Zipped right through Season 1. It’s really good, I can say that already. 

Though, as a politics/history buff, sometimes it’s a bit difficult. I guess I’ve also read too much Discworld and, more recently, Game of Thrones. Both depict fantasy universes which have constraints of reality. The Song of Ice and Fire books are brutal, but in many ways realistic. Armies don’t appear out of nowhere, and battles aren’t nice or pretty. 

Discworld is more whimsical, but takes into account something very important: magic doesn’t come cheaply. Wizards are well aware of how destructive their power can be, and learned that the most important lesson to learn about magic is not to use it. On the Discworld, there’s industry, farming, trade. Sir Terry imagines a fantasy world where people seriously go to work every day. They have ideas, innovations, and build things which change the world. 

In both, economics is important. What is the price of bread in King’s Landing? How does Vetinari finance his Undertaking? It’s all of interest, and all relevant. 

Avatar is a nice, light-hearted adventure, with strong characters and character development. It’s fun and I enjoy it, but there’s this little voice in my head which wonders how the people of each nation get balanced diets, how they farm, how they build. The water tribes live in snow, ice and tundra, where there aren’t really any vegetables. The air monks live up mountain tops, with similar disadvantages. There doesn’t seem to be any trade. 100 years is a very long time to fight a war, and the changing generations must surely have changed their attitudes in various ways. And so on. 

I find it funny how the benders often say “It’s not magic, it’s bending!” and I’m forced to wonder what they consider magic, if bending is not magic. It may as well be. And it obviously seems to come cheaply, and there’s no cost to it. And that means they seem to use it for everything, and when they fight, it’s incredibly destructive. Can that much wild destruction from all sides possibly allow for stable societies? 

In any case, it’s fun and that doesn’t bother me much. But it’s still there. 

Had a delay because of a busy week, and to watch it with my dad.

I’m actually pleased with how they represented the shadow thingie. Creepy, but that’s how it’s supposed to be. All in all a good episode, and it filled in some of the gaps that weren’t previously explicitly written.

Still, a couple of things. Seaworth wasn’t involved in what happened to Renly. He shouldn’t have been there. It makes me wonder if they would remove Edric Storm entirely from the plot.

Also… Renly’s peach! It’s not there. So sad.

Game of Thrones 2.2 | The Night Lands

One of the reasons I really liked the series was how close it was to the written material. But now that I watch this one, I’m really not so sure… The departures are just not… They don’t make sense. And there’s wayyyy too much sex than there needs to be in a story that’s mostly about power, blood and politics. Sometimes I feel like GRRM is shipping characters in the show that he only hinted at in the books, and who would have been better off without a sexual component.

Frankly, the TV show has more sex than the books do. The books have a lot, too. 

Bloody violence too… well I’d wonder about that. Some things aren’t in the book, like Drogo ripping that guy’s tongue out of his neck, but there are other bloody things which aren’t in the show. 

For example, there’s a lovely monologue by Littlefinger which is in the show but not, so far, in the books. It actually tells me more about his motives than anything in the books, and I love it. But it’s against the background of him training his whores how to better fake enjoying themselves by pleasuring each other (ie. lesbian sex) which was kind of unnecessary. I think it was partially put in to give the show-only character of Roz some screen time and also just to throw more sex into it. 

I just watched the first episode of the new season, and it does have me excited for the next. And I like that they put the scene in of the gold cloaks hunting for Robert’s bastards, but did it really need to show now-elevated Roz training whores? 

I dunno. I don’t mind showing sex and sexuality in film and in story when it serves a purpose, even if it’s only to establish the setting, but sometimes it’s just gratuitous. 

What I do think works for it, is that when you’re showing gratuitous sex scenes, nudity is no longer a big deal. Genitalia is everywhere, orgasms everywhere, so just seeing a boob is really no big deal anymore. 

Some have accused GRRM of just being a horny and bloodthirsty old man, and while I think that’s silly, sometimes I wonder… Writing sex into novels must be the most odd things to write in the world, at least to my imagination. When you’re writing it between characters to portray their intimacy, it serves a purpose, but there’s a lot of just… there’s just so much of it, and written so casually, but with some detail. It’s confusing what its purpose is. 

I’m happy that there’s little comment to the gratuitous sex and violence.

