I don’t have HBO and I haven’t watched the dvd’s. I haven’t read the books either. So everything I know about the show is based on occasional clips and second hand descriptions.
But it seems like all I ever hear being talked about are murders and torture and executions and rapes and kidnappings and massacres and plotting and beatings and battles and oh god the blood was everywhere…
Is this accurate? Is the show really an ongoing series of horrible events one after another? Or are there a lot of lighter moments but they just don’t get mentioned in comments about the show?
There is much more dialog and intrigue than slaughter. All of the terrible things that happen are set up in advance with plenty of build up and warnings for those that watch carefully.
But yeah its set during a brutal bloody five way civil war. Lots of bad stuff happens, but yes there is also plenty of comic relief, a lot of it provided by the interaction between the courtiers at King’s Landing, especially Peter Dinklage’s character.
The books and the show is based on medieval European history, though in a fictional framework (arguably a fantasy framework, as dragons and magic exist). Read some medieval history, it will make Game of Thrones look tame by comparison.
Also, there is much intrigue and scheming going on, as mentioned above. This is what makes it more than a stupid mishmash of violence … the violence is integrated with the scheming and duplicity very nicely. We see the effects of the struggle for the Iron Throne on the people in the story. It makes the story much more powerful, IMHO.
Apparently there is quite a bit of extra sex scenes in the TV show especially in season 2 there is a lot of “sexposition” scenes which happens inside a brothel in Kings Landing which are not in the books.
I think this is key to understanding and enjoying George RR Martin. He likes to pull the rug out from under you. I’ll avoid names here, though at this point, the spoilers are pretty well known, but in book one (or season one of the TV show), there was a character who was clearly a major character. It seemed obvious that he was going to be playing a major role long-term. He gets arrested and threatened with death - OK, well, you can’t have a major character without him getting into and out of trouble. Particularly in the book, Martin goes out of his way to drop hints as to how this character might escape. Plans are laid, schemes are plotted, and everything’s in place for him to sacrifice his honor, but escape with his life. Then BOOM. Out of the blue, his head gets whacked off.
THAT’S what gets people. It’s not the violence, necessarily. It’s the setup. It’s the unexpectedness. It’s the way he toys with his audience and their expectations. It’s quite thrilling, actually. At least it was for me, the first time I read it. Now he’s been doing it for so long that it’s becoming more and more expected, and less of a surprise. But still.
Which to be fair, was a shock to everyone involved in the books as well.
I think a lot of it isn’t even the setup, or the graphicality(?) of the violence and sex scenes- there’s worse on HBO most weeks. It’s the matter-of-fact nature of it in the the Westerosi culture, which is clearly based heavily on 14th (or thereabouts) century medieval culture. It’s our modern sensibilities that are disturbed.
If I recall, there was a lot of the same shock about the HBO series “Rome” some years back- the level of sex and violence was shocking to a lot of people, even if it was relatively accurate as portrayals of ancient Rome go.
All of us CS mods were enjoying our brief vacation from the endless squabbles about Game of Thrones spoilers. To resume that vacation, I am declaring this to be a thread with spoilers in it, since the OP didn’t seem to expect to preclude them.
Spoil away, y’all. People who don’t want spoilers – don’t read this thread.
War, torture, backstabbing both literal and figurative, incest, people not being ver excellent to each other. Everyone in Westros is a dick, therefore there is a lot of dickery in both the book and the series.
It is my deepest wish that the dragons coming back burn the whole damned continent right down to the ground.
I actually have read a lot of medieval history. Enough to know it wasn’t a constant parade of horror and death. Most people weren’t killed by plagues or wars. If you had the impression they were, it’s because the historian chose to describe those incidents.
And that’s history, where the writer is supposedly constrained by objective reality. In fiction, the writer can just make up whatever he wants.
Well, Barbara Tuchman writes in “A Distant Mirror” of knights cutting off the hands and feet of peasants belonging to lords other than their own, strictly as a form of economic terrorism, not because the peasant had done anything bad. She writes of the siege of a French city where the besieger cut off the heads of some captured city residents and catapulted those heads into the city to “discourage” the residents. She writes of people in ordinary life walking past criminals who were broken on the wheel and left out for public display, or other criminals who were beheaded and their heads put on spikes. We got the pear, the Iron Maiden, the iron boot and a lot of other “fun” stuff from that period.
I’ll grant you that most people probably lived peaceful pastoral lives in Medieval times, but let’s not pretend that the level of violence was not WAY higher than what we are used to now. And Game of Thrones is set in a bloody civil war and deals with the principals in that war, it’s hardly a chronicle of peasant life. So … I still think Game of Thrones is RESTRAINED compared to what actually went on in medieval history.
My god, I think you’ve stumbled onto GRRM’s endgame! In the first pages of the last novel, a strange device of glass and steel will appear outside King’s Landing, and two men will stumble out. One, with raven hair, will proclaim: “Whoa.”
Most of those devices are in fact based on tall tales from the 19th century. Not that torture wasn’t common in medieval times, but it mostly involved nothing more sophisticated than the rack and hot pokers.