T w e n t y S i d e d

(This was supposed to go up this morning. Somehow I never got around to actually clicking the “publish” button, so it’s late… oops)

I want to take a closer look at one character in particular: Lady Crane. This character, and the way the show treats her, gives us (I think) a lens into how the writers think, and what sort of world they’re depicting.

Game of Thrones is not a black-and-white show, but there are certain characters we get the impression that we’re supposed to either like or dislike. And while it’s not always a clear binary value, I’m pretty sure we’re supposed to like Lady Crane. We’re supposed to root for her and consider her one of the good guys/women. So, by looking at her, we can look at what sort of character the show wants and expects us to like, and why. So let’s look at Lady Crane.

A Play Within A Show

I admit it: I’m a sucker for play-within-a-play stuff. And this unnamedI think? Braavosi theatre company is my favorite part of the Arya storyline. I always like to see story elements illuminate the setting, and here we get some sense of what version of Westorosi political current events has made into the court of public opinion. Here, Ned Stark is a scheming, power-hungry type, Joffrey a noble innocent, and Tyrion a vile demon.

We know this is all hogwash, but the Braavosi audience doesn’t, and you can’t really blame them. It’s also nice to take a trip down memory lane, and revisit plot points from seasons past. It all ends with Lady Crane’s star turn: her anguished monologue as she holds Joffrey’s body in her arms. Despite the determined use of sing-songy rhyming couplets, this is actually halfway affecting stuff. Maybe they should just do the whole show this way.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Game of Thrones Griping 12: More Like Lady PAIN”

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.

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.