This post discusses plot points from the May 12 episode of Game of Thrones.

The third novel in George R.R. Martin’s A Song Of Ice And Fire is titled A Storm Of Swords, but through much of this third season of Game of Thrones, the battles have happened off-screen or between the wooden troop markers on Robb Stark’s map and in his mind. Instead, the game of thrones is being played in a more literal sense, as the great lords and ladies of Westeros negotiate who will sit not just in the great chairs of the realm, but beside the people who occupy those chairs—in other words, through marital alliances. It’s only fitting, then, that Game of Thrones should spend an episode grappling with marriage and sex, with the very real difficulties of people who get to choose who they love, as well as with the fears of those who have no choice at all, and with the question of bonds between men and women outside of marriage in a society where friendship across gender lines is almost inconceivable.

The last episode of Game of Thrones, “The Climb,” ended with a transcendently romantic embrace between Jon and Ygritte after they survived a harrowing ascent of the Wall. It was a nasty little tease for a show where no one gets much in the way of happiness, a dare to the audience to continue believing in true love after an episode that brutally eviscerated the possibility of hope. So it’s fitting that their moment of joy immediately comes into question as Jon and Ygritte move from her country beyond the Wall into his in Westeros, and Jon’s choice whether or not to be “loyal to his woman” or to the vows of his that remain to him comes closer and closer.

“Is that how you lot do your fighting? You march down a road banging drums and waving banners?” Ygritte teases him about his country, which seems impossibly civilized to her. “You mean right foot left foot right foot left foot. You lot can’t remember that?” But even though Ygritte pretends not to be impressed by Westeros, her inexperience with civilization is clear. “Is that a palace?” she asks Jon of the first windmill they pass on their trek. “Who built it? Some king?…They must have been great builders, to stack the stones so high.” “If you were impressed by a windmill, you’d be swooning if you saw the great keep at Winterfell,” Jon teases her back. Their banter is a negotiation. Jon is still coming to terms with his liaison with a woman who tells him things like “Why would a girl see blood and collapse?…Girls see more blood than boys.” And Ygritte, for all she sees the wilding in Jon, is still unsure of the solidity of their relationship. “I know that you’re beautiful, and fierce, and wild. I’ll be good to you,” a painfully Jealous Orrell tells her. “You love him? Cause he’s pretty, that it? You like his pretty hair and his pretty eyes? You think pretty’s going to make you happy? You won’t love him so much when you find out what he really is.” And he’s not wrong. “I know it. If you attack the Wall, you’ll die. All of you,” Jon warns Ygritte on the road, unwilling to tell her the full truth of his continued allegiance to the Night’s Watch, but hoping to dissuade her from a mission he sees as suicidal. “All of us,” Ygritte tells him in a declaration that’s also a question. Ultimately, they delay their reckoning. “You’re mine,” Ygritte tells Jon. “And I’m yours. If we die, we die. But first we’ll live.”
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We’re halfway through the third season of Game of Thrones, a year that’s seen the elevation of female characters—and consensual sex—suggestions that one religion, the worship of the Lord of Light, could be gaining precedence and validity in Westeros, and some of the best swordfighting the show’s ever seen. I talked to executive story editor Bryan Cogman about how the show’s handled changes in characterization from the page to screen, how he wrote those steamy sex scenes in last week’s episode, and how the action choreography of the show comes together. This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

To get started: halfway through the third season, Game of Thrones remains largely true to George R.R. Martin’s novels, but there are diversions in both plot and characterization. As the story editor, I’d be curious what the conversations about those changes look like. And in the case of characterization changes, do they tend to be driven more by the actors cast in the roles? The need to pace the story? Or a mix?

Oh, good you started with an easy one! Well, for one thing, now that we’re in Season Three — a lot of the changes stem from changes/alterations we made in previous seasons. Now, Margaery Tyrell, as we’ve talked about before, is an important character in the novels in terms of plot but she isn’t a point of view character and you don’t really get to know her until later in the saga. And even then, she’s not really driving her own storylines. Now, in Season Two, we always planned to go behind the curtain, if you will, with Renly and his relationships, but even with that, Margaery was still planned to be (more or less) a minor character. Now, Natalie Dormer was original considered for another role. I’m not sure who’s idea it was to have her be Margaery, but casting her immediately changed the character and the possibilites for her before we even started writing. It allowed us to move up the Cersei versus Margaery dynamic–that’s a big part of a later book).

