I think maybe intentionally selective in the first line was more incendiary than I really ought to have been, sorry. I was trying to get across that I think you are missing the point.

Nobody in the Khalassar gets as much casual pleasure from killing as Joffrey (And what? I finally get a character with the same abbreviated name as me in something and he’s a sociopathic little shit with no redeeming human features? Pout) or the Claganes. But the Dothraki are less recognisably ‘formal’ about it.

Nothing the Khalassar does on its rounds is any more savage than what Tywin Lannister orders done repeatedly to various parts of Westros. But the Dothraki are less recognisably ‘formal’ about it.

Both societies settle issues in single combat as a matter of course, but the Dothraki are less recognisably ‘formal’ about it.

I think it actually asks you to examine how you percieve the same acts when wrapped up in a veneer of ‘western civilisation’ and when not. And Viserys is very much an indicator of the lens you’re likely to be using.

I broadly agree with your observations about sexuality, but I do think that rather than looking at as a numbers game of amount of straight sex versus gay sex or “weird” sex (by this I mean the heterosexual situations you mentioned) versus “normal” sex, we need to ask why we’re being shown more of one than the other. In this case, I think the sex reinforces the point that women have a deeply restrictive role in this society, and goes some way to highlighting that when they escape from this mother/wife/whore role they are very capable individuals – though it could be argued that Catelyn’s naivete indirectly causes her husband’s death, discuss, among other examples.

Lastly, I’ll comment again on how frustrating, as a reader of the books, I find the fact that so much discussion focuses purely on the series, and is critical of the series purely on the basis of what is shown so far in this first series, when we not only actually KNOW that Arya does kick quite a lot of ass later on and that Daenerys is a lot more, and scarier, than just a child bride but also KNOW that we are going to see that in the second series. To me it feels like discussing the first chapter of a novel outside the context of the rest of the novel; bizarre, weird, and an odd thing to criticise someone for – like saying a magic trick is rubbish before getting to the prestige.