(Photo by Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images)
HBO’s panel at yesterday’s Television Critics Association yielded few surprises about the state of Westeros. It was confirmed, for example, that Season 8 would be the last year of Game of Thrones. Showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss had been upfront about that. It’s also not a big surprise that HBO is trying very gently to get them to say yes to a spinoff. If there’s one thing we know about the entertainment industry, it’s that if something works the way Game of Thrones does, Hollywood isn’t just going to let it end because the story is complete.
But what was surprising was the sudden left turn the panel took towards the end of the Game of Thrones segment, as questions about the show’s violent and sexual content, specifically violence against women, came up.
Fans are used to these questions by now—they’ve been asked ever since Season 1 coined the term “sexposition,” and especially after Season 5, after Ramsay Bolton raped Sansa Stark on their wedding night. Although nothing in Season 6 set off waves of controversy, the questions are by now part of the standard set put forth by critics, and were to be expected especially in light of Casey Bloys having only just taken over the position from Michael Lombardo this spring.
Carter Bloys was NOT prepped for questions about whether HBO drama overrelies on sexualized violence against women. #TCA16
— Daniel Fienberg (@TheFienPrint) July 30, 2016
Apparently it never occurred to Bloys that he would face these kinds of questions, nor did anyone at HBO think to point that out. When asked whether HBO shows would eventually depict sexual violence against men, he turned it into a joke. “We’re going to kill everybody,” he said.
"We're going to kill everybody" is not the ideal response to a question about pervasive use of rape as a story point. #TCA16
— Haleigh Foutch (@HaleighFoutch) July 30, 2016
The critics were a little shocked, and pounded Bloys on the topic in the executive session. Question: Why were more women than men being assaulted on HBO shows?
"I don’t necessarily see it as specific to women. The point of is there a lot of violence in Westworld and Game of Thrones? Yes, but I don’t necessarily think that it’s specifically isolated to women.No, you haven’t seen men being raped. But the point I would make in Game of Thrones for example is men are castrated, a guy is fed a cake made of his sons. The violence is pretty extreme on all fronts. I take your point that so far there have not been any male rapes, but my point is the violence is spread equally."
That did not satisfy critics who kept coming back and back to the question, asking Bloys if he thought that such depictions across the network, including new shows like Westworld, “normalized” sexual violence against women.
"For the Westworld pilot, the point in Westworld is they’re robots. How you treat a robot with human-like qualities? Is that reflective of how you would treat a human? It’s a little bit different than Game of Thrones, where it is human-on-human violence. But to your larger point: Is it something we think about? Yeah, I think the criticism is valid. I think it’s something that people take into account. It’s not something we’re wanting to highlight or trying to highlight, but I think the criticism is point taken on it."
With Game of Thrones turning more towards the final battle between the dead and the living, not to mention the long break between seasons we’ll have this year (and presumably between Seasons 7 and 8), the show may finally find themselves no longer in the direct crosshairs of these sorts of questions going forward. But with HBO’s new shows under fire for the same issues, and especially in light of a possible spinoff and a return to Westeros in a different generation, these questions won’t fade from view for very long.