Game of Thrones 2.03 - What Is Dead May Never Die

[prodigy]

Brienne! Brienne Brienne Brienne! Game of Brienne! What Is Brienne May Never Die!

You have to understand, of my four favorite ASoIaF characters, one of them is in my icon, one of them is in two of my other icons having a bad day, and one of them is in one of my other icons having a really bad day. And one of them is the Maid of Tarth.

- This show is really melodramatic. I realize this revelation is likely to arouse a series of yuk-yuks and "it's a fantasy series!!!" from troglodytes people who don't care for the fantasy genre, but I mean to say that I think the show is incredibly melodramatic, not solely as a consequence of the events depicted on it. The tone of cinema/TV is so dependent on lighting, filming, and soundtrack, among other things: sometimes people realize how much these things manipulate how you react to a filmed work, but most of the time not. The directors and film editors of Game of Thrones... do not have a love affair with understatement, that's for certain. Which is really causing most of the violence to get really dull and desensitizing; everything's a dramatic moment, everything's dark. A lot of the straight-up humor and black humor of the book series is cut out in favor of more grit -- you can see it even more in the way they film every location. It's the most painfully 90s way to show a European location between 1000 and 1500 C.E. ever (Hollywood believing that everything was beautiful and marble in Europe before then, and beautiful and brocade after then). I am getting really worn out on how dark and gritty and dramatic everything is. For one second I would like someone to die on this TV show without feeling like it's turning to me expecting me to go "Augh!!" You are never going to get people to care about your major character deaths and real depressing moments this way. Not everything has to be onscreen. Not everything has to be grubby. More things could do to be hilarious.

- Okay now that I've got that out of my system.
- Renly and the Highgarden camp are definitely an improvement on how GoT's been treating Renly so far otherwise, though I'm still not totally happy -- these people should be dripping in bright colors and luxury! Otherwise Cat's lecture to them seems kind of misplaced. Renly has a Rainbow Guard -- I suspect someone at HBO was like "I wonder if that's insensitive" which, funny story, this would definitely be the first time you cared about not characterizing Renly homophobically, considering in S1 you were committed to showing how much contempt you hold your homosexual characters in so straight viewers would feel more comfortable watching them make out. Uh, not that this pisses me off or anything.
- That being said, I liked Renly and Loras's actually passionate scene: one of the few times I believed the people were actually sexually aroused in a GoT sex scene, or proto-sex scene anyway.
- Renly had more charming, flip and/or politicking moments this episode than usual, but he was still a little too uncertain; I don't believe Renly Baratheon wouldn't have had a polite arrangement with his bride discussed at the time of the actual wedding. Either he'd be able to get it up long enough to have one kid or he'd provide a black-haired lover of some sort, to be blunt. This still plays into the whole faintly-homophobic filming.
- I'm definitely enjoying Margaery, though, she seems on-point, and Natalie Dormer is perfect casting. Game on, sister, game on.
- Still, I liked how he interacted with Brienne, I liked Loras's jealousy over Brienne, and Brienne!!!!!! She looks perfect! She's tall and muscular and pale-blonde and ugh, she's just so Brienne! Her stoic crush on Renly! Her awkward respectfulness to Cat! I cannot waiiiiiit for S3 when she is a main character.
- If they seemed like they were making Cersei a bit too even-tempered in S1, they're making Shae really unrealistically hot-tempered in general. It's not a matter of whether she has the right to feel unhappy or not -- it's kind of ridiculous that she never manages to put on a fake face of happiness. At this rate it's going to make Tyrion look exceptionally personally dense when some things about Shae later come to light. Come on, girl. After years of sex work in this patriarchal world you can't be so comfortable with a lord of Lannister as to abandon all brain-to-mouth filter around him.
- However, every moment Bronn is onscreen is magic.
- I don't even know if it bears commenting at this point that Tyrion was awesome.
- I hope there's more Sansa screentime next ep -- well, there's bound to be, given her beatings apparently start then, poor Sansa. She was great in this one, her scene with Cersei was perfect (on both ends, really; I love the chilling smiles Lena Headey gives Sophie Turner, they have the perfect creepy Cersei-Sansa dynamic). Basically I think Sansa should be getting more screentime overall given what a prominent character she is, but w/e, I guess with TV they have to make some adjustments.
- The series is pretty favorable and spotlighting of Theon, surprisingly. I've also warmed to the young woman who plays -- sigh -- Yara, every time they pan to one of her reactions there's this kind of cynical grit and grimness where you know she doesn't love everything about this either, but this is the path she's chosen and she has little sympathy for her brother's unhappiness and tantrums. Which, why would she? She's basically had to be a Greyjoy Ironborn son but three times over to be able to overcome her setbacks particularly in the Iron Islands -- she has to be Balon's perfect son to even be regarded as a half-son. The acting really humanizes her there, I think I get a stronger feeling about the culture of the Iron Islands from her than from anyone else.
- They shot Theon's baptism with a lot of dramatic lighting and pretty soundtrack: in general the Iron Islands scenes are oddly beautiful, aside from how Balon never cuts his hair, that is. And hey, is that Aeron Damphair?
- Ugh, Yoren, you fucking BAMF, I wonder how the Harrenhal men are going to explain having so many losses to one adult men and a bunch of kids. I still think the way they film this storyline is way too gritty and depressing and wahhh kids are dying we have to make sure you know we think this is dark and fucked-up too, but whatever. Arya gets all the amazing dadfigures, I swear.

