A Year of Ice and Fire: Week 2

Daenerys I

Daenerys goes to the ball and meets her Prince Charming.

The first chapter to demonstrate what is, depending on your perspective, either Martin's gritty realism or Martin's overblown determination to rub nasty, creepy behavior in the reader's face. “I’d let his whole khalasar fuck you if need be, sweet sister, all forty thousand men, and their horses too if that was what it took to get my army." Ah, Viserys; unlike Joffrey and Ramsey you were a short-lived Aristocratic Grotesque (not to be confused with Lowborn Grotesques like Rorge and Biter), but you did you best to make up for low quantity with high quality. But what I always remember about this chapter is the sentence "All that Daenerys wanted back was the big house with the red door, the lemon tree outside her window, the childhood she had never known," which is, as unsubtle attempts at pathos go, right up there with "The Poor Little Match Girl."

I did also note that, for all the cluttery exposition in this and other chapters, plenty of stuff goes unexplained, like the mention of the Unsullied. It's interesting (and depressing) to think that when Martin first wrote this chapter, he probably intended Dany's purchase of the Unsullied to take place in the same book. But anyway, my point was that, despite all the infodumps and Martin's generally workmanlike prose, there's enough unexplained to create that sense of mystery that a certain kind of fantasy fiction depends on.

Eddard I

The fat king arrives. Did I mention he's now fat?

Not much to see here. More exposition, the first signs of how compromised a ruler Robert is, and the first bit of evidence regarding Lyanna and Jon, a topic in which I have zero interest at this point. The last lines certainly beat the drum of cheap foreboding pretty hard. A possible small inconsistency: in the first Catelyn chapter Ned has seen Tommen (and Cersei) within Tommen's lifetime, but here he hasn't seen Robert since the Greyjoy rebellion, which was before Tommen was born. I suppose there could have been some circumstance under which Cersei and Tommen would have been traveling without Robert, but it's hard to imagine. I'm sure there have been multiple threads on the Westeros.org forums about this, but at the moment I'm too lazy to look.

Jon I

Jon whines a lot, and Tyrion whines a little too.

I hate to break up the pity party Jon and Tyrion are having here, but I do think it ought to be pointed out that they both lead lives of unimaginable privilege. That people are occasionally mean to them only rankles because otherwise they can expect deference and stability. So no, "not all bastards need be dwarfs" doesn't move me as it once did. Otherwise, the only noteworthy thing in this chapter is Jon's exchange with Benjen, which foreshadows Jon's arc with the Watch a lot better than one could have guessed before A Dance with Dragons came out and revealed that Jon's part in George R. R. Martin Explores Medieval Leadership was going to be another chapter in the "Don't Let This Happen to You" section.

Catelyn II

Catelyn feels a good ache, and gets some bad news.

Aw, we're already up to our first ineptly-described sex scene! I don't care if the setting is cod-medieval; "Her loins still ached from the urgency of his lovemaking. It was a good ache. She could feel his seed within her." is not something you should inflict on your readers, even as a transition to a point about her desire for dynastic stability. This isn't a bad chapter, though. It does confirm my earlier suspicion that Martin sees even this, his one stable arranged marriage, as shadowed by the fact that it was arranged. The part where Catelyn wonders if Ned is punishing her by separating her from the children is especially grim. But Cat shows the first signs of the canny strategic mind that so many fanboys (some of them TV producers) have overlooked. In contrast Ned seems slow-witted, and self-pitying to boot: "It was all for Brandon, boo hoo hoo." That's something I think we'll be seeing more of. Martin wants Ned to come across as tragically world-weary, but he often seems whiny instead. All that grief and loss in the rebellion doesn't come through. With the possible partial exception of Catelyn, I don't think Martin ever writes about the immediacy of grief in a credible way. Cersei's grief for Joffrey in Feast is virtually non-existent, though I imagine it's meant to be a factor in her psychological breakdown.

Arya I

Arya starts a fight, and then she watches one.

