Since the first episode of “Game of Thrones” aired in 2011, HBO’s ambitious fantasy-drama series has been carefully scrutinized for its handling of sexual assault and rape in its storylines.

In “Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon,” a new book about the series from James Hibberd, Entertainment Weekly’s editor-at-large, the story’s author, George R. R. Martin, said he and the showrunners never discussed one particular change: Khal Drogo sexually assaulting Daenerys Targaryen on their wedding night.

“It made it worse, not better,” Martin said.

While it’s true that in the books their first sexual encounter is technically consensual, Drogo assaults Daenerys repeatedly after their wedding night. The showrunners said that pushed them to change that scene.

And when you look at the choices made in the series for other important female characters subjected to the same abusive treatment, it’s even more alarming how sexual assault and rape were treated in the HBO series.

So let’s take a closer look at what happened between the Mother of Dragons and her first husband, and how this adaptation choice fits into a larger pattern in the HBO series.

The 2 big changes ‘Game of Thrones’ made to Daenerys Targaryen from the start

Clarke and Harry Lloyd as Daenerys and Viserys Targaryen on “Game of Thrones.” Helen Sloan/HBO

In the pilot episode, Daenerys is introduced as an exiled princess of House Targaryen, a young woman cowed by her older brother Viserys’ emotional and physical abuse. She’s married off to the fearsome Drogo and warned that she must please him on their wedding night.

These basic plot points in the “Game of Thrones” pilot align with the opening chapters of Martin’s first novel in the “Song of Ice and Fire” series. But the show’s cocreators, David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, made two significant changes to Daenerys’ character.

First, she was aged. In the books, Daenerys is just 13 years old. Martin’s characters were following customs in line with the Middle Ages, when girls were married off as soon as they experienced puberty and reached childbearing age.

“It was against British law to cast anyone in a sexual situation who is under 17,” Martin said in an interview for “Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon.” “You can’t even cast a 17-year-old to play a 13-year-old if it’s a sexual situation. So we wound up with a 23-year-old playing a 17-year-old and had to adjust the timeline.”

So while Dany was made four years older, Drogo’s age — somewhere around 30 years old — was unchanged.

Momoa as Drogo. HBO

The second big change was having Drogo rape Dany on their wedding night. In the books, Drogo seems to extend much more empathy toward Dany. The chapter is written from Dany’s point of view, allowing the reader to understand her mounting fear and apprehension. When she and Drogo are finally alone together and she’s crying, Dany feels “a little better” when Drogo wipes away her tears and says, “No.”

Then Drogo speaks in Dothraki and touches her hair, while Dany feels “warmth” and “tenderness” in his words. Eventually, Drogo sits and shows Dany how to untie his braids. Dany is still shy and afraid once it’s “her turn,” and Drogo begins undressing her.

Once Dany’s naked, Drogo sits and looks at her for a while, then begins touching her hands, legs, and face. Dany says it seemed as if “hours” had passed by the time Drogo’s hands “finally went to her breasts.” After more (for lack of a better term) foreplay, Drogo brings Dany on his lap, cups her face, and asks, “No?” As Martin writes it, “Dany knew it was a question” and replied “yes” as she moved his hand between her legs.

Clarke and Momoa as Daenerys and Drogo in “Game of Thrones.” HBO

At first, Benioff and Weiss planned for the pilot to follow this series of events. But then the showrunners recast Daenerys and rewrote most of the pilot’s scenes.

Dany’s first sexual encounter with Drogo was changed to assault. He undresses her and bends her over onto her knees while she cries. Then the scene cuts away.

“Why did the wedding scene change from the consensual seduction scene … to the brutal rape of Emilia Clarke? We never discussed it. It made it worse, not better,” Martin said in “Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon.”

Benioff defended the change. “Here’s a girl who is absolutely terrified of this barbarian warlord she’s being married off to, it’s the last thing in the world she wants, yet somehow by the end of this wedding night she seems to be in a completely joyful sexual relationship with him. It didn’t entirely work for us,” he said.

“Also, in the second episode she has to go back to the less consensual, rougher relationship,” Weiss said. “In the book that works, but we just didn’t have that amount of time and access to the character’s mind. It turns too quickly. It was something the actors themselves felt wasn’t gelling.”

Weiss went on to say that Clarke “mentioned the wedding night and issues she was having with it” too, adding that the two were on the same page.

So what happens in the books after their wedding night?

Clarke as Daenerys. HBO

In the chapter after their wedding night, Dany describes the intense pain of learning to ride a horse as she began traveling with Drogo’s khalasar. The chafing and blisters on her legs and bottom made Dany feel like she was going to die. And Drogo only made it worse by coming into their tent each night and raping her.

