I am hoping the show will be able to show how Joffrey reacts to the truth about his parentage. I’m not sure if it was addressed in the books if he believed the rumors or not. From the books it seemed like he was very eager for aproval from Robert and he basically had no interaction with Jamie over the course of the books.
I can see them giving more screen to Robb in season 2 but what can they do with Jamie locked in the dungeon. I wonder if they will show Robb hooking up with his wife or save that for season 3.
It’s glossed over in the books, but Jaime does almost escape in Book 2 via Tyrion’s mummers and muderers plot. I’m sure they’ll show that in detail.
I think evil is a weird word to through out there.
There aren’t really many, if any evil characters in the books. Joffrey comes close, but he is just a 12-14 year old boy. Everyone is out for their own families. As Cersei said, in the game of thrones you either win, or you die. She was looking out for her own family’s sake, she wanted her son to reign as king, and she was in love with her brother and wanted to stay with him. How is that any different than Catherine’s love for Rob or Bran? Or King Robert treated her like shit, and didn’t love her, he broke her heart. I will say that she is definitely very cold, calculating and a bit psychotic (especially as the books move forward) but evil is a bit far.
That is one thing I enjoy about these books, aside from the white walkers and scary monsters up north, there is no great evil, it is only men looking out for themselves and their friends. Nobody is comic-book evil really, just sadistic, fucked up in the head or ruthlessly loyal.
The slave traders across the sea are pretty evil, and so are Gregor Clegane and his lot. The bloody mummers are creepy and evilish. The Freys commit probably one of the most evil/dastardly acts, but it is all for a purpose. I definitely wouldn’t count Cersei as evil, she is a lot more complicated than that, like Jaime and a lot of the other lannisters. Tywin is pretty bad, especially in regards to Tyrion, but we all know how that shakes out.
I think GRRM’s definition of evil is pretty clear, and quite Kantian - people will certainly be out to benefit themselves and their kin and friends, for sure, that in itself isn’t necessarily evil, it’s just human. It’s when they knowingly walk all over the “smallfolk” to do it.
This is the opposite of the Kantian, “act so that you treat people not as means only, but also as ends in themselves”. The “only” is a crucial point - of course we treat people as means sometimes, that’s an unavoidable part of life: it’s when we treat them as means only, as mere incidental tools to get what we want, and cease to look at things from their point of view too, that we become evil.
In AFFC, it’s clear how Cersei is portrayed as truly evil (although tbqh I think it’s a bit overwrought) - you are privileged to see her inner thought processes, and you can see how her only thoughts are about the machinations to get what she wants, she only has the rarest twinge of awareness of how it looks like from others’ point of view, but she quickly brushes it away.
What I do like about GRRM is that he’s also aware of the other side of the equation - how good people doing good things sometimes result in unforeseen consequences that lead to evil results. e.g. Arya frees the 3 thugs, partly fulfilling her destiny with Jaqen, but also in the process releasing a really evil fucker like Rorge into the world. Or take Catelyn, whose bumbling efforts to get justice for her son sets in motion a whole train of events leading to the war of 5 kings and beyond (not least, the fact that there’s going to be a huge disaster for the common folk in view of the fact that there’s been no real preparation for winter because of the wars and depredations).
That’s sort of the context in which I’m calling Joffrey, Viserys and Aerion Brightflame the sort of “bad seed” evil characters; they aren’t sort of brooding anti-heroes-gone-bad like Tywin, they’re the kids who started mutilating small animals when they were young, in Joffrey’s case literally.
Each of them might have a few seconds here or there where the reader will think “it’s a shame this kid turned out this way - was it the power, the bad upbringing, congenital madness?” But mostly there’s no time as the characters are being by turns petulant, sadistic, cowardly, or mad with power and their sense of personal grandeur. Without getting too much into potted psychology, I think we’re meant to suspect they’re both crazy and evil from a young age.
As gurugeorge pointed out, the blithe self-centredness of Cersei’s POV was actually what made her seem more like this to me. That is, the “bad seed characters” seemed like (semi?)psychopathic sadists, emphasis on the sadism, whereas she seemed ignorant of/indifferent to others well-being to the point of mental illness, but she didn’t come off as particularly sadistic.
