If you're the show only crowd, I recommend not reading the following post.
I want to address the Jaime/ Cersei scene. He did not rape her in the book, she lightly tried to tell him know in case they were caught but she quickly relented, she even led up to it with some surprising tenderness. From the book, since I have it right here, Page 851 of Storm of Swords:
"You'll kill him for me, won't you? You'll avenge our son."
Jaime pulled away. "He is still my brother." He shoved his stump at her face, in case she failed to see it. "And I am in no fit state to be killing anyone."
"You have another hand, don't you? I am not asking you to best the Hound in battle. Tyrion is a dwarf, locked in a cell. The guards would stand aside for you."
The thought turned his stomach. "I must know more of this. Of how it happened."
"You shall," Cersei promised. "There's to be a trial. When you hear all he did, you'll want him dead as much as I do." She touched his face. "I was lost without you, Jaime. I was afraid the Starks would send me your head. I could not have borne that." She kissed him. A light kiss, the merest brush of her lips on his, but he could feel her tremble as he slid his arms around her. "I am not whole without you."
There was no tenderness in the kiss he returned to her, only hunger. Her mouth opened for his tongue. "No," she said weakly when his lips moved down her neck, "not here. The septons..."
"The Others can take the septons." He kissed her again, kissed her silent, kissed her until she moaned. Then he knocked the candles aside and lifted her up onto the Mother's altar, pushing up her skirts and the silken shift beneath. She pounded on his chest with feeble fists, murmuring about the risk, the danger, about their father, about the septons, about the wrath of the gods. He never heard her. [Some steamy bit here that's certainly not appropriate for the Guild]
"my brother, sweet brother, yes, like that, yes, I have you, you're home now, you're home now, you're home."
This, clearly, is not the same as what we saw on the show. Yes, he was forceful in the book, but nothing like that. It was passion she was receptive to, just worried about getting caught, nothing more. I'm not saying Jaime's a great man, and he's certainly done some fucked up stuff, like the whole Bran toss and incest thing, but violently raping Cersei? What the shit. You can't even pretend that the book and the show are the same thing with the same personalities for that scene. Hell, from the man himself: http://defamer.gawker.com/george-r-r-martin-distances-himself-from-game-of-thron-1565857941
"“I think the “butterfly effect” that I have spoken of so often was at work here. In the novels, Jaime is not present at Joffrey’s death, and indeed, Cersei has been fearful that he is dead himself, that she has lost both the son and the father/ lover/ brother. And then suddenly Jaime is there before her. Maimed and changed, but Jaime nonetheless. Though the time and place is wildly inappropriate and Cersei is fearful of discovery, she is as hungry for him as he is for her.
The whole dynamic is different in the show, where Jaime has been back for weeks at the least, maybe longer, and he and Cersei have been in each other’s company on numerous occasions, often quarreling. The setting is the same, but neither character is in the same place as in the books, which may be why Dan & David played the sept out differently. But that’s just my surmise; we never discussed this scene, to the best of my recollection.
Also, I was writing the scene from Jaime’s POV, so the reader is inside his head, hearing his thoughts. On the TV show, the camera is necessarily external. You don’t know what anyone is thinking or feeling, just what they are saying and doing.
If the show had retained some of Cersei’s dialogue from the books, it might have left a somewhat different impression — but that dialogue was very much shaped by the circumstances of the books, delivered by a woman who is seeing her lover again for the first time after a long while apart during which she feared he was dead. I am not sure it would have worked with the new timeline.
That’s really all I can say on this issue. The scene was always intended to be disturbing… but I do regret if it has disturbed people for the wrong reasons.”
"The "butterfly effect" is presumably in reference to the idea that one small change in the story necessitates later changes, reverberating for the entirety of the television show. Martin is sympathetic to the creative plight of Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, who are tasked with translating sprawling fantasy novels into popcorn television, but he essentially lets them live or die on their own decision with regard to this episode's rape scene, making it clear that he was does not recall being consulted (as he sometimes is) on the alteration.
His final statement, in which he apologizes for a decision that he did not make, is admirable even. The scene as he wrote it—a brother and sister having public reunion sex beneath the corpse of their son—is disturbing, and would have been sufficiently so on the show. But the so-called "wrong reasons" fall in the lap of Benioff and Weiss, who—in a decision that has yet to be explained—transformed that scene into a rape.
Martin has said his piece, and at some point Benioff and Weiss will have to as well."
