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

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

Weiss: In the book there are a couple of characters who have more of an offscreen role and come back in Book 3. But in the case of, say, Robb Stark — played by Richard Madden — he has more of an offscreen presence in the book, but Richard did such a fabulous job once his character came to the fore, he so commanded the screen that we realized there's no way to talk about this guy and not have him in the show. So there are people offscreen in the book who we are going to write onscreen in the show to make sure people who viewers have fallen in love with are still there in the second season.

Benioff: In the case of Jaime Lannister, he's got one scene in the second book, but he's such an important character we want to see more of him. There's fluidity in that certain scenes from the third book find their way into the second season just as certain scenes from the second book find their way into the end of the first season. We wanted to make sure those characters stayed in the audience's mind and didn't disappear for a whole year.

hrm

There's some spoilers in there, just a warning for n00bs.

xp

Seems sensible enough, max.

i am kind of over people who are watching this show and not reading the books frankly, get your act together

Lot of people have been asking to borrow my copies recently

lol the problem is that i have a stack of books to read but i dont have as much good tv...

Not reading that full article, but if they're deviating that much I might be able to justify reading the books after all. Though I have to say I loved the shock of Ned's demise, and would hate to lose that excitement.

Why would you need to justify it?

i am kind of over people who are watching this show and not reading the books frankly, get your act together

you being serious?

i dont think so

heh, are you

Why would you need to justify it?

A lot of books I'd like to be reading, and if the series follows the books as closely as it seems to (from reading the first 150 pages) then I'd rather just watch the show, but if they're deviating significantly from here on out then I can see the value. Part of me just doesn't want to ruin the WTF shock value. I really like the show, but I'm not convinced it's going to have the depth of some of the greats, which leave the WTF funtimes as its greatest asset.

no¿

xpost

Fair enough Gubke, but despite the show following largely the same plot there really is so much more in the books than what's on screen. And you get the WTF moments on the page too.

For this season I'm reading the book but trying not to read ahead of the show. Next season I might try the opposite to see how I feel about it but I like experiencing stuff on the show first and then enriching my viewing after the fact. I sort of fear that reading the book first might make me less enthusiastic about watching the show.

Yeah, I am torn -- < 200 pages into vol. 1, I'm still conflicted about the moment when I'm done with it and waiting on season 2.

you should keep reading; it's not going to diminish your wanting to see the show.

its hard for me to imagine someone regretting reading the books. especially regretting reading the books in order to watch stuff happen on the show first

reading the books made the show better...I think I said this way upthread somewhere, but the show helped me to better picture the minor characters as I was reading, and I was pleased to find that knowing what was going to happen didn't spoil the show because HOW they make it happen from a writing standpoint has been really kind of interesting for me. They've truncated it enough for the screen to make sense, and though some of the exposition scenes can get a bit much, I am really enjoying the subtle and bigger changes in the story. Like a slight redux or something.