Winter is coming

As everyone knows, Game of Thrones season debut later today (actually tomorrow here).

Saw the guy who plays Jamie Lannister on Jimmy Fallon and he said he has a whole character arc on this season that is NOT in the book. They are totally going their own way from the strict letter of the books. I am FINE with that. I hope they cut out most of whatever is going on in Dorn as well. I don't care about Dorn and don't need to invest in any more characters. I feel like they are smart if they realize that fans of the show are caught up caring about what happens to someone like Jamie Lannister and want to give him more to do than mope around with one arm feeling sorry for himself.

BTW, Jamie Lannister as well as all the Lannisters are among my favorite characters. Martin did such a great job of writing the bad guys. With Jamie Lannister he starts out as a total villain and over time he is humanized and given a chance to explain the motivations for his treachery. Dunno about the incest though.....

Each season, I've been keeping a mental note of my 5 favorite "living" characters. Jamie Lannister went from a total douse-bag to my top 5 favorite characters last seasoning. Probably 3rd behind Tyrion Lannister and Arya Stark.

No HBO but pretty excited about it. I'm teaching a course on the political science in the series (book based) next semester so I'm guessing it'll get the students jazzed.

I think the show is getting stronger while the books are getting weaker as seasons/books wear on.

I'm a fan of the books, so I've been avoiding the show so far. A lot of people don't understand that, so I will try to explain. The books are great, except that the fourth and fifth ones took an extreme amount of time to write, especially given that the first three took only two years each to write. And I started reading this series back in '96, because I was already a fan of Martin going back a decade earlier.

Anyway, because I read most of the books before the show ever started, I already had a vivid mental image of what many of the characters looked like. I understand that the tv folks had to make some compromises in order to get good actors, but I find the appearance of some of the actors to be quite jarring. It's great that Jon Snow and Robb Stark really look like brothers on the show, but in the books, they don't particularly have a resemblance, for good reason. And I never imagined either of them to look like Bert Viola of Moonlighting. Cersei is too average-looking. And in the name of the Seven, can't anyone get Daenerys to bleach her damn eyebrows?

More importantly, I consider Martin to be a superior writer to almost any tv writers. So I want to read his version of the story more than that of the series writers, and there have been differences since early on. Some of these changes were definitely for the worse, like the mind-numbing stupidity of Robb Stark bringing his wife to the Red Wedding. Even so, I plan on eventually binge-watching the series, though ideally after I finished reading the books. I just want to enjoy the books the way they were intended before I watch some adaptation for another medium. Normally this isn't even an issue, because tv or movie treatments tend to happen years if not decades after the story has been told in print.

Sadly, it seems unlikely that Martin will finish the books. He is old, and fat, and understandably spending a lot of time on other things that he would also like to do before he dies. And even if book six sees print in 2016, he has been talking about needing eight books to tell the whole story, which was originally intended to just be a trilogy. I don't see Martin living for another 9 or 10 years, so I don't think that we're going to get the eighth book, unless he has arranged for another writer to finish the series in the event of his demise.

So it seems that I may be forced to watch the series sooner than I intended. Hearing that they are starting to take extreme liberties with the story is disappointing. And I have heard that Martin isn't happy about some of the changes. I understand that television often needs to dumb stories down for the lowest common denominator, and it's amusing that this series sometimes resorts to flashing titties just to get people to sit through some lengthy exposition. But it doesn't give me great hope that I will get a fitting end to a great story.

The first 4 episodes of season 5 have been leaked online. I was very briefly tempted, but then realized I'd have to wait another 5 weeks to start again. Looks like I'll just be torrenting them each week the old fashioned way.

Good luck avoiding spoilers for a month.

Uh, Alistair, hate to break it to you, but Jaime Lannister is getting a story arc distinct from the books... in Dorne. That's been all over the GoT/ASoIaF blogs and sites since last October.

Shellhead: First off, they're not taking extreme liberties with the story. No one's character is about to become distinctly different from their book version. The overall arc of the story remains in sync with the books. They're just moving people around a bit (Jaime to Dorne instead of Riverrun, for example) and delaying some storylines (No Bran this season) while trying to bring others into closer sync. It was always going to be a challenge to do these things because of the difference in media (there's a fair amount of Jaime material in season 2 while he disappears for all but a couple pages in Clash of Kings) and I think they've done a pretty solid job of it so far.

