Sept scene

The episode attracted controversy for a scene where Jaime Lannister rapes Cersei Lannister in the Great Sept of Baelor. In the episode, Cersei repeatedly tells Jaime "no", "stop", and "it's not right" while attempting to push him away. In the source novel, however, Cersei initially rejects Jaime's advances but changes her mind, saying "yes",^[4][16] though some readers interpret it as implying rape.^[5] This controversial scene has led to both fan and academic discourse.^[17]

Alan Sepinwall of HitFix stated that viewers interpreted the scene as a rape: "Though there aren't comments on these reviews at the moment, the reaction I've seen on Twitter, in emails and on other blogs suggests nobody is agreeing with [director Alex] Graves' interpretation of the scene and are viewing it as rape, plain and simple."^[18] Sandy Hingston of Philadelphia wrote that the scene had outraged many viewers, but had led others to make "tentative attempts in comments sections to explain why maybe actually this wasn't rape."^[19] Critics, including Erik Kain of Forbes,^[9] Sonia Saraiya of The A.V. Club,^[4] Megan Gibson of Time,^[20] Amanda Marcotte of Slate,^[21] Maureen Ryan of HuffPost,^[22] and Alyssa Rosenberg of The Washington Post, also viewed the scene as rape.^[23]

The episode's director, Alex Graves, described the scene in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter as "and then Jaime comes in and he rapes her".^[24] In another interview with HitFix, Graves said "it becomes consensual by the end, because anything for [Jaime and Cersei] ultimately results in a turn-on, especially a power struggle."^[18] In an interview with Vulture, Graves further elaborated: "The consensual part of it was that she wraps her legs around him, and she's holding on to the table, clearly not to escape but to get some grounding in what's going on. And also, the other thing that I think is clear before they hit the ground is she starts to make out with him. ... before he rips her undergarment, she's way into kissing him back." Graves stated that it was important for him and others involved with filming the scene to indicate to viewers that the sexual encounter was not completely one-sided, and that he hoped this aspect would not be overlooked.^[25] Noting that during filming, "nobody really wanted to talk about what was going on between the two characters", he described this whole scene in the Sept as "one of my favorite scenes I've ever done".^[18]

Others involved with the series also commented on the scene. David Benioff, who co-wrote the episode and serves as showrunner with D. B. Weiss, described the interaction of the two siblings as "a really kind of horrifying scene, because you see, obviously, Joffrey's body right there, and you see that Cersei is resisting this. She's saying no, and he's forcing himself on her. So it was a really uncomfortable scene, and a tricky scene to shoot."^[26] George R.R. Martin, author of the novels from which the series is adapted, stated that the dynamic is different between Jaime and Cersei in the show because, as opposed to the books, "Jaime has been back for weeks at the least, maybe longer." He stated that while the setting is the same, "neither character is in the same place as in the books" and that he surmises this "may be why Dan [Weiss] & David [Benioff] played the sept out differently." Martin added that he never discussed the scene with them, and that the scene "was always intended to be disturbing... but [I] regret if it has disturbed people for the wrong reasons."^[20] Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, who portrays Jaime, said in an interview that while many saw the scene as a brutal rape, "that was obviously never intended. I understand that one can see it as that, but for us it was much more complex."^[27] Lena Headey, who portrays Cersei, declined to comment about whether she interpreted the sex as consensual, but said that "it's a very complicated moment for many reasons ... There was this need and it wasn't right and yet it felt great and yet it wasn't right and it played out the way it did. And I was really happy with [the scene]."^[28]

To Saraiya, the series' choice to portray this scene as rape appeared to be an act of "exploitation for shock value".^[4] Marcotte and Josh Wigler of MTV commented that the rape scene may have damaged Jaime's character's arc of redemption from his earlier crimes, and Marcotte wrote that it might never recover from the rape.^[21][29] Dustin Rowles of Salon noted that viewers who were previously able to sympathize with Jaime despite his earlier crimes of murder and incest now became angry at the series' creators "for allowing a terrible person to do something more terrible than our minds will allow us to forgive."^[30] Andrew Romano of The Daily Beast opined that the scene "wasn't supposed to be a rape. It was supposed to look consensual. The filmmakers messed up." He cited the fact that "neither the director of the scene nor the two actors who played it seem to think that Jaime raped Cersei—and the story itself is continuing to chug along as if the rape never happened and Jaime is still a character we're supposed to root for." He suggested that viewers "ignore the rape—at least from a narrative perspective" because Benioff and Weiss had "botched" it.^[31] In a broader context, Hingston credited the episode with furthering "the furious debate over consent going on in our culture".^[19] Laura Hudson of Wired described the scene and its appraisal by its director as "one that encourages the most dangerous thinking about rape imaginable: that when a woman is held down on the ground, screaming for the man to stop, that deep down inside her she might still really want it." She considered what she called Graves' lack of realization that he was filming a rape scene disturbing because, according to Hudson, his comments encouraged the thinking that a man's persistence might "'turn' a rape into something consensual", and that it is a "dysfunctional, dangerous way of looking at sex and consent, one that is based on the idea of forcing women to give it".^[32]