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Author Topic: Game of Thrones: The TV Show  (Read 9989 times)

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Royal☭

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Re: Game of Thrones: The TV Show
« Reply #60 on: May 12, 2013, 03:33:25 PM »

While looking over summaries of the books and stuff, is it a mistake to believe that the Theon Greyjoy plotline will continue like it currently is for the next... 2-3 seasons?

Niku

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Re: Game of Thrones: The TV Show
« Reply #61 on: May 13, 2013, 02:21:14 AM »

I was complaining to a friend about that last night.  I haven't read the books but I have been told the Theon stuff is bridging material that was left out of the actual narrative.  Much like MY DRAGONS in season two, I think there are times when it's fine to add in scenes to remind the audience that characters exist but every time the show goes to extra lengths to make sure that a given character gets seen every single episode they end up suffering for it.  The Theon stuff wouldn't be nearly as tiresome if it happened every three episodes instead of every one.  The Dany stuff in season 2 would have worked a lot better if it hadn't beaten the same plot points episode after episode.  There are so many damn character and plot threads that it's okay to let them breathe within a season.
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Thad

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TA

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Re: Game of Thrones: The TV Show
« Reply #63 on: June 04, 2013, 03:28:33 PM »


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Mothra

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Re: Game of Thrones: The TV Show
« Reply #64 on: June 06, 2013, 04:57:15 PM »

Welp, just caught up on Game of Thrones.

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
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Thad

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Re: Game of Thrones: The TV Show
« Reply #65 on: June 07, 2013, 02:19:33 AM »

"Now you can tell your friends, 'See?  Now you understand what I was so upset about 13 years ago!'"

I've still only caught one episode of this season.  But I know what happened in last week's episode.

Might catch up when my wife goes on vacation in a week.  The show got too violent for her to keep watching right around the time Tyrion sent Joffrey a couple of hookers.
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Friday

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Re: Game of Thrones: The TV Show
« Reply #66 on: June 07, 2013, 02:51:37 AM »

(Spoilers for s3 ep 9 (the big thing everyone is moaning about) in video below)

(Don't watch this if you haven't seen the actual ep)

Game of Thrones - "Red Wedding" (Storybook Edition)
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Kayma

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Re: Game of Thrones: The TV Show
« Reply #67 on: June 07, 2013, 02:58:41 AM »

Hah, that was fantastic
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TA

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Re: Game of Thrones: The TV Show
« Reply #68 on: June 07, 2013, 05:59:22 AM »


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Mothra

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Re: Game of Thrones: The TV Show
« Reply #69 on: June 09, 2013, 05:39:17 AM »


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Thad

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Re: Game of Thrones: The TV Show
« Reply #70 on: June 13, 2013, 03:52:33 PM »

Okay. So.

At the end of the latest episode (S3E3) when [spoiler]Jaime got his hand cut off[/spoiler]...

did

did a catchy rock song play during the credits?

That was the greatest thing I have ever seen.
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Thad

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Re: Game of Thrones: The TV Show
« Reply #71 on: June 14, 2013, 03:13:12 PM »

Catching up.

It's funny that "Hey, that's Simon from Misfits!" was probably the most notable moment of the episode I just watched.  I guess because that was really the only part that surprised me.

Well, that and [spoiler]Varys keeping the sorcerer who castrated him in a box[/spoiler].  Holy shit.  That was one of those moments that simultaneously was unexpected and made perfect sense.

The cast really is fucking great, and for all that Dany's [spoiler]liberation of the Unsullied[/spoiler] gave me literal chills, it's the conversations where this show really shines.  Here are a few of my favorite pieces of interactions between characters over the past couple episodes:

Edmure and the Blackfish
Robb and Edmure
The Blackfish and Catelyn
Jon and Mance
Arya, Gendry, and Hot Pie
Jaime and Brienne
Jaime and Not Vargo Hoat
Tyrion and Cersei
Cersei and Tywin
Tyrion and Bronn
Tyrion, Bronn, and Pod
The Queen of Thorns and absolutely everyone she talks to

Obviously the material the show's working with is good.  But the cast is SO goddamn talented.

The show's usually up to the source material, occasionally better, and it's good enough that those cases where it's worse are easily forgivable.
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Thad

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Re: Game of Thrones: The TV Show
« Reply #72 on: June 17, 2013, 02:31:40 PM »

Having caught up to where the show was when you posted this:

While looking over summaries of the books and stuff, is it a mistake to believe that the Theon Greyjoy plotline will continue like it currently is for the next... 2-3 seasons?

So far it's been paced roughly the same as in the books.  The difference is that the books bench Theon for awhile and when we see him again he's missing most of his teeth and fingers and we find out what happened in flashbacks.

