The following is a conversation regarding both the A Song of Ice and Fire books and the Game of Thrones television show. It contains spoilers for the five ASOIAF books and the show through Season Five, Episode Four.
DF: Did you watch last night?
TEB: I did. It felt like it was just a murder montage.
DF: Bronn and Jaime were fun
TEB: They were. And I’m totally fine with the book and show being different. They are separate in my mind. And maybe there is no way to make the Sand Snakes not suck, but do they have to suck that much?
DF: I’ve always considered the sand snakes to be the worst plotline in the novels.
TEB: It was just: “Here we are. In our desert tent. With, uh, a carpet. And no shovels. But we buried this guy up to his head. And apparently we don’t need food or anything? Do we live here? How did our step-mother find us?”
So. The new trailer for the new Star Wars is out. Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Episode 7. If you haven’t watched it yet, here you go:
Okay, did you watch it? As you saw, the entire thing is set to a monologue by Luke Skywalker, talking about the Force and his family.
The one aspect of it that I find most notable is that, when referring to having a strong gift for the Force, Luke does not say my father had it, but my father has it. This suggests that, in Luke’s opinion, Anakin Skywalker, aka Darth Vader, should be referred to in the present tense and not the past. (Yes, the dialogue is based on a very similar monologue in Return of the Jedi, but that doesn’t explain why he is speaking as if his father is still alive.) Continue reading “Can Darth Vader Be Forgiven?”→
Note: this assumes you have seen every episode of Game of Thrones, through Episode One of Season Five. I do not assume that you have read the books, but this does contain spoilers for one plot point in Book Five, A Dance with Dragons.
It is possible that we saw, in the season premiere, the first death of a major character in HBO’s Game of Thrones who is not yet dead in the books. That man? Mance Rayder, the King of the Wildlings, Wildest Man of them All, burned at the stake.
This recent GQ article, “The Secret to Success is Saying ‘I Quit,'” made me feel better about the number of television shows that I have completely abandoned attempting to watch. I decided to compile a list of these. Now, I decided to only include television shows that are generally considered “good.” I also chose to only include ones that have some kind of an overarching narrative, meaning that things like South Park and Family Guy don’t make the list.
1. The Office. I loved this television show. It might actually be the first show that I ever really liked. But then it became the thing that you are holding onto some loyalty for and you don’t know why. And then it just wouldn’t go away. That person lingering at the party, telling the same jokes, hoping for the same laughs.
2. House of Cards. I wrote an entire separate blog post about why I think this show is dumb, but I was still excited for Season Three. Until I got two episodes into it and realized, you know what? What’s the point of suffering through this? I don’t care about these people. I don’t like the storytelling techniques. It’s not even that I want the characters in it to fail. I just don’t care at all what happens. Claire has a hearing to be an ambassador or something? Don’t care. Doug is in a hospital bed and might have amnesia? Don’t care. Frank is president and he killed a terrorist or something? Don’t care. Everyone is bisexual? Well, that caught me off guard, but I still don’t care.
This quote is so far removed from the original line from the French novel it’s quoting, that it has ceased to have any meaning.
Note: this blog post is written assuming that you have seen Seasons One through Four of Game of Thrones. If you have not read the books, I avoid any significant spoilers.
We all know that people die unexpectedly in Game of Thrones, and we all know that no one is safe. Not protagonists, not women, not children. Especially not Starks or their friends.
And it is also no secret that, in Season Five, we are going to see people start to die who have not died in the books. I previously wrote about this, and how excited I am about it, in Why All the Bad News About Game of Thrones is Actually Good News. The storylines in GOT have become crowded, muddled, confusing. Too many aspiring royals with too many backstabbing sycophants in too many locations.
But there is one character that I hope dies this season, and that character is Daenerys Targaryen, aka Khaleesi, aka Mother of Dragons, aka Mrs. Khal Drogo, aka etc.
Her.
Why? First of all, I think her story has been pretty boring since Season One, during which her story was the best part of the show. The relationship between Mr. and Mrs. Drogo is one for the ages, especially the part where she eats a horse heart. Plus there’s the phenomenal ending scene with the fire, the screaming witch and the dragon babies. Continue reading “Slouching Towards Westeros: Why I Hope Daenerys Dies in Season Five (And Who Should Kill Her)”→
Before you read: I assume you have seen the first four seasons of Game of Thrones, but have not necessarily read the books. I have carefully written this to not give anything major away about upcoming plotlines that may or may not be in the show. (But note: book readers, this is written for you as well. I just tried to keep it vague enough for the non-readers.)
