Oh for fuck’s sake.
I agree completely. SenorBeef has done us a service.
Or as DrDeth would put it
I agree completely.
I read voraciously, but have just bought the first DVD series of Game of Thrones (after a friend recommended it.)
I’d be interested in a thread that just discussed the TV series, as I’m going to read the book later.
When it comes to any high profile adaptation it always leads a double life: its life as an adaptation of the source material and its life as a work of art in its own medium.
These traits are fairly independent. Something can be a terrible or incomplete adaptation, and a wonderful work of art in its own right. The converse can also be true – many of the screenplays Stephen King writes are very good adaptations but terrible work of televisions or film, contrasted with Kubrick’s The Shining which isn’t a particularly stunning adaptation, but a masterpiece of filmmaking.
Whenever we discuss an adaptation of an already somewhat popular work, we always tend to focus on its quality as an adaptation. Even worse: we often use the source material to explain away poor storytelling in its status as its own work. Explaining away plot holes as “oh, that makes sense because in the books…” is common.
There’s nothing wrong with viewing an adaptation in terms of what it’s adapting. And it can shed plenty of light on the work, explain things, and make it more enjoyable for some. However, there is an immense amount of merit in letting a work stand on its own. All Beef’s GOT threads are doing is providing a space where the series can be analyzed as a standalone work of fiction, which stands or falls on its own merit. Where a plot hole is a plot hole and can be rightly criticized even if it makes sense to book readers. Where changes in characters aren’t squabbled abount when it’s a change that makes the character better given that it’s a show with a 1 hour running time. Sometimes losing nuances, changing or merging scenes, or altering characters is important to work within a medium, and having a place to discount the original is a place where you can truly analyze these traits in a distilled fashion. How they work as a character within their medium rather than as a proxy of an already written character.
If anything, being unable to do anything other than draw allusions to the book shows a profound lack of ability to intelligently critique television as its own medium and a certain amount of inflexibility in analyzing a work in general. Having a spot to disregard the books is a very good way to have a focused discussion on a work’s own merits, because in my experience, if it’s not it will be judged almost solely on its quality as an adaptation, not a holistic work.
Needing taped what?
I’d agree with this. Take the US version of House of Cards, which has approximately nothing at all to do with the book except it’s about a scheming politician called Francis and there’s a journalist in it too, as well as some broadly similar plot points.
It’s still a good show and it’s still a good book, even if they don’t share many similarities.
Hey! There’s all sorts of fucking going on in GoT, so that should have been in a spoiler box!!
It’s an annoying American regionalism that I think is an Anglicization of some Central European regionalism. Feel free to want kill any user of it; we do.
I can never tell whether that sort of thing is a weird American thing (like referring to pizzas as “pie” when they clearly aren’t), a reference to a TV show I’ve never heard of, or someone making an egregious typographical error.
Good to know it’s apparently the first, even if it still doesn’t make any more sense that way. 
Oh, yeah, like YOU guys are all announcers for the ABC. 
Back to the topic, hasn’t he read those fucking books yet?
Why is a pizza “clearly” not a pie? It’s a regionalism that I don’t use myself, but I can’t see why it’s clearly wrong. It may not have every attribute that one thinks of when one thinks of a pie, but it certainly has most of them.
Wrong type of crust. Pies (even salty pies, quiches, what have you) are made with pastry dough. Pizzas are made with bread dough.
So, I can’t make a pie with a Graham Cracker crust?
I do not know what that is, I’m afraid
Graham crackers or digestive biscuits are crumbled and mixed with butter, etc., to make a sweet pie crust. It’s a common American recipe.
For goodness’ sake. A pie is stuff in a crust. Is there a crust? Is there stuff in it? Then it can be a pie.
Then that probably counts as pastry dough. There’s like a million types of it. But bread specifically isn’t.
Hey, I’m not the one who came up with food cladistics. That would be the French.
(fuck, that’s me, too)
What about Hot Pockets?
They can only fit into food cladistics if they are food.
Don’t tell the manufacturers of Moon Pies.
Actually, the provincialism displayed in pretending that pizza is not a pie would seem to be indicative that one’s education is limited to British culinary experiences.
Pizza has been known as a pie since its importation from Italy, (where the word pizza is a derivative of the word for pie).
Claiming that a pizza could not be a pie is reminiscent of the guy I encountered who claimed that a spoon could not be a utensil because (in his mind) utensils could only refer to farming utensils.
I think there is some debate about where the word “pizza” comes from. But yeah, this idea that a word can only be used the way I’m used to hearing it is… provincial. But only if you live in the provinces. Because if you don’t live in the provinces, you can’t be provincial.