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

For all your ASOIAF recipe needs
http://innatthecrossroads.wordpress.com/

omg

HA!

BTW about to watch this weeks episode - eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

week's

I want max to send me the screeners RIGH NOW

great ep, tho i thought the scene between dany's blonde pervy brother and the concubine chick went on for too long and was really weird. tho i guess they need these expositional scenes to fill in backstory stuff.

You're right, I got a very draggy feeling with that scene too.

thought last week was better, a whole lot of exposition-dumping this week. About ready to stop meeting new characters and start seeing 'em get into action of some kind (as in the last couple of minutes.)

Oh man that jousting scene was brutal, y'all are bloodthirsty folk. Remind me never to get on your bad sides.

lol loving "Why Do They Call You Littlefinger" Arya. Ned Stark is kinda dumb though! Is this the first time we've seen his right-hand man in a speaking capacity?

Last scene with Lady Cat was some righteousness though.

Oh man that jousting scene was brutal, y'all are bloodthirsty folk.

Brutal but awsome!

I kinda couldn't figure out what happened -- was that splinter in the guy's throat from the lance itself, or did it happen when he was falling off the horse?

ie: is this a dangerous sport that can lead to your death or is the mountain just a particularly violent and disturbed fighter (as is indicated by Littlefinger's story to Sansa)? Also, why did Littlefinger tell Sansa that story? Was he trying to freak her out?

is this a dangerous sport that can lead to your death or is the mountain just a particularly violent and disturbed fighter (as is indicated by Littlefinger's story to Sansa)?

both?

Also, why did Littlefinger tell Sansa that story? Was he trying to freak her out?

to warn her about the cleganes, i think, both the mountain and the hound? in the book the hound tells her the story himself

my word, that recipe site

i think i suddenly stopped liking the books the fifth or sixth time someone ate an olive; that, i think, is what did it for me

i. the Mountain's lance slipped under an improperly fastened gorget and impaled him

ii. Littlefinger's motivations for most things he does tend to be rather oblique

I got the sense it was more a malfunction than intentional. People seemed pretty horrified and if the Mountain was known for killing his jousting partners presumably they would've known what to expect. Kinda a mirror to the Dothraki festival where they also kill ppl but they're all pretty cool with it. It makes a nice counterpoint that no matter where you are -- among the Dothraki or in the capital city, people are killing other ppl for pretty much no reason. The only difference is the civilized veneer applied in the capital.

^ Yeah I thought definite armor malfunction.

Sir Hugh was Jon Arryn's squire. Jon Arryn who was Ned Stark suspects was poisoned....

how is carcetti?

there are five olive-eating scenes in 'a storm of swords', by the way, and four in 'a feast for crows'; there are additionally four scenes between the two which take place in or proximate to an olive grove, and thirteen situations in which someone's skin is described as 'olive', in four of which it is immediately followed by a reference to the size of their breasts.

olive-eating data for the first two is proving hard to find.

that is an incredibly weird thing to notice. maybe in westeros olives are super plentiful. it's basically forecast: mediterranean in king's landing and south, so presumably they've got a lot of trees or summat.

now that i think about it, the real 'reason' littlefinger told that story to sansa is probably that they didnt want to shoot another scene & knew that 'Littlefinger does mysterious shit' would serve in the place of real character motivation - i think it makes way more sense coming from the Hound. in the book he also explains (as a way of mocking Sansa's belief that knights are valorous men whose only interest is in protecting the weak) in that scene that Gregor intentionally tilted at Hugh's weak spot cuz Gregor's just a brutal man who loves to kill

it's weird, but the hound is introduced and seems like the most boring notion of a character, & littlefinger seems exactly like what the book needs, but the hound's arc is actually pretty compelling until SPOILER, whereas that of littlefinger quickly reaches the level of 'oh, right, yes, go on then'; hopefully he will get killed off in a really entertaining fashion

bean i think it's an example of the paucity of martin's imagination but i am aware that it's not exactly the silver bullet that's going to convince anyone else -- i just found it incredibly annoying that the books go medieval diet medieval diet medieval diet, & then he decides that westeros is actually the size of a continent, and the books go OLIVES OLIVES OLIVES CHICKPEAS CHICKPEAS

all the olive-eating scenes take place in Dorne dont they? which is basically moorish spain

idk i never noticed the olives as much as, like, salt cod and freakin lemoncakes

it's moorish spain if moorish spain was cornwall, yes

i forgot about all those cornish deserts

toatlly going to make these: http://innatthecrossroads.wordpress.com/2011/04/11/lemon-cakes-part-2/