“Drogo would come to her tent and wake her in the dark, to ride her as relentlessly as he rode his stallion,” the book says. “He always took her from behind, Dothraki fashion, for which Dany was grateful; that way her lord husband could not see the tears that wet her face, and she could use her pillow to muffle her cries of pain.”

It goes on to say that Dany would be in too much pain afterward to fall back asleep. This went on for so many days that Dany decided “she would kill herself rather than go on.”

But the same night Dany was close to suicide, she had a dream about a dragon covered in her blood. It was a recurring dream — one that invigorated her and made her feel “strong and new and fierce” when she awoke.

It’s after this dream that Dany begins operating with more agency in the khalasar and learns to love riding her horse. Eventually she decides to seduce Drogo, just as she does in “Game of Thrones.”

Benioff and Weiss made the right call by changing the pilot’s plot

Clarke as Dany in season one of “Game of Thrones.” HBO

Adding sexual assault to the episode meant there was one more explicit and shocking moment in an episode of TV already packed with explicit and shocking moments.

But Benioff and Weiss are right that the whiplash of Drogo and Dany’s relationship wouldn’t have made much sense to viewers — it barely makes sense to readers, especially when you have to square her loving and romantic feelings with the man later.

In Martin’s version of events, 13-year-old Daenerys is married against her will and on her wedding night finds her much older husband to be more empathetic than expected. Their wedding night may have been unexpectedly tender, but it doesn’t change the circumstances or their age difference. Historical accuracy aside, readers and TV watchers alike in modern times should find it upsetting to think about a grown man seducing a child.

Benioff and Weiss recognized this sensitivity and the leap the two characters would have to make, and they made the reasonable choice to show Dany’s abusive situation in a more straightforward way.

But that doesn’t mean they’re entirely off the hook for the way their adaptation handled sexual assault overall.

Dany’s wedding night began a pattern of the main female characters being sexually assaulted in the show when they weren’t in the books

Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and Lena Headey as Jaime and Cersei Lannister in “Game of Thrones.” HBO

Over the show’s eight-season run, which ended in May 2019, three of the most prominent female characters were assaulted during scenes that weren’t written in the books.

The first was Dany’s wedding night. The second happened in season four when Cersei and Jaime Lannister reunite after not seeing each other since his capture by Robb Stark’s army. Cersei is deeply upset and initially hesitates but eventually has sex with her brother next to the corpse of their incest-born son.

Though the episode’s director and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, the actor who played Jaime, believed it to be complicated but ultimately consensual, it wasn’t. The final cut of the episode — the only one that aired and that fans have seen — shows Cersei repeatedly saying “no” and crying.

Sophie Turner and Iwan Rheon as Sansa Stark and Ramsay Bolton in “Game of Thrones.” HBO

The third time was in season five when Sansa Stark, newly married to Ramsay Bolton, was raped on their wedding night. In the books, Ramsay doesn’t marry Sansa at all — he’s wed to Sansa’s childhood friend, a young girl who’s passed off as Arya Stark in part to give the Boltons more power.

Sansa’s assault storyline in the TV adaptation has been discussed and critiqued among fans perhaps more than any other change Benioff and Weiss made.

A whole chapter of “Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon” is dedicated to the scene. The book quotes the show’s biggest female stars — Clarke, Sophie Turner, Natalie Dormer, Maisie Williams, and Gwendoline Christie — as mostly arguing that “Game of Thrones” and Martin’s original story were presenting a “real” threat women faced both in the Middle Ages and now.

But the criticism about the pattern of sexual assault in “Game of Thrones” was not that a TV audience should never be challenged by a realistic depiction of abuse. It was about including more sexual assault in a story already filled with examples of what women in that period faced.

Clarke as Daenerys. HBO

“I’m not opposed to shows depicting sexual violence, but rape-as-prop is always distressing, particularly in a show like this, where that disregard echoes the kinds of ideas that foster rape culture in the first place: that women’s feelings don’t matter, that sexual agency isn’t a big deal, that rape is something that just kind of happens and that healthy people simply move on,” Vulture’s Margaret Lyons wrote after Cersei’s rape scene aired in 2014. “Rape and abuse have consequences for the victims who carry those traumas with them.”

Another significant failure of these plot points was how Sansa was the only character who seemed to contend with her trauma onscreen. She escaped her marriage and eventually reclaimed power over the Boltons by being crowned Queen in the North. But Daenerys’ feelings about Drogo’s assault were never meaningfully explored in the books or in the show. Cersei also never appeared to seriously contemplate Jaime’s assault. This was a disservice to not only the characters, but the viewers.

When we reflect on the legacy of the show and where it began, Dany’s wedding night is an important starting point for the conversation about sexual assault and how it’s depicted for a wide-ranging audience. Martin may take issue with the change to this early scene, but really it was the later shifts that were much more concerning.