Slightly extended edition of the trailer, debuted at Comic-Con
I share your concerns, but the two doofuses who ruined AGoT are not tied to this production. So that levels the playing field, leaving it all down to the writing team they hired to fill all the missing character and dialogue pieces you pointed out.
The trailer does look epic though, I have to say that. Some fantastic visuals.
There is A LOT of new stuff on display in this BTS video.
Was wondering if I was alone in this. I think it genuinely looks good! Can’t wait for the show, cautious optimism is always the best play.
I’m so sure I’ll watch it that I haven’t even watched any trailers! That’s how sure I am! (70%).
I am curious over why the Iron Throne change though. Easier for shooting with it in the frame is my guess. You get the ruler on it in the background of your shot without having to go Orson Welles and dropping the camera below the feet of the foreground actors. But that’s just a guess on my part.
Looking good, and at least we don’t have to worry about them running out of story. :)
I think they wanted to upgrade it a bit, as a huge original pet peeve was it should have been much grander, and unfortunately they can’t really re-do the base throne (that one concept drawing was amazing), so…
Regarding the show, I’m enthused. Blame D&D for the last season, and i guess if you want to embrace some by-assocation crap to do with the Battle of the Bastards, but I think you’ll see a bit of a different approach here and would be worth seeing. If you don’t like it at the first season, fine. But don’t knock it because you didn’t like Season 8 or Battle of the Bastards or George Martin being unable to write for a decade because he likes football or something.
— Alan
The problem is, the guy who thought it should be “much grander” was Martin and to me that’s an indication of his overweening and uncontrolled ego. The Iron Throne in GoT worked really well; it’s an iconic image. But it wasn’t big enough for Martin. If you read some of his accounts from his blog and other sources over the years, or his voice overs in the GoT Blue-Rays, his ego is apparent.
I consider it a bad sign that the HotD showrunners gave in to his ego right off the bat.
Now I’m biased and I carry a hate-on for Martin’s ego, but I still think this is a valid critique.
My expectations for HotD are extremely low. Maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised when I read the reviews, but… we’ll see.
Is that ego or being possessive and protective of his creation? I think a lot of his criticism springs from teh fact the two showrunners (and they admit to this) came off as fanboys in their early meetings with him, and continued to promise an extremely faithful adaptation of his writing. Which set expectations that could never reasonably be met, and GRRM having worked in TV production should’ve known better. But that was TV and not H B O, so maybe he thought the bigger budgets would allow for a close hewing to his words. The fact he reacted badly to when the 1st season killed off a minor Dothraki character stood out back in 2011 to me and even then I thought it would only get worse. Just today at work I was going over all the stuff the show dropped from the books to someone who just watched all 8 seasons for the first time this year and he walked away saying he was overloaded with info. So I honestly think Martin expected at least four seasons to cover the first three books, and another three for the next two. Which even if that had happened, the irony is that the show still would’ve passed his lethargic ass.
As for House, I’m hopeful but not excited. . .probably the best way I can put it.
Martin has actually written about this. I cannot recall the link now but he wrote an article 10 or 15 years ago about the contrast between TV production, limited by budget, versus writing books, where his imagination was the limit. I think at first he was striking a balance but over time he lost that balance.
And it goes beyond budget to also include quality. Not every idea that pops into a writer’s head is worth pursuing. Self editing, discipline and focus are all important.
I wish I could find a link to that article of his - it was on his blog years ago I think. But it just screamed to me that he had lost the ability to edit himself. He considered the limits of TV budgets an unmitigated bad without ever thinking “Hey maybe I don’t need that scene, or that character, or…”
Specifically, the article I’m thinking of mentioned Martin talking about the freedom of writing, how the Mountain could be eight feet tall, and Casterly Rock could be bigger than El Capitan and the Iron Throne could be many feet tall, and so on. And he never reflected “Hey, maybe Going Big all the time doesn’t make my work better.”
Ambition is a key ingredient in creative success but it must be tempered by discipline and focus or you end up with, well, what we have here with Martin.
And I continue to worry that with HotD giving in to what I consider to be Martin’s worst instincts on something like the Iron Throne is a bad sign.
Dang, I wish I could find that article - it was pretty glaring.
Does anyone else have prequel fatigue? Seems 90% of “new” showd are prequels. Bleh
I think you’re reading too much into it. The Iron Throne is bigger now and has melted swords around it, I am assuming more consistent with what is probably in the text and I am sure the showrunners are hoping will make some scenes look more impressive to the average viewer. I imagine they are borrowing alot from GoT development in terms of sets/costumes/CGI, so have the budget and time to iterate on some things and make them different.
That’s really it.
Sure, but does any of those things make it worse? Of course not.
Well, I can’t disagree with this! My personal opinion is that Martin is someone who views his universes and every character in them to have intrinsic value. When a showrunner thinks to remove a character, he is thinking about how every character in a fantasy universe has a part to play to create a sense of a living breathing universe that immerses the reader, and probably how he thought up every line of dialogue that character had and how it was clever.
Whereas showrunners are inherently more utilitarian and just want to capture the essence of something as efficiently as possible, not only due to budget constraints but also time and the higher ups who want the content to reach as wide a demographic as possible.
Well, the days when GRRM had any of that are long gone.
And that’s not even a specific knock against him; in my experience, writers who become as successful as GRRM usually lose that ability and furthermore, can no longer be edited by anyone else either. Same is obvious with JK Rowling (did the last book really need so many pages? nope), and pretty much every other wildly successful author.
Most of them usually manage to finish their works, though.
Yep, I seem to recall JK Rowling spent way, way too much time with Harry, Ron, Hermione in some forest in the last book. It would have been nice to have an editor say “uh, I think this is too long.”
Martin has Covid.
A shame, Winds was just around the corner. Rest up!
So they did a premiere of Episode 1 or something and there’s a couple of twitter impressions (disclaimer: there likely has been positive twitter impressions of every upcoming piece of nerd content in the history of the visual medium, so take it as a noisy signal):
lol as if any impressions coming out now are going to be anything other than positive, or otherwise buried by an NDA.
Hell, even in elementary school I knew that JK Rowling had stopped listening to her editor by the 4th book. I may not have understood why yet, but I still knew it was bloated. It tempered my enthusiasm real fast, and I never even bothered with the later books.
I am perfectly willing to give House of the Dragon a chance. Both the world and general lack of plot armor were definite positives in Game of Thrones. A fresh start with new showrunners is welcome, especially if they’ve absorbed the message that we were there for the political intrigue, not the gratuitous torture & rape scenes. Also, dragons. Having dragons, especially if given minimal screen time for maximum impact, is always a good thing.