George R.R. Martin criticizes Daenerys-Drogo wedding scene: “It made it worse, not better”

George R.R. Martin is mostly happy with how HBO adapted his books, but Daenerys and Drogo’s wedding night remains an issue for him.

Up until its fifth season, HBO’s Game of Thrones stuck fairly closely to the story laid out by George R.R. Martin in his A Song of Ice and Fire series. And even after the show began to deviate from Martin’s framework, the author had few complaints about where showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss took things. In fact, Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon contains a great deal of praise for how the showrunners handled his work — but that’s not to say Martin doesn’t have his gripes.

For example, he wasn’t a fan of how Benioff and Weiss handled Daenerys and Drogo’s wedding night, a scene that needed to be filmed twice due to the series switching actresses. The show’s unaired pilot had Tamzin Merchant cast as Daenerys, but it also had a scene of Dany and Drogo consummating their marriage that was far truer to Martin’s vision.

When Daenerys’ role was recast and given to Emilia Clarke, the scene had to be shot again — and this time, the consensual component was taken out in favor of Drogo raping Daenerys on their wedding night. “Why did the wedding scene change from the consensual seduction scene that excited even a horse to the brutal rape of Emilia Clarke?” he wondered. “We never discussed it. It made it worse, not better.”

For his part, Weiss said that something about the scene the way it was written in the books didn’t work for them. “[W]e just didn’t have that amount of time and access to the character’s mind,” he explained. “It turns too quickly. It was something the actors themselves felt wasn’t gelling. They weren’t able to find an emotional handhold.”

We should point out that, in both the show and the books, Drogo is a full-grown man during this encounter while Daenerys is a teenager, and she’s younger in the books than she is on TV. So from the start, the scene had some very troubling elements. Both versions have received their fair share of criticism, although clearly Martin prefers his to the show’s. Either way, it’s one of the series’ most controversial moments, and for Game of Thrones, that’s saying something.

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