People like to say Sansa is dim, but in this, her first meaningful appearance, she hits the nail on the head: "Poor Jon... he gets jealous because he's a bastard." That's not very nice, and Sansa seems to follow Catelyn in a certain coldness toward Jon (even in Feast, when she thinks he's her only surviving relative, he's still just her bastard half-brother), but it's not wrong either. And after setting up the Arya/Sansa conflict, this chapter gives us another round of "Poor Overlooked Jon Snow," for which I have not very much patience. Also, Joffrey's still a jerk. Actually, this is the first real sign of his personality, and here it is, like the squabbling between Arya and Sansa, only on the level of ordinary childish nastiness. Even transplanted to a fantasy version of the Middle Ages, the sibling feud here is a little banal, but it does give an emotional baseline that makes the later onslaught of horribleness more meaningful.

Bran II

Bran goes for a climb and watches a peep show.

The second real dose of grimdark. The evocation of a child's mind is intermittently better here, including the mixed response to leaving home, and his memories of his parents' attempts to get him to stop climbing. And then it all goes bleak. I'm sure this shocked me once, but now I'm thinking "Yes, Jaime is fucking his sister, and then he tries to kill a little boy, but when is something interesting going to happen?"

Tyrion I

Tyrion does some reading, some slapping, and some fast breaking.

A short chapter. I had forgotten that it begins with Tyrion reading, which does feel like an attempt to manipulate a geeky, literate audience into liking the character. I should also point out that while Joffrey getting slapped is always a crowd-pleaser, it's not exactly great child-rearing even in a feudal context. As Arya's entire storyline across Clash and Storm is designed to point out, cruelty begets cruelty. I don't know whether Joffrey was doomed from birth to be a monster-- two generations of inbreeding aren't a good sign-- but look at his family life: a drunken lout of a father (who also hit him at least once), an overindulgent mother, and the nicest guy in the vicinity is slap-happy Tyrion. You could almost pity the kid.


Coming over the next week: Jon gets abused, Dany gets married, Catelyn gets saner, and Arya gets into a bunch of trouble.

All Together Now

"A Year of Ice and Fire" is switching over to weekly-or-so updates, just so I don't feel compelled to drag in stray observations to pad out each individual posts. Look for the next update, um, later.

Today, for my non-existent faithful audience, I'm copying over a message-board post that captures my only new complaint about Game of Thrones this season:

"As I look back at this season, it really sticks out how poorly the show has handled the overall scope of the story. Each plotline seemed to be occurring in isolation, with virtually no reaction to happenings in the others. Until this week, no one in King's Landing ever mentioned Robb's marriage, an event of enormous strategic significance; it was darn near impossible to tell the Lannisters were fighting a war at all, since all the writers could think to do with all the added screen time for those characters was drag out Tyrell/Lannister wrangling that has at least two more seasons to go. Meanwhile, the ironborn apparently sat on their hands all season, until it was time to remind the audience that they hold the North. Robb appears to have forgotten that too, since he made no mention of it, and instead of reclaiming his homeland planned for an attack on Casterly Rock(!). And, of course, Theon had to be isolated from everything else, so they could hold for the finale the underwhelming reveal that his captor is a character who means nothing much to the TV audience anyway. The show is often praised for managing such a large cast and story, but that's easy if all you have to do is divide it into several barely-connected chunks."

Some of that has to do with the (misguided) desire to make the Red Wedding an utter shock rather than an extreme expression of the direction in which the character was already heading, and some is just the inability (seen with Daenerys last year) to create interesting new material for characters they want to expand, but simple incompetence is also likely a factor. The flatness of "Mhysa," with the title scene turned into an underwhelming season-capper, is just the show reaping what it has sown across a season with so little focus that the producers can't bring any kind of closure, only another "Daenerys, white savior" moment and the pretense that anyone cares who Iwan Rheon's character really is. Bring on season four!

A Year of Ice and Fire: Catelyn I (A Game of Thrones)

Catelyn visits the godswood, and visits us with some exposition.

