I was trying to find something original to say about the “Mad Men” finale, but the debate over this week’s episode of “Game of Thrones” has turned out to be more interesting than the mysteries of Don Draper. It even roped in a United States Senator, Claire McCaskill, who announced her intention to give up watching “Thrones” after Sunday’s show concluded with (spoiler, spoiler, spoiler, SPOILER) the wedding-night rape of Sansa Stark, the often-menaced daughter of the show’s most heroic and beleaguered family, at the hands of the most sadistic and loathsome member of the show’s dramatis personae, Ramsay Bolton.

McCaskill was one of many viewers moved to outrage (and more) by this scene, and there was a particular outcry among some of the same feminist critics who had raised issues with the show’s portrait of rape and sexual violence in the past. Which in turn prompted counterpoints from various writers, some of whom defended the seriousness with which the show treats sexual violence and some of whom just noted that this particular outrage was a strange place to draw the line. Sonny Bunch of the Free Beacon made the latter point with a vivid catalogue of all the horrors that viewers have watched unfold prior to this particular rape (“a woman was sold into sexual slavery by her deadbeat brother … [and] raped in literally the first episodes of the show … A pregnant woman was stabbed in the womb about 57 times as a way to punish a man who broke his vow to marry a psychopath’s daughter …” etc.), while at the Washington Post Alyssa Rosenberg argued that the show has always been telling “a story about the consequences of rape and denial of sexual autonomy” and that it’s “odd” for angry viewers to “accuse the showrunners of adding a sexual assault to somehow up the stakes when … intimate violence is already at the core of so many of the series’ storylines.”

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I’m not saying all this, incidentally, to tell anyone that they should quit watching because of what happened to Sansa. I will still be watching this Sunday night, so who am I to judge? But more than any other prestige drama I’ve obsessed over, my “Game of Thrones” fandom makes me, at the very least, morally uneasy. And as long as I have that feeling, it doesn’t really matter what specific scene persuades them to quit: The ones who walk away from Westeros have my understanding and respect.