And this solved a few problems we needed to deal with as we started adapting A Storm of Swords. If you break down A Storm of Swords, there isn’t a ton of King’s Landing story in the first half of the book, and virtually nothing for a few characters (Cersei, Littlefinger, Varys) to do. So having Margaery be a greater presence on the show (coupled with her arrival of grandmother, Lady Olenna) allowed us to dramatize the arrival of the Tyrells and their effect on the Lannisters (and Cersei, Joffrey) in particular. And the idea of Margaery as a sort of Princess Di type was very interesting–and that’s definitely in the books–her popularity with the people is mentioned, we just took that ball and ran with it.
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Over at the Daily Beast yesterday, I wrote about a television phenomenon that officially became a trend over the weekend: the prestige television male virgin. I explained:

On last night’s Game of Thrones, after getting seduced by wildling warrior Ygritte (Rose Leslie), Jon Snow (Kit Harrington) confessed that “There’s been no one else.” Ygritte knew that as a man of the Night’s Watch, the celibate brotherhood who guards the Wall which marks the border of Westeros, Jon was forbidden from having sex after he swore the vows she asked him to break. But she assumed that he’d had sex before he joined up, and was surprised to learn she’d been mistaken. “A maid! You’re a maid,” she teased him.

An hour later on Sunday night’s television line-up, Mad Men copywriter Michael Ginsberg (Ben Feldman), whose father sprung a blind date with a pretty schoolteacher on him, confessed during a bout of logorrhea at the diner where he took her that “I’ve never had sex, not even once.” His confession was inexplicable, even to him. “What am I doing?” Ginsberg moaned. “I ordered soup. I just said that.” And Jon and Michael are in good company. Much of the third season of Downton Abbey, which aired on PBS earlier this season, concerned the sexual awakening of Matthew Crawley (Dan Stevens) after he marries Lady Mary Crawley (Michelle Dockery), ending years of sexual yearning and passing into the realm where, in the words of his bride “all things are permitted.”

As I wrote earlier in our discussion of lies pop culture tells us, one of the biggest is that everyone’s having sex all of the time, and that everyone started having sex sometime late in high school or early in college. It’s worth noting that all three of these stories which have acknowledged that there isn’t a set age at which everyone is miraculously divested of their virginity are in some form or other period pieces. Game of Thrones is set in a world where youthful marriage means that a lot of people do have sex for the first time at a relatively early age, but often not in a truly consensual fashion. Downton Abbey is set in an environment where nice people of both sexes are expected to come to marriage inexperienced, and when the slow burn of sexual tension is a key source of cultural drama. And one of the things that Mad Men captures with great perceptiveness is the uneven arrival of the sexual revolution in different characters’ lives depending on their level of privilege and the conditions of their upbringing.

It would be nice to see some shows attempt to tell similar and similarly respectful stories about characters in contemporary settings, and about women as well as men. High school and college may be the point by which the majority of people have sex for the first time, but they aren’t the only times that people decide to—or get a chance to—have sex for the first time, and there are different concerns and different anxieties about it at different ages. I’m not saying that pop culture should abandon teen and young adult sex stories. But Mad Men, Game of Thrones, and Downton Abbey all serve as a reminder that there’s rich material in different kinds of first time stories, whether someone’s having sex for the first time at a different point in their life, or having sex for the first time with a new partner, which can be just as momentous as the first time period.

Bull Durham, which lies about sex less than most pop culture.

This morning’s post on the problems prestige television continues to have with sex inspired a rather epic conversation about the assumptions movies and television shows make about sex and sexuality, and the lies that a lot of them told us. A number of folks were kind enough to help me curate the conversation, including Jess Zimmerman, who Storyfied the section of the conversation on the very specific misconceptions about sex my followers took away from pop culture, Monica Reida, who captured, among other things, a long section of the conversation on young adult fiction, fan fiction, and respect for characters, and Heather McLendon, who produced a comprehensive roundup of the discussion I’ve embedded here*:
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My friend, New York Magazine television critic Matt Zoller Seitz has a novel solution to the complaint that Game of Thrones makes gratuitous use of female nudity: get the guys naked more often. He argues:

Since its 2011 debut, Thrones has been attacked for “gratuitous” nudity and labeled sexist for stripping its women more often than its men. These are two different complaints, though; intertwining them muddies each. The first concerns the appropriateness of graphic sex and/or nudity; the second is about the show’s “gaze,” which is undeniably heterosexual and male. But it’s possible to enjoy sex and nudity without guilt or bluenosed justifications while simultaneously pointing out that the scales of spectatorship are out of whack. I’d like Game of Thrones to enlarge the scope of its fantasy­ — to show more same-sex couplings and male nudity — as Starz’s Spartacus series has done with such panache. For all its tough, complicated women characters, Thrones is rightly perceived as too much of a ­sausagefest. The producers could change that perception by adding more sausage.

