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Game of Thrones 1.08 The Pointy End
Jun. 5th, 2011 10:03 pmThis was the GRRM-penned episode. It may be confirmation bias played a factor in my judgment, but I think it showed: everyone's dialogue seemed particularly on-point, especially the Tyrion-Bronn sections. Anyway, this is still the part of the book where stuff is heating up, so it was bound to be intense.
That being said, oh my God.
( Spoiler Green is made of spoilers. )
Musing on that point, I think the Gratuitous HBOness isn't actually doing that any favors, though probably unintentionally. Contrary to semi-popular misconception, the A Song of Ice and Fire series did not come quite this HBO already: the adaptation's added a lot of random sex and violence, to say the least. This is all well and good when it's (the still WTF) Petyr Baelish monologuing to a pair of cavorting whores, but it makes the Dothraki portrayal look even more brutal and savage and lurid than it was in the books because we have to watch all their uncivilized-savage-person-violence as Dany does.
I'm not a fan of the HBO-ifying in general; it gives it a mood occasionally too close to HBO'S Rome, where you get dulled to the violence in the company of Antony and Atia eventually because you can't emotionally engage with it. In A Song of Ice and Fire, you're supposed to take all the violence dead seriously: it's a world where bad things happen to people, oftentimes for no reason, but commoners and foreigners and whores are not meant to be redshirts even if some of the POV characters think so. Adding too much more background violence makes it just seem like it's colored with blood and no one cares -- which undermines the context of various characters' classism, callousness, and self-centeredness, and misses the whole point of the intended social complexity in favor of a simplified bloody political sword-and-sorcery epic. It's good TV and good entertainment, but it's not the books.
That being said, oh my God.
( Spoiler Green is made of spoilers. )
Musing on that point, I think the Gratuitous HBOness isn't actually doing that any favors, though probably unintentionally. Contrary to semi-popular misconception, the A Song of Ice and Fire series did not come quite this HBO already: the adaptation's added a lot of random sex and violence, to say the least. This is all well and good when it's (the still WTF) Petyr Baelish monologuing to a pair of cavorting whores, but it makes the Dothraki portrayal look even more brutal and savage and lurid than it was in the books because we have to watch all their uncivilized-savage-person-violence as Dany does.
I'm not a fan of the HBO-ifying in general; it gives it a mood occasionally too close to HBO'S Rome, where you get dulled to the violence in the company of Antony and Atia eventually because you can't emotionally engage with it. In A Song of Ice and Fire, you're supposed to take all the violence dead seriously: it's a world where bad things happen to people, oftentimes for no reason, but commoners and foreigners and whores are not meant to be redshirts even if some of the POV characters think so. Adding too much more background violence makes it just seem like it's colored with blood and no one cares -- which undermines the context of various characters' classism, callousness, and self-centeredness, and misses the whole point of the intended social complexity in favor of a simplified bloody political sword-and-sorcery epic. It's good TV and good entertainment, but it's not the books.