Anyway, it’s hard keeping silent about what happens later in the books, but I manage. So far I only tell him what I still don’t know, which considering the series, is actually quite a lot.

Admittedly, not as often as I used to.

But it’s very often about the show, and people making predictions and projecting hope for their preferred characters.

But when you’ve read the books, and all that happens, and all that changes…

Well it ends up sounding pretty funny, what people say.

got-confessions:

“While Tywin isn’t a favorite of mine, I do hope that he has a decent end.”

Excuse me while I go giggle in a corner. 

Read More

When I first started reading “A Game of Thrones” I watched the series at the same time. I enjoyed it. 

I’ve since read all the books up to “A Dance With Dragons” though haven’t actually read that yet. 

When I go back to the series, it’s hard not to wonder how it’s going to handle all the changes that happen. 

I started re-reading the first book again, and it occurs to me that I just can’t figure out the plot. 

Sure, the book series isn’t finished yet. And we all enjoy a surprise, and the mystery of finding out… 

But I’ve gone through four huge books now, and I still don’t know what it’s all supposed to be about. There are big things happening, we get attached to characters, they die, and it’s hard to find out what the whole point is. 

There is an off-chance that everything is really tied together, that some things from the early books will come back to relate to later things in the last books. But at the moment, the whole thing reads like he’s making it up as he goes along, wondering how many more plot twists he can fit in. Again, I might be wrong, but sometimes I wonder. 

The cynic in me wonders if maybe he did start off with a strong plot, but finding commercial success to work in concert with the fact that the series is taking forever, he’s not just putting it off with more plot twists to keep us interested. Again, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe he’s a genius and we’ll find it all out with the last book. 

Either way, it occurs to me that they’ve started making a TV-series without really knowing what’s going to be important to the central plot. It’s a good thing it’s a long series with a lot of detail from the book faithfully carried over, but what if some obscure character detail was changed, but later would become important? 

What, indeed, if the series is what determines the author’s writing and plot? He’s notorious for taking ages to write each book. But he’d better wrap it up soon, because presuming each book becomes one season of a TV series, he’s only for 4 years to finish his next book, which had better round things off. 

I don’t really have a theme to this. Just throwing my thoughts into digital words. But I really wonder. Is there a freaking plot? I appreciate that it’s realistic, and that just because things should happen doesn’t mean they will happen, but it’s happening so much that I have no idea who I should be rooting for and what I’m even looking forward to anymore. Couple that with what is probably a wonderful commercial deal to make it a rather good TV series that doesn’t even know what it’s going to become… 

Yeah. I’m confused. 

got-confessions:

Game of Thrones: Season 2 Teaser!

Woohoo Stannis! 

got-confessions:

This was too perfect not to post here.

Sadly, grammar fail. :P But still funny! 

Beware of spoilers, and I haven’t picked up “Dance with Dragons” yet. 

Read More

I like going through the #game of thrones tag here on Tumblr. People are creative, and not just that, it’s the fastest moving tag I have. Quite crazy. 

Anyway, I’m always amused when people reach the end of the first TV season and are stunned when Ned Stark is executed. 

I’ve gotten to the point in the books where I feel like “… Ned Stark? Oh yeah, that guy that died 4 books ago.” 

So much happens afterwards, that in a way I feel like maybe I didn’t get to know Ned well enough compared to others. 

Following on the events of “A Game of Thrones” Tyrion, the Imp, joins his sister at the royal capital of King’s Landing. He mostly takes over. 

His sister Cersei is cunning but blind to the real threats. She hires many more city guards and squashes any dissent brutally. Her son Joffrey sits on the throne and he’s not much different. 

Tyrion, upon arriving, discovers that there are a great many problems with this. Hiring more guards sounds good on paper, but not only can their quality no longer be vouched for, the threat of popular uprising is made worse. Revitalizing the city’s economy is neglected, food prices skyrocket, bakers and other food producers hire their own guards to protect their shops from thieves and would-be looters. 

Cersei reacts conventionally. More guards = more security. Tyrion realizes that it’s a layered problem. More guards are handy in the case of attack or uprising, but surely the best defense is avoiding the problem entirely. And that starts when people are unafraid to sell food for reasonable prices.