Unbleached Unbent Unbroken

O: "The last time I was in the capital was many years ago.

Another wedding. My sister Elia and Rhaegar Targaryen, the Last Dragon.

My sister loved him, she bore his children, swaddled them, rocked them,

fed them at her own breast. Elia wouldn’t let the wet nurse touch them.

And beautiful, noble Rhaegar Targaryen left her for another woman.

That started a war and the war ended right here when your father’s army took the city… and butchered those children. My nephew and niece. Carved them up and wrapped them in Lannister cloaks.

And my sister, you know what they did to her?

I’m asking you a question”.

T: "I’ve heard rumors".

O: "So have I. The one I keep hearing is that Gregor Clegane the Mountain raped Elia and split her in half with his great sword".

T: “I wasn’t there. I don’t know what happened”.

"That is Nymeria’s star, burning bright, and that milky band behind her, those are ten thousand ships. She burned as bright as any man, and so shall I. You will not rob me of my birthright!"

(title taken from the poem of the same name by Suheir Hammad)

I’m crawling out of my little fandom hole because three episodes in, I’m becoming increasingly irritated at how Oberyn Martell and the Dornish on a whole are being portrayed in Game of Thrones. 

Apparently, when not attending weddings, Oberyn and Ellaria can be found exclusively in a brothel inciting an orgy of some sort. Even when they do attend outside events, they are drawn to the scantily clad contortionist or to propositioning fellow guests by suggestively eating food. Yes, Dorne is more sexually permissive than other areas of Westeros. Paramours are common, noble-born women have sex before and outside of marriage, and bastards are not scorned and hidden away. For the writers of Game of Thrones, this means one thing: more sex scenes.

Instead of highlighting how racist the Westerosi attitudes towards Dorne are, the show buys into them, reducing the Dornish so far to a few men in turbans and over sexed characters with quick tempers. So far, Oberyn Martell has spent his time having sex, issuing threats and hotheadedly killing stray Lannister soldiers. Gone is any subtlety he had in the book, where he patiently bided his time with his brother to seek justice for his sister, Elia. Instead show!Oberyn is the orientalist archetype of a highly sexed, overly passionate non-white male, unable to keep either his libido or temper in check.

Coming on top of Essos and how the characters there are PoC who are either cruel, barbaric, avaricious slave owners or slaves who need to be saved by the white saviour character (and this is without mentioning the cringe worthy end of season 3 where Daenerys crowd surfs a purely brown crowd), this portrayal of Oberyn Martell and Dorne is particularly galling. 

The Sand Snakes:

Omahyra Mota as Obara Sand

Janina Gavankar as Nymeria Sand

Jasmine Sanders as Tyene Sand

Samira Wiley as Sarella Sand

Naomi Scott as Elia Sand

Ulka Gupta as Obella Sand

Ashnoor Kaur as Dorea Sand

Okay, so I have seen some posts circling around Tumblr defending white-washed fancasts of the Sand Snakes, particularly Nymeria and Tyene.  They try and justify the white-washing by saying that Nymeria is described as having “milk-pale skin” and Tyene as having green eyes and blond hair.  First of all, George RR Martin has said that Nymeria looks like Janina Gavankar:

She is most definitely not a white woman, and is 100x hotter than Gemma fucking Arterton wearing brownface in the Prince of Persia.  .  Fancasting a white person to play a mixed character erases part of their identity, and that shit is fucking racist.  A lot of mixed-race people can be described as having milk-pale skin, but that does not make them white.  Case in point:

All of these people have milk-pale skin and are mixed, not white.  Similarly, having blond hair and/or blue or green eyes does not automatically mean a character is white:

A large part of Tyene’s identity comes from being the daughter of a Dornishman.  She should be played by a mixed actress in order to reflect that.  I am fine with a white-passing mixed woman playing Tyene, but Gemma Arterton, Jennifer Lawrence, and Katie McGrath are not mixed and are therefore inappropriate choices for Sand Snakes/Martell women.  

Critics’ Reactions to the Jaime/Cersei Rape Scene in Episode 4.3 of Game of Thrones

"I wonder, then, if the rape was on some level a misguided attempt to give Cersei even more pathos, a la the convenient backstory rapes that have become depressingly common on prestige TV (and Scandal)…I wonder if TV Thrones‘s writers just have a tendency to change problematic book sex scenes into clear scenes of unconsensual sex.” - Hillary Busis, Entertainment Weekly

“Game of Thrones has a rape problem.” - Kevin Spak, Newser

"In the original depiction, Jaime never says “Why have the Gods made me love a hateful woman?” — a line that the TV show added in, which in context makes Jaime look like an abusive rapist (the gods made me do it!)”- Darren Franich, Entertainment Weekly

Jaime forced himself upon Cersei despite her demands to stop. “It’s not right,” she cried, to which Jaime snarled, “I don’t care.”…we can never unsee that godawful scene. - Leanne Aguilera, E! Online

"If this scene really just is a miscalculation in direction (and potentially the writing of Benioff and Weiss, neither of whom have yet commented on it) and doesn’t get any payoff later in the season, then it truly deserves all the criticism it has been receiving.” - Terri Schwartz, Zap2It

The director who shot the scene and the man who acted in it both believe it wasn’t necessarily nonconsensual sex— an attitude that isn’t totally surprising in a society that’s deeply confused about what constitutes consent, and that doesn’t always recognize sexual violence for what it is. -Tara Culp-Ressler, ThinkProgress

