All right all right already! I watched Game of Thrones. At least, the first season. I will be watching season two soon.
Why did it take me so long to begin watching this extremely popular television series? It’s not like I haven’t known about it for all four seasons it’s been on TV. I even read the first book in the series, and a bit of the second. Ah, but there was the problem. I didn’t love the books. I didn’t hate them. I would even go so far as to say that there are things I admired about them. But I did not enjoy reading them. I found them tedious, with far, far too many points of view to allow me to lose myself in the story. It felt like every time I was starting to get into something, I would get ripped away from that aspect of it and thrust into something completely different. I wasn’t even that bothered by the fact that heroes died and villains survived. That was gutsy and I respect it. But the bottom line for me is that the books were a chore for me to read. I never plan to finish them.
Moving on the the TV series….
This is an extremely well-done series. Watching it, I can’t even fathom how much work went into every aspect of it. We see the actors — who all performed their roles extremely well (even the children) — but behind them think of the wardrobe, the props, the makeup, the set designers. They have many, many horses in some of the scenes. A great group of people got together to put this show together, down to the tiniest details. It must have been one heck of an undertaking!
As a TV series (disregarding my feelings about the book, which roughly follows season 1 and which I can scarcely recall anyway), this was just very, very good. It’s something special. Something you don’t see on TV, and when you do it’s certainly not this well done.
Watching the episodes, I saw a world hovering on the brink of destruction from enemies within and without. I saw what I know was the underlying theme of the books — the game the nobles play while the common folks suffer. And they all have their reasons, they all have a purpose — vengeance comes into things a lot. But at its heart, whether for noble or selfish reasons, it is a game that causes nothing but grief. Brave and noble men die while villains carry on. Or villains may die. But justice doesn’t really play into it.
Meanwhile, on the northern wall, strange things are happening. The dead are coming back to life and the wildlings are fleeing south. Winter is coming. We hear that a lot, but for all people say it, the truth of the matter is far, far away from the games they play.
The TV series has some of the same problems that the book had. There are a LOT of characters. I can’t keep them all straight; I don’t know what most of their names are and I can’t spell the ones I do know! (In this, actually, the book might have an edge. At least they repeat names in the text very often.) The perspective of the first season is split: You start with the Starks at Winterfell and Daenerys (I looked it up on IMDB) who is the daughter of the last kind who was overthrown by the Starks and the current Kind Robert. Then the Starks split, some going south to the capitol, some staying at Winterfell, and one going north to serve on the wall. Perspectives split further in the capitol as new characters and introduced, and Lady Stark heads south with evidence that the Lannisters tried to kill her son.
It remained challenging to keep track of it all. BUT…
The season had 10 episodes, about 11 hours of viewing time, which was about half as long as it took me to read the first book. So it was less tedious. Also, the way they divided the viewpoints, I got a bit of everyone in almost every episode. There weren’t long stretches when I was following someone or something I couldn’t care less about, wondering when we were going to get back to the thing I did care about.
And most importantly, because the TV series wasn’t narrowly focused in the points of view of scheming people, I felt that it allowed this story to take on a nice wordly feel. And after all, that’s what it’s about — a whole world!
For those reasons, I plan to continue watching into season 2.
I’ve been thorough and specific for a reason. I don’t love this series any more than I loved the books, but I do like it more than I liked the books and feel it is easier to sink into and lose myself. It’s very dramatic. They show scenes that have made me turn my head away (pouring molten gold onto a guy’s head!!!!!) They cut off a horse’s head and showed the blood pumping out. (They didn’t really kill the horse, did they? You can do that with computer graphics? Because it looked really real!!!)
Going forward, my greatest hope is that they will start giving more air time to naked men. I mean, if they’re going to show so many scenes of topless women or the full, rounded backside of women, or scenes of women having sex with men, women, and sometimes all of the above, the least they could do is show a few equally good looking men in the buff! I mean, HBO, I am a little taken aback by all the nudity, but mostly I just want my fair chance to oggle gorgeous men. 🙂
This is four years later. If you’ve been on the fence about this … maybe you’re like me and didn’t love the books … give them a try. It’s really a different experience to watch something on the big screen and this is truly an epic story that has been masterfully put together.
Warnings: Excessive, gory violence (realistic battles, beheadings, etc.), nudity, and sex are all involved in this story.