7 Things Game Of Thrones Toned Down For TV

3. Arya's Time At Harrenhal

The Ghost Of Harrenhal
HBO

Arya's time as a prisoner at Harrenhal had some unpleasant moments in the series but in the book she Gendry and Hot Pie are stuck there for several chapters and survive several regime changes as the cursed castle is captured again and again. It's a bleak look at the way ordinary people suffer when the aristocracy goes to war but opinion remains divided on whether it was necessary to show this through sexual exploitation, torture, characters describing rapes they've committed in graphic detail and women in stocks being brutally and repeatedly gang raped.

My personal opinion? No. If anything the repeated rape of background characters (especially when men's 'blood is up' after a battle) creates a disturbing sense of normalcy, as though every man in Westeros is just one adrenaline rush away from becoming a rapist. However with a book roughly the size of a brick to cram into just ten hour long episodes there also simply wasn't time to dwell on every single plot event.

Arya's time at Harrenhal was condensed into a brief spell as a prisoner and a stretch of time as Tywin Lannister's (not Roose Bolton's) cupbearer, which included all of her important interactions with Gendry and Jaqen H'ghar, some new conversations with Tywin and the development of her vendetta against those who have wronged her and her family.

Contributor
Contributor

Kate Taylor has a BA in English Literature and Creative Writing and an MRes in Creative Writing. Her nonfiction, reviews and other articles have appeared on Cuckoo Review and Mookychick as well as WhatCulture. Her fiction has been published in Luna Station Quarterly, Eternal Haunted Summer and in anthologies by Paizo and Northumbria University Press. She is 23 and lives in the North of England.