Sansa Stark couldn’t have done any of this without a rape igniting her flame, then you have bought into the myth. Her flame has been lit from the very beginning.
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