Incidentally, Martin has stated that it's unfortunate that variations have to be made, but he's also stated repeatedly that most of the changes that Benioff and Weiss have made to both characters and story are things that he would have changed himself if he could go back and alter the books (like Osha's more dynamic character, for example.) So, there's little to no truth to the idea that Martin "isn't happy" about the changes except to say that that's what adaptations do to stay coherent. He wrote for TV for a couple decades, so he knows this. Furthermore, he's been writing an episode a year on the series and stays in constant contact with the showrunners, who have also emphasized that they want to tell the story that came from the books because they love the material and because they know the fans (and Martin) would blow a gear if they did anything radical. Any impression that Martin's work is somehow beyond his control by the casual or indifferent nature of HBO or Benioff and Weiss is flat wrong.

Your choice to avoid the show is your choice and there's nothing wrong with it. But you're exaggerating problems with the show and Martin's supposed irritation with it without ever having seen it. (Personally, I think the casting of Cersei was accurate, as she's still gorgeous but fading as the years pass, which is exactly how Martin depicts her. Lena Headey has presented a far more nuanced version of Cersei which Martin has, again, said he would have liked to have created earlier so that she didn't come off as such a Wicked Witch of the West parody.) Also, Martin is aware of the fact that his story is going to be spoiled and has opted out of most of his appearances for the rest of the year and isn't writing an episode for the next season of the series in order to focus his time on Winds of Winter. You can think what you like about his age and health, but I don't think either of them are particularly pertinent to the chances of his completion of the books (his editor was the one speculating about 8 books, not Martin.) What hinders him more than anything is the fact that he still only writes on an old DOS machine, which means that he can't work when he travels...

BTW, I agree with you entirely about Emilia Clarke's eyebrows. However, she's never dyed her hair for the role. It's a wig. Given the length of the shoot (over 200 days this last season), trying to keep a dye job coherent is tough and it's probably one more complication and expense that they may not have had money and time for in the first season and can't change now, unfortunately.

Jackwraith wrote: BTW, I agree with you entirely about Emilia Clarke's eyebrows. However, she's never dyed her hair for the role. It's a wig. Given the length of the shoot (over 200 days this last season), trying to keep a dye job coherent is tough and it's probably one more complication and expense that they may not have had money and time for in the first season and can't change now, unfortunately.

What bugged me even more than eyebrows is that they didn't shave her head for the funeral pyre hatching of the dragons. The book talks about how all her hair was burned off, and in the next book they mention a couple times how her hair was growing back in tufts as they journeyed across the land.

kingput, you prefer Jamie to Dany??

I watched the leaked episodes. Now I need to go find some book readers and spoil stuff for them.

Jackwraith wrote: What hinders him more than anything is the fact that he still only writes on an old DOS machine, which means that he can't work when he travels...

I think he just lost the heart for it. When ADWD was released a few months after the show started, he was saying in interviews that it revitalized his intent to complete it; also a good chunk was already there, as ADWD was getting too large and had to be split (seems like there's a pattern happening with that). Here we are 4 years on and TWOW nowhere in sight. Here's another sample chapter to sate your thirst though! And a cryptic statement from the author to keep speculation going! Blagh. I'm also really not sure that he could satisfyingly complete the story in 7 books what with the stuff he keeps adding even this late in the game.

Black Barney wrote: kingput, you prefer Jamie to Dany??

I do. Although the bit where she frees the slaves and they kill their previous masters was great, one of the highlights of last seaon.

Total speculation: I think his first love is screenwriting. Seeing it go so well on screen I think must be incredibly satisfying---perhaps satisfying enough where it becomes less important to finish the books.

the fact that he told the producers how he plans to finish the books is a real good sign that his passion is screenwriting. most writers wouldn't give a shit about a TV spin off of their novels since they are authors first and foremost.

Sales of the series (books) was around 9 million copies when the tv series started to air. Now it's up to 58 millions copies. There's still money to be made with the books.

Columbob wrote: I think he just lost the heart for it. When ADWD was released a few months after the show started, he was saying in interviews that it revitalized his intent to complete it; also a good chunk was already there, as ADWD was getting too large and had to be split (seems like there's a pattern happening with that). Here we are 4 years on and TWOW nowhere in sight.

Martin had a quote in Entertainment Weekly last week about how he was all fired up to write "Winds of Winter" right after "Dance with Dragons" was published. Then he took six months off, and as he put it, "the iron cooled off." I suppose that makes sense, but it makes you wonder why he took freaking SIX MONTHS off. That seems like quite a long vacation.

It's weird, because the guy has been writing professionally for DECADES. He knows how the industry works, and he knows what it means to write for a living. It's so strange to now see him take such a lackadaisical attitude towards his career. The passion and drive and work ethic that got him to this point seem to have vanished. And does his publisher have no ability to light a fire under him? Don't they have deadlines and budgets and a publishing schedule? I don't get that either.

If you thought that you were likely to die in a few years, would you work obsessively to catch up at work and finish a big project? Or would you try to relax and enjoy your time left?