Game of Thrones Final Project

For my final project, as I have said from day one, will be focusing on the wedding night scene between Daenerys Targaryen and Khal Drogo. Now, I love the television series and its corresponding book series, A Song of Ice and Fire, but there can be no doubt that these particular pieces of pop culture are extremely violent, sexual, and vulgar. The particular scene that I will be concentrating on occurs in the very first episode of the T.V. show and the eleventh chapter of the first novel. Essentially, it happens pretty early on in the series.

By the time of this scene, which I will argue is a rape scene in the show and not in the books, the viewer of the television show has already seen about a dozen dead bodies, a man get his head chopped off, what appears (at first glance anyway) a frozen zombie-like being, four naked women having a five-some with Tyrion, at the wedding between Daenerys and Drogo people (not the married couple) have sex openly and kill each other over sex partners and other minor insults, Daenerys herself stripped naked, basically felt up by her brother, wear a nearly see-through dress, and forced into a marriage that she absolutely fears (to say the girl’s life sucks is an unimaginable understatement).

I am pretty sure that there is enough violence and sex and combination of the two in this first episode to keep viewers interested, and all of this occurs in the books. Thus the added violence of raping Daenerys seems completely unnecessary. In the book, she does cry and try to converse and plead with her new husband that does not understand much of her language, but he is able to tell her that he does understand the word no and does not have sex with her until saying “no?” and her saying “yes.” Not rape. In the show, Drogo repeatedly says no, but there is no understanding from Daenerys, there is no tenderness, there is no yes. Instead, the strong, older, dark skinned man, who Daenerys’s own brother calls a savage, pushes the white, blonde, younger Daenerys to the ground and consummates their marriage.

I will be looking at why this marriage (which is one of the few happy and loving marriages in the series) starts off with a rape instead of the consensual act that it is in the book. In particular I will look at through the racial lens, because Khal Drogo is one of the few ethnically diverse characters in the first season (and basically the show overall). Why is it so unbelievable for his marriage to Daenerys to start off happy and consensually? Why is this rape added if not to boost ratings for the show? Those are some of the questions I hope to answer.