There is a lot of nudity, both male and female - not all of it people you want to see naked, but a good part of it… And sex (mm (albeit, not much), mf (lots), ff (lots)…no groups that I can think of, though).
There is lots and lots of gratuitous sex. Watch SNL from a few weeks ago-- they did a great spoof. I think you’ll have to get it form OnDemand, as I don’t believe it’s available on hulu or youtube.
It’s rather jarring in comparison to the books. There’s quite a bit of sex in the books, to be sure, but the show (at least the first season, I haven’t seen the new season yet) ramps it enough that it feels gratuitous.
Imagine a series based on Hamlet, and then add scenes of Hamlet and Ophelia fucking while they, and other characters, deliver monologues that aren’t in the play. They may be good additions or meh. It varies. But they will occur during sex scenes that have no other impact on the story.
Now imagine that happening an average of twice per one-hour episode.
That is the sex scenes in Game of Thrones, in a nutshell.
All I know is that somewhere I read someone talking about the “exposition lesbians” that show up and somewhere in the back of my brain went “why aren’t we watching this?” (yes, I refer to myself in the plural a lot)
Really? I’d imagine that 90%+ of all the sex talk about the show is about Ros the sexposition whore and that the lesbian fingerbanging scene was talked about more than all the other sex put together.
I seem to be in the minority, but I LIKE the sex additions to the series but DON’T usually like gratuitous sex scenes.
Hard to explain why, but I think they tend to be very revealing, and sex-as-power is a pretty major theme in the books. Off-camera subtlety doesn’t work well on TV.
Violence doesn’t do an adequate enough job of separating grown up fantasy from kid’s stuff, so I like the double helping of sex and more importantly sexuality. One of the few points of reference for the general-non-book-reading public is likely Lord of the Rings which is asexual and quaint by comparison. I like the depictions of these characters as sexual beings because it rounds them out as characters.
I, for one, don’t think there’s anything excessive or gratuitous about the nudity or sex. I’ve always wanted a serious drama with good storytelling that routinely employed nudity and explicit sexuality. And I’m loving it. So far as I am concerned, they can double the nudity and the sex and not harm the show.