A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones Spoiler-Filled Discussion

I don't think Robb's death will cause as much of an uproar as Ned's did. Now, as a longtime fan of the books, that reaction was hilarious to watch unfold.

 

Wash your keyboard out with soap for mentioning B&B!!!

 

Sorry. I was trying to gain perspective and convince myself it wouldn't be so bad. B&B's touching portrayal of the emotional aftermath of Trip's death seemed like the thing to focus on to accomplish that.

I wasn't watching the show during season one, so I missed the uproar. Man, Robb's got some devoted female followers on youtube. Madden's got that full on, Scottish Ewan McGregor accent going on in real life that makes us chicks follow him like the pied piper. They're gonna be mega pissed if his character is written off. He is pretty handsome, I must admit. Reminds me of Jamie Bamber.

Uproar might not be the right word, but Robb's death could be supremely sad and moving if written properly.

 

I think Harrington just needs better material. The writers have really slacked off on making us care about his storyline. The character is presented as not particularly intelligent, not particularly charming and not particularly effective. Most of those things were true of him in the book too, but we had the benefit of being in his head to excuse his behavior as well-meaning, honorable, etc. Also, he spent half the season walking around in snow, which doesn't exactly get our blood pumping.

 

Based On cast members adding these two to twitter and this clear picture:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/gungeekatx/7464255412/in/photostream

Mackenzie crook and philip mcginley has been cast

 

DAMN she's tall!

 

Venardhi has a point. The series did a (mostly) good job of reworking Daenerys' 'do-fuck-all' plot from book two, and an even better improvement on Arya's rather thin stuff (she's never Tywin Lannister's cupbearer and they don't exchange a single word in the books).

While they did do some good things with Jon - the Ygritte material comes to mind, and the series has remembered there's nasty things out there in the North - it still feels quite a bit like the Dany and Arya plots in book two did, that is, treading water until something important can happen.

Uh... yeah.

Though Bran Stark's a very important role in its own right.

There's always Liam Cunningham as Davos Seaworth, the honourable right hand of Stannis Baratheon, who was fantastic this year, but that does kind of depend how much the show will use him.

 

Liam Cunningham was great, but he's not really a main character as far as the show goes. How much can they realistically write for him? I enjoyed Arya's turn as the cup bearer and getting to spy on Tywin, but I agree that Dany is treading water. It's as if they're inventing obstacles so she can't get her ships. The show definitely lost focus on Jon until it was too late in the season to do anything significant with him. We didn't get to see him dealing with any significant grief over Ned's death or lamenting that he cannot go to his family. It all settled far too soon, IMO. Igritte mocking and teasing him was great, but they needed to get on with him meeting the king north of the wall already.

I hope that Harrington's up to the storyline. Perhaps all the white walkers and supernatural beasties will help things along. I'm just not as interested in Jon as I should be considering the fact that he's probably the true king of the seven kingdoms by birthright.

 

The Arya/Tywin scenes were good, but I'd hesitate to call Arya's plot an across-the-board improvement, because they omitted or downgraded many of her best scenes from the novel.

 

I can't stress just how lowly I hold Arya's plot from A Clash of Kings, though. So much bloody faffing about with those kids. Off the top of my head the only major change that bothered me was that we won't get to see her stab the Tickler to death.

So yeah, I'd call the Tywin stuff an improvement.

 

The Arya/Tywin scenes are well-performed and, in isolation, well-written, but they don't really add anything interesting to either character, and Arya doesn't evolve at all during her time at Harrenhal, in contrast to what happens in the book. (I gather Bryan Cogman has justified this by saying they needed to slow Arya's arc because of the splitting of A Storm of Swords over two seasons, but I don't see how a character stagnating for six episodes is a desirable alternative.)

The Qarth plot on TV is ridiculous, the sort of generic and heavy-handed "intrigue" that belongs in a bad fantasy film, not a TV drama that's even halfway serious. If the writers wanted to abandon the nature of the Qarth material from the books (and I can understand why they would, though I regret the loss of something so different in tone from the rest of the series), they ought to have replaced it with a realistic, fully-conceived political storyline, not some half-baked FIENDISH SCHEMING. They also ought to have come up with a meaningful ending-- the House of the Undying is a logical conclusion to the Qarth storyline of the books, but the watered-down TV version of it isn't a conclusion to anything, and makes Qarth not only pointless as immediate narrative (which it arguably is in the books) but as foreshadowing and fantasy storytelling. Not that I have strong feelings about this or anything.

