I do agree that it probably kind of came off wrong. I know the showrunners said it wasn't intended to be a rape scene, but they might be backpedaling. It's hard to tell.

Director Alex Graves told Alan Sepinwall of Hitfix that “Well, it becomes consensual by the end, because anything for them ultimately results in a turn-on, especially a power struggle.” By contrast, critic Sean Collins was listening through the episode commentary and flagged David Benioff, who is one of the “Game of Thrones” show-runners and who co-wrote the episode, describing the events rather differently. ”It becomes a really kind of horrifying scene, because you see, obviously, Joffrey’s body right there, and you see that Cersei is resisting this. She’s saying no, and he’s forcing himself on her,” Benioff said. “So it was a really uncomfortable scene, and a tricky scene to shoot.”I tend not to care very much about what showrunners, writers, or directors think they are doing in a given scene once an episode is out of the gate. Stories are like Dany’s dragons: Once hatched, they are beautiful and terrible spectacles that soar out of control of their progenitors. But if we are trying to divine how “Game of Thrones” will proceed from this dramatic alteration to its source material, it is a relief to see that the actual showrunner for the series shares the understanding that what happened on Sunday was horrifying, that he knows that Cersei’s repeated “no” means no. As much as I dislike this parsing of creators’ motivations and understandings of what they have let loose on all of us, this disparity between Graves and Benioff is revealing not just as tea leaves for the future of the show, but as a reflection of a debate that surfaced among viewers immediately on the episode’s conclusion.