But here’s the thing: all of this is actually good news.
And here are the reasons why:
1. The fourth and fifth books of A Song of Ice and Fire are not as good as the first three books. If you aren’t aware, the show has thus been adapted with Book One (A Game of Thrones) inspiring Season One, Book Two (A Clash of Kings) inspiring Season Two, and Book Three (A Storm of Swords) inspiring Seasons Three and Four. The confusing thing is that Books Four and Five are actually parallel storylines, because Martin’s story and characters got so bloated, epic, and unfocused that he had to say “I’m not even including Jon Snow, Tyrion, or Daenerys in Book Four.”
Sure, I couldn’t put this book down, but it’s definitely my fifth favorite of the five books.
Everyone agrees that A Feast for Crows is, without a doubt, the worst book in the series. He introduces many new storylines, settings, and characters, while ignoring established ones, but, more importantly, these new storylines are not as compelling as the established ones. In A Dance with Dragons, he returns to many of those characters, but it basically feels like he is not very focused and that no one helped him edit any of it. Yes, some amazing things happen, and a lot of it is beautiful, poetic writing, but there are also other parts that are basically just kinda boring, and lots of other parts where you just aren’t sure what is going on.
2. There is a 150-page section of A Feast for Crows dedicated to pirates electing a new Pirate King, and it will not be in Season Five. The worst portion of the ASOIAF storyline is, almost indisputably in my opinion, the half dozen chapters in which the Greyjoys (Theon’s sister and four uncles) all decide to have something called a “kingsmoot,” during which they figure out who will be the new King of the Iron Islands, i.e. the new Pirate King. It’s long, boring, confusing, and becomes predictable about halfway through. How we know that we won’t have to suffer through this endless kingsmooting in Season Five? Because not a single new Greyjoy has been cast, and we should all be very thankful for that. Continue reading “Why All the Bad News About Game of Thrones is Actually Good News”→
That’s because this blog post has unusual content, especially for this blog.
Captain America. Not a real person, but not someone you should get mocked for admiring.
I often use this blog in critical or cynical ways. Mocking things like Ocean’s Eleven, Fast and/or Furious films, House of Cards, etc. I call things dumb or bad. The specific article that I previously wrote about this was “Guys, Let’s Take it Easy on the Superhero Shaming Concept.” And I still do agree with my concept in that, which is we should be careful about creating buzzphrases like “superhero shaming” and that the director of Guardians of the Galaxy probably isn’t really getting “shamed,” whether he wins an Oscar or not.
But I recently saw, when reading through the search terms that have lead people to this blog, that someone stumbled across it as the result of searching “made fun of for liking superheroes.” Because of the possibility that someone might end up on this site as a result of searching for help after getting made fun of for liking superheroes, I felt obligated to write a blog post to assist the next person who might end up here for that reason. Continue reading “Made Fun Of, For Liking Superheroes…”→
Note: The following contains “spoilers” for the novel A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin. Some of these spoilers are based on details that did not make it into the HBO television show (possible not yet, possibly not ever). However, there are no spoilers for Martin’s subsequent novels in his A Song of Ice and Fire series. There is also a lot of information about The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, but that book came out a long time ago.
If you are not familiar with The Sun Also Rises, the narrator is Jake Barnes, an impotent American expatriate living in Paris in the 1920s. Jake Barnes is, for our purposes, both the Ned Stark and Jon Snow of his story. Like Ned Stark, he holds unfortunate secrets, and like Jon Snow, he is held back by forces beyond his power.
What Hemingway does in TSAR is something that Martin does in A Game of Thrones: he gives us unclear inner monologues, in which a truth is hinted but not revealed. In TSAR, we get it was a rotten way to be wounded and a flashback scene in which a commanding officer assures Jake that he gave more than his life, but without ever specifying what exactly it was that he gave. As the novel goes on, and if you read the Wikipedia page or discuss it in class (or, sometimes, if you just read the back cover), you realize that Jake suffered a wound that resulted in impotence. The details are unclear. Is he a eunuch? Is he simply impotent? What exactly happened? This stuff is never explained, but there is one thing everyone can agree on: there is no other explanation for the novel, and a bunch of those scenes, other than Jake not being at 100% as far as his genitalia is concerned. But that Hemingway decided to just allude to this as heavily as possible without every actually saying it.
