Yellow gingham on the bed, remember?

So I've seen it before, but I was recently re-linked to ThinkGeek's $30,000 Iron Throne -- made of fiberglass, really, but honest advertising never got anyone anywhere. It's mindbogglingly expensive for a site that mostly sells novelty pens and mugs, of course, and kind of cutesily packaged with well-meaning joking malapropisms for flavor text (I'm not sure they remember what the iron price actually is, but okay). But I laughed, it was ridiculous enough. Oh, ThinkGeek, what a card, that sort of thing.

Then I'm like: wow, geek culture has gotten commercialized. The "Iron Throne" is a good example of that, but so is all of ThinkGeek honestly, and San Diego Comic-Con, and io9, and... everything, really. This is a really obvious yesterday observation that lots of people have made so I am not trying to make a new observation here, just pondering my own personal experience with it in the form of A Song of Ice and Fire fandom and how the experience of being a "fan" has changed since the advent of GoT.

( I was about 13 when I first read A Game of Thrones. )

Liveblogging this time.

( There is only one god and his name is Spoilers. And there is only one thing we say to Spoilers. )

Second verse, same as the first.

( Did you pay the spoiler price or the spoiler price? )

I'm not sure all that much happened in this episode either to advance the plot, but it felt like it went faster than the last one, I think because they didn't try to cover all the plotlines (a notable absence of Robb, for one). I liked it, but I hope this goes more places next week.

Sitting on third base, angling for home tomorrow! At least, it's late, I hope there are only three bases in baseball. There was that time when I was playing scales in piano and accidentally invented a note, "H." Except no, because that implies there's been only one time in my entire piano career that I've inadvertently renamed A "H."

More to the point, WLtWFH business as usual, and that business is spoilers.

( Day 6: Why A Song of Ice and Fire Needs Her )

Pip necessitated hosing out her litterbox out in the yard again, at which point a wasp promptly stung me through my shirt. Our cat's badness level is unusually high for someone her size.

This is the late-night and semi-belated rendition of Round 4 of WLtWFH, brought to you by yellowjackets, coffee, and spoilers.

( Day 4: Ned Stark and Petyr Baelish )

Other: Say Yes to Gay YA, in which agents demonstrate a level of cynicism and heterosexism that should be shocking but sadly isn't and in which writers stand up for the queer characters and elements in their books. Go represent.

We Love the Women Fandom Hates week continues today with day 2, In Which We Address A Pretty Large And Uncomfortable-Looking Elephant In The Room: so why does fandom hate Catelyn so much?

Spoilers as always for the books. Longer than the other days' posts, probably.

( Day 2: So What's the Problem with Catelyn Stark? )

Birthday went well. Excepting the 4-5 drunkdials I made, which I guess you might consider as not going well if you consider I was missing all kinds of people's numbers from my semi-new phone. The good news is, though, that it wasn't actually a party, and my actual party is on the 14th, so that is plenty of time to get more people's numbers.

Thanks to Tumblr, I became totally obsessed today with Akinator, which is one of those 20-questions algorithms that uses users' answers to gather data and refine itself, so naturally I went crazy testing the damn thing. Here are some of the results:

Roy Mustang: 18 questions
Jonathan Strange: 19 questions
Scout: 23 questions
Locke Lamora: 25 questions
Dolores Haze: 18 questions
Maes Hughes: 18 questions
Hisoka Kurosaki: 32 questions (after first guessing "Pikachu")
Dr. Frank-N-Furter: 58 questions (after "Andy (Toy Story)," "Thomas Leroy (Black Swan)," and "is your character a sex maniac")
Sam Axe: 20 questions
Brienne of Tarth: 18 questions
Guybrush Threepwood: 27 questions (after "Qwop")
Mordecai Heller: Gave up (after "Niels," "Nostalgia Critic," "Spades Slick," "Jordan Chase")
The Master: 16 questions (winner!)
Maru: 24 questions

~

We first reported this rumored casting a few weeks ago, but now it is official: Gemma Whelan has been cast to play Yara Greyjoy in season two of Game of Thrones. Yara was named Asha in the books, but has had her name changed in the show so as not to confuses audiences with the character Osha.

Oh, sure, don't change Osha or anything, change POV character Asha Greyjoy instead. I mean, Yara Greyjoy. Yara. Yarrrrrrrra.

Meanwhile, they went and cast a black guy as Xaro Xhoan Daxos the Qartheen, because it's not like ethnicities or consistency matter if the characters are non-European, and this definitely could not bode ill considering GoT's track record with the Dothraki.

Hot damn. It's over. Ten entire weeks and now we'll have to wait a whole 'nother year for Clash of Kings Game of Thrones S2 to come out. I think I made a post -- ah yes, it's right here -- with a bouncing-minions macro and "please don't suck please don't suck please don't suck" just before the first ep came out. Now it's over and I can let out the last fraction of my metaphorical breath and say, no, it didn't suck. It quite didn't suck. It was very good. And it was probably the most successful faithful adaptation of book-to-screen that I've seen.

( No. I am your spoiler. )

I think once I get my act together I am going to put together my full thoughts on Season 1 of Game of Thrones, regarding which I was withholding judgment as a work until it was finished: there were a lot of things difficult to rate episode by episode outside of the context of the whole story. Now we have at least the first part of that. The task is a little daunting.

Hunh, it's over.

This 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.

For the record, Dreamwidth's rich-text interface in general is shit. I'd finished typing my review for this episode, was curious whether my cut-tag was busted, switched from HTML to rich text to see, and it ate everything after the busted tag and erased over it in the draft -- that is, destroyed my entire review. It's only because this is A Song of Ice and Fire, my second fandom one true love (after Discworld), that I am bothering to retype the goddamn thing. Let's see if I can even remember. The rest of you be warned, though: don't even touch that rich text button, all of your work will be lost now, like tears in rain.

( Rhaego. I named him after my two favorite pasta sauces, Prego and Ragu. )

Game of Thrones is a beautiful demonstration of how much emotional weight translated from page to screen depends on how good the actors are. Not usually to its credit. But not always not to its credit, either.