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

that was all done pretty well i thought. series is ending strong. only most of a year to wait until the next one.

X post Just noticed that was already linked. Sorry.

Stannis is this awesome cross between whiny crybaby and battlehardened soldier. The fact that he lives on an island seems to be convenient for both Stannis, who hates pretty much everyone in the world, and everyone in the world, who think Stannis is a dick.

wtf nedddddd!
and almost-horse-zombie khal drogo!
and aaagh war!
this show...

it's gonna give me nightmares tbh

horses do not fare at all well in this series

I sorta don't care about the battles---I'm in it for the ~machinations~

― all the pretty HOOSes (gbx), Monday, June 13, 2011 3:18 PM (7 hours ago) Bookmark

i kinda agree - i dont need riproaring battles. at the same time, there's a lot more tactical and strategic detail to them in the books and i think it would've been cool if they preserved more of that instead of boiling it down to 'we tricked tywin and caught jaime' - i think that stuff is cool as heck and should've been in there, because its as much a part of the machinations as anything.

for show-watchers who are confused, here's a detailed thing about how everything went down (spoiler-free) that i swiped from another board:

Tywin is in a shitty position as he has the neck to the north of him and Robb's army in between him and the Westerlands. I expect they'll explore this in the next episode. Though in regards to the tribesmen, to put it in perspective there's only about 400 (or was it 200) or so tribesmen in total. They weren't the van, they were just put in the van. They're really much too small otherwise.

So anyway, re: the war, in the novels, up to this stage without any spoilers:

Jaime Lannister lead an army (15,000 in book, 30,000 in show) to attack the Riverlands whilst Tywin lead a second army (over 20,000 in book, 30,000 in show) north against Robb's host.

Jaime scored several quick and easy victories against the Tully armies and essentially forced them back into Riverrun, the Tully stronghold, and laid siege to them.

Robb has to make a choice about going south to face Tywin or crossing the Green fork to face Jaime. He eventually decided to split his force, with the bulk of the army on foot (some 16,000 in the book) going south as loudly and publicly as possible to face Tywin's host, whilst he himself lead like 4,000 horse (Catelyn noted that Robb, like his father, always lead the most dangerous and crucial bit by himself) or something to cross at the Freys (where they were joined by several thousand Frey horse and infantry) and use their strategic speed and surprise to ride on Jaime.

The foot army attempted to steal a night attack upon Tywin's host but were alerted of. In the morning the two sides had a pitched battle besides the Green Fork river (and this was known as the Battle of the Green Fork) Tywin had Gregor "The Mountain" lead the left flank as the van, right besides the river. It was later revealed he intentionally placed the weakest elements - free riders, mercenaries, squires, mounted field hands and Tyrion's tribesmen, under the command of an unthinking savage, in the Van on the left so that they would be defeated, and that Robb, who Tywin thought would be brave and eager and not cautious enough, would commit to the hole in Tywin's line, at which point the rest of Tywin's army would wheel and trap and crush Robb's army against the river. The Stark army proved too cunning however and retreated before that could happen, suffering a considerable defeat but maintaining the bulk of their strength. It was also established here that Tyrion was actually quite a decent fighter, and he killed several enemies as well as defeating a northern knight.

Here Tywin realizes that they've been fooled, as Robb had used this time to steal a march upon Jaime. Robb's cavalry attacked in the night from multiple sides in small raids on Jaime's camp, designed to draw Jaime who was brash into pursuing them into the woods. Jaime did so with about a third of his army and Robb ambushed him from the woods. Seeing the battle was about to be lost and being metal as hell Jaime Lannister lead a charge against Robb himself and attempted to end the battle right then and there, and he killed a handful of Robb's retinue (all sons and young nobles of his bannermen) before he was captured. And this was known as the Battle of the Whispering Woods.

So as it stands at this point in the books, there's still a Lannister army at Riverrun but they have no commander and their encirclement has been broken. Tywin is trapped between a still considerable Northern army to his north and Robb's army to his east cutting him off between him and the Westerlands.

That sounds cool enough to make me want to pick up the book again.

It reminded me of the Battle of Pharsalus in Rome, where they basically showed a banner hitting the mud and then Pompey explained what happened to Kevin McKidd. They did give us a pretty full-on battle for Philippi in the second season, but they also cut the episode order from 12 to 10, which was fairly unheard of for HBO in those days and I always assumed it was so they could afford to do that battle.

I dunno...I like a good battle scene. I don't require it, but for a medieval-y drama, it'd be nice to have a couple of barnburners.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Am I watching wrong if I was half-expecting Arya to make it onto the stage thing to run "King" Joffrey through w/ Needle??????????????

