Beyond the Wall: Exploring George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, From A Game of Thrones to A Dance with Drago

by James Lowder

  Sexual violence is also the hallmark of, perhaps, the two greatest monsters to appear in the series to date: the freakishly large Gregor Clegane, the Mountain That Rides, and Ramsay Bolton, the legitimated son of Roose Bolton, Lord of the Dreadfort.

  There are many rumors about Gregor Clegane’s brutality, but the one act that defines his monstrosity is the rape and murder of Elia Targaryen, along with the murder of her son. The story of Gregor’s atrocities against Elia is told over and over again in the series, from multiple perspectives. It’s one of the first things that Ned recalls about the man when he comes to court in A Game of Thrones. In a litany of possible crimes involving dead siblings, mysterious fires, and disappearing servants, the story of Elia’s rape and murder is the most specific charge against Gregor. It is the moment when he stepped over the line, exceeding his orders to kill the last of the Targaryen line and moving beyond the kind of domestic brutality Westerosi society tolerates, as long as it is kept private, into overt villainy.

  While the people who benefit from Gregor’s atrocities may appreciate the end results and grudgingly accept that it’s necessary for someone to perform such violent acts, his brutality still makes them intensely uncomfortable. In A Storm of Swords, Tywin Lannister, who has never felt the need to justify anything to his youngest son Tyrion, makes an exception to that general contempt to try to explain how such a thing could have taken place while he was in command of the army: “I grant you, it was done too brutally,” he admits. “I did not tell him to spare her. I doubt I mentioned her at all. I had more pressing concerns [. . .]. Nor did I yet grasp what I had in Gregor Clegane, only that he was huge and terrible in battle.” He’s willing to confess to having ordered the family assassinated, but the suggestion that he ordered Clegane to assault Elia is something he rejects: “The rape . . . even you will not accuse me of giving that command, I would hope.”

  It seems, for a moment, that the monsterous Mountain will be defeated by a hero when Oberyn Martell, the foreign prince who was Elia’s brother, faces Gregor in trial by combat. During the duel itself, Oberyn’s taunts unnerve Gregor into making a confession. Yet he answers his rival in a way that feels more like a triumphant reaffirmation of the act than a repudiation of it:

  “I killed her screaming whelp.” He thrust his free hand into Oberyn’s unprotected face, pushing steel fingers into his eyes. “Then I raped her.” Clegane slammed his fist into the Dornishman’s mouth, making splinters of his teeth. “Then I smashed her fucking head in. Like this.” As he drew back his huge fist, the blood on his gauntlet seemed to smoke in the cold dawn air. There was a sickening crunch. (A Storm of Swords)

  It’s a monstrous way to end a fight, and one that forces polite Westerosi society to acknowledge what kind of beast they’ve tolerated in their midst all these years. They could ignore Clegane’s atrocities while he himself was quiet about them. His public affirmation of his guilt, though, indicts the nobility for harboring him.

  The duel marks Gregor’s transformation into a literal monster. Though the Mountain manages to kill Oberyn, the Red Viper poisons Gregor before he dies. The defrocked Maester Qyburn takes Gregor into his lab and proceeds to turn him into an unbeatable champion, murdering inconvenient members of the court so he can harvest their organs for his own use. There’s an extent to which these developments are afterthoughts, emphasis added to a fact that was already established long ago: Gregor Clegane needed no help from anyone to become a monster; the violence he perpetrated against Elia established him as monstrous long ago.

  While Gregor’s crimes began before the events of the first novel in the series, we witness the full empowerment of another horror, whose atrocities against women are directly linked to his rising acceptance in Westerosi society. The first thing we know about Ramsay Bolton, born a bastard but legitimated by his father, is that he abuses his wife. After he is recognized by his father, Ramsay marries Lady Hornwood to gain control of her ancestral house, then leaves her to starve to death in a tower cell. As the story of her death spreads, the detail that stands out is that she chewed off her own fingers in her desperate search for sustenance before death finally claimed her.