Just caught up with the latest episode. It started off well, with Sean Bean earning his keep with some quintessential Sean Beaniness, some great Wall action, and a brilliant portrayal of Walder Frey and his court. The Dany scenes were good too, pretty much as I’d pictured them.
But does anyone else feel Tyrion was short-changed on the battle? I mean part of his charm in the book is that despite his misgivings he actually does have a lot of courage, and does step up to the plate when it comes to battle (he is a dwarf after all :) ) - having him tromped into the mud and missing the fight seems a bit cheap.
Are we ever going to see any proper battle scenes in this series? I’d be happy with even just a flash of a few extras and some flocking algorithm CGI stuff, just enough to get a sense of the scale. At the moment, all I’m seeing is a few horsemen here and there, and pure implication.
Otherwise, awesomeness all round, as per usual.
You don’t think Cersei’s association with Qyburn is a huge sadistic red flag? She could have gotten rid of Falyse Stokeworth in any number of ways, but she sent her on down to a torture that’s so horrific that Martin leaves it to our imagination. Cersei even watches Qyburn’s work on the Blue Bard with pleasure. I’d say her insanity leans heavily towards sadism.
In Joffrey’s case, you can see that he’s fucked up in large part due to his parents and being put into a position of near-absolute power at almost the exact wrong time in his life. I did like that GRRM went out of his way to point out that - through Tyrion’s eyes as Joffrey lay dying - he was just a 14-year-old kid at the beginning of his life who could have eventually become something quite different.
Viserys is another story: he’s halfway nuts to begin with and his situation in life drives him pretty deep into delusion and fantasy. Evil? Sure, but really more psychopathic than morally corrupt. The HBO show makes him more nuanced than the book, where he’s just so over the edge that he can’t see what’s going on right in front of his eyes.
And the Mad King Aerion (wasn’t Brightflame a different king?) was just that : mad. He was evil in the same way that other truly batshit-insane people are evil… but I don’t think that really counts.
StGabe
2909
I think you guys are going way too easy on Cersei. In book 1 we know she’s a schemer but we don’t really have enough info to really see where that’s coming from. By book 2, via her interactions with Tyrion, it starts to become clear that she’s very destructive and has almost no empathy for other people.
With Joffrey, Aeryion and to a lesser extent Viserys they actually have power with which to let their pathos out on the world. Cersei doesn’t really have that power for much of the story (in Book 1 she’s “just” the Queen and later on she is checked by Tyrion/Tywin). It’s natural that we don’t really see the worst of her until later when she has some opportunities to really let loose.
That was my reaction the first time I read it, and I remain similarly convinced that Cersei is self-destructive, paranoid, and needless vindictive on a second reading. However, what I hadn’t noticed as much is just how much Tywin and Tyrion are different manifestations of the same sort of diseased thinking. Tywin (possibly my favorite character in the series) is a grotesque caricature of Machiavellian stereotypes, but for the most part he manages to subsume his brutal, cruel nature to strategic considerations, and in fact channels it in a positive sense (career-wise) much of the time. Tyrion has a lot of that strategic thinking, but because of his appearance and the giant chip on his shoulder his early achievements are never matched to his reputation, and when actively opposed prejudice crushes him and perhaps begins to breed some of that festering murderousness in him near the end of his time as a POV character so far. Cersei, on the other hand, got all of that cruelty, the chip on her shoulder except from being treated like chattel as a woman and brutalized accordingly, and none of the strategic thought because she’s always survived on cunning alone and was never groomed for command but rather as a vaginal placeholder. She’s not a character that I could warm to (and part of that is I can only deal with so much sex chatter with Martin and he pushes the limits with most female characters), but now that I have a clearer vision of her family I feel like I understand how she gets so fucked up.
Equis
2911
In the books, it’s hinted that while Tywin is “currently” cruelly machiavellian, he was much more amenable, less brutal and more likely to co-operate when Joanna Lannister was around. Martin has pretty much stated that her death, and the birth of Tyrion changed him a lot. I wonder if that previous sense of how “good” (relatively speaking) Tywin once was is manifested in Jaime’s story arc.
To me that’s more about Tyrion being a nice guy than anything. I think Joffrey is meant to be crazy/evil even if the implied cause is more environmental than in the case of the Targaryens.
