Zoe’s Game of Thrones Post

* Fair warning: This post might never be finished.  You might keep scrolling, and there will probably be more. *

I understand that there is an entire web-verse full of people frantically scribbling away at their own Game of Thrones post, either because they’re watching the show on HBO or they just found the news that George R.R. Martin’s publishers are claiming A Dance with Dragons is done.

Clearly, I am writing this post because I am doing the first and read about the second.

There are a lot of things that I am really passionate about, but while I absolutely love Martin’s series about civil war, intrigue and betrayal, gruesome medieval life and sweeping life courses, I am not a crazy fan.  If I’d started reading the series when I was thirteen, this would be a whole different post, I promise you–and the post really would be never-ending.  I find the books fascinating, frustrating, hard to keep track of but never unwieldy, and especially excellent because they’re so dense they deserve multiple reads (something I love to do).  But I haven’t decided if this makes me a better viewer for the television series HBO is doing, adapted from the series of books, or a poorer one.

Certainly I’m not paying attention to how well they introduce characters, explain their basic relationships to each other, or lay out the general set-up of the world; I have the massive character list and the map in the books, plus the added advantage of having read like three billion pages-worth of stuff about them.  I am delighted, however, by the visuals the show is presenting us with, especially the mega fucking super awesome artist/architect/graphic designer’s wet dream of the show’s opening.  If you haven’t seen it, it’s this incredible three-dimensional map that looks hand-painted, and as it zooms in on this castle or that landmark, it shows the structure/location in incredible detail: the fucking sweetest digital pop-up book EVER.  The costuming is spot-on as well, depressingly bulky clothes for the guys and fairly utilitarian layered clothing for the ladies in the main setting, with fantastical costumes for the part of the story set someplace sunnier and warmer that could be some out-there element of a fashion runway.

The acting is a little hard to judge.  The adults are seasoned actors (Sean Bean, Mark Addy, Lena Headey, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) who are all smart enough to know when to really work the ensemble angle and when to just really amp up their presence to dominate the scene or moment.  The direwolves, aka Inuit Huskies, are BITCHIN’ and I want all of them!  The kids are doing just fine, but there’s terrible things in store for their characters, so I’m reserving judgement to see how the actors do when… stuff… happens later on.  Plus, I know the story, so I know each of the characters has personal, intense, pivotal, life-changing moments or actions, opportunities for all of the actors to open up and to demonstrate their full range.  I’m looking forward to that, and I have enjoyed the tense and sad moments so far.

(Site note: If you’ve never read the books and you think what you’ve seen in the first two episodes is “really intense and emotional,” you better strap on an adult diaper and get ready to faint.)

Now, practically speaking, I think this program is a wild gamble, the sort that only a few networks could even dream of, let alone actually do.  It’s a period drama with basically every sort of atrocity, plus dragons, monsters, intricate family trees, secrets, a billion characters who all matter, and a hell of a lot of settings.  For me, the biggest potential drawback is that the books don’t exactly have lulls where nothing happens, nor are there that many times that have a low level of drama, and there are odd moments of humor, but they’re more dark or sour or gallows humor, versus… dick and fart jokes.  It will take a magnificent amount of skill to be able to carry off a show where the baseline of drama is like 8 out of 10 without exhausting your audience.  Soap operas and serious dramas are roller coasters, but A Game of Thrones is on this heightened tightrope of danger where the reader (and now audience) will get shoved off at completely unexpected intervals.  The payoff in the books is phenomenal, and I’m saying that not even knowing how the damn series ends; I just hope the television series can learn how to pull that off too.

Oh, and to finish: About the sexy content.

There have been lots of reviews that focus on this aspect, of the kind of ick factor to the context / content of the sex or the sexism of how it’s portrayed in the show so far.  Okay, I am always conflicted about this topic, but I’ll try to be clear here.  The book doesn’t have a whole lot of glamour; it’s painfully realistic, and there’s very little pleasure for any of the characters at any point, let alone happiness.  The sex is almost always paid for, brutal, or, well, between siblings.  The world they live in is chauvinist just as our medieval world actually was, where women’s bodies sealed deals for armies, lands, and crowns.  That’s just not pretty.  It’s a part of the story and it would be impossible to leave it out.  Sex does have something to do with life, after all–it can impact our happiness, our sense of self; it can draw us together or it can tear us apart; and it can be awkward, painful, dutiful, joyous or it can be criminal.  While I appreciate that I don’t want all women used as sex objects (even if they’re really, really pretty), I promise you, the more you watch the series, the more you’ll realize that all of these women, whatever else they are, are all working their asses off to be stronger and as independent as they can be.

Because the series hasn’t ended, I can’t say of course if I think the overall tone of the show is “right,” or if I agree with how they’re tailoring the book to make it viable for the small screen.  But given what I’ve seen so far and the arc of the first book’s plot, I’d say that I think the show is solid and moving in the right direction, picking up speed quickly.  If you haven’t read the books but are enjoying the show, if you find yourself frustrated by a lack of, oh, answers, I’ll say: Welcome to the club, buddy.  The books are full of teases like that.