It serves a few narrative purposes.

First, in A Clash of Kings you're led to believe that Theon dies when Winterfell burns.  It's late in one of the next couple of books when there's finally word that he's a prisoner.  In the books that makes it a dramatic surprise.  (Or not a surprise.  I subscribe firmly to the rule that if there's no body then he's not dead.  But nonetheless dramatic.)

Second, it gives us some space from Theon for awhile.

Third, it allows him to hit rock bottom.

Thematically, it's one of Martin's favorite devices: making a character utterly odious and seemingly irredeemable, making you want terrible things to happen to them, and then making them suffer so much that you feel terrible for originally wanting it to happen.

Another of his favorite themes is that it's under greatest tragedy and duress that people show their true mettle, and the ones who seemed irredeemable may be imminently redeemable after all.  We're seeing that story play out with the guy who shoved a little boy out a window in the first episode, of course.

And additionally, it establishes Ramsay as the most legitimately twisted character in the series, and indulges in the most unflinching portrayal of brutality and sadism in a series that's rife with brutality and sadism.  Seriously, between Ramsay, Joffrey, and the White Walkers, Ramsay would be my last pick of people I'd like to meet.  (True story: my reaction to seeing [spoiler]Ros full of bolts[/spoiler] at the end of the previous episode was relief.  I was worried she was going to wind up married to Ramsay.)

The show, on top of that, has to use this sequence to introduce us to Ramsay in the first place.  You meet him earlier (and under much more dramatically satisfying circumstances) in the books.

All that said, as horrifying as things have been up to this point, they've still been toned down.  Even the [spoiler]castration and hunting humans for sport[/spoiler] are diluted -- though the book is much more coy about the former and lets it act as a slow burn where it's never said in so many words and it's left to dawn on you slowly.

But unlike the book, at least so far nobody's been [spoiler]raped by dogs[/spoiler].  Guess there's still time for that, but as I've said before, I don't think the show will go that far.

I guess I don't really know the answer to your question -- I don't know how long the torture subplot will keep up or if the show will bench Theon for awhile now that Ramsay's been established and the highlights have been depicted in real-time instead of as flashbacks.  Likelier, I think, is that next season we'll start seeing [spoiler]Theon as Ramsay's pet[/spoiler] and less of the torture.

As far as it being tough to take: yeah.  It is.  It's fucking awful.  That's kind of the point.

As for how I feel about it, well, after "horrified and squeamish" it gets harder to quantify.  Is it necessary?  I don't know.  Is it effective and affecting?  Yeah, it's certainly that.

It certainly feels different than when, say, Tarantino does it.  I don't get the impression that Martin enjoys writing it at all -- I suspect when he said Dance was "two bitches and a bastard" to write, he wasn't just talking about the difficulty of juggling a dozen different major plots running at wildly different paces.
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Thad

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Re: Game of Thrones: The TV Show
« Reply #73 on: June 23, 2013, 03:28:00 PM »

Welp, all caught up.

I've got a blog post coming tomorrow on the subject of spoilers and the theory that stories are actually MORE satisfying if you know what's going to happen.

For now, though, a couple of thoughts:

The spot where it ends.  I've heard from both people who know the books and people who don't that they thought that was a weird, arbitrary place to end the season.

Having seen it, I'm inclined to disagree.  While it's true that this is the first season not to cover a single book beginning to end, it adhered to the formula of the first two seasons nicely: episode 9 is the climax, the Shit Hits the Fan episode, and episode 10 picks up the pieces and moves all the other subplots to the end of an act.

Season 3 was paced the same way as the first two -- it's the BOOK that sticks the climax in a different spot.  Or, alternately, sticks its climax in roughly the same spot but its ending hundreds of pages later.

(Flipping through my copies of the books: Ned dies on page 727 of 807, not including appendices; the outcome of the Battle of Blackwater is revealed on page 869 of 969, and [spoiler]Catelyn gets a knife across her throat[/spoiler] on page 705 of 1128.)

And while there are several other Everything Changes moments before the end of the third book (MAJOR SPOILERS FOR THINGS THAT HAVE NOT HAPPENED YET ON THE SHOW: [spoiler]Joffrey dies; Tyrion is convicted of Joffrey's murder; Jon becomes Lord Commander of the Night's Watch; Lysa reveals she killed John Arryn at Littlefinger's behest; Tyrion kills his father and flees King's Landing[/spoiler]), I'm still more than comfortable describing the Red Wedding as the climax and indeed as one of the two most important moments in the series (the other, of course, being Ned's death).  Now, I'm not sure how they're going to pace that last 1/3+ of the book out across season 4, though if I were doing it I'd try and reorder some events, put some bits of books 4 and 5 in, and end season 4 in roughly the same spot as book 3.