the tom colicchio game of thrones food truck did lemoncakes too, but the recipe is trickier:

http://www.makinggameofthrones.com/storage/got-lemon-cakes-recipe.pdf

dorne is prolly the goofiest the books get w/r/t nineteenth-century-style OMG EXOTIC, although the dothraki put up a good fight

like -- what bugs me about the books (apart from the narrative stasis) is that martin wants to have his cake and eat it too as to whether westeros is basically medieval england or whether it's a panopoly of various cultures -- so there's this 70s reader's digest cookbook idea of what people ought to be eating, and the logistics of empire are like the war of the roses when they ought to be like rome, and people in an area the size of south america have been speaking one language for six thousand years, before which there were two languages

ha i don't even think he even had the idea that dorn was going to be full of desert and shit until he was halfway through the second book, though

their foods are spicy... the women spicier!!!

reading the books made me realize i'm some kind of marxist after all, because it pisses me off how just totally bored martin is by "the smallfolk" and by any aspect of history that isn't the part where whispery eunuchs poison heirs in the west wing. i read an interview with him where he was like "i'm into history, but lol not the boring parts" and like oh you mean the relevant parts, dickhead

totally having fun watching this though

x-post lol

yeah that recipe might be a little too complex for my remedial baking skills - could prob handle the other tho.

where whispery eunuchs poison heirs in the west wing

this phrase is awesome! i want to embroider it on a sampler

(in the third book there's a bunch of tyrion/littlefinger/whoever stuff involving how much "coin" the "realm" has, and it's really basic and trivial and like someone eating their vegetables: "i guess there should be some administrative intrigue here but ugh why can't people get raped over grain prices")

x-post yeah it is

DLH you're a very good writer even on a msgbrd. I can't imagine what you write like elsewhere.

some friends say not as well!

i think hes more curious about it than you let on dlh - there's an entire POV in AFFC that's dedicated to just showing how devastated the commoners are by the wars being waged by all these narcissistic aristocrats (and from what i can tell the fans hated him for it) - i mean hes definitely more interested in the ~lords & ladies~ type stuff but i will give him credit if he concludes the series (heh) in a way that questions these power structures, because from a certain perspective basically everyone in the books is a villain

there's an entire POV in AFFC that's dedicated to just showing how devastated the commoners are by the wars being waged by all these narcissistic aristocrats

was afraid someone would say this cuz i haven't finished this one. but this is cool and makes sense; one of the neat things about him not planning the story from the beginning is his interests/priorities/style can shift.

i've read it and i don't know which one he means tbh. but the entire plotline with the brotherhood of the thingummy (i hope this is loose enough to not be considered a spoiler) is at least vaguely concerned with all of that, i suppose -- but in the vague-received-idea-of-robin-hood way, not the how-does-robin-hood-actually-function way

reading the books made me realize i'm some kind of marxist after all, because it pisses me off how just totally bored martin is by "the smallfolk" and by any aspect of history that isn't the part where whispery eunuchs poison heirs in the west wing. i read an interview with him where he was like "i'm into history, but lol not the boring parts" and like oh you mean the relevant parts, dickhead

totally having fun watching this though

― difficult listening hour, Tuesday, May 10, 2011 11:19 AM (18 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

haha otm i keep waiting for a collectivist religious movement or something and it never comes.

i've read it and i don't know which one he means tbh. but the entire plotline with the brotherhood of the thingummy (i hope this is loose enough to not be considered a spoiler) is at least vaguely concerned with all of that, i suppose -- but in the vague-received-idea-of-robin-hood way, not the how-does-robin-hood-actually-function way

― thomp, Tuesday, May 10, 2011 11:38 AM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark

i will respond to this in the book thread so i can talk spoilers

yeah zip it up in this piece guys

sort of enjoying this tho it is kinda confusing still, perhaps i am dense (or stultified by having to ffwd the six ad breaks per show that sky atlantic has) but i feel like it keeps mentioning characters and i'm like "who..", i guess this always happens at the start of these shows, i should prob read the character guide...

This may seem like a silly solution but I've found reading Sepinwell + AV Club's reviews of the show has helped with characters + events that confused me the first time through. Might be worth checking them out just to clarify everything you saw in an episode.

I've been watching this with my flatmate who hasn't read the books and he literally doesn't know a single character's name. Don't blame him though.

HBO has a very handy viewers guide

http://viewers-guide.hbo.com/game-of-thrones/