I think he’s on the right track, but has arrived at the wrong destination. What Game of Thrones needs isn’t more anatomy of any variety—and, as I’ll discuss at greater length in my full review of the season, which will be up on Friday, I think the show has actually absorbed that criticism in a productive way and is stronger for it. Instead, it needs more consensual sex, preferably in situations where one partner isn’t paying the other. At its best, Game of Thrones can be a terrific story about sexual violence in wartime. But for the full weight of that argument to be felt, and for sexual violence to register with the horror it’s meant to elicit—particularly given the troubling use of rape as a way to generate drama on prestige television without thought to larger context—we need to see the alternative, to see some of the happiness and normality that gets destroyed by war. It may be harder to depict good sex than the embarrassment of bad sex or the numbing fear of sexual violence. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying, in part to remind those of us watching at home what kind of good world our friends in Westeros and beyond are fighting for.

This post discusses plot points from the third and fourth episodes of the first season of Veronica Mars.

Noir is mannered, but I admit through the first several episodes of Veronica Mars, the show’s stylized nature was keeping me at a bit of a distance. That all changed with these two episodes of the show. It’s not so much that the cases got to me—I suspect that after the first two episodes, which used crimes to pull the basic cast of characters together, that Veronica’s clients will be a little more disposable. It’s that the, despite its use of private eye conventions, and in fact because of them, Veronica Mars became piercingly emotional in these two episodes, which focused substantially on the relationships between parents and children. In noir, everyone has secrets, but in Veronica Mars, the gap between public and private selves takes less time to unravel, or at least to become apparent. But that doesn’t mean that Veronica is free to send clients on her way faster than Sam Spade—instead, mysteries matter less than the consequences they open up.

In her first case, Veronica is employed by a boy named Justin to find his father—except that as far as Justin knows, his father is dead, and the gig is just an excuse for him to talk to Veronica and to give her mix CDs built around 311 releases. But instead of pulling off a successful ploy, Justin ends up discovering something that requires much more maturity from him than the quota that’s required to hit on a cool, older girl. His father’s transitioned and is living as a woman named Julia, played beautifully by Melissa Leo, who regularly patronizes the movie rental business where Justin works so she can have a chance to talk to him about film and take his recommendations. In one of the slyest, most impressive arguments for tolerance I’ve seen, she is clearly and deeply loved by the man she lived with. And Justin is in terrible pain not just because he’s discovered that his father abandoned him, but because his mother couldn’t trust him to react well to the truth.

“This is hard, I know. I wish I could have found a way to tell you,” Julia tells Justin. “This is something I had to do. This is who I am.” Justin is focused on the betrayal rather than the rare opportunity he has not just to be loved again, but to act like the kind of man Veronica would admire, until Veronica explains what it would mean to her to know that her mother wanted to visit her, even in disguise. “90 miles,” Veronica tells Justin. “That’s the distance your dad travels every week to see you for a few seconds. Look, my mom’s been missing, too, and I would give anything to feel that she cared enough about me to do that.” The case ends, and Justin’s resolution begins, with him tentatively calling his mother to tell her that the copy of Body Heat he recommended to her and special ordered for her has arrived—and giving her his regular schedule. The mystery matters far less than the emotional landscape that it opened up, noir’s secrets giving way to the complexities of contemporary life, which is difficult enough even before you introduce guns, gumshoes, and dames to die for into the mix.