At any rate, though, conjecture aside, I thought episode 10 did an admirable job of giving us an End of an Act for all the major stories -- though it had to cheat the timeline a bit to do it, and I'll get back to that in a minute.  Everybody got some sort of moment where their story wrapped up and pointed them in a new direction:

Arya [spoiler]playing Cub to the Hound's Lone Wolf, while pondering her coin and realizing she's pretty good at stabbing people[/spoiler];
Tywin [spoiler]triumphant, having won the war decisively at a single stroke[/spoiler];
Theon [spoiler]gets a new name, and we finally learn the name of his captor[/spoiler];
Yara finally puts in an appearance; [spoiler]sets out to rescue her brother[/spoiler];
Tyrion and Sansa [spoiler]actually seem to be getting along, which is more kindness than the book ever gave them[/spoiler];
Shae [spoiler]decides to stay, and reaffirms that she is most definitely not the Shae from the books[/spoiler];
Gendry [spoiler]is off to who-knows-where[/spoiler];
Bran [spoiler]ventures north of the Wall[/spoiler];
Jon [spoiler]makes it back to warn his brothers about the impending attack[/spoiler];
Sam [spoiler]makes it back to warn his brothers about the other, worse impending attack[/spoiler];
Stannis [spoiler]turns his attention to the Wall[/spoiler];
Jaime and Brienne [spoiler]reach their destination[/spoiler];
Daenerys [spoiler]meets her new subjects[/spoiler].

As far as changes from the book: nearly all of them were good choices.  (I could still gripe about Ramsay's introduction, but that's really a season 2 problem, not a season 3 one; season 3 really did, to my mind, do the best job it possibly could given that he didn't show up in season 2 like he should have.)

I think the change I liked most was having Melisandre cross paths with the Brotherhood Without Banners.  First of all, it gives Gendry something to do (as opposed to the books, where he's been benched ever since joining the Brotherhood -- though given the way the season ends, he may still get benched now); second, it gives us a chance to see Melisandre interact with Thoros of Myr and Beric Dondarrion, which she never does in the books.  I think one of the best things the show has done is show us interactions between characters who never meet in the books (like Bronn and the Hound last season).

As for the change I liked least, well, honestly I have to cast about a bit for one; I could gripe that Coldhands hasn't shown up yet but really that's a bit of a nitpick.

I think the most jarring thing, really, was the timeline.

Think about it for a minute: ravens from Harrenhall to King's Landing, back to Harrenhall and to the Twins; riders from the Twins to Riverrun.  How long does that take?  The Red Wedding is planned, meticulously, across three different locations, and it all comes together far too quickly.  (It's easier to believe in the books, where -- spoiler for thing that happens differently in the books -- [spoiler]it's strongly implied that Tywin orchestrated the whole thing from the beginning, all the way back to Jeyne Westerling seducing Robb in the first place[/spoiler].)

And yet, I didn't even think about any of that until the finale.  The finale really blows it -- Joffrey gets news of the Red Wedding immediately after it happens, and, likewise, the show cuts straight from Maester Aemon dictating a letter to Davos receiving it.  The show flagrantly cheats on the timeline in the eleventh hour (well, the tenth) and in doing so calls attention to the fact that the ENTIRE SEASON'S timeline doesn't make sense.

But really, that's a minor structural gripe in another really fantastic season.  The stuff they kept was good; the stuff they changed was good; the story was well-told and the cast hit it out of the park.

Course, now they've got a real challenge ahead of them, given that they've got the last 400 pages of Storm to adapt plus the two much-less-tightly-paced books that follow.  Like I say, I think they did a fine job of choosing where to end this season -- but I don't think it's going to be nearly as easy to turn the next 2-3 seasons into something coherent and satisfying.

And THEN of course the big question is whether there'll BE a sixth book yet by then.
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Büge

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Re: Game of Thrones: The TV Show
« Reply #74 on: June 23, 2013, 10:14:43 PM »

And THEN of course the big question is whether there'll BE a sixth book yet by then.

Ah yes, the One Piece Dilemma.
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Thad

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Re: Game of Thrones: The TV Show
« Reply #75 on: June 24, 2013, 02:39:49 AM »

There were 2.5 years between the first two books, a little less than 2 years between the second and third, 5 years between the third and fourth, and 5.5 years between the fourth and fifth.  It's been just about 2 years since Dance was released; if he takes 6 years to release Winds, that'll plop it in 2017, which, assuming current scheduling holds, would put it right after the end of season 7 (and the producers have said their goal is to finish it up in 7 seasons).

