T w e n t y S i d e d

A visual medium – like television – has certain advantages over the printed word. For example, an actor who makes savvy performance choices can convey more about a character with their poise and their voice than entire paragraphs of text can. The way actors move within the frame, the choices of the cinematographer, the director, the costumers, the set designers… all of these are ways to communicate meaning to the audience.

It also faces certain disadvantages. It’s trickier to deliver exposition in a natural-seeming way, for instance. However, for my money, the single biggest challenge in adapting a book to a TV show is length.

In practical terms, books are way longer than shows – and that’s just normal books. GRRM’s works are your classic twenty-stone fantasy doorstoppers. To give you an idea, A Storm of Swords, which is the longest of the series, is 424,000 words. The entire Lord of the Rings trilogy? 481,000.These word counts vary according to the counting method. But the point is, GRRM’s books are very long. If you were to attempt a completely faithful, scene-by-scene, line-by-line reproduction of the books, you’d have to have fifty episodes a season.

The practical limitations of the form make that impossible, so the act of adapting A Song of Ice and Fire into a TV show is an act of severe abridgment. Every scene has to be pared down to the bone, entire storylines have to be cut, multiple characters have to be merged together into one, and so forth.

It’s why I always check myself whenever I get grumpy that one of my favorite things from the books isn’t in the show. I have to remind myself that they really just don’t have time to include everything. I try to be as understanding as possible.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Game of Thrones Griping 11: Arya Gets Hit With A Stick Over and Over Again”

Bob Case MrBtongue is the Pele of complaining about videogames and will soon be the Garrincha of complaining about TV shows. You can find his Youtube channel at youtube.com/user/MrBtongue.

Everyone’s favoriteshut up Game of Thrones gripe-a-thon is back! I won’t even have time to complain about everything I wanted to complain about between now and July 16th, when the new season is scheduled to start. But all I can do is try. Never let it be said that common sense limited my can-do spirit.

In keeping with what I’ve done so far, I’m going to pick a single season six storyline – in this case, Arya’s – and stick with it. And hoo boy, did I pick a doozy.

It would be going too far to say that Arya’s storyline was the season’s worst – that particular trophy was retained by the season five defending champions, Dorne. But it was the one I found the most obnoxious. The Dorne plotline was inept and scatterbrained, sure, but I didn’t personally see any malice in it. The Arya plotline, on the other hand, continuously manipulates the audience in a way that I find familiar enough to breed contempt.

I’ll sound smarter if I give this phenomenon a name, so I’ll call it the “Lindeloffian Method.” Damon Lindelof is the often-talented-but-even-more-often-infuriating auteur who gave us Lost and Prometheus, among other things. He’s not the only writer who practices the Lindeloffian Method, but he is the most noteworthy, so I’ve named it after him.

The Lindeloffian method is this: have something happen that makes no sense, hint at a promised explanation later, and then never deliver. Simple, but effective, because it gives the audience something that’s initially indistinguishable from actual suspense. When they start to get antsy, you replace the old mystery with another, bigger mystery, and carry on as before.

It’s essentially the Ponzi scheme of fiction writing. In a Ponzi scheme, the grifter gets people to invest in some plausible-sounding company, and makes payments to the first group of investors with the money from the second group, then the second with the third, and so on. Once you run out of suckers the scheme collapses, of course, but by then a smart operator will have already skipped town with what’s left of everyone’s money.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Game of Thrones Griping 10: The Lindeloffian Method”

Bob Case MrBtongue is the Pele of complaining about videogames and will soon be the Garrincha of complaining about TV shows. You can find his Youtube channel at youtube.com/user/MrBtongue.