After the first couple posts in this series, I was regretting that I didn't have more to say. But then I said to myself, Dude, (I call myself dude, because no one else will), you're going to write 344 of these. I don't think the works of James Joyce deserve 344 long blog posts, to say nothing of the works of George R. R. Martin.* And this Catelyn chapter is especially devoid of things on which to comment. The description of the godswood is atmospheric enough considering the plainness of Martin's style, but otherwise this chapter is mostly about setting up the scenario and underlining the differences between Northern and Southern worldviews. (Northerners are grim and, er, stark, while Southerners are soft and joyful. If you hadn't noticed.) Because of this emphasis, our first glimpse of Ned and Catelyn is about the distance between them rather than the basic stability of their relationship. Which is interesting, since the Starks have pretty much the only functional marriage in the whole damn series, and they don't get a lot of time together. Granted, Ned is in a mood because he had to cut someone's head off.** The second Catelyn chapter shows more of their intimacy, in every sense of the word. But there are also some signs of strain there, as we'll see, which makes me wonder if on some level Martin doesn't assume that every arranged marriage has its hollows. Or every marriage period; even his fiction with contemporary and futuristic settings isn't big on people getting along. There's a reason some people call it grimdark.

*Idea for a parody: James R. R. Joyce. "Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a deserter coming down along the road and this deserter that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named bran stark..."

**Which sort of undermines my point from last post about the coarseness of the Northern worldview, even granting that Ned is an especially awesome guy.


Next: Daenerys I.

A Year of Ice and Fire: Bran I (A Game of Thrones)

Bran watches beheading, gets puppy. A good day all around.

If the big surprise at the end of A Game of Thrones is that the nominal hero gets his head chopped off, the big surprise at the beginning is that he does some head-chopping of his own. It was only recently that I took note of this, that our first glimpse of the most prominent character in the book shows him killing a man, and not, despite his words about the danger of deserters, a particularly bad man, but one we know to have understandable reasons for the action that led to his death. It's the first sign that this is a cruel setting, one in which even the nice guys operate by rules we wouldn't care for, the kind of place where a father might think it's important for his seven-year-old son to watch a beheading. It's to the series' credit, I think, that even the Northern lords aren't romanticized. They might be more honorable and less duplicitous than Southern lords (Roose Bolton aside), but they're also harsher, with a brutal value system born of life in an unforgiving land. A Dance with Dragons really underlines this, in the conflict between Stannis' Northern and Southern supporters, in the viciousness of Lady Dustin, and in the mention in one of the Reek chapters that houses like the Umbers (of the lovable Greatjon) still practice prima nocte. People go on about how nasty the ironborn are, but the northmen aren't far behind.

A couple moments in this chapter reminded me of one of my issues with Martin's style: the habit of allowing exposition to overwhelm the logic of a character's internal monologue. I don't think Bran would particularly be thinking about how his father's "closely trimmed beard was shot with white, making him look older than his thirty-five years," or about how Snow is "the name that custom decreed be given to all those in the north unlucky enough to be born with no name of their own." Dumping info like that may be a necessity, but at least phrase it within the frame of reference of a seven-year-old.

Other notes:

*I had forgotten that Theon was nineteen, significantly older than Robb and Jon. That has implications for how he relates to them; I'll try to keep it in mind for the Theon chapters in A Clash of Kings.

*"Bran thought it curious that this pup alone would have opened his eyes while the others were still blind." Symbolic, obviously, like the direwolf having been killed by a stag, but of what? Jon being aware of the threat of the threat of the Others before the rest of his siblings?

Tomorrow: Catelyn I

A Year of Ice and Fire: Prologue (A Game of Thrones)

So after watching "The Rains of Castamere," which was devastating in spite of my contempt for the way that storyline has been adapted over the past two years, I felt like I wanted to reread the books. I get that feeling once in a while, and mostly I ignore it because no matter how much I enjoy the series, I don't have time to reread 1.7 million words multiple times a year. But last night I was thinking about a gradual reread, one that would last a long time and not interfere with the other reading I do. Then I remembered that there are 344 chapters in the series (I counted them once; I do things like that), so one chapter a day would take nearly a year. And my latest soon-to-be-abandoned project was born...

