Yup, they skipped the whole shit hitting the fan at the Fist, kept us with Sam’s POV and put him out collecting fire"wood" instead of at the camp.
I have to credit the writers - they are doing a pretty damn good job of delivering the plot points and character development, while trimming like all hell. While I might have liked to get a deeper feeling for Davos’s suffering and desperation, and I miss Strong Belwas, I think it’s generally to the good. A few sentences between Dany and Jorah convey the struggle about where to go and whether to buy slaves that seemed to take ages in the book, for instance.
Was I the only one who loved that Winterfell is now a smoking ruin in the opening credits? Nice touch.
My question is how are they going to handle the aging of the young actors? We are on Season 3, presumably only months after the events of Book 1 and the actors have all aged two+ years in real life.
My WAG is that this is going to be most apparent with Bran, Rickon and Arya. Sansa certainly looks more womanly than season 1.
I don’t remember it ever being spelled out how long it is between the events of the first book and book 4, did I miss something?
It’s already pretty apparent with Bran. I was watching a couple season 1 episodes the other day with my roommate, who’s just getting into the series, and I couldn’t help but thinking how young Bran looked just compared to what he looked like in season 2. He’ll look a bit older this season, too.
And GRRM always avoided talking about exactly how much times passes in the books. But we do now that book 1 is pretty damn close to a year. It has to be enough time for Dany to get married to Khal Drogo, get pregnant, and be far enough along in the pregnancy that when she goes into premature labor thanks to Mirr Maz Duuri, no one thinks it’s that odd.
So I’d say at least 8 months for book 1, possibly as much as 10 or 11.
After that, we’re less sure. Book 2 seems to be less time. Maybe only half a year, same for book 3.
Books 4 and 5 sort of happen at the same time, and I got the feeling they took more time than books 2/3, if only because Sam has enough time to go from Castle Black to Eastwatch by the Sea, then sail to Braavos, then shit around Braavos for a long time (I gathered at least a month,) then sail to Oldtown. And a ship from Braavos to Oldtown would take a while, since Oldtown is on the complete opposite side of Westeros as Braavos, so they had to go all the way down the Narrow Sea, then “under” Dorne, then back north a bit.
Plus, Victarion does a similarly long sea voyage. He sails from The Iron Isles, all the way south along The Westerlands and The Reach, around Dorne, and then along the southern coast of Essos until he reaches Slaver’s Bay.
I was SO disappointed they left him out. I was looking forward to seeing the casting and the costuming generally, and the shitting scene* in particular. It was so funny and well-written and could picture the whole thing and wanted to see how HBO would handle it. Now who’s gonna eat poisoned locusts?
** I can’t believe I just typed that out …*
Yeah, I almost missed it, because someone was talking, but I caught the “-burn” and figured out it was him.
I’m ok with that, it’s an easy enough way to introduce him. All of the Harrenhall stuff is compressed and “cleaned up” in the TV series. My prediction is that Robb puts Roose in charge now, he makes Qyburn his “quasi-Maester,” since there’s no real Maester, and in the next episode or two Jaime and Brienne get captured by The Brave Companions, he gets his hand cut off, and they are taken to Harrenhall.
Jaime meets Qyburn, who heals him and tells him all about his failed attempt at becoming a Maester. Jaime meets Roose, who then frees him.
I’m wondering how the show will handle that…will they come right out and let us know then and there that Roose has switched sides, or at least is giving Jaime back to Tywin to convince him he is willing to switch? Or will they have Roose concoct some lie that makes it seem like he’s still sworn to The North?
Watching Tywin tell his son how much he despises him was a lot harder to watch than it was to read. Because of Peter Dinklage, the real live person. He had to listen to it and I had to wonder if hearing that caused him any real pain.
One of the things niggling at me is that Cat and Robb still don’t know what happened at Winterfell. Cat’s main reason in the book for releasing Jaime was fueled by her grief over Bran and Rickon. It just seems odd that this hasn’t even come up yet in the show.
I hadn’t read any of the books while watching the last season. This year I read them all first after hearing from several people that the show was more enjoyable if you’d read the books.
Well, I’m not sure. I loved the books at first, until I got to the point where I realized nothing was really happening in terms of moving along the main plot elements. Daeneris’s story was great early on, but once she takes the city it bogs down into typical medieval court drama and goes nowhere for a long time. Arya wanders around and gets into various adventures, but never does make it back to her family or become a major figure in the supposedly unfolding drama. More major characters are killed off before they do anything of note in terms of the main story line. By the end of the last book I was quite annoyed at the glacial pace.
Hell, “Winter is coming” is the tagline to the show, and it never comes. At half a book per season, it won’t be here for a decade, assuming GRRM ever gets around to writing about it before he grows infirm or dies, and that the show maintains an audience long enough for us to see how it ends before it is canceled.
So I actually hope the TV series starts diverging from the books substantially, if it means picking up the pace of the main plot threads.
Yeah, welcome to the fandom. Now imagine you waited 5 years each for AFFC and ADWD.
I’m pretty confident that they’ll change things around. There are already some pretty large changes in the story and the first three books move at a decent pace, at least compared to the last two. I imagine that AFFC and ADWD will be the end of season 4 and then season 5 and part of 6. The two books together have less plot than Storm of Swords and it’s two seasons. I don’t expect them to get that much even with their length.