 

I'd argue they do, from the perspective of the series. The Arya scenes are an important window into Tywin's actions and attitude - he's a very important character who we simply don't see a lot of. This is an important difference generally between television and books - in the books, Tywin can spend ages off-stage while knowledge about him is given to other characters and impressions of him exist in the minds of Lannister POV characters, but in a TV series we're better off actually seeing him and seeing him speak to get a sense of the man.* His conversations with Arya and his Harrenhal material generally ("THEY HAVE MY SON!") was pretty much the entirety of Tywin's stuff this year.

For Arya the scenes show an increase in her resourcefulness, testing the limits of the various roles she's been hididng in, and gives her a formidable opponent to trade words with. Tywin is simply a more interesting figure to have Arya talk to compared to her travelling companies, or the bullshit mysteriousness of Jaqen H'ghar.

True, but generally if Westeros is grounded in War of the Roses-type pseudo-England, Essos is where there's a medley of often ridiculous fantasy tropes and some naff orientalism. The Qarth arc for Dany in the books is less melodramatic, but the locale isn't a helluva lot less ridiculous (it's hard to do the warlocks seriously, for example, and I think the series did about as good as one could expect with Pyat).

Ah well. I'd say A Storm of Swords is right up there with A Game of Thrones when it comes to Daenerys' arc, so I hope they get the same sense of epic catharsis that the novels managed.

*Perhaps the best example of this inevitable disparity is Rhaegar Targaryen, whose shadow hangs over the novels in the recollections of characters talking to POVs, POVs of those who actually knew the man, and so on... but on TV he's basically this dead guy who doesn't even have a credited actor. So it goes.

 

I agree that it's important to capture Tywin through direct onscreen characterization, but I don't find the approach the TV writers have taken to him particularly rewarding. As with Cersei, their work is hamstrung by an evident belief that you make an unsympathetic character round by giving him/her scenes of poignant unhappiness/wistfulness/grandfatherly wisdom -- superficial likability to balance the "dislikability" rather than a genuine sense of why and how people become deeply unpleasant. The building blocks for that sense exist in the books-- that TV Tywin is musing on his "legacy" suggests the TV writers are at least dimly aware of it. And it would be easier and more natural to create that portrait of the real Tywin through his interactions with his actual children in seasons three and four than by contriving scenes where he reveals his personality to a random cupbearer.

In the book the point of Arya's arc in Harrenhal is not "an increase in her resourcefulness"-- in fact it's practically the opposite. It's an environment of terrible violence and danger in which she's functionally powerless except through the deaths offered by Jaqen, which starts her on the road toward violence as vengeance down which she's still traveling as of A Dance with Dragons. (It's also part of Martin's portrayal of the horrors of war for commoners, which is an important aspect of the books that the TV show has thus far neglected, but that's another topic.) There's very little sense of real danger in TV Harrenhal, just unconvincing asides like the will-she-be-recognized Littlefinger cameo and the comedy chase sequence with Lorch. By the end of episode ten, has Arya changed in any meaningful way from the end of episode four? She knows to say "m'lord" instead of "my lord," but I don't see any sign that she's actually more resourceful than before.

If anything, the Tywin scenes undermine the idea that Arya is remotely resourceful at posing as a commoner. Tywin plainly knows that she's highborn northern girl playing a servant, and yet is evidently uninterested in that, for reasons best known to Benioff and Weiss. The logical consequence of their scenes together would be investigation, identification, and capture, but that would break the basic plot structure to which the show is committed.

