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

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.

in general, though, less rapey is better...

My wife knew exactly what they were doing to those women without having it spelled out. She found it pretty noxious as presented.

I'm not looking for it to be more horrifying, was just expressing irritation with the whole "violence violence, that's totes fine, let's rip out some tongues on camera, guys!" but, like, Sansa and Danaerys have to be aged up and have the sexualized parts of their stories softened/erased because the pretty-much-historical truth of marrying off 14-yr-old girls and what happens to them afterward is too difficult to make titillating.

too difficult?

fair point. can see why they'd shirk away from it tho.

xpost

It's not stopping me from enjoying the show or anything. Obv.

I agree with you (Laurel). Also find the gratuitous nudity and violence to be kind of distracting and unnecessary in general. Almost wishing AMC would have made this show in a way. Gotta love HBO's budget, though.

xxxp's

was just expressing irritation with the whole "violence violence, that's totes fine, let's rip out some tongues on camera, guys!" but, like, Sansa and Danaerys have to be aged up and have the sexualized parts of their stories softened/erased

oh yeah no argument here, welcome to america

the tongue ripping was totally o_O

Lol as I saw someone say on a comment thread recently, "How do you like America? Have you been here long?"

I think one of the lines this show has been walking (and is not the first to walk it -- we're rewatching the Sopranos recently and it has similar issues) is that on one hand there's this heavy theme of the consequences of noble politics. so you've got the butcher's son being killed, or the woman being raped/killed as consequence of war ("this is what war is") or the other casualties that come about because of the machinations of these nobles. at the same time, tho, there's this very real risk of aestheticizing in a pleasurable way these things we're supposed to find repulsive. in the Sopranos that's getting all hyped up and excited whenever the show shows violence. I think that show handled it by trying to implicate us in our own enjoyment (generally thru these proxy witness figures of Carmella, or Melfi), but it's less convincing when Daeny is horrified partially bc of what ppl are noting (that the full horror is not brought home) but also bc she seems to get it both ways. She gets to stop the horrifying stuff and still become the agent of those actions. I kept waiting for Drogo to put his foot down here, that it's impossible to keep an army running if you undermine their traditions of militancy (OT a little but very interesting article recently about how rape in war creates kinship bonds between soldiers -- http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/05/is-rape-inevitable-in-war/239480/). I'm not particularly upset about this, bc really who wants to see that much gritty realism in a television program? But I think the Sopranos, which is atm a superior show (tho who knows where GoT will end up in a season or two) didn't shy away from those uncomfortable elements.

I'm not sure I've fully thought this out, but just some ideas...

tbh if you're waiting for Drogo to put his foot down, you've misread the Drogo/Daenerys relationship