Seriously, I think I can keep up with reading a chapter a day, but I doubt I'll always be able to blog about it. And some chapters don't offer much to talk about anyway. Like the prologue to A Game of Thrones. Two of its characters die right away, and the third becomes an ex-crow in the very next chapter, so there's not much to say about them. It's nice that Royce, instead of living and dying as your standard Nobleman/Fop, gets a moment of bravery. One thing that caught my attention was the talk of how the Wall was "weeping." Obviously it means the temperature is high enough that the Wall is melting slightly, but I don't think we've seen that image, or any description of the Wall's solidity at a given moment, used again, even elsewhere in this book. Am I wrong? We'll see.

I had also forgotten that the Others have a language. I'd been thinking of them more as a force of nature than a people. There's a George R. R. Martin interview I can't find at the moment where he suggests they may not have a culture in any way that we'd understand the term. One of the frustrating things about the dilation of the story is that revelations about the Others, which would have been reasonably paced over three books, have slowed to nothing over seven (or eight). Even the last Bran chapter in Dance, which really jolts the northern/magical storyline forward in a lot of ways, doesn't have much to say about the Others. And speaking of Bran (nice segue), I may or may not be back tomorrow with thoughts on his very first chapter, the image that popped into George R. R. Martin's head 22 years ago and counting, the true beginning of the story. I'm off to read it right now.

Good news, everyone

I'm not going to be updating this blog with thoughts on every week's episode of Game of Thrones. What's the point? I think you know by now what I found objectionable (Edmure being changed from brash to doltish just so Robb looks good; the decision to produce a deleted scene from a direct-to-DVD American Pie flick in the midst of an otherwise serious drama) and what I liked (most aspects of the production other than the writing) on the micro level, and a serialized drama isn't going to offer enough progression for new insights every week on the macro level. To a large extent we already know what the macro level looks like; Benioff and Weiss have been pretty consistent in their vision of the material. To be blunt, that's a vision that appeals most viscerally to people I'm ashamed to share a fandom with. But hey, they probably wouldn't like me either.

Here Comes My Cheese

I got around to watching "Dark Wings, Dark Words" this morning. I liked it. Given what the series is, I think the past couple episodes have been as good as it's going to get. The banality of the dialogue is less glaring, and the decision not to cram every storyline into every episode gives things room to breathe and allows for neglected characters like Sansa to get some screen time. Along with opposite-of-neglected characters like Margaery. But as far as that goes, I thought her scene with Joffrey was interesting to watch. I'm not sure there's a coherent conception of her personality at work, but Dormer has a fascinating presence all the same.

I'm really starting to wonder how the changes the show has made to some of the characters are going to affect the plausibility of fixed narrative points. The cracks are already starting to appear: surely TV Shae ought to be too smart to sneak into Tyrion's chambers or to be jealous of Ros? And how hard are the writers going to work to separate Cersei and Joffrey? Their scene here was a retread anyway; the fact that he prefers Margaery to her was made clear enough last week.

There was a Catelyn scene in this episode. It was stupid and embarrassing and demonstrates that the writers will never run out of new ways to make the King in the North storyline a ridiculous collection of anachronistic cliches. But the damage to Catelyn and Robb was done last year; this is just a little salt in the wound. And I'm happy with Diana Rigg's take on the Queen of Thorns. I can see why some are less enthusiastic: her sharp tongue is now a function of cynicism rather than of brio, which makes the character less of a comic delight. But she's still delightful, and for once compressing dialogue from the books actually works. So I'm going to do what Olenna Redwyne did, and focus on the positive. I thought that dreadful scene with Talisa was never going to end. But look, here comes my Queen of Thorns.

Nothing to Declare

I don't really have anything to say about "Valar Doeharis." I mean, there's more of this post, so obviously I have something to say, but only one the level of moment-by-moment critiques. It's not really an ambitious enough episode to warrant an in-depth critique. It's all setup, which isn't objectionable in a modern serialized drama. I don't know, though, about ending the episode with the reveal of Barristan Selmy, AKA "Who?", AKA "Oh, was he in the first season?" AKA "Oh, yeah, him." The sequence with the scorpion was effective, though, not least because the creature itself was remarkably creepy.

