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

She is so hot

xxxp And now I'm angry at that guy!

That could have pertained to what DHL said too but I actually meant it for The Dink ad.

DLH your friend sounds like a winner.

Her lips make up for the awful awful hair.

THE HAIR IS SO BAD

xxp he was 17 so we should probably cut him some slack too although not as much as we cut dany

hmpf maybe

her assistant is hotter...

Well at least at 17 he still has time to grow up into someone way more awesome than he is now. He should get started on that, imo.

yeah, i object less to the character than the actress. emelia clarke is gorgeous, but the daenerys remains a complete cypher due to the fact that the actress is practically a walking mannikin. i gathered that D was scarred and near-catatonic in the beginning, but it's not like great depths have opened in clarke's performance as the character has blossomed. love the idea of daenerys and can see as how she'd be a great character if portrayed in a more interesting fashion, but so far, she's just a face & body.

and some quilt batting

eh, dunno about that; Daenerys in this last episode vs Daenerys in the first episode are for all intents and purposes radically different ppl

Honestly all the women cast so far bore me except Cat Stark. The others are all coded for "attractiveness" in way that substitutes thousand-yard stares and blow-job mouths for acting.

I don't know because I don't find Cersei to be attractive at all.

x-post You really think so? I don't know - that seems a little harsh. I don't think she's awful, I'm just offended by the horrid dye job.

Cersei is scary looking.

that gif of cersei upthread ruined any potential attraction

I don't find Cersei attractive either, but she's clearly MEANT to be "attractive", her face and body follow all the rules. Not that Catelyn's don't, but she's the only one who I believe as a character.

Daenerys in this last episode vs Daenerys in the first episode are for all intents and purposes radically different ppl

oh hell yeah, the character's progressed enormously. my point was that the actress isn't really doing anything to illuminate this. she's just louder, more furrowed, less slack. it's a terribly dull performance.

cersei is... brittle, which is probably right.

C'mon guys, she ate a horse heart

Cat/Daeny vs Cersei/Lysa is kind of an interesting contrast

i think both arya and (harder!) sansa are doing good jobs, although they're 12 or whatever so maybe they're not what we're talking about here.

The most convincing part of her eating a horse heart was when she almost vomited and then choked it back down in her determination to complete the ritual. During which, her face was completely hidden from view, and iirc for part of the scene the camera wasn't even ON her, it was on her brother's reaction, and you could hear her gagging and coughing but that was all. And I found the scene way more affecting when she wasn't visually IN it.

I def agree that Cat is great. Yeah, I also think the girls are both doing very good jobs.

Sansa is kind of blowing me away, in the books she's a totally unrelatable non-entity harpy at this point and it's really a credit to the actress that she is portraying starry-eyed teen with such surprising amounts of empathy

yeah i can't remember how the horse heart scene was framed in the book -- can't have been quite the same, since all the dany chapters are from dany's POV -- but i thought it was super good at fixing the moment viserys feels a loss of control at the moment dany doesn't puke.

xp to Dan: Agreed re Sansa! They've softened her way up for the show, I hated her for ages as a reader. I wonder if that will affect how they treat what's up ahead for her, too....

I think the total opposite tbh. In the books you at least know what she's thinking so you can relate a bit. Here she just comes off as whiny

She was always whiny.

haha I remember in the books thinking she had to be a bastard child seeing as how completely unlike any of the other Stark children she was; the show iteration still keeps the naive self-involvement but there is also Stark steel in there as well

In the books Sansa is 11, so her childish, selfish behavior make sense. The aged-up Sansa has been one of the worst parts of the show to me.

also the show plays up a connection between Ned and Sansa that I missed in the book (largely due to hoping Sansa would die every time she popped up), namely the infatuation with honor

Sansa has the worst Brit student accent

cersei is... brittle, which is probably right.

i think lena heady is kind of great as cersei. she's a straight-up villain, but her human motivations are clearly apparent. we saw the lingering traces of tender affection she bore for her late husband even through the years of betrayal and contempt that hardened her heart against him. we see the cruelty of her manipulations, but also the anxious familial devotion that drives them. i like that, the way she portrays the struggle between cersei's more humane impulses and the ruthless ambition that ultimately overwhelms them.

They've aged up a few people and sidestepped a HUGE amount of sexual/sexualized violence and barbarism. That scene where Danaerys saves the captured women, you see a corpse being dropped into a pile of corpses? That's supposed to be a pile of women who have already been RAPED TO DEATH. And so on.

I mean they aged up Danerys, too, she's supposed to be...fourteen? That would be JUST TOO SHOCKING, I guess, although having two whores finger each other on camera apparently...isn't?

episode 8 was the first time i cared for sansa. not just because she stood up for her father, but because we saw and could empathize with her confusion in her situation. she's previously been portrayed simply and lazily as a "brat".

cersei is portrayed well imo. i've not read the books but she has a good range of manipulation. the scenes with her and sansa she does this kind of big sister thing, it's quite creepy.

xxp: well in fairness, that's what whores do

also the show plays up a connection between Ned and Sansa that I missed in the book (largely due to hoping Sansa would die every time she popped up), namely the infatuation with honor

arya being all cool and swashbuckling like the male starks makes her "fit" the family more than her sister but yeah i think the thing to remember is that from her parents' pov arya is a weird and even slightly alarming anomaly and sansa is the girl who's been successfully brought up to be a princess.

sort of unsurprising that the sexual initiation and rape of a 14-year-old girl might be more shocking than two (presumably adult) prostitutes getting it on...

Yeah I was going to say...

That scene where Danaerys saves the captured women, you see a corpse being dropped into a pile of corpses? That's supposed to be a pile of women who have already been RAPED TO DEATH. And so on.

― Back up the lesbian canoe (Laurel), Thursday, June 9, 2011 1:05 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

yeah, i was surprised by how daintily this scene was presented, given its obvious subject: the gang rape of a village's women. you could hardly tell what was going on. show is usually much more brazen abt such stuff.

No I know that was just my momentary annoyance at the show defanging the things that are actually supposed to be shocking/show real depravity/create contrast to other or later scenes and people.

xxxp

/cersei is... brittle, which is probably right./

i think lena heady is kind of great as cersei. she's a straight-up villain, but her human motivations are clearly apparent. we saw the lingering traces of tender affection she bore for her late husband even through the years of betrayal and contempt that hardened her heart against him. we see the cruelty of her manipulations, but also the anxious familial devotion that drives them. i like that, the way she portrays the struggle between cersei's more humane impulses and the ruthless ambition that ultimately overwhelms them.

I agree! can't wait to see how she does upcoming cersei

i don't really have a problem with them dropping explicit explanations of things like the pile of raped women because (A) i thought they were often kind of callow and leering in the books and (B) the SAVAGE NOMADIC HORSE LORDS are taking settled women as prisoners, what do you think's happening to them

that said if there is ever a brutal extended rape scene i just hope someone talks exposition continuously over the top of it

yeah, i didn't need to see extended barbarian raep scenes, but it looked more like herding sheep. odd decision, when the point could easily have been made cinematically w/out wallowing in it.