jesse

Theon of Pyke and Winterfell

Thanks to sum-42 for her art that inspired me!

Claudia has been dead for three seasons, and they have somehow managed to bring her rape storyline back in 3/3 of those seasons. At this point: LET THIS PLOT DIE.

In season 1, I gave them the benefit of the doubt with the Bruce storyline. Maybe that was a mistake, but I had reasons:

First, I hadn’t read the book, so I didn’t know this was a change. I took what the show gave me at face value.

Second, they made the deliberate choice to keep the assault offscreen. The show explicitly framed this as a decision not to be exploitative or make a spectacle of the details of Claudia’s suffering. That was a choice I thought was genuinely good and gave me hope: they at least seemed to understand that a female character shouldn’t be reduced to an opportunity to depict her being raped.

But then season 2 happened, and this is where my goodwill really started to evaporate.

In 2x03, Claudia tells Louis about what happened, and the show essentially soft-retcons the storyline into something much more extensive. It wasn't just the one time assault we saw implied in season 1; now she was kidnapped and repeatedly tortured. There was basically no indication in season 1 that this was the backstory they were building toward, and to me it very clearly felt like a choice made for season 2 to make the material more severe in retrospect.

And I was already like: okay. So we're bringing this storyline back and retroactively making Claudia's experience of sexual violence significantly more horrific.

But I still tried to give them some credit because, at least, Claudia herself was the one telling Louis about it. It wasn't another person reading her diary or the audience being given a voyeuristic reconstruction of her trauma.

She was choosing to tell him, in her own words, because she trusted him. I could at least interpret that as Claudia reclaiming some agency over the story and finally being able to speak about it and move forward.

Then we got episode 6 and I understood the actual reason they made her mention it again.

Because apparently the only way these writers could conceive of a romantic relationship between two women was: have them bond over being sexually assaulted.

And Madeline's assault is even worse in terms of how the show depicts it. At this point it basically feels like: oh, here's a female character. Let's have her get raped on screen because thats what happens to women. We get the gratuitous, lingering shots of the attempted assault, Claudia intervenes and saves her, and that becomes the catalyst for their relationship.

The narrative logic is basically the same as the most tedious dark-romantasy trope imaginable: male love interest saves female character from being raped by some random bad guys → shes so grateful she falls in love → romance. Except they put it between two women and apparently expected that to make the trope less grotesque.

And to be clear, I am not saying anything about people who enjoy Claudia/Madeleine, nor do I particularly dislike Madeleine as a character. My problem is entirely with the writers' decision to develop their relationship this way and chosing sexual violence as a the narrative shortcut.

So by season 2, this was already becoming a pattern.

And then season 3 comes around and they bring Claudia's rape storyline back again.

It was finished in season 1. Then they revisited it in season 2, expanded it, retroactively made it worse, added another woman being sexually assaulted and then used that assault as a means for developing Claudia's romantic relationship.

I genuinely cannot think of many examples of a television show spending three entire seasons progressively fleshing out a dead female character's rape in more and more detail. How much do you have to hate your own female character to keep finding new ways to make her sexual trauma narratively relevant after she's been dead for years?

And don't even get me started on Bruce being brought back.

Sometimes a rapist living without facing consequences is actually the point. That is, unfortunately, the reality of sexual violence: perpetrators frequently do go on to live their lives without facing anything remotely resembling justice. That was a perfectly coherent place to leave the story.

He simply did not need to come back.

And the decision to have him change his name to Killer, the nickname Claudia gave him, is especially weird to me. It makes it seem like Claudia had this enormous, life-defining impact on his identity, like she fundamentally shaped his life and he carried this piece of her with him, when, from her perspective, he was a random man who violently victimized her.

Why are we giving the rapist that kind of narrative significance?

Why is the story so interested in making him into a character?

And there was absolutely no reason they needed to use that time on him. They could have explored Lestat's memories of Claudia instead. They could have given us a flashback about Claudia that was actually about Claudia, something he remembers about her that isn't her being sexually assaulted.

Instead we're talking about a man reading Claudia's diary including accounts of her sexual assault out loud to her rapist as he kills him as some sort of heroic power fantasy of righteous vengence. And dont say "that's the point! it's supposed to be hollow and meaningless!" But its also supposed to be lesdaughter pararells so which is it?

Are the writers actually critiquing the voyeuristic misogynistic consumption of her trauma? Or are they just repeatedly doing exactly that, reconstructing and revisiting this girl's rape long after she's dead to use it as material for men's emotional arcs?

At some point, you cannot keep saying "look how exploitative these characters are being with Claudia's story" as though that automatically means the show itself isn't benefiting from the exploitation. The writers are the ones choosing to put this material on screen. They are the ones deciding that Claudia's rape needs to be revisited again and that we need more details every season and that her private account of being assaulted needs to become a plot device.