  His abuse of women is both widespread and notorious. As one nobleman explains to another, the Bastard of the Dreadfort takes up the unpleasant habit of hunting down women in whom he’s interested: “When Ramsay catches them he rapes them, flays them, feeds their corpses to his dogs, and brings their skins back to the Dreadfort as trophies. If they have given him good sport, he slits their throats before he skins them. Elsewise, t’other way around” (A Dance with Dragons).

  When Theon Greyjoy falls under Ramsay’s control, the sadist gelds him, partially flays him, and forces Theon to participate in sexual assaults, most notably on a servant who is impersonating the late Ned Stark’s younger daughter, Arya. So while women are not Ramsay’s only victims, his crimes sooner or later seem to involve them.

  Eventually we learn that the Bastard of the Dreadfort is, himself, the product of sexual violence. Roose Bolton raped Ramsay’s mother in an exercise of his first night rights, a story he relates in A Dance with Dragons with a casualness that’s chilling:

  “I was hunting a fox along the Weeping Water when I chanced upon a mill and saw a young woman washing clothes in the stream. The old miller had gotten himself a new young wife, a girl not half his age. She was a tall, willowy creature, very healthy-looking. Long legs and small firm breasts, like two ripe plums. Pretty, in a common sort of way. The moment that I set eyes on her I wanted her. Such was my due. The maesters will tell you that King Jaehaerys abolished the lord’s right to the first night to appease his shrewish queen, but where the old gods rule, old customs linger [. . .]. So I had him hanged, and claimed my rights beneath the tree where he was swaying. If truth be told, the wench was hardly worth the rope. The fox escaped as well, and on our way back to the Dreadfort my favorite courser came up lame, so all in all it was a dismal day.”

  In A Storm of Swords, Roose admits to Catelyn Stark that Ramsay’s “blood is tainted, that cannot be denied.” While he undoubtedly means that his line has been polluted by having to divert it through an illegitimate son who is half-peasant, Robett Glover provides an alternative explanation in A Dance with Dragons: “The evil is in his blood. He is a bastard born of rape. A Snow, no matter what the boy king says.” While it may be decidedly antimodern to blame children who are the product of rape for his parents’ sins, there’s something to the idea that unpunished rape is a sin that carries implications far beyond individual victims and perpetrators, a crime that comes back to haunt the society that permits and enables it. This is the one moment in the novels when the characters acknowledge an argument that Martin’s been building for us all along: rape produces damage that lingers beyond a single act, a single victim. It can produce monsters that contribute to the destabilization of entire societies.

  Rape touches the lives, and shapes the world, of almost all the characters in the series, be they noble or common-born, perpetrators or victims. And while each of them feels pain, and terror, and anger individually, it’s given to us to see the collective impact of these assaults across continents. Even when rape isn’t being used as excuse to start a war or a way to manipulate court politics, a tolerance for rape and the failure to provide justice to its victims deforms Westeros and its enemies alike. Rather than an exercise in exploitation, the pervasive nature of sexual violence in A Song of Ice and Fire serves as a powerful indication, and indictment, of corruption and inhumanity.

  ALYSSA ROSENBERG is the culture blogger at ThinkProgress, and the television correspondent for The Atlantic, where she writes regularly on gender, race, and the presentation of policy issues in popular culture. Her work has appeared in Esquire.com, The Daily, The American Prospect, The Washington Monthly, The New Republic, National Journal, and The Daily Beast. She lives in Washington, D.C.

  DANIEL ABRAHAM

  SAME SONG IN A DIFFERENT KEY

  Adapting A Game of Thro
nes as a Graphic Novel

  WHEN I WAS FIRST approached about adapting A Game of Thrones to graphic novel form, Anne Groell, the editor who has overseen these books from the start, asked me to write a brief philosophical statement on my approach to the project. It’s been said that no plan survives contact with the enemy. No adaptor’s philosophical statement does either. The opinion I worked out in the page and a half I gave her hasn’t been unmade by the experience of working through the scripts, but it’s been tested and refined and become generally better fleshed out.

