{"id":6080,"date":"2011-05-13T06:00:12","date_gmt":"2011-05-13T14:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/aidanmoher.com\/blog\/?p=6080"},"modified":"2012-09-09T14:16:49","modified_gmt":"2012-09-09T22:16:49","slug":"guest-post-the-three-wedding-nights-of-daenerys-targaryen-by-daniel-abraham","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aidanmoher.com\/blog\/2011\/05\/articles\/guest-post-the-three-wedding-nights-of-daenerys-targaryen-by-daniel-abraham\/","title":{"rendered":"Guest Post | “The Three Wedding Nights of Daenerys Targaryen” by Daniel Abraham"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"The<\/a>So like everyone else on the planet, I\u2019m watching HBO\u2019s Game of Thrones<\/strong>. Unlike most people, I\u2019m not bitorrenting a pirated copy. I\u2019m going over to a friend\u2019s house. How\u2019s that for old school?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a different experience for me than for most folks, though, because I\u2019m also in the middle of adapting Game of Thrones<\/strong> to a visual medium. I\u2019m 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\u2019t spoken to anyone in Holywood about the decisions they made, what to cut what to keep in. I\u2019m on my own for that, and seeing the decisions they made has been fascinating. (What about Bran\u2019s dreams? Where\u2019s the three-eyed crow?)<\/p>\n

One thing that struck me particularly, though, is the wedding night of Daenerys Targaryen. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

In the original book, Daenerys is a thirteen-year-old girl given by her brother to a foreign warlord. It\u2019s 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\u2019ve seen Dany as a victim and a child, lost and powerless, through the whole book. We\u2019ve seen the wedding \u2013 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.
\n
\n\"A<\/a>In the book, George is setting us up. We\u2019re expecting, essentially, child-rape. What we get is very different. Dany\u2019s new husband takes her to a beautiful place, spends a great deal of time with her. She brushes his hair. He helps her to feel comfortable with her nakedness. There\u2019s foreplay. There\u2019s a lot of it. And when the marriage is finally consummated, it is explicitly with Dany\u2019s consent.<\/p>\n

So that\u2019s surprising and oddly humane. At least compared with what we thought was going to happen.<\/p>\n

Now let\u2019s switch over to us poor adapters. Like I said, I haven\u2019t talked to my confreres in Hollywood, so anything I say about them and their process is speculation. Mine, I can talk about.<\/p>\n

The first problem is we\u2019re putting up pictures of a thirteen-year-old girl having sex. You start there, and your second problem almost doesn\u2019t matter. Let\u2019s see . . . Child pornography. Definition. Visual depiction of a person under the age of 18 engaged in sexually explicit conduct. Felony. Check.<\/p>\n

For a great stretch of history and even now in many parts of the world, a thirteen-year-old girl is marriageable. Juliet Capulet was thirteen when she ran off with Romeo. We can have long conversations about human evolution and sexuality and the ways in which childhood is a recent invention, and it won\u2019t matter a bit.<\/p>\n

Emilia Clarke is about a decade older than Daenerys. In the comic book, Dany is at least 18 years old so that we don\u2019t have anything professional to talk to Comic Book Legal Defense Fund guys about. <\/p>\n

So already, and unmistakably, the folks and HBO and I have turned aside from the intent of the original. A thirteen-year-old is different than someone five or ten years older. The Dany we\u2019re working with isn\u2019t a lost child growing to maturity in the way that George\u2019s was because she\u2019 s not a child to start with. The constraint of law is upon it, and as a parent, I\u2019m fine with that.<\/p>\n

So the second problem. Time and foreplay.<\/p>\n\"My<\/a>\n

HBO had less than a minute to cover the wedding scene. A minute is a freaking long time in television. Me? I had three pages. That\u2019s about ten percent of an issue that had a lot of plot to cover, and if I could have given it more time and space, I would have, but it just wasn\u2019t there.<\/p>\n

George had the challenge of convincing the reader that Dany could give consent in a situation where, really, if she withheld it, it wasn\u2019t going to matter. And he did it because he could take us into her mind, walk us through her experience, and take the time she needed to take the reader to an unexpected place that was both uncomfortable and humane. In the comic and the TV show, we literally didn\u2019t have time or space to do that. I had a little more than they did, and I did my best to give Dany and her khal that moment, as imperfect as my translation might have been.<\/p>\n

HBO? Let\u2019s be straight. They had him rape her.<\/p>\n

Constraint changes stories. Different media have different constraints, and some things that aren\u2019t possible in one medium become possible in another. This is that case. What George did in that scene, we couldn\u2019t match. Not me, not HBO. We did something else, and hopefully in ways that don\u2019t do too much violence to the story. But my Dany and HBO\u2019s Dany can never be George\u2019s.<\/p>\n

I write a lot of books myself, and I have to say, as frustrating as it is to be an adapter, it reassures me to be reminded that there are always going to be some things the book does better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So like everyone else on the planet, I\u2019m watching HBO\u2019s Game of Thrones. Unlike most people, I\u2019m not bitorrenting a pirated copy. I\u2019m going over to a friend\u2019s house. How\u2019s that for old school? It\u2019s a different experience for me than for most folks, though, because I\u2019m also in the middle of adapting Game of… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[50,122,38,49,51,102,123],"class_list":["post-6080","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-a-song-of-ice-and-fire","tag-daniel-abraham","tag-fantasy","tag-game-of-thrones","tag-george-r-r-martin","tag-guest-post","tag-the-dagger-and-the-coin"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n