Comments

[prodigy]

Haha, I try to avoid watching HBO's videos and featurettes, I end up hearing things like "Renly Baratheon takes his responsibilities seriously" and going cross-eyed. I wonder what it's like for people who watched GoT first to be reading the books second, since I'm sure there are spades of them. I'm almost curious, but I know I'd likely be really frustrated by their interpretations, to be realistic.

[dantesspirit]

The husband's reading them now- thankfully he's finished the first two books. Heh. He's spotting things they changed or cut out almost before me.}:P

We went to see The Hunger Games- I've read the book, he's reading it now- and he apparently is prefering the movie over the book. So I imagine for a number of people, this will be the same way.

[prodigy]

I dunno, though, THG has a lot of specific factors there. I read THG books before the movies and I remember thinking the first one would make a good movie as I read it -- so much of it is description of action that it basically reads like something that was begging to be adapted into an action movie. I think they'll have a little more trouble with CF and Mockingjay, but THG itself was an action flick waiting to happen.

ASoIaF doesn't actually have that much action compared to other stuff in it -- it's so heavy on dialogue and politics and characterization that it's hard to read it and watch the series and seriously think they just pared off unnecessary chaff when they got rid of like, 60% of what's in them.

[dantesspirit]

that it's hard to read it and watch the series and seriously think they just pared off unnecessary chaff when they got rid of like, 60% of what's in them

My thoughts exactly.

[gehayi]

Oh, God, tell me about it. It's really weird to have read the books first and then hear people saying, "Theon Greyjoy is such a woobie and I love him to pieces!" (Robb Stark/Theon Greyjoy is an insanely popular pairing. Thanks to future events, it makes me want to hurl.) Or when people start insisting that Jon Snow is really immature...and the problem is that Kit Harrington, who looks twenty-five, is playing a seventeen-year-old who's been aged up from a fourteen-year-old.

[prodigy]

The woobiefication of Theon and Jaime is kind of unsettling and is going to invalidate it when both characters do need a certain amount of redemption -- I like Theon (and Theon/Robb in an ill-fated, unrequited way) and I love Jaime, but I don't so much love this watered-down toothless version of him that I think people find sort of mildly amusing rather than dislikeable and cruel. I wonder if HBO is worried about controversial characters and wants to make them less controversial. Doesn't think highly of its audience if so.

As for Jon, he's definitely immature in the books! Due to, y'know, being a broody lonely little emo kid who's only a couple steps up from Sansa in maturity. It plays really differently to have fourteen-year-old book!Jon be immature to Tyrion than to have adult-looking Kit Harington. The age fiddling has done some weird things with character dynamics in general, though; I wonder how many people don't realize Ned and Cersei are supposed to be about the same age, or that Tyrion is Jaime and Cersei's little brother by quite a bit.

[gehayi]

As for Jon, he's definitely immature in the books! Due to, y'know, being a broody lonely little emo kid who's only a couple steps up from Sansa in maturity.

Oh, he is immature! But he's a kid. And that makes it a lot more understandable. You accept a certain level of immaturity from an emo fourteen-year-old that you don't from someone ten years older.

It plays really differently to have fourteen-year-old book!Jon be immature to Tyrion than to have adult-looking Kit Harington.

It really does.

The age fiddling has done some weird things with character dynamics in general, though; I wonder how many people don't realize Ned and Cersei are supposed to be about the same age, or that Tyrion is Jaime and Cersei's little brother by quite a bit.

One popular perception is that Tyrion is the OLDER brother. This despite the constant references to Tyrion being Jaime and Cersei's younger brother, to Cersei referring to her mother dying in childbirth with Tyrion, and so on.

The woobiefication of Theon and Jaime is kind of unsettling and is going to invalidate it when both characters do need a certain amount of redemption

Although you would think that Jaime willingly fucking his sister and throwing a little boy off of a tower WOULD de-woobify him. Apparently not, though. From what I've seen, Cersei comes in for most of the hostility and most of the blame; Jaime is absolved. It seems that much will be forgiven you if you've had the foresight to be good-looking and male.

[prodigy]

Frankly, I see a lot of Lannister apologism in general in GoT fandom which is... awkward, to say the least, because, well, I'm a Lannister fan, but I'm a fan of the pathetic broken family with a fragile veneer of dignity and reputation that you come to know in the books, not the sort of trashy-fun glamourized The Tudors power dynasty a lot of GoT Fandom seems to be invested in seeing. (Which they're going to be disappointed, I guess, when they realize it's not that the family bickers or feuds, they just genuinely hate and don't care for each other in large part, at least where Tywin is concerned with his children.)

But on the show they're busy playing to what a good-looking heartthrob Nikolaj Coster-Waldau is (so aside from the window-throwing, he just doesn't seem like a nasty person, which is... not the Jaime Lannister you see in A Game of Thrones, that's for certain) and pandering to Lena Headey's big name as one of their few big-name actors, which leads to some really dissonant character choices and the awkward fact that they've set up this accidentally likeable dignified character who's just going to get more and more dislikeable and embarrassing because they didn't plant the seeds of her temper and grudge against Tyrion in S1. Altogether, it's just reaping all these Slytherin-apologist type fans who want pretty blonde people scheming in a throwaway manner. Sigh. /snob