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

Josh, which book is that from, ACOK?

ACOCK

My biggest issue with GRRM is that I really do admire his world building and huge family trees and all sorts of other little details that do eventually pay off, or at least reward attention. But at the same time, he has this distinctly by-the-word spin in place style. That may be why the shows work so well, because it really propels the pulpy plot forward, usually intelligently, jettisoning the unnecessary stuff while accenting just the right world-building details. Then again, my understanding is that things the show seems to be getting right may seem wrong to those familiar with the book, and of course, the show has had more than its fair share of unforced errors. Like, let's change this part ... (yay!) ... into THIS part! (boo!)

I finished the first season and the first couple of episodes of 2. WOW so crazy. The Queen Cersei is so amazingly evil. She's so mean to Tyrion in that one scene! Ahhh! So evil!

The King Joffrey is detestable too. They are both so great as villains, they really are. It is fun to see that the larger world of GOT is full of characters that will hopefully fuck them up. I get the feeling they are in over their heads but the Lannisters seem to have a knack for survival.

The Daenerys storyline has taken off even more than I thought it would. I was wondering if something would happen to Drogo and then just a few episodes later she is burning him and the sorceress who failed to save his life. She lost the power that he wielded but it is cool bc she is creating something of her own. With dragons.

The baby dragons scene at the end of season 1 was AWESOME. I am so psyched for the rest of the show.

http://history-behind-game-of-thrones.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/daenerys-dragon-birth.jpg

Loving your enthusiasms, keep posting. You're still some way off peak craziness/fuckedupness.

I have always loved pop fantasy it's easily my favorite genre. This show is some great stuff.

I do appreciate the two scheming advisers, they are very Shakespearean. The last episode I saw there was a scene with some people having sex on a chess board. Super writerly. That's the sense of humor this show has.

Cersei is very hard to read, her expression and reaction to anything comes across as perpetually dissatisfied. I get the feeling she has been doing this a long time, ruling in all but name while her husband was off hunting and whoring. She has powers but they are dependent on the whims of the murderous men around her, much like Daenerys.

Cersei makes me think of Hatshepsut (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatshepsut). Hers is a very interesting story. Queen pharaoah of Egypt for 22 years, married to her half brother, usurped the throne from her step-son and made him her military advisor.

Blowing through season 2. It isn't as good as season 1. I could do without the entire Qarth subplot, really. I liked her Daenerys character arc last season bc she was consistently dealt the most insane and/or horrible circumstances and then powered through on the force of her own will. This season is more kind of pointless, her commanding her tribe or her hosts or anybody in sight to do things for her, them to refuse, and her to quickly sentence them to a firey death from above in the unforeseen future.'

The newer characters and the cast of all the different parties vying for kingship is interesting but the heart of the show remains the cruel and always entertaining Lannisters.

Would watch a buddy cop spin-off with Tyrion and his bodyguard.

Ssn 2 is great but more for Kings Landing stuff
I was having trouble remembering back to when Dany's story was interesting

Don't worry, Dany's story picks up MASSIVELY in s3. Then nose dives a bit, but I still think most people underrate her as a character.

OTM that s1>s2, and that the best bits of s2 revolve around the Lannisters.

The Lannisters are the best house all round really, that's pretty much a fact.

Yes definitely.

Ok the end of season 2 was nice. I guess if you are holding off on showing the dragons until the last episode again you could do worse with a scene where they are all shooting fire through Daenerys and roasting her would-be captors.

The army of the undead....woah. They really nailed the sound when the undead king screeches there. Is it the dead who die beyond the wall that come back, or all of them? Cos there are a lot of corpses showing up all around...

I guess it is good to know they can be killed by fire. Probably should be placing all bets on the fire-proof woman with fire-breathing dragons. Still, Sansa said it best when she predicted Joffrey would survive, "The worst ones always do".

Woah.... just finished S4E2. I did NOT see Joffrey dying, I thought he would be around to torment everyone for the entire series. They did give him a great send-off, it's like a greatest hits of horrible spitefulness. And Cersei grinning off to the side through the whole thing, trying to hold back the laughter. These are some of the most evil characters I have seen portrayed on screen in a long time.

I really liked how the episode was playing w fan assumptions. "Oh who would kill someone at a wedding?", that warrior guy whose kin was killed by Tywin, Shae being as LOUD AND OBNOXIOUS AS POSSIBLY while Tywinn threatens to kill the next whore seen w Tyrion. I half expected that cake to have a dead prostitute in it that he had just sliced in half.

Really hope Shae is gone for good, she was just annoying for most of her screen time by the end. Tbh she really took me out of it. It seemed like the dangerous and violent world of the Lannisters (and her dead fellow prostitutes) was entirely separate from whatever life she had w Tyrion.

Joffrey's eyes turned that pale blue color, the same color as the army of the undead. I'm hoping his body is stolen away before they can do a formal cremation and he becomes an undead Joffrey w 100x the evil of his former self.

think you might be misreading cersei's reaction to her son's grizzly death

Hah no i meant the little play before that, and the gleeful abuse of his uncle.

Tho thank God they shut down his plan on involving Robert Stark's head in the preceedings.

just wait until you get to season 5 and the army of the dead shows up led by Ned Stark riding Dany's dead dragon

Dude save that for the spoiler thread.

Finally finished season 5. Stannis burning his daughter was really painful, and it's a testament to how cruel the show is to its characters that very soon after everything went to complete shit for and he got what was coming to him. Brienne was able to finally keep her oath, but she's kind of a sad case imo, she's obviously super capable but has the extreme misfortune to often be at the wrong place at the wrong time. Either that or the person she is trying to save doesn't want to be saved at that moment. Missing the candle in the window by seconds was gtfo

Dany's story has gotten more and more interesting, I think it took a while to get into the whole leading-sure-is-hard part where she's at, and for a while she was just going from city to city conquering w this super simplistic and reductive way of going about it. Now she's out hanging w her dragon, which I kind of wonder is a first time thing for her, I'm assuming her actually flying on the dragon in the ep was for the first time.