He's recently claimed (warning: link is to Morning Spoilers, a column about spoiling all sorts of things, not just Game of Thrones) the show won't catch up, so who knows, maybe he's farther along than he seems.  It's already too late for him to get back on the "every two years" train, but it could be that the last two books really were aberrant and the next two will be more focused now that things are starting to come together with all the pieces starting to fit into place.

But I'll believe it when I see it.
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Büge

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Re: Game of Thrones: The TV Show
« Reply #76 on: June 24, 2013, 03:36:52 AM »

Eh, if not, they'll do an episode where Tyrion and Arya learn to drive cars.
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TA

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Re: Game of Thrones: The TV Show
« Reply #77 on: June 24, 2013, 05:01:45 AM »

The number I heard was 9 seasons, though it might have been 7 for the current 5 books.  That would put a 2017 Book Six release right on track, though it only really buys two to finish up Book Seven.
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Thad

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Re: Game of Thrones: The TV Show
« Reply #78 on: June 24, 2013, 12:51:59 PM »

The number I heard was 9 seasons, though it might have been 7 for the current 5 books.  That would put a 2017 Book Six release right on track, though it only really buys two to finish up Book Seven.

Apparently the source for the "seven seasons" number is this Rolling Stone quote from producer Frank Doelger:

Quote
"[The number of series] is being discussed as we speak. The third season was the first half of book three, season four will be the second part of book three. . . George R.R. Martin has written books four and five; six and seven are pending," Doelger told Radio Times at the BAFTA Awards last weekend. "I would hope that, if we all survive and if the audience stays with us, we'll probably get through to seven seasons."

Yeah, that DOES sound like people read way too much into it.  It's more "If he can do seven books, we can do seven seasons", not "THE SHOW WILL END WITH SEASON SEVEN."

That said, I think it's doable -- and obviously this depends on speculating about two books that do not actually exist yet.

A Feast for Crows is the shortest book, and it's STILL got plenty of fat that can be trimmed from it.  We could lose most of the Dorne and Ironborn subplots (indeed, the end of season 3 suggests there may be no Kingsmoot -- which would actually be a shame as it's one of only two examples of a democratic election in the series) and at least half of Brienne and Jaime Just Sort of Wander Around For Awhile.  That leaves, what, Cersei [spoiler]Goes to Jail[/spoiler] and Sam [spoiler]on a Boat[/spoiler] and...what else happens in Feast?

A Dance with Dragons, by contrast, is the longest book and still feels a incomplete.  (Presumably they'll intersperse Feast and Dance; nobody's going to put up with a whole season of no Tyrion, Daenerys, or Jon.)  Now, a good big meaty chunk of Theon's arc has already been taken care of, and for my money that's the most important subplot in Dance.  As for what's left, well, obviously the [spoiler]Winterfell[/spoiler] arc still has to happen, but a good big chunk of its supporting cast Does Not Exist on the show -- Big and Little Walder, Tom O'Sevens, and Jeyne Poole, off the top of my head.  I expect we'll see the same plot in broad strokes, but a whole lot of the details are going to be trimmed.

I think that, once again, we can trim out the Dornish, even dropping the Quentyn Martell subplot entirely (although on the other hand it pads out the Slaver's Bay portion of the book, which consists largely of Daenerys and [spoiler]Tyrion[/spoiler] sitting around).

As for Jon, given that the Janos Slynt subplot has already been dropped from the TV show I think it's safe to say that's at least one chapter cut.  And I think a lot of the Tough Decisions stuff can be condensed down.  I expect we'll see a greater emphasis on the battles and a smaller one on the politicking -- though maybe not; up to this point the show has tended to prefer the politicking to the battles, if not to the extent that the books do.

On the other hand, Bran, Arya, Sansa, and Davos all have precious little to do in the past two books, so I'm guessing very little of their stories will be cut.  And the show may feel the need to give some airtime to supporting characters like Gendry, Osha, and Rickon, even though they've been benched for the past couple of books.

All that to say: despite having the longest book in the series still to do, and more than a third of the next-longest, it's still feasible that the show could get caught up with the fifth book by the end of the fifth season.  I wouldn't bet on it, but I wouldn't bet against it either.

Dunno.  It'll be interesting to see, anyway.




ANYHOO.  As promised, my post on spoilers.  Warning: contains spoilers.  Huge ones.  For things that haven't happened on the show yet.
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Thad

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Re: Game of Thrones: The TV Show
« Reply #79 on: July 19, 2013, 05:51:15 PM »

Comic Con video tribute to all the characters who've died so far.

Needless to say, if you're not caught up there are pretty huge fucking spoilers here.

Game of Thrones: In Memoriam (Comic-Con)
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