*Warning, if you have yet to watch episode six of Game of Thrones season five, look away now.*
For the rest of you, we hope you are holding up alright. We could do with a hug, and maybe one of those brain swipe yolks from Men in Black to make us forget those final moments of this week's Game of Thrones ever happened. Disturbing is not the word.
The episode saw Sansa Stark wed Ramsay Bolton, who actually may have stolen the crown from Joffrey as the worst human to walk the land of the Seven Kingdoms. It was their wedding night when things took the incredibly dark turn though, as viewers watched in horror when...we don't even want to write it.... but Sansa was raped while her childhood friend Theon Greyjoy/Reek was forced to watch.
Thankfully, the scene cut to credits before we all had to check into post-traumatic stress counselling, but it was horrific, to say the least, with many fans questioning if the show had just gone too far this time.
Yes, we've seen rape before in Game of Thrones, hell, we've seen murder and castration too, but undoubtedly the reason this hit everyone hard is that as Ned Stark's eldest daughter, we had all taken Sansa into our hearts. Pitied her as she was pulled from pillar to post in King's Landing, firstly as the fiance of King Joffrey, and then forced into a marriage with Tyrion, who was lovely of course, but it wasn't her choice.
Now that she was back in her home of Winterfell, we had hoped that there might be a happy ending of sorts for Sansa. That this marriage to Ramsay proposed by the scheming Littlefinger would somehow be prevented from going ahead by the arrival of Stannis and his troops.
Or that Sansa would light that candle in the window and Brienne of Tarth would arrive in like the hero she is and save her. But nope, as usual, this is no Disney movie, and Game of thrones took us down the darkest road possible.
The scene was also another stray off from the books as although this did more or less happen, it was Jeyne Poole, Sansa's childhood friend that Ramsay married, who was pretending to be Arya Stark.
Author of the books George R.R Martin has defended the scene however and the producers decision to differ it from what he originally wrote. He took to his blog following the show as he had unsurprisingly received “a flood” of emails about. He said; "Let me reiterate what I have said before, how many children did Scarlett O’Hara have? Three, in the novel. One, in the movie. None, in real life: she was a fictional character, she never existed. The show is the show, the books are the books; two different tellings of the same story … There have been differences between the novels and the television show since the first episode of season one. And for just as long, I have been talking about the butterfly effect. Small changes lead to larger changes lead to huge changes."
He added; "There has seldom been any TV series as faithful to its source material, by and large (if you doubt that, talk to the Harry Dresden fans, or readers of the Sookie Stackhouse novels, or the fans of the original WALKING DEAD comic books)... but the longer the show goes on, the bigger the butterflies become. And now we have reached the point where the beat of butterfly wings is stirring up storms, like the one presently engulfing my email."
He then went on to say; "David and Dan and Bryan and HBO are trying to make the best television series that they can. And over here I am trying to write the best novels that I can. And yes, more and more, they differ. 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. In the meantime, we hope that the readers and viewers both enjoy the journey. Or journeys, as the case may be. Sometimes butterflies grow into dragons."