  Let me give you a little background.

  When it comes to prose, I believe that reading is an essentially performative act, where directions given by the author are interpreted by the reader in a series of deeply personal, private, and unshareable acts of imagination. When George R.R. Martin writes something like, “The gods of Winterfell kept a different sort of wood. It was a dark, primal place, three acres of old forest untouched for a thousand years as the gloomy castle rose around it” (A Game of Thrones), each of us as readers comes up with a set of images and smells and abstract emotions that make up that experience for us. For me, there’s a sense of darkness and greenness and buildings glimpsed between tree trunks. Someone else might have more familiarity with oak trees and the smell of forest litter. There’s no reason to think that the things conjured by the text are the same for everyone—they almost certainly aren’t. And the way that we tailor those scenes and images makes up our experience of the story. That’s what we mean when we talk about the literary dream. Graphic novels—comic books, sequential art, however you choose to describe the medium—employs different tools to achieve an effect similar to prose, but it’s not identical.

  In one way, graphic novels require less cognitive effort from the audience than prose. By providing images to the reader, graphic novels give the creators more control over the immediate visual aspects of the reader’s private, internal experience, but also lose some of the less concrete information control that prose offers with, for example, exposition, which we’ll talk about specifically later on. The idiom that creates the story has different strengths, different relationships to information control, and moving from one toolbox to the other isn’t trivial. Because the experience of the tale is shaped by the tools used in the telling, what exactly is being preserved in the translation is a critically important question. An adaptation that tries to recapture the experience of coming to a story for the first time, another that recreates the thematic and artistic intentions (as understood by the adapting team), and a third that cleaves as closely as possible to the actions described in the text, can all be faithful to a source without being at all similar to one another. There was never any question that, in adapting A Game of Thrones, we should be true to the spirit of the original book, but what exactly that fidelity meant had some pretty wide error bars.

  Refining and defining what it meant to keep faith with the original was bounded by two kinds of considerations: specific, concrete problems idiosyncratic to A Game of Thrones on the one hand, and structural issues that rise from the act of moving between prose and graphic storytelling regardless of the underlying work on the other. I’ll give some examples of each.

  The first of the idiosyncratic issues was the place A Song of Ice and Fire had achieved in the cultural moment. Our adaptation of A Game of Thrones wasn’t the first one that the books had inspired. Before our comic book project began, there had already been replica swords, sculptures, and enough art to fill several calendars, card and board games, and two volumes of The Art of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire. The popularity of the novels had also inspired a television series that was already casting. Which is to say, A Game of Thrones was already in the center of a body of artistic work that had spread well beyond the book itself. How we chose to play off those existing visions of the characters, places, and events had practical implications for more than just us.

  There is an attraction to participating in a larger creative enterprise. If our Eddard Stark bore some resemblance to the actor cast in the television show, the image would gain something by the familiarity. Ted Naismith did brilliant versions of Winterfell and the Eyrie. John Picacio’s Eddard Stark, Jon Snow, and Daenerys Targaryen are wonderfully realized and compelling. These talented people have already created a bevy of first-class work. Why not build on what they’ve accomplished? The artistic argument against that strategy was that, in taking our lead from earlier artists, we would sacrifice something of our own originality and vision. By tying ourselves to what had come before, we would lose the opportunity to invent our own versions, maybe better, maybe not, but certainly more authentically our own. Neither was that the only consideration.