I don't know why Benioff and Weiss think their version of Margaery is so interesting, but it was nice to see Joffrey in his fawningly solicitous mode; that, more than the outright sadism, is what makes Gleeson's portrayal of the character so easy to loathe. Elsewhere in King's Landing, the Ros/Shae was notable only in that it highlights the show's delusion that the former is a dramatically valid character rather than a source of moar boobies. The Tywin/Tyrion scene was great, though, a reminder of just how good Charles Dance can be when he isn't forced to play material with a spurious twinkle in his eye.

Robb and Talisa and Catelyn. A pointless scene, there for the sake of having the characters in the episode. Benioff and Weiss seem to think that making Robb into an adolescent prat is good for the character, but all it does is undermine the milieu and create tiresome and conventional teen angst. Speaking of which, how could the show possibly have turned Ygritte into a character I hate? She's the kind of female character Benioff and Weiss love, and yet Rose Leslie's performance never demonstrates actual strength, only self-satisfied flirtatiousness. And speaking of events beyond the Wall...

Why would you cast Ciaran Hinds and then have him play a nothing version of Mance Rayder? I don't know, but I think the writers did a solid job of inventing a new fake reason for Jon to join the wildlings, since the one from the books wouldn't fit this nothing version of Mance Rayder. Did I mention I think this is a nothing version of Mance Rayder? Actually, I'm not as bothered by this as I'm making it sound; I have no attachment to the character. But the show does seem to prefer watering down Martin's larger-than-life personalities, which is odd, since HBO dramas don't generally object to the colorful. I still fear for the Queen of Thorns.

That's all until next week, when "Dark Wings, Dark Words" will presumably bring the Tullys into the picture. Poor Catelyn... in more ways than one.

So Last Year

Season three of Game of Thrones premiered the other night, and it's what everyone's talking about, so of course this blog entry concerns... my thoughts on season two. I rewatched the whole season last week, and meant to write this up before Sunday, but you know how it goes. I'll be watching episode one later today, and possibly blogging about it. I'm already not liking what I've heard about the show's take on Olenna Redwyne. If they've managed to make me not adore the Queen of Thorns, I may never forgive them.

Oh, by the way, I don't think I've said as much before, so: this is a spoiler blog. I'll feel free to mention details from all published books, and from spoiler chapters of The Winds of Winter.

*     *     *

The first thing I should say is that on a technical level the show is a bit better made than I'd been giving it credit for. You can see where the money is going, the direction is sharp, and the performances, while they don't wow me as much as they do some viewers, are consistently solid: no one is bad, though a few are notably underwhelming. What holds the show back from fully enacting the upper-middlebrow template of HBO's prestige dramas (on which see Mike Hale's season three review) is the dialogue, which is horribly flat and banal. Characters are endlessly describing the plot to each other, saying exactly how they feel, and laying out themes. The show's idea of subtle is characters offering memories and legends up as obvious parables, but at least in those instances they leave out the fortune cookie wisdom; most of the time we aren't even that lucky. 

The Littlefinger/Cersei scene about knowledge and power is an especially egregious case of "here is the theme, don't miss the theme" (and also demonstrates that, despite their evident love of a character they shoehorn into other storylines for no good reason, Benioff and Weiss have no grasp of what makes Littlefinger an interesting character). But further examples abound: Margaery telling Renly to man up, Margaery telling Loras to man up, Dagmer telling Theon to man up, Asha telling Theon to... well, you get the picture. And that's another problem: the show is a little over-eager to show its audience that you have to be CALCULATING and RUTHLESS to succeed in this society. That's an accurate reflection of the source material, but this is one of those cases where adaptation ought to have improved things, by removing the thematic repetition that comes with narrative bloat.* Unfortunately, Benioff and Weiss, unlikely the makers of actual quality HBO dramas, are not guided by a sense of dramatic quality, but by coolness of plot and character. Which can still make for an entertaining show.

*They ought also to have thought about what happens when dialogue from the books is compressed for use in the show. Catelyn's "they are the knights of summer and winter is coming" line makes sense as the result of a gradually-elaborated thought process over several pages; as off-the-cuff conversation with Renly it feels on-the-nose and written. Likewise, in the big Catelyn/Jaime scene, he brings up Cersei for no evident reason, because a transition from the books has been cut for time. As I've said before, poorly-considered faithfulness is often worse than making changes.