This show keeps getting more and more grim. It is hard for me to watch any scene w Arya because it may erupt in extreme gore. A silly complaint given the show but I tend to watch out the corner of my eye when things get really brutal. Wouldn't have it any other way, all the violence, all the horrible things that are shown in this show, are all things that happened during the dark ages, not the squeaky clean medieval fantasy that I kind of grew up w in pop culture.

On that note the walk of shame was pretty crazy, and I guess something that really happened. I'm still kind of fuzzy on the whole arrangement, how the fanatics were given power that usurps the king and queen, as manipulative and calculating as Cersei is it seems like she would've foreseen that, but maybe not. Was the entire purpose of granting them power to get rid of her new inlaws? I am guessing in the next season she will just have Franken-Mountain chop all fanatics in half.

Jon Snow bleeding out in the snow, was there really any other end to this guy? Like Stannis he was fixated on the big picture and it allowed his growing enemies to sneak up behind him and stab him in the back (or the front, repeatedly). Not gonna hold out for Franken-Jon-Snow but who knows...

Dany's story has gotten more and more interesting

Haha, this really is the reverse of commonly held opinion. I still like her stuff more than most do though.

http://deadline.com/2015/08/ian-mcshane-max-von-sydow-cast-game-of-thrones-season-6-1201491099/

Not gonna hold out for Franken-Jon-Snow but who knows...

yeah, don't think you can run for Veep if not from Earth

Well I really liked her first season arc but once she became a ruler sitting on her throne for most of it, it was kind of dull. Post-Joffrey and post-Tywin the Lannisters are really floundering in King's Landing. Doing what they do best, killing and disgracing other people not named Lannister, but those tactics are starting to wear thin. Now that the small council is gone (and more or less under Dany's wing now) I think it's a less interesting story than it used to be w those two characters. Not that Jonathan Pryce didn't bring a heck of a lot of great acting to that storyline, but w Dany's story you get the feeling she is at least evolving and learning from her mistakes. Stannis, Jon Snow, even Cersei are all victims of their own obsessions while Dany doesn't exactly know what she wants. Plus she has survived 5 seasons relatively unscathed, so she's really in the best position right now than all of them.

I thought Dany's story was looking up when Tyrion showed up. Would have liked to see the two them plotting world domination, but then Dany gets whisked away to hang out with barbarians again. Seems like stalling, but maybe she'll find a magic amulet or something that will be super important.

can't wait for danys to storm kings landing with her dragons and army of dothraki and eunuchs and jorah "clobberin time" mormon and tyrion.

Basically where Tyrion goes I go.

Jorah Mormont more like Borah Moron aren't I correct?

was wondering how Lovejoy hadn't been in this yet

I think Dany's story has improved too. In most of the earlier seasons her scenes were usually my least favourite but that could partly be to do with my loving the greener and colder settings more than the sandy places (that certainly holds true for Mario videogames).

i'm on s01e03. this is really pretty bad. how is everyone so into this.

it gets a lot better, then worse.

great!

Its p consistently empty/pointless imo

It has boobs and dragons, to answer yr question goole

fun stuff happens eventually

season 1 coheres once you see its finale. it sets things up slowly.

I read it as S03e01 and still agree that it gets better then worse

Season 4 is still my favourite season of any show.

this continues to be bad. i'm sticking with it out of... well i don't really know why

dinklage is a bad actor. nobody is really that great, but he's particularly bad. a lot of these people seem lost in their accents.

it has a teenage dork's idea of debauchery and high politics. scenes where people are subtly threatening each other are excruciating. the sense of a world driven by adult desire is signified by men talking about fucking whores all the time. like, that's your gritty addition to the milieu of howard, moorcock, tolkein, and lieber is... giggly shit about prostitution?

What episode are you at? If you're not remotely interested in any characters by the end of the first season then it's unlikely you'll want to stick with it.

like, that's your gritty addition to the milieu of howard, moorcock, tolkein, and lieber is... giggly shit about prostitution?

p much

also rapes

i've got like 2 left in s1.

may as well get to the "surprise" in the finale

well i already know about that. poor sean.

the politics don't make much sense either, no idea why this realm or throne even exists (just to have a venue for scheming i guess).

GoT is one of those shows that definitely gets better even while it sort of doesn't. It's a frustrating paradox. (Unlike something like Walking Dead, which definitely gets much, much better past the first couple of seasons, but still pretty much stays bad.) So yeah, it never makes a lot of sense, and motivations remain pretty shallow and confused, but I'd say, sure, stick with it. As least the production value stays high, and the show does a good job getting you invested in the political machinations. Until it compulsively undercuts them. Or, er, overcuts them.

season 1 is good but i think it's not as good as S2&3. 4 is good, 5 had some parts i didn't gel w/ but then again there was that massive white walkers episode, which was great.

After reading the books this past summer, I appreciate how well the show captured the good parts as well as how bad the bad parts are.

like, that's your gritty addition to the milieu of howard, moorcock, tolkein, and lieber is... giggly shit about prostitution?

The show shows the subjugation of women and other groups, and even glorifies it at times. But the larger themes of the story are about rising up and taking the mantle of power imo.

the tv show doesn't engage any consistent themes beyond the power struggles that serve as the main drivers of the plot. which are also about as banal as anything in Dallas or Falcon Crest

agree to disagree

xpost Yeah, I agree. It's pretty soapy, but laced with portent and teeming with dragons and giants and magic and zombies.