Sorry, by "half-expecting," I meant "wishing with all my heart, and money."

GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH. THIS SHOW.

What I'm saying is, I could use a vaguely Eastern European courtesan right now to play drinking games with me.

Stupid Ned meme:
http://winteriscomingbitch.tumblr.com/tagged/stupid+ned

oh! i missed that somehow.
― magic punani (The Cursed Return of the Dastardly Thermo Thinwall), Monday, 13 June 2011 21:01 (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I don't think it was very clearly explained.
― Inevitable stupid samba mix (chap), Monday, 13 June 2011 21:01 (Yesterday) Bookmark

There's a lot of that happening. I'm finding that as long as I can follow the bigger arcs/themes, the details sprinkled throughout (Rickon, say) will become clearer when the story needs them. (Except for stuff like Stannis, where I've spent a couple of episodes going "wait, who's that again? Why do they keep talking about this dude?").

Whatever happened to the other Stark brother who was hanging with the Night Watch guys - was it Benjen? Is he gone for good?

benjen's disappeared, as far as anyone knows

http://uk.eonline.com/uberblog/b247126_game_of_thrones_sean_bean_stabbed_in.html

wtf

Despite his wounds, Bean refused any medical attention and opted not to go to a hospital.

Instead, the actor accepted a first aid kit from the bar staff, then ordered another drink.

almost too badass sounding to be true!

That's awesome, I even know the pub.

Surely this man is our king

episode 9 was dece, first time i've thought emilia c. was other than boring. didn't miss the battle action, either, as it left more time for dinklage (whose accent is, yes, a bit shaky) and other character threads. ol ned's death was a bit anticlimactic tho...

dunno what the "either" is doing in that second sentence

ol ned's death was a bit anticlimactic tho...

Really?

it just didn't hit me. good story move tho.

I was like "they aren't gonna ... WHOA!"

probably would have worked better if i didn't know it was coming. what i get for watching late and reading ahead.

Dinklage ends up sounding kinda posh Scottish Richard Wilson-y a lot of the time

reminds me a bit of Aragorn's weird gaelic sounding grab-bag of vowel sounds at the start of LOTR before he got all shouty and regal

He does OK, it's not like he's a Natalie Portman-level offender or anyt'n

i'm completely willing to compromise with the accent for the sake of the facial expressions.

oh yeah, me too. he's the best thing about the show.

he gives excellent quizzical frown

I love his performance and am willing to explain away his weird vowels by saying he's not trying to do an English accent, but a Westeros accent.

Too bad no one else is trying to do a Westeros accent, then.

I've changed my mind; why bother with depressing drinking games when I could innocently wrestle my East European courtesan?

http://img87.imageshack.us/img87/2457/gotxls.png

I realize a count of unique prostitute/slave nipples per episode would probably have been more insightful than the magic/zombies count, but I had to go with what I could recall with help from the wikipedia summaries. what's important to note is that while the increasing body count for speaking roles is obvious to everyone, nobody seems to notice that before too long we are going to have almost 100% of the show taking place inside of some kind of tent.

ahaha

haha tom did you make that!! you are so talented

blog it

Are we just talking about what we actually saw? Because like a few thousand dudes died in ep 8.

I was only counting people who had lines

I'm now not only watching for dinklage awesome but also to find out how the eunuch's game plays out with carcetti's game - the great thing is, thanks to the limited POV and exposition, it's hard to tell which parts of what they talk about wanting to do are more game, and which parts are sincere. Clearly both have plenty to gain by destabilizing the state, but how much, and who do they actually favor? Obv nobody was going to favor Ned or the Starks, fundamentalist patriots have no place in a libertarian utopia.

Ned AND the Starks, I guess, all thumbs tonight

oh and somehow I forgot the squire-made-knight dude who got his neck split open in the first joust with the Mountain, now I remember he spoke with Ned's guard captain before the tourney

Tom that is my favorite graph of all time

nice plot! of course, being familiar w/ matlab i immediately noticed the the xaxis labels weren't corresponding to the correct episodes.

is the "people out camping" number for episode 8 (episode 7 in the graph) deliberately odd because of tyrion? if so, nice touch!

yeah the x axis labels were kind of a bitch because I am no senior wrangler when it comes to quickie excel graphs, it's good enough for jazz
I would like to say the little bump is all about dinklage but I think it's just an artifact of the microsoft smoothing routine

you shoulda seen it when I tried to drop in some logarithmic trendlines on that nonsense - 100% campground settings PROVEN BY SCIENCE

The showrunners speak.

Bit of a spoiler in that article if you're worried about that kind of thing