Whether or not you watched the fifth season of Game of Thrones, you likely caught wind of the controversy surrounding its especially gratuitous violence against women. Even fans of the show condemned certain scenes—Sansa Stark’s rape in particular—as both excessive and lazy plot devices. And what do you know? The showrunners have tempered the sixth season in direct response of these criticisms.
According to the New York Daily News, “director Jeremy Podeswa, who is helming several episodes of the upcoming sixth season…says that the backlash over a shocking rape scene involving Sansa Stark (Sophie Turner) has brought a toning down of the way sexual violence is tackled on the show.”
Podeswa recently spoke at an event at Fox Studios Australia where, the Telegraph reports, he made the argument that the producers should not “self-censor.” “The show depicts a brutal world where horrible things happen,” he explained to the audience. The producers “did not want to be too overly influenced by that [criticism] but they did absorb it and take it in and it did influence them in a way.”