Counting Every Instance of Rape, Death, and Nudity on 'Game of Thrones'

Broadly counted every instance of rape, murder, and nudity in “Game of Thrones.” This post is an introduction to the data and methodology, and includes total numbers across all seasons.

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I’ve been a ravenous fan of the Game of Thrones books and HBO show for years, devouring the universe’s amalgamation of Tolkien-caliber expansiveness and detail, medieval lore, and supernatural phenomena. I’m only one of the millions of avid viewers of the most-watched show on television—its first season averaged 2.52 million viewers, and its numbers have since grown exponentially, exploding with the most recent season’s record-breaking premiere.

It’s hard to succinctly describe the plot of Game of Thrones: It’s an incredibly complex tale of intrigue involving over 100 principal characters and numerous fully realized civilizations. The show accordingly gives us wedding massacres, Byzantine plots devised by silver-tongued rich people, women killing witless and cruel men with fire, a dozen pairs of star-crossed lovers, repetitive incest, gouged eyes, gorgeous vistas with ancient castles, and disgusting morbidity. It’s a dizzying spectacle, one that’s nearly impossible to look away from.

Despite its Shakespearean ambitions and enthusiastic reception, the television adaptation of Game of Thrones has been widely criticized for the amount of superfluous female nudity as well as its depictions of violence and, specifically, sexualized violence against women. This has posed a challenge particularly for feminist and female viewers, despite the inclusion of compellingly powerful women characters such as Brienne the knight, Arya the moral assassin, and Daenerys the dragon queen.

The Atlantic called the show’s “tendency to ramp up the sex, violence, and—especially—sexual violence ” its “defining weakness.” The Washington Post pointed out that the show’s nude scenes were meant to titillate straight men, making them alienating to other viewers. These gratuitous tendencies were even parodied in a Saturday Night Live sketch about the show consulting a 13-year-old boy on the plot, whose primary objective is to show as many boobs as possible.

The Season 4 depiction of Jaime raping his sister and lover Cersei triggered a national conversation about the show’s treatment of sexual violence and women. The controversy around the scene—which did not appear in the books—made the front page of the New York Times, where Dave Itzkoff said, “Rape has become so pervasive in the drama that it is almost background noise: a routine and unshocking occurrence.” The Season 5 depiction of Sansa’s rape by Ramsay was widely panned as well, with Vanity Fair , Salon , The Atlantic , and The Daily Beast calling it unnecessary and poorly done. After the scene’s airing, pop culture site The Mary Sue announced it would stop covering the series, and even US Senator Claire McCaskill said she’d quit watching. Jeremy Podeswa, who directed the episode containing Sansa’s rape, responded to the criticism: “It is important that (the producers) not self-censor. The show depicts a brutal world where horrible things happen. They did not want to be too overly influenced by that (criticism) but they did absorb and take it in and it did influence them in a way.”

With sensationalized nudity, violence, and rape dominating the discourse around my favorite show, I decided to conduct my own research to see if numbers supported or refuted the claims that women have it much worse than men in Westeros. I thought a quantitative approach would help add larger analysis to the show’s treatment of women and elucidate the whirlwind of feminist and antifeminist discourse that’s surrounded it. So I counted every instance of death, rape, and nudity by gender to see how the numbers stacked up. Because I’ve also watched some of my favorite women characters’ plot lines suffer in recent seasons, I also wanted to examine scenes between women more closely, determining whether or not each episode passed the Bechdel Test. I hoped that all of these tallies, pulled together, would give me a more comprehensive look at the depiction of women characters across all seasons of the show, and the ways in which men’s and women’s representations and story arcs might be treated differently, influence one another, or change over time. To get these numbers, I watched all 67 episodes of the show so far at minimum three times each, totaling approximately 200 hours of Game of Thrones.

While the show highlights far more men’s deaths than women’s, the killing of men feels more routine, as hundreds occur during and even after battles, whereas women’s deaths, while more rare, are also more often used to illustrate the maliciousness of evil men. I also found that there were fewer instances of rape, nudity, and violence against women on the show than I had expected, with the most egregious offenses taking place in the first four seasons. After Seasons 4 and 5, the creators may have listened to critics, using nudity and sex more thoughtfully, and writing what they believed to be more convincing portrayals of women’s sexuality and power.

However, this change in approach revealed that the show’s mishandling of rape and nudity was symptomatic of a bigger problem: When instances of gratuitous nudity and rape decreased, women characters suffered, highlighting the inability of showrunners to deploy other tactics to showcase complex character development or invent convincing, creative plot lines for women characters.

Here’s how it breaks down, by the numbers: