Last night on Game of Thrones, Ramsay Bolton raped Sansa Stark on their wedding night. It’s a major departure from the books, where a completely different character was forced to undergo Ramsay’s marital monstrosities. The show’s version is actually less gruesome than what was on the page, but considering fans have had five seasons to watch Sansa literally grow up onscreen, its depiction left some viewers understandably upset. One who wasn’t? Sophie Turner, who told Entertainment Weekly that she “kinda loved” the scene. “I love the way Ramsay had Theon watching,” Turner explained. “It was all so messed up. It’s also so daunting for me to do it. I’ve been making [Bryan Cogman] feel so bad for writing that scene: ‘I can’t believe you’re doing this to me!’ But I secretly loved it.”
Author George R.R. Martin also weighed in on Sansa’s new plot on his LiveJournal, defending the changes as a necessary factor in adaptation. “There have been differences between the novels and the television show since the first episode of season one,” Martin wrote. “And for just as long, I have been talking about the butterfly effect. Small changes lead to larger changes lead to huge changes.” Though he says that “there has seldom been any TV series as faithful to its source material,” he assures fans the books and the show are just telling two different versions of the same story: “Two roads diverging in the dark of the woods, I suppose … but all of us are still intending that at the end we will arrive at the same place.”
