So like everyone else on the planet, I’m watching HBO’s Game of Thrones. Unlike most people, I’m not bitorrenting a pirated copy. I’m going over to a friend’s house. How’s that for old school?
It’s a different experience for me than for most folks, though, because I’m also in the middle of adapting Game of Thrones to a visual medium. I’m writing the comic book scripts for Bantam and Dynamite. The license they bought was for the original book, not the HBO show, so I haven’t spoken to anyone in Holywood about the decisions they made, what to cut what to keep in. I’m on my own for that, and seeing the decisions they made has been fascinating. (What about Bran’s dreams? Where’s the three-eyed crow?)
One thing that struck me particularly, though, is the wedding night of Daenerys Targaryen. It’s a wildly problematic scene in a number of ways, and the problems and solutions about how to deal with it pretty much run the gamut.
In the original book, Daenerys is a thirteen-year-old girl given by her brother to a foreign warlord. It’s a political marriage meant to cement an alliance in preparation for war, and as such, boy howdy, does it have a lot of historical precedent. We’ve seen Dany as a victim and a child, lost and powerless, through the whole book. We’ve seen the wedding – which is violent and strange and frightening. Then the time comes, and Dany is taken off from her family and the people she knows with a huge, strong man who has the acknowledged right to have sex with her whether she wants it or not.
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