I spent a fair amount of time today discussing that horrid scene with Jaime and Cersei with various friends and family members who were pretty skeeved out and outraged by it. To my eyes it looked exactly like rape. I suppose I could believe that this was some kind of creepy domination game between them - they have a weird and complicated relationship - but this is not what came across on the screen, at least not to me.
The thing is, I was actually more horrified by what came before it - that Cersei begged him to kill their brother. All I could think about was what happened to the last person who asked Jaime to kill a member of his own family. And then that freaky rape next to a corpse thing happened, and the whole time I kept waiting for Joffrey to roll over on top of them, the way Cersei was clutching at the cloth drape thing he was resting on. Christ. What a creepy scene.
And then there were snot rockets and the Hound was back to being the Hound and everything was wrong with the world again.
I guess I wasn't as horrified by the rape as most of the people I spoke with were, but I think maybe I was trying to compare sins, which I know is an incredibly slippery slope, but it's hard for me to reconcile. Is it worse to try to murder your brother, or rape your sister? How about throwing an 8 year old out a window in the hopes that he will die on impact? Is Jaime now irredeemable? What about Khal Drogo? Was he irredeemable after he raped Dany on their wedding night? It's just too much to try to figure. I don't feel like this ruins Jaime's redemption arc for me, because honestly, I feel like Jaime's actually been on a decidedly downward trajectory since he got back to King's Landing and tried to resume his regularly scheduled life. Even Loras Tyrell managed to one-up him last week. But I'm not ready to write him off just yet.
I love the way this show makes me question my own moral code, and who I think is mostly "good" and who I think is mostly "bad", why I even use such categories, whether it's useful to think that way at all, the ways I subconsciously pass judgment on people without even realizing it, in ways that are totally unfair, etc. Very interesting.