The ending of "The North Remembers" is pretty strong, for instance, a well-directed, difficult to watch, thematically-relevant scene. I don't even mind that the show moved the decision to kill Robert's bastards from Cersei to Joffrey. It's a watering-down of her nastiness, as in season one, but unlike season one, season two doesn't offer other behavior that contradicts that watering-down, so it's at least coherent drama, and the notion of an evil queen uncertain and possibly unhappy in her victory is an intriguing one. It's also a reflection of Benioff and Weiss' preference for making characters ambiguous from the get-go, rather than following Martin's pattern of having them start off as types and show depth later, often when they become POV characters. There's an echo, however faint, of the decaying Cersei of A Feast for Crows in TV Cersei's second season. A big difference, of course, is that book Cersei is largely blind to Joffrey's faults; in fact, her grief for the son she never understood is a big cause of that psychological decay. It'll be interesting to see how season four (which, after the premiere's strong ratings, is a foregone conclusion) balances her grief with her knowledge of what he was.

The complementary mother/son relationship fares less well. The writers persist in taking strategic wisdom away from Catelyn and attributing it to Robb, undermining the books' deconstruction of the "boy king" trope and making her into a more conventional mother figure. It doesn't help that Michelle Fairley is a strong actress, while Richard Madden, who like Kit Harington appears to have been cast largely on the basis of prettiness (where does he get his hair gel out on the battlefield, anyway?), is competent but never compelling. To add further insult to injury, a big part of Catelyn's actual thematic purpose, to argue for peace and against needless war, is given to Talisa, a ridiculous character whose very existence flouts the class hierarchies that are part of the gritty realism the books and show are praised for.

Speaking of flouting class hierarchies, how about Arya and Tywin? Aren't they cute? And Jaime was dyslexic till Loving Papa Tywin fixed him! Reader, my heartstrings have been pulled! I don't even mind that Tywin shows no interest in a highborn northern girl who looks like a Stark, or that "will Littlefinger recognize Arya" is cheap melodrama that also undermines his character, or that all that time could have been used instead to show Arya's psychological coarsening as a result of the brutality of Harrenhal. Arya and Tywin are just so sweet. And sweetness is what Game of Thrones is all about.

Sweetness, and nudity. No one should have needed that Neil Marshall anecdote to recognize that nudity in Game of Thrones is mostly about straight male titillation. Like Osha sleeping with Theon. That was apparently part of her escape plan, though why it was necessary is an open question. Joffrey torturing Daisy and Ros has the fig leaf that it was to show us Joffrey being sadistic... as though we hadn't grasped that yet. (At least it was a rare example of Tyrion, a character whose shades of gray have been whitewashed, making a mistake.) The amount of sex on the show is often defended by pointing out that there's a lot of sex in the books, and of course there is. But proportionally speaking, the show includes much more of the sex from the books than it does anything else, and invents more. And as anyone who's thought about the effects of different media can tell you, prose and film don't work the same way. This is one of those cases where you could actually justify making changes, but of course they haven't.

Talking of changes-- oh, the effort I'm putting into these tortured transitions-- let's look at Daenerys. There was an interview with Emilia Clarke a while back in which she called season two "frustrating" for the character, which brought home to me that, despite the changes they made, Benioff and Weiss hadn't addressed the "problem" with Qarth: Dany's passivity. She reacts rather than acts. The show rather crudely turned this into theme and upped the superficial drama of the surrounding intrigue, but it still started the story slowly and didn't offer the sort of cool Daenerys butt-kicking action that the audience with which Benioff and Weiss seem obsessed would have preferred. And "Daenerys learns to stand up for herself and take what she wants" is, after the first season, an already-learned lesson, one that doesn't play to Emilia Clarke's strengths as an actress. Part of the reason "Where are my dragons?" is so grating is that Clarke turns the frustrated Daenerys into a posturing child. That may be the intention, but if so, it's a bad one. Still, the stuff with Xaro's empty vaults is a nice play on the "power as illusion" theme elsewhere in the book and season, so I'll give the show some credit for that.

