HBO adaptation of Game of Thrones - will this be just for nerds? (NO SPOILERS PLEASE)

maybe you take this show... too srs ??

that's not it at all

dammit this show is kind of silly. now i feel really self-conscious about wearing cloth of gold pantaloons to the office.

thought this last episode was grrrreat (tony the tiger voice), best one yet possibly. was feeling really down on this season before, really hating all the non-book scenes and feeling like they were giving short shrift to important moments.

I don't enjoy the addition of even more awkward expository dialogues given in the context of unsexy sex scenes that weren't in the original book. The gross stuff that happens in the book would totally be enough for this show.

― Moodles, Thursday, May 3, 2012 12:41 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

agreed, my past comment was just to reflect that some ppl i know irl seem to think the book was some kinda chaste, trad lord of the rings thing and that all the sex is "HBO being HBO"....martin's a perv

increasingly so! (although probably he just got edited down in ealrier books).

imho the silly fun lurid quality is a central and knowingly employed aspect of the show, which is why its so much better than like some po faced lord of the rings bullshit

basically otm. there is after all a dwarf who is actually just a little fella.

basically otm. there is after all a dwarf who is actually just a little fella.

― Roberto Spiralli, Thursday, May 3, 2012 12:54 PM (5 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

huh?

some ppl i know irl seem to think the book was some kinda chaste, trad lord of the rings thing

This is odd, because when the books came out originally they were totally sold as an "adult" take on fantasy i.e. there was violence, swearing, nudity etc. And the books do have all those things but HBO have really been piling it on, seemingly for no good reason.

This is odd, because when the books came out originally they were totally sold as an "adult" take on fantasy

yeah but it's reaching ppl now who have basically one (or two give or take narnia) reference for "fantasy"

its really well crafted trashy entertainment, there are not a lot of other qualities operating particularly, nor by the light of griffinhall is there any need to be

what does well crafted trashy even mