HBO adaptation of Game of Thrones - will this be just for nerds? (NO SPOILERS PLEASE)

Arya my # 1 - she's my homegirl

Just saying you were very prescient about your fondness for Oberyn.

those bastard name sound like mls team names to me.

― ryan, Tuesday, June 3, 2014 12:02 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Sporting Sand United of Dorne

Ladies and Gentlemen please welcome your favorite minor league baseball team, The North SNOWS!!!

oh wow I forgot that I predicted Dorn-dude's untimely demise

*clutches Arya tightly* YOU CAN'T HAVE HER

i love the bastard last name detail!

yeah it's cool

I love it bc it's great shorthand to let you know where a character comes from and their likely sense of self and their place in the world. And it's also effective wrt how westeros operates, like this sin of the father passed into the child who has to bear the burden while the one who did it gets off scot free.

agree the show is not v serious which is why all the rape stuff feels off. feels semi-cartoonish like a group of 13yos playing d&d except that ppl get raped to death&children get incinerated, which harshes the buzz imo & for no obv purpose.

king robert was semi-assassinated by that guy keeping him lubricated, khal died from an infected wound from a duel, both half marks at best, not really any sense of the capriciousness of fate/nature. these ppl have no technology or magic, they should be scared of all this shit they can't control but they're not even v religious. neither bob b nor khal d would make it onto the natural causes section on this great list - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_monarchs_of_the_British_Isles_by_cause_of_death - highlights include henry I, who died of"food poisoning from eating "a surfeit of lampreys"" & james I of scotland who was assassinated in a monastery, "He attempted to escape his assailants through a sewer but, three days earlier, he had had the other end of the drain blocked up because of its connection to the tennis court outside."

they're not even v religious

Not so sure I'd agree with this, religion plays a huge part in their world!

xp Cat's father Hoster Tully dies of old age. That's the only one I can think of, though.

religion plays a huge part in their world!

for the majority of the characters on the tv show this is not really readily apparent

is there even a priesthood?

yeah only the fire woman seems remotely interested in doing anything about it, everyone else is basically a c20th anglican

churches? holidays?

xp

agree the show is not v serious which is why all the rape stuff feels off. feels semi-cartoonish like a group of 13yos playing d&d except that ppl get raped to death&children get incinerated, which harshes the buzz imo & for no obv purpose.

― ogmor, Tuesday, June 3, 2014 1:33 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

idk i kinda feel like this is good

is it pagan w multiple deities? or monotheistic? is there a good/evil duality as with God/Satan? I really have no idea.

xp

I have to run to a meeting so I really can't get in depth on this, but I get what you are saying - individual actions don't really seem to reinforce any kind of belief system. However, if nothing else the remnants of religion are all around and impact their daily lives in so many ways! Maybe it just comes across more clearly in the book, but almost every character seems to, at the very least, toss off a prayer to The Warrior or The Mother or whoever. And, c'mon, the entire Stannis plot revolves around the spread of a brand new religion that creeps out those that believe in the old gods.

yeah the Stannis subplot is the only one with an overt religious dimension that I can think of

its almost like the whole thing isnt that coherent or well thought out

it does seem odd to do this sort of laborious recreation of medievel European history and completely leave things like the Church out of it

seems like closer to a pagan sense of religion (the gods do what they will and we are there play things) rather than a christian one that foregrounds the belief/unbelief question. like they barely seem to distinguish (in the show) between the "new gods and old"--except perhaps for a strong disapproval of black magic. i assume ethics/metaphysics etc exist in the world of the show but it's almost never spoken about.

Good job Brandon Stark wasn't a bastad from The Reach huh

like instead of JESUS what if there were dragons and zombies and some random pagan shit yeah

xp

i assume ethics/metaphysics etc exist in the world of the show

absolutely everyone seems to be a nihilist

However, this system does not apply to the bastards of smallfolk: at least one parent (usually, but not always, the father) has to be a member of a noble House. If both the father and mother are commoners, the child cannot use the special surname.

The low-born commoners of Westeros do not actually use surnames at all. Therefore, possessing a bastard surname is simultaneously a mark of distinction and badge of shame. Anyone who encounters someone with a bastard surname will immediately know that they are not simply a bastard, but the bastard child of a noble.

they should have fancier surnames than just Snow or Wood or Beach or whatever

agree the show is not v serious which is why all the rape stuff feels off. feels semi-cartoonish like a group of 13yos playing d&d except that ppl get raped to death&children get incinerated, which harshes the buzz imo & for no obv purpose.

