Alyssa Rosenberg: How much violence is too much on ‘Game of Thrones’? {Spoilers}

In some of these cases, a willingness to depict extreme violence or the after-effects of a wound or torture is of direct service in overturning our gilded dreams about golden ages past. Armor might augment the man who wears it, but it does nasty things to that same man when his chain-mail gets bashed into his skin.

And depictions of violence can also be useful in explaining the rules of the world to a viewer. The reason Ned Stark’s (Sean Bean) beheading at the end of the first season of “Game of Thrones” is so upsetting isn’t just because of the blood or violence involved. It’s because Ned’s death lets us know what characters like Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey) have done and are willing to keep doing to survive. In a similar way, though I don’t particularly like watching Ramsay Bolton torture and hunt people, a few initial scenes of that nature do help establish what sort of behavior will be treated as tolerable if you’re of sufficiently noble blood and the child of a sufficiently cold fish, which Roose Bolton (Michael McElhatton) certainly is.

But what happens after the audience has gotten the point? I can’t imagine there’s a “Game of Thrones” viewer who doesn’t understand by this point that the series is set in a phenomenally violent world where the rich do hideous things to the poor, and where men claim full dominion over the bodies of women.

When some of us start bumping up against our limits, it’s not so much that we’re asking for the rules of the world to change, but that we don’t need to have the same points reiterated for us over and over again. I think it makes narrative and emotional sense that Ramsay Bolton would kill Walda and her child, and I don’t think “Game of Thrones” should have done something different with this part of the story.

From: How much violence is too much on ‘Game of Thrones’? – The Washington Post