Viserys is another story: he’s halfway nuts to begin with and his situation in life drives him pretty deep into delusion and fantasy. Evil? Sure, but really more psychopathic than morally corrupt.
I’m looking in terms of the end results - again, the petulant, cruel, sadistic, grandiose combination the three strikingly share.
And the Mad King Aerion (wasn’t Brightflame a different king?) was just that : mad. He was evil in the same way that other truly batshit-insane people are evil… but I don’t think that really counts.
Aerion Brightflame was a Targaryen prince who appeared in the Hedge Knight, who basically came off as another Viserys or Joffrey. We don’t see quite as much of him as the other two. Aerys II, the mad king, does also fit the mold a bit in his post-Duskendale behavior, but he apparently wasn’t that bad earlier in his life.
Re: Cersei’s sadism, I just meant she isn’t comparatively sadistic. Joffrey and Aerion on the other hand really seem like the small-animal-torturing types in terms of looking for opportunities to hack up the smallfolk and torture those they have power over. Viserys it seems more like casual brutality towards Danaerys, which one could maybe compare to the anecdote about Cersei casually twisting Tyrion’s genitals when he was a baby. But we don’t see much of that from adult Cersei; her attitude towards torture and so on is certainly rather deranged, but it didn’t strike me as having the same recreational avidity as Joffrey’s.
Rywill
2913
I totally agree. Not having battles blows, not just because they would be cool to see, but because not having them loses some important stuff from the book. Robb’s tactical genius is the important other half of his strategic blindness, and in the series it’s almost passed over. For Tyrion, it’s even worse: as gurugeorge says, the fact that he’s courageous and can actually fight is a really important aspect of his character, which I thought the show was going to portray (based on his fighting during the first hill tribe attack). But then instead of having him courageously in the thick of it in episode 9, they have him get comically clobbered and spend the whole fight unconscious. It’s like the Gimli Effect has infected GoT.
And I really don’t understand why. I get that they can’t stage gigantic battle scenes due to budget. I know nothing about moviemaking but maybe even doing CGI battles is too expensive. But why can’t you have fight scenes focused on the characters? You just see what they can see, so you have a confused scene of Tyrion fighting with maybe 15-20 extras around him and getting legitimately wounded. You have a scene of Jaime cutting through 10 extras to try to get to Robb before Robb’s friends bring him down and capture him. Surely that wouldn’t cost that much?
It’s like the scene of Robert’s hunt. If you just put ten extra guys in the frame, the whole thing is much cooler and closer to what the book portrayed. I can’t imagine that would be prohibitively expensive. I don’t know why they don’t do it, especially for stuff that’s important to the characterizations.
Yeah but she has qualms - she doesn’t actually revel in the torture like the archetypal mustachioed villain would, it’s more like she’s queasily curious.
I agree that there’s a whole range of types of villainy shown, but I maintain that GRRM’s core view of evil is more rationalist and Kantian than deterministic.
There are psychopaths aplenty (G Cleg, Rorge, Mummers), whose behaviour is certainly evil in a general sense, but the characters who are mover-and-shaker, plot-advancing evil are the people who have made rational decisions to override their qualms about the way they are treating others in the pursuit of their aims.
In GRRM’s books, everyone is damaged, but whether they become evil depends on three factors: 1) where they are in the bell-curve of born-natural-nice-guy/bad-guy-ness, 2) how they’ve been treated as they’ve grown up, and 2) the rational decisions they’ve made in reaction to the evil that has befallen them.
i.e. GRRM properly sees 1) nature, 2) nurture and 3) rational decisions in the course of one’s Bildung, as interacting factors, but he lays most stress on 3) (it being the only factor that’s in one’s control).
Which means redemption is always a possibility, but few make the right decisions for it. You can see how it’s always a possibility by the way Sandor Clegane is treated - he’s almost as bad as Gregor, but you get the feeling that he’s more of a thinking man, and is sometimes almost redeemable (e.g. in his sympathetic interactions with the Stark girls).
This argument makes sense for Robert’s hunt (and for the tournaments as well, which look like practice matches in someone’s back yard), but there’s just no way to make a big battle that doesn’t look laughably bad without spending a lot of money. Even with CGI. It sucks how they handled Tyrion’s performance, but you couldn’t have set it up without some establishing shots showing the scope of the battle, and I’m guessing they didn’t want to blow half of the episode’s budget making something that merely supports a few seconds of character development (and those few seconds would have cost a ton of money, too. Filming fight scenes costs a ton). Had they half-assed it, it would have looked awful and completely broke immersion.
