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[TorchTheWitch]

21. I agree that it LOOKED like a rape scene

It wasn't MEANT to look that way, it was just that it wasn't done well enough to show that it wasn't. While she tells him to stop she also kisses him back just as fiercely and at one point grabs his shirt sleeve and pulls him to her just before they slide to the floor. As I said, they failed at making it more obvious that it wasn't rape. They could easily have shown that it wasn't rape just by having her say something like "oh, yes!" before the sex to make it more obvious and probably beforehand it would have been better to show her thinking more in that she DID want to have sex with him just not where they were for fear of being caught, like having her say something like "not here".

Film is a really difficult medium to show what people think. You really have to go more on what you know about the characters, their backgrounds and relationships, the cultural aspects of the times, etc. Even if Cercei didn't want to have sex with him at that time and wasn't sexually interested in him at that time the culture these people live in makes sex with a man you've willingly had sex with before their right to have sex with you again any time they want and where ever they want in the future and that this is also acceptable to the women in that culture because that's they way things are and always have been.

In knowing their characters that aren't so well known in the tv series but were in the books this is how their sexual encounters were with her pushing his buttons in giving and pushing away repeatedly in a single encounter and how he expects their sex is going to be because that was their custom. She LIKES sex with him though sex with him for her is more of her way of manipulating him than just for her own enjoyment. And she only cares about his enjoyment if it gets her to have him do things that she wants not because she cares for him or loves him because she doesn't and never has.

To US in the culture and times that WE live in this would have looked like rape without it being obvious that though at first she told him to stop she did want and did enjoy the sex and he should have stopped when she told him to. In THAT culture it wouldn't have been rape even if she wasn't interested in the sex at that time and he did it anyway with her still not wanting it and not enjoying it and even she wouldn't have considered it to be rape because this was normal and acceptable treatment of women in that culture that women agreed with and accepted just as they agreed with and accepted having their husbands chosen for them and had to have sex with them whether they wanted to or not. Women considered it their duty to accept who they were married to and have sex with with them and would have felt there was something wrong with them if they were revolted by it.

Of course this is hard for women in our culture and times to understand how women could not only accept but even enjoy their fates in such a culture, but that's how the medieval period was. Women at that time were treated like a bargaining chip or a useless thing. They had no personal ambition because they were raised in a culture that believed this was outrageous by both men and women. They were the servants of and play things of men, and raised to believe that a woman's own thoughts, opinions and feelings were of no account and that this was all right and proper. It's one of the reasons I've always had such an interest in this period of our own history... to understand how women themselves endured such treatment while also believing it was right and proper and applying that to women's growth into being accepted as people in their own right and how even now we still aren't quite there yet especially how so many women of today still cut down women by so many mens' superior perspectives.

Just going by the culture of the medieval period of the show it wasn't rape nor would either character believed it was. Seems to me one would have to watch the show and read the books with the perspective of the culture of the time and place. Otherwise the things characters do and why doesn't make sense.

I like the character of Cercei for much the same reason as I like Anne Boleyn. Both strong intelligent women that despite their upbringing and their culture they broke the mold on the expected character of women and their place in society and didn't care what was thought of them as long as what was though of them thwarted their ambitions. They both also achieve extraordinary success in the highest echelons of power. They both use sex as their ultimate weapon as it is the only weapon afforded to them in their cultures. But they both do/did evil things for their own personal ambitions.