So then Jaime … well … no other way to put this, really. He rapes his sister beside their corpse of their murdered son. This is the same guy who protected Brienne from a similar fate last year.  - James Hibberd, Entertainment Weekly

"…the show’s overall treatment of women as disposable objects onto whom physical and emotional violence are relentlessly enacted. Sexual violence is so pervasive on the show that nearly every woman on the show has been raped or threatened with rape. The show, and the books, reveal the disturbing and cavalier facility with which rape becomes a narrative device.Rape is used to punish. Rape is used to make a woman more sympathetic or to explicate their anger or other unlikable qualities. Rape is used to put women in their place.” -Roxane Gay, Salon

"The entire scene in the sept was an exercise in Cersei’s belittlement. She watched her father degrade and dishonor (albeit truthfully) her firstborn’s legacy and then manipulate her youngest into serving as his marionette. Then, on the floor next to the body of her dead son, the only man she’s ever taken into her confidence abused that trust in the most vile way imaginable.” - Hillary Kelly, The New Republic

"A giggling dead body would have at least taken our attention away from, you know, the raping." - Johnny Brayson, wetpaint

"Whether the show meant it to come across that way or not, what we saw was a rape.” - Erik Kain, Forbes

"The scene, which has Cersei pleading “stop it” repeatedly and struggling against Jaime, appears far from consensual." - Margaret Wappler, Los Angeles Times

In the show there’s no other way to interpret it as unambiguous rape. Jaimie isn’t loving when he tries to have sex with her in the show, he’s shown as being angry and hateful, cursing her for being a wicked woman. There’s no point in the scene on the show that we can see Cersei consent, which makes the whole scene significantly different from the book. Some readers have pointed out that the rape in the show is damaging for Cersei’s character arc since she had to endure the marriage to Robert Baratheon in which he essentially engaged in marital rape,  Her consensual sex was always with Jaimie who made her feel safe. Jaimie raping her in the show completely destroys their relationship and destroys the trust she has in Jaimie leaving her without anyone. - AJ, the Digital Times

The rewritten scene also takes away all of Cersei’s agency. In the original text, Cersei chooses to have sex with Jaime, grotesque as it and the setting may be — because she wants to, or because she uses sex to manipulate, it doesn’t matter. Cersei has power and control. The scene in the show deprives her of all of that. - Amelia McDonell-Parry, The Frisky

His response is not to stop loving her, not to stop believing that he is victim to the gods. Instead, Jaime rapes his sister, passing that sense of unendurable pain on to her. He must know that this is the worst possible way that he could hurt her. Jaime knew that Robert raped Cersei, and in the novels, he wanted to kill Robert for it. Not only does raping Cersei remind his sister of her repeated, humiliating violation, Jaime is poisoning their own relationship, the thing that had been Cersei’s antidote to the miseries of her marriage. It is an exceptionally cruel thing for Jaime to do.  - Alyssa Rosenberg, Washington Post.

It’s hard to shake the idea that Game Of Thrones, the show, doesn’t see a problem with pushing a scene from complicated, consensual sex to outright rape. It would be easier to accept that idea if it were clear what the show was trying to do with those changes. - Sonia Saraiya, AV Club

If Graves intended to depict consensual sex in the end, he completely failed. This wasn’t even one of those terribly clichéd scenes where a man starts raping a woman only to find that she comes around to thinking it’s hot. Cersei is still kicking and protesting when the camera cuts away. It’s as straightforward a rape scene as you’ll get on TV, unless you buy the ridiculous myth that a woman can’t be raped if she’s consented to sex with a man before. - Amanda Marcotte, Slate

This isn’t the first rape scene in Game of Thrones—far from it. And there’s been controversy over the show’s use of rape before. But what makes this scene the most upsetting one yet is that the director didn’t realize he was filming a rape scene…Whether or not the creators intended this to be a rape scene is irrelevant; they made one anyway. And worse, they made one that encourages the most dangerous thinking about rape imaginable. - Laura Hudson, Wired

"How will victims of sexual assault be affected when a director and actor in one of television’s most popular shows questions whether no really means no?" - Eliana Dockterman, Time Magazine

I’ll go ahead and say it: Jaime Lannister has become a rape cliché. He’s the boss, like every other on-screen rapist we’ve ever seen. - Hayley Krischer, Salon

"I’m not opposed to shows depicting sexual violence, but rape-as-prop is always distressing…Rape and abuse have consequences for the victims who carry those traumas with them. While I don’t know exactly how the show will depict the aftermath of Jamie raping Cersei, GoT does not have a strong track record of acknowledging or exploring the lingering effects of surviving sexual assault." - Margarey Lyons, Vulture/New York Magazine

"I can’t think of any comparable defense for the rape scene in "Breaker of Chains," which feels like a naked and ill-conceived attempt to push Game of Thrones into even darker territory. …I’m concerned that Game of Thrones has made a mistake it can’t take back — and one that sets a troubling precedent for the show’s future.” - Scott Meslow, The Week

The Game of Thrones Rape Scene Was Unnecessary and Despicable….The fact that showrunners might be asking us to overlook this for the sake of character development is downright insulting and says a lot about how we treat victims, especially the ones who come off as unlikable. - Madeleine Davies, Jezebel.com

→ obrynmartel requested a Martell graphic//