I'm out of transitions, so let's just move on to Stannis and Renly. I think the introduction of Stannis works pretty well. You lose something not having all the Cressen backstory, of course, but the show doesn't do that kind of backstory, and I've made my peace with that. The show isn't really interested in the Stannis/Renly dynamic anyway, which I do think is a shame, simply because it captures the way an aristocratic society's political dramas can be driven by family dysfunction. In the books Stannis is the awkward middle child, caught between the gregarious Robert and the equally handsome and charming Renly, who despite his sexual orientation is very much like his brother. TV Renly, by contrast, is a bit of a feeb. This allows for Margaery and Loras to reiterate the themes by telling him to toughen up, but serves no actual purpose, and is remarkably dull to watch, the Tyrell siblings have nothing on the Lannisters when it comes to twisted family dynamics. I should note that TV Margaery is another example of Benioff and Weiss' lack of interest in non-assertive female characters. We can debate the extent to which the book version is politically alert, but she's certainly not shown to be this kind of hard-eyed pragmatist. The more the show turns its female characters into the kind of quote-unquote strong women you get in most epic fantasy, the less rich its portrait of feudal society is going to be. We only need so many Machiavellian schemers.

Speaking of which, what have they done with Stannis? The character in the books, one of the more fascinating non-POVs, is worth reading about precisely because of the ambiguous nature of his claim to be concerned with justice. The reader is left to wonder whether his self-image as the unjustly-ignored loyal and honorable guy doesn't cover up self-serving behavior, and to consider the dangers of devotion to black-and-white morality. None of this is in the show. Oh, a couple bits of dialogue reflecting it have been left in-- thoughtless copy-pasting again-- but the basic notion has been dropped, leaving a character who's cold and pedantic but never especially honorable, someone you're clearly not supposed to sympathize with. Melisandre, who in the books is clearly misguided but not monstrous, is reincarnated as a stock dark sorceress, exotic variety (and God, but that shadow creature is laughable: it's supposed to look like, you know, a shadow, not an ectoplasmic whatever). One has no sense why Davos, a decent guy, would support Stannis, or why anyone would, except as part of an endless series of self-interested calculations.

Well, that marks the end of the list of observations I typed up while watching the season, so I guess I'm done. No big conclusion here: I imagine I've made clear what I think doesn't work about the show. "So why are you watching?", you might ask. So I can complain about it, obviously. I enjoy thinking about what I do and don't admire in the show and its source material and why, and the overall gloss of the production means that watching isn't a painful experience. Plus my mom likes it, so it's something we can watch together. And if there's one more thing Game of Thrones is all about, it's family.

Purity

A new season of Game of Thrones is upon us, and... well, I'm looking forward to seeing Diana Rigg. Otherwise, the TV series is more of a fact on the ground than something I'm likely to get excited about. I'm going to try to get at some of the reasons why, using this Bryan Cogman interview from Rolling Stone as a jumping off point.

The annoying thing about that Cogman interview is the insistence on using pointless language like "book purists." I don't dispute that somewhere, out there in the vast wasteland of the Internet, there's someone who could adequately be called a book purist. But most criticism doesn't come from people who prefer the books over the show out of reflexive stubbornness. It comes from people who prefer the books because the books are less likely than the show to indulge laughable genre cliches, whitewash complex protagonists, diminish and objectify female characters, and generally prioritize cheap, familiar entertainment over anything more ambitious. A Song of Ice and Fire is not high art, but it's not from a tradition where you'd expect it to be. HBO drama, on the other hand, does create those expectations, and Game of Thrones resolutely fails to live up to them. The production values are high, the cast is solid, the direction is competent within its frame of reference, but the writing falls flat. And here's the thing: this isn't primarily a question of faithfulness to the source material. You could change the plot of A Song of Ice and Fire fare more radically than Game of Thrones does, and still wind with up something that was true to its themes while elevating the material above its pedestrian popular-fiction origins. You could, in short, make something that belongs on HBO, instead of something with an HBO budget that belongs on Showtime.