  As much as I would like to think that artistic concerns are first and last in all things, the constraints on a project are rarely exclusively aesthetic. The property for which we had rights was, and is, the original novel. While it would be possible to get the permission from the previous artists who had created versions of Westeros, keeping track of the full catalog of A Song of Ice and Fire creations and integrating them into our version of the story could prove more awkward, time-consuming, and unwieldy than starting from scratch. There would necessarily be some family resemblances among the various incarnations of A Game of Thrones. We are, after all, interpreting the same source material and sometimes artists naturally reach for the same solutions to common problems. And there were some real problems. For example, Daenerys.

  Daenerys Targaryen was the second issue that we faced, one specific to A Game of Thrones, and very thorny, both for us and for other adaptors. Her character arc in the book takes her from emotionally abused political pawn, through an arranged marriage that rightly lifts the ethical hackles of a contemporary readership, an overtly sexual coming-of-age, a pregnancy, and a miscarriage, to become a political leader and powerful force in her own right. Her sexual awakening and the relationship of her sexuality to power are central to her story, as are issues of consent, control, and fertility. At the beginning of the book, she is thirteen years old.

  There is an argument that drawing the story as it is written would be illegal.

  The PROTECT Act of 2003 prohibits “obscene visual depiction of a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct” where the term “obscene” is defined according to the Miller Test. That is, a work can be classed as obscene if it violates community standards, is patently offensive, and, as a whole, lacks literary or artistic value. Whether the comic would have met those standards would be for a court to determine, unless we did something that explicitly took into account the legal implications of moving from text to image. The television adaptation addressed this by casting an actress who was legally of age. The comic book has no actress, and so the images created of her don’t have an objective truth to use in their defense. The alternatives available were either to omit several of the most important character moments, change the age of the character to fit contemporary legal standards regardless of the violence that would do to the intent of the story, or remain utterly faithful to the original text and prepare for scandal, censure, and legal action.

  The third issue that A Game of Thrones brought with it was that A Song of Ice and Fire is still in progress. In the previous adaptations I’ve done—of the novel Fevre Dream and the novella “The Skin Trade”—there has been a finalized story in print. By knowing the ending toward which the plot was progressing, it becomes possible to see how events were foreshadowed in the text, and how that could be recreated in images. A Game of Thrones, on the other hand, is the first book in a series that is expected to run seven volumes, the last three of which hadn’t been published when the first scripts were written for the graphic novel. A Song of Ice and Fire is also notable for its willingness to surprise and work against the expectations of the genre. Knowing which characters are important to the overall story—and even which ones will survive to the final volume—is almost impossible at this stage. When Robb Stark and Jon Snow find the direwolf pup
s, Eddard Stark’s full group is with them, something like eight or ten named characters. Drawing them all could be visually confusing and cluttered. But the fact that Theon Greyjoy was present may be important later on. What can be cut and what can’t simply isn’t obvious yet.

  That’s not true for every project. There are certainly long-running comic book series that have succeeded brilliantly without a strict continuity or foreshadowing that began years ahead. I’m thinking of ongoing serial (even soap-operatic) titles such as Batman or Spider-Man. But A Song of Ice and Fire isn’t open-ended. It does have a conclusion it moves toward, and in fact, the last sentence of the last book is already decided. Adapting the story without having the full text to judge still allows approaches ranging from strict adherence to the source material, to a good faith “best guess” on the adaptor’s part, to gathering information from lengthy interviews with George. It’s even possible to imagine an adaptation in which the ending of the graphic novels isn’t the same as the ending of the books, the two versions diverging as they progress, each controlled by its own internal logic. At that point, though, what exactly the adaptor is preserving rightly comes into question.

  So, in addition to the peculiar issues of A Game of Thrones, there are more general structural differences between prose and sequential art that constrain the boundaries of adaptation. These grow, for the most part, from the aural nature of written English.

  The literal symbols of English writing are encodings of sound, not vision. When reading prose silently, the sensual experience most immediately and easily evoked is sound, and the sound most easily evoked is the spoken voice of the characters or the narrator. This makes dialogue one of the strengths of prose fiction.