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Much has already been written about Sunday’s controversial episode of Game of Thrones. The episode itself was actually rather dull—a lot of exposition and little action—but one particular scene has already garnered thousands of keystrokes, hundreds of outraged tweets, and dozens of confused attempts at rationalization. Viewers will no doubt know exactly what scene I mean.

In the Great Sept, next to the dead body of their first born son, Jaime Lannister rapes his sister, the mother of his three children.

Immediately after this scene aired, fans were at their keyboards crying foul. Jaime Lannister would never! That’s not how it happened in the book! How could they?

I had waited anxiously for that scene. In the books, it was the …show more content…

And, because of his relationship with Brienne, we know that, deep down, under the gold cloak and the shiny hair and attempted murder of a child. All he ever wanted to be was a knight like Ser Arthur Dayne, the Sword of the He’s really just a noble guy whose been lead astray.

And whose fault is that?

David Beniodd and D.B. Weiss say it’s Cersei’s fault. Not explicitly. At least, not yet. But that’s why the sex scene in the Sept became the rape scene in the sept. That’s why, despite hundreds of pages of painstaking character development that make it entirely illogical for that to happen, they wrote it that way for television.

Because on the King’s Road with Brienne, Jaime was beginning to get in touch with the boy-knight still inside himself, the one who still believed in the words he said. Her honor made him want to be more honorable too. But now he’s back in King’s Landing, outside of Brienne’s sphere of good influence and back in Cersei’s corrupting one. Instead of welcoming Jaime home with open legs, D&D’s Cersei is standoffish and unresponsive.

He stands in the previous episode, pathetically pleading for a modicum of her affection, but she spurns him, telling him he’s too late, that things have changed. D&D’s Cersei cares not a whit for Jaime, though he has devoted his whole life to her, has allowed her to mold him into the man who stands before her. And what better way to show how corrupting she is, than to have that love turned against her?

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