Kegg is right that Qarth in the books is an outright fantasy milieu rather than the cod-medieval Europe of Westeros (and the rest of known Essos, really). Some readers will find that ridiculous; others, myself included, like it, though I think Martin's "the further east you go, the more magic the world gets" notion is indeed problematically orientalist. But the key point is that some of the most fantasy-driven storytelling in the book series is what the source material offers here. If you're not interested in that, or think it won't play with your audience, fine, make changes, but you need to replace it with something, not add a barely-thought-out gloss of political intrigue to a city that is explicitly not about that sort of thing. When you're diverging from the (thematic and genre) substance of the source material to the extent that TV Qarth does, you have the opportunity to invent something of serious complexity. Don't think the warlocks will work on TV? Cut them entirely. Don't want prophecies in the House of the Undying? Drop it altogether. Otherwise, you get a plotline that has no magic for the fans of that and no realistic politics for the fans of that. In the context of the books, there's at least a justification for the existence of the Qarth storyline, but on TV, Daenerys gains nothing from it; they might as well have had her go straight to Slaver's Bay.

 

Not sure how much play these got outside the US, but here are 3 videos done by Mother Jones magazine showing American attack-ad-style campaign commercials from Game of Thrones.

I like the Dany one the best...


[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ao4HVlV7wZU[/yt]

[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yzw2ZiMt3y4[/yt]

[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6r9CdNenuk[/yt]

 

Ned and Jaime duel with lightsabers:

[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17W4QMNwm-c&feature=player_embedded[/yt]

 

Okay still reading the books. Making slow progress due to work commitments. Sorry if this has been beaten to death.

In the books -
1. One thing that struck me was this - Why once Robert was king did Ned never visit? Cat's and Ned's memories of their youth seem to suggest travel on their parts and that of their parents. It seems to me that Ned shut himself off in the North far away from the man he supposedly loved like a brother.
2. Would Robert have made Lyanna happy anyway? He already had at least one illegitimate child around the time they were betrothed. Would he have grown bored and cheated on her like he did Cersei? He seemed to place Lyanna on high and use her death as an excuse for his lewd behavior, but would have he really been any better if she had lived?
3. Dany is morphing into the same entitled so-so she loathed when it was her brother.

Show related....
1. The books mention Rhaegar alot. Are they going to have to cast the character and do a series of flashbacks? Much seems to be interwoven with his actions and motivations.
2. I think they used the Arya/Tywin scenes to flesh Tywin out more than help along Arya's storyline. If I were the show runner and had a talent like Charles Dance, I would make use of him. Plus, Tywin is mentioned quite alot in the books and we are left to deduce his motivations based on what we learn of him from other characters.
3. I think the character of Jon Snow suffers some from the TV adaptation. In the books I see him as a young boy struggling to make sense of his life. I guess because the actors playing Robb and Jon look older than I feel they should, I keep thinking of them as dullards rather than boys struggling with hard choices and responsibilties.

 

B1. The last time they saw each other was when the Iron Islands rebelled. Ned was always more of the quiet loner type and it took someone like Robert to drag him out of his shell. Beside that, he never much cared for the society of the south. After his brother joined the Nights Watch it made sense for him to stay in the north as his heir was still a child and there must always be a Stark in Winterfell.

B2. Probably not, She seemed to think comparatively little of him next to his fantasy of her.

B3. Aye, it is debatable that the family insanity did indeed pass her by.

S1. They filmed flashbacks (or possibly a prologue?) for the first season but cut them all and any other opportunities to show such things have also been left out. Clearly they would rather keep the focus on current events.

S2. Probably

S3. Yeup. A 15 year old acting like Jon makes a lot more sense than an 18 year old.

 

Dany's problem is that she doesn't know how to run a country and is getting frustrated by how difficult it is. This isn't that much of a mark against her, no one currently alive in the setting knows how to run a country. And, indeed, many institutions that are absolutely vital to good and fair governance simply haven't even been thought of at this point in time.

The Sons of the Harpy are a good example. Anyone from modern Earth would immediately see that the solution is to create a national investigative and law enforcement service that answers to the crown and empower them to investigate such crimes. It isn't all that difficult to infiltrate a subversive organization or flip one of its members.

But J. Edgar Hoover hasn't been born yet in the world Dany lives in and the concept of a national police force isn't something that's really come up yet, certainly not a professional one. She isn't sufficiently innovative to come up with the idea on her own.

 

I would say the obvious answer to the Sons of the Harpy is to kill the guy who is obviously their leader.

 

Nice podcast interview of Martin:

http://mynorthwest.com/category/tbtl_player/?a=9943582