They’re also packing a ton of scenes into each episode and I’m sure they have to make some agonizing decisions as to what they do or don’t keep in. They’ve already established Tyrion’s courage by the way he handles himself when he’s threatened, so interesting as his battlefield courage is I’m sure they felt it was overkill when they had so much else to do and so little money to do it all.
I’m hoping the series is successful enough that they’ll get a budget that can handle these sorts of scenes satisfactorily in later seasons. Considering what a gamble season 1 was, and the budgetary constraints it was produced under, I’m frankly shocked at how great it looks overall.
This.
HBO took a huge gamble with GoT. Period pieces are expensive to produce to begin with, and that’s if you’re not using CGI to create several castles, cities and backdrops for your settings. Season One looks really good so far for a show that was not a proven winner, and while I would like to have scene some battle shots, even with just 15 or 20 guys as people have suggested, I also totally understand how such shots could become very expensive very quickly with all the costuming, animal wrangling, fight choreography and whatnot, all for a 30 second bit that while cool, isn’t pivitol to telling the story at this point.
Now that GoT has proven a success and HBO is happy with it, I expect we’ll see a great budget for Season Two. That said, the dragons are going to eat into it a lot, so I wouldn’t expect enormous and epic LOTR-style battle scenes. Instead perhaps they’ll have enough budget and production cachet to include some of those 15-20 guy scenes, especially for something as important as the Battle on the Blackwater.
To use The Tudors as an example, we didn’t see small battle scenes in that show until near the end of the second season, and the big battle in France was the final season of the show and probably took up more than half the budget for the whole season. That was all AFTER Tudors had proven it could be successful, so now that Game of Thrones has done the same I’m sure they’ll be willing to invest a bit more for follow-up seasons.
Trey
2917
They’ll have another chance to show Tyrion in battle in the Battle of Breakwater Bay in season 2. Incidentally this is the episode that GRRM is writing. And I doubt they can gloss over that battle.
The interview with the showrunners that was posted above has some interesting tidbits (that’s where I got the GRRM is writing the Battle info). Among them is that they’re trying to come up with more scenes for Robb and Jaime since they have limited presence in the book.
In CoS, Robb spends all his time fighting battles away from POV characters, other than intersecting with Cat at Riverrun before and after sending her off to meet with Renly.
Jaime spends the whole book in the dungeon of Riverrun, until the very end when Cat sets him free.
So this means more book scenes will be cut to make room for made up Robb and Jaime scenes. I get that they hired the actors and need to have stuff for them to do, both to keep the audience from forgetting who they are and to keep them from seeking other employment, but I hope that the upcoming season(s) get more more episodes so that they won’t have to cut as much as they do, and rush what they don’t cut. It would be really nice to let some scenes really breathe.
Athryn
2918
They only said they’re doing 10 eps next year, too.
Rywill
2919
The other possibility, and this is what the producers imply in that interview, is that they’re just going to change the sequence of events somewhat, moving things from book 3 up to season 2 and some things from book 2 to season 3 maybe. For example, I can imagine them (book spoilers coming) having Jaime try to escape early on, then have Cat release him and have his journey with Brienne start. You could end with his memorable meeting with the mercenary guys to give his story a strong ending and good WTF cliffhanger before season 3. For Robb, I dunno, maybe his battle and wounding and falling for that pepperpot girl?
With Robb it’s easy, as he’s doing plenty during A Clash of Kings, it’s just all “offscreen” in the books. All they’d need to do is show him doing that stuff maybe once per episode (the Spicer siege/romance mentioned above for example) and you’re good. With Jaime it’s going to be a lot more difficult as he literally does nothing in Clash of Kings but rot in his cell at Riverrun. I suppose they could show the attempted escape attempt with the mummer troupe and make it more dramatic, then as suggested they could speed up his eventual release. They might get some milage too out of having him interact with Edmure Tully somehow, or hav ethe Blackfish show up and have conversations with him. They could even do some flashbacks where he remembers things about his family and life from the past while rotting away. That might be a good way to start making him a bit more sympathetic and gradually transition to his quasi-reformation.
