George R.R. Martin’s darkest possible past strikes again.
Game of Thrones viewers are used to watching people decapitated and burned alive by dragonfire. But some of the 10 million viewers who tuned in to Sunday’s premiere of the prequel series House of the Dragon found themselves unexpectedly triggered by the franchise’s latest bit of buzzy body horror: a scene in which Queen Aemma (Sian Brooke), laboring to bring forth a possible heir to the Targaryen throne, who is stuck in the breech position, undergoes a very visually unpleasant non-consensual caesarean operation, okayed by her loving but weak husband, King Viserys (Paddy Considine), who is desperate to have a male heir to his throne.
On r/Mommit, a Reddit board for mothers where one user posted spoilers for the scene as a public service, another user wrote, “That scene just triggered me … I’m 3 months [postpartum] and I was crying my eyes out. It was too much.” Some of their male partners, these women reported, laughed at their squeamishness; others got it. “I don’t understand why TV shows don’t have to have a warning for birth trauma triggers,” another poster added. “Birth trauma is actually pretty widespread even if people don’t talk about it and the impact from seeing a birth scene when you have experienced birth trauma is huge.”
For others, the birth scene’s outcome was even worse to watch. Aemma dies, as the maesters warned Viserys she would, and the baby pulled out of her lives only a few hours. So we’re treated to the sight of a tiny body in a winding sheet, and the whole ugly thing was for naught—unless you count the addition to the mountain of textual evidence we already have that the world of GoT is not a great place for women. Those who made the show point to history as a reason for the sequence’s inclusion. Episode director and co-showrunner Miguel Sapochnik told the Hollywood Reporter, “We felt that was an interesting way to explore the fact that for a woman in medieval times, giving birth was violence. It’s as dangerous as it gets. You have a 50/50 chance of making it. Many women didn’t. If given the choice, the father would choose the child over the mother as a cesarean would kill you. It was an extremely violent part of life.”
In Fire & Blood, Martin’s Targaryen novel, which is written in the voice of a latter-day historian, Queen Aemma dies in childbirth, but we don’t get many details. The story of a later Queen, Alyssa, aligns more with that of the show’s Queen Aemma. At Alyssa’s last birth, the attending maester says that he can’t save her, but could possibly save the child by c-section: “The babe might live, or not. The woman will die.” The king gives his go-ahead, and the historian/narrator records conflicting accounts of what happens next. Either Alyssa agrees to the procedure, or she dies during it, without waking. The child, a girl, survives, but one of Alyssa’s grown daughters blames her husband for her death, and curses him: “Save my wife, you should have said, but what are wives to men like you?” (Edmund Bridgerton, he wasn’t.)
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