― ogmor, Tuesday, June 3, 2014 1:33 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

idk i kinda feel like this is good

― lag∞n, Tuesday, June 3, 2014 5:38 PM (1 second ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

well it seems lots of ppl dig it but for me it rings v false, it's like "skeletor is so much more gritty in this reboot now that he mutilates ppls genitals". I think those topics are too serious & raw to have them pad out a bad guy, unless your take on e.g. the d.r. congo is "i guess they're all just really evil", which given the dothraki-mongols is mb not far off grrm's worldview, idk. I guess the closest thing I can think of that I thought was mb 'good' was having magneto in x-men being a holocaust survivor, but iirc they dealt with that reasonably carefully as opposed to having a big climax where an SS soldier gleefully squashes his brains into the floor while bellowing about how he gassed his family

Jon Semi-Worthless Offspring

xp

agree that the bastard names are pretty neat. also like the idea of the "sins of the father" playing a role in the series as a whole--given that the entire movement of the plot seems motivated by things that happened between dead people a generation ago.

absolutely everyone seems to be a nihilist

yeah this strikes me as a very pre-modern sensibility, prior to any sense of a "moral" position from which to criticize the state. not that people don't privately disapprove, but there seems little purchase for any broad critique of power structures from what they have available.

I don't think a big chunk of pre-modern ppl were nihilists... mb fatalists

Jon Yellowsnow.

certainly not dentists!!!

agree fatalism is more accurate

xp

Religion is much more important in the books, yeah. But even then, they are hardly as religious as people were in the middle ages, but I don't think that is inexplicable. The church lack political power, so nobody really bothers pretending to be anymore religious than anybody else. But it does sorta speak into the problem with the whole world, in that nobody but the nobility ever has any significance what so ever. No new inventions, no new trading routes, no peasant rebellions. And no religious statutes either. The only thing is magic, which is bound up in the Lord of Light.

so there is a church?

The Church of the Seven or whatever is a rough analogue to the Anglican Church, and the books explore its function a little more closely.

it seems weird to me that there would be magic and yet no institution to exploit it, develop a power base, etc.

xp

Faith of the Seven is more analogous to Catholicism

you've seen weddings and funerals in it so yes

oops that's an xpost obv

Ehn, it's more of a rubberstamp institution that currently operates largely at the behest of the (laic) ruling class, and not its own sovereign entity.

there's a history of a militant wing of religious believers. theres a sense that the awesome power of dragons essentially eliminated or supressed all threats to the institutions of the throne and the aristocracy though its not totally adequate in explaining westeros' very modern-feeling apathetic secularism

anyhoo yes, most of westeros is at least nominally Catholish, except the divinity is sevenfold rather than a trinity. There's still a strong Druish presence in the North.

Not unlike Olde Europe!

Melisandre's monotheism is a new import from Essos but she didn't invent it. Thoros is Myrish and an adherent as well.

very modern-feeling apathetic secularism

well this is sort of what's most interesting about it as an alternative universe. it's like a middle ages without christianity. like power doesn't appeal to theology to justify itself but instead can only justify itself through, well, power. it's like a middle ages with the mask of piety stripped off. which makes sense given the constant lack of legitimacy and subsequent power struggles constantly going on.

im actually super glad they dont get into all the church stuff in this, that stuff has been doooooone to death in every medieval thing ever. its refreshing that its only sort of tangential.

xp, it's like in the absence of the divine right to rule you get...the Mountain.

religion is much much bigger in the books, catelyn is pretty devout from what i recall but by and large it's another dropped from the show as something that doesn't drive the plot at that moment and something that doesn't lend itself to tits and gore (the notable exception on these fronts is the one case where they have worked it in though even there i'm not sure they've done it at all well). it's also probably another case where their taking that shortcut of just not dealing w/ something cuz it wasn't necessary is going to rob later stuff of the impact or even logic it should have.

lena headey had this on her instagram a while back -

http://games-of-thrones.ru/sites/default/files/pictures/5750-9-015_f2-copy-518x470.jpg

oic her thumbnails look like tiny cartoon eyes!

btw just want to say that max's morning after things are pretty great and essential reading for anyone who hasn't read the books or read them but didn't like memorize them or anything.