Let's look at the scene Cogman was discussing when he uttered the useless phrase "book purists." The contrived Robert/Cersei scene from season one. Lots of people love this scene. George R. R. Martin loves this scene, somehow. Cogman cites it as a freeing moment in Benioff and Weiss' evolution, the point at which they realized it was OK to make shit up to serve their story. The scene has issues simply as drama-- "seven kingdoms couldn't fill the hole she left behind" is a terrible piece of on-the-nose writing; Martin's dialogue, crafted to work alongside internal monologue and in the not-superficially-realistic mode of popular fiction, has its limitations, but he hasn't came up with anything that unbelievable-- but its deeper problem is one of adaptation.

Cogman defends the scene by suggesting that even if it isn't true to "book" Cersei and Robert, it's true to "show" Cersei and Robert. But that's the problem: because the TV show is generally so faithful, often to the point of lifting dialogue straight from the novels, most of the time "show" Cersei and Robert are "book" Cersei and Robert. Robert in particular hardly ever shows the contemplative side on display here, though the "first kill" conversation (which, in the interest of fairness, I'll say I like) is an exception. The show's softened take on Cersei is brought across more often, as in the crude, emotionally manipulative dead baby conversation with Catelyn earlier in the season. But the harder, nastier Cersei of the books is also present, as in the scene, drawn directly from the books, where Ned confronts her about the incest. That scene is pretty well impossible to square with the Robert/Cersei exchange, which has wandered in from a fundamentally different conception of the characters. The Robert and Cersei of the books are degraded, unpleasant human beings, and that fact determines their actions; you can't chuck in a random moment of more sympathetic behavior, then have them go back to acting like grotesques.* The problem isn't making the change; it's not thinking the change through in the context of the larger story.

The Cogman interview points to another, somewhat different example of this failure, one that brings us back to Daenerys and the House of Undying. ("Back" in the sense of their having been the subject of my first post nine months ago; I don't blame you for having forgotten.) Cogman says that for Dany "Season Two was basically about her screwing up a lot and learning from her mistakes." I'd love to see him pressed on that claim-- what precisely she learned, and what those mistakes were, apart from letting herself get caught up in Generic Fantasy Intrigue #27, complete with Stock Evil Wizard-- because the central feature of Dany's arc in season two is its pointlessness. In the books, Qarth is not the most essential storyline, but it provides Daenerys with uncertain prophecies to which she continues to respond in later volumes, and it gives the reader even more hints about the future, as well as helping to make clear the increasing significance of magic to the series. TV Qarth does none of those things. Well, I suppose Pyat Pree's magical cloning powers might fall under the "increasing significance of magic" banner, but that's not really enough to justify eight episodes. The key is the reduction of the House of the Undying from a major piece of eerie foreshadowing to a brief bit of fanservice with Dany's beloved rapist husband. Again, it's not the change that rankles, it's the failure to replace the removal of the storyline's payoff with anything else. Benioff and Weiss might just as well have had Dany go straight to Slaver's Bay, except that that would throw the timeline out of whack.

What weakens the dramatic integrity of adaptations like Game of Thrones and the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings films is not that the ones doing them are not fans, but that they are fans... on a superficial level. Jackson, Benioff, and Weiss love moments, images, characters, and insist on shoehorning those things into storylines where, due to changes made by their non-fannish sides, those things no longer fit. (This is a good essay on how Peter Jackson falls into that trap.) They cut down half the forest, and expect individual trees to retain their beauty devoid of context, devoid of roots. "Purists" are accused of focusing on small things, but as any good critic can tell you, sometimes small things matter. Sometimes, without small things, all you have is empty grandeur.

*This points to one of the fundamental differences between the books and the show: their approach to moral ambiguity. Martin's moral ambiguity, while it does include characters who are capable of being both nice and nasty, also includes characters who are consistently nasty, but shown to be working, in their twisted way and within the twisted values of their society, from recognizable human motives. In other words, while not psychologically realistic in the way of stream-of-consciousness literature, the novels look at the psychology of monstrous behavior. Benioff and Weiss don't seem interested in that, and would prefer to make the less pleasant central characters more superficially likable by giving them banal moments of "humanity:" Cersei as grieving mother, Tywin Lannister as grandfatherly mentor. But don't let me get started on the Tywin/Arya scenes.