As Julia’s taking the risk that Justin can love her as his mother, rather than his father, Keith Mars is confronting his daughter’s maturity, rather than his worries about her lack of it.
When he’s called into the principal’s office because she wants to tell him “We’ve noticed a dramatic change in [Veronica] over the last year. She’s late, a lot. She has attitude with certain teachers. She falls asleep in class. And socially she seems a bit isolated,” Keith downplays these changes. “I’d say Veronica is doing pretty well given the circumstances,” he tells the principal. “I can handle it, thank you.” But while he can manage Veronica’s behavior in limited ways, he can’t exactly arrest the forward march of time. When he asks Veronica about her first date with Troy, he’s rattled by her explanation that it was “Lousy conversation, but the sex was fantastic.” He gets territorial when the two keep seeing each other. “If he’s going to be kissing my daughter on my front porch for eight and a half minutes, I’m going to have to meet him,” Keith demands. “He’s taking up a lot of daddy-daughter time.” And Keith can even use his private-eye skills to put the kibosh on Veronica’s plans for homecoming. “You won’t mind, then, that I cancelled your reservation at the Four Seasons?” he tells Troy over Diet Cokes. But tracking down hotel registers one at time can only go so far—Keith’s business, in fact, depends on the idea that the world will stay richly supplied in venality. He can intimidate Troy out of sleeping with his daughter on one occasion, but he can’t predict her slipping out of her red dress and racing into the water in Lily Kane’s memory, can’t stop her from being exposed to hurt and seeking out new forms of joy.
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“Why do the girls on Girls have sex?” Toni Bentley asked in a recent piece in Vogue. “This question arises in my mind while watching this terrific, smart HBO series that wraps up its second season on Sunday. The four quirky protagonists have sex frequently and easily and, hey, why not? They have the pill and we have the right to choose. But, what exactly are they choosing? Not pleasure, that’s for sure.” The rest of the piece is a disaster, including praising Adam’s disregard of Natalia’s sexual comfort for what Bentley calls his “I-am-not-a-prisoner-of-feminism chutzpah.” But it’s an excellent question, and one that gets at an important question that also came up at one of the panels I moderated at SXSW: why it’s so much easier to depict bad sex in pop culture than good sex.

The thing about Girls is that the characters actually have—or are implied to have had—a fair amount of decent sex in it. We may not see Ray and Shoshanna in bed while they’re having sex, but they certainly seem reasonably happy, and sex doesn’t come up in Shoshanna’s litany of complaints when they break up—instead, Shoshanna insists that “I can’t be the only thing you like.” Whatever problems Jessa and Thomas-John had, they weren’t about sexual compatability. When Hannah has sex with Sandy, her short-lived boyfriend from the early episodes of the season, their encounters seem happy and unfraught. During her lost weekend with Joshua, when Hannah asks him to get her off, rather than her having to oblige first, there’s nothing baroque or even particularly inventive about the encounter, but Hannah looks happy, lost in Joshua’s touch. And when Charlie goes down on Marnie in the season finale, she talks about how much she’s enjoying herself, even if she doesn’t seem particularly able to get lost in the moment.

So why do the bad moments stand out more than these? Girls has become almost notorious for its scenes where characters express their fantasies, or where characters have bad sex due to a lack of assertion, compatibility, or poor sexual communication. In the finale, Natalia, who tells Adam during sex “I can like your cock and not be a whore, okay?” before asking him to “Slow down. Can you slow down for me, babe?” appears to get at least some of what she wants out of sex, but, as their disturbing encounter in the previous episode revealed, she and Adam want fundamentally different things. Hannah’s poor sexual decision-making, like her decision to sleep with Laird while high on cocaine he helped her procure despite his efforts to maintain his own sobriety, or her compliance with Adam’s fantasies and sexual desires in the name of having experiences, have been one of the most-discussed elements of the show. When Marnie tells Charlie “This is what I keep trying to tell Hannah when she talks about all her wandering. There’s an endpoint. We have all these experiences so we can settle down,” she’s missing the point, too. The idea isn’t to stop having new experiences. It’s for those experiences to inform the characters’ sense of their own desires, and to make it easier for them to ask what they want.

Maybe part of the problem is that it’s easier to make clear that sex is going wrong than when—and to what degree—it’s going right. Watching Hannah struggle to take off her panties while lying on her stomach because that’s what Adam told her to do, or the high pitch of Natalia’s voice as she’s getting anxious, and the dip in register as she makes her displeasure clear, are easy ways to manifest discomfort. But choreographing sex scenes so that they look attractive to viewers at home isn’t the same thing as conveying what’s going on in the characters’ heads. One of the funniest, sharpest illustrations of this conundrum is the sex scene beween Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks in Kevin Smith’s Zack and Miri Make a Porno. When the two characters, who have been close friends and roommates for a long time, finally have sex, the camera first lingers on their faces, focusing on their emotional involvement, and their reactions to what their bodies are doing, which remains off-screen. When the camera pulls out, they don’t appear to be doing anything special, and their co-producers on their pornographic movie look puzzled about what’s going on.

It’s an idea that offers some solutions for Girls if the show wants to shift its tone in the third season, and to be as notable for the good sex its characters have as well as for all the times things go awkward, and miserable, and wrong. The show’s made a name for itself by the amount of its actresses bodies it’s willing to put on screen, and the things it’s willing to show people doing with their bodies and to other people’s bodies. But maybe it’s time for Girls’ writers and directors to remember that their eyes—and a lot of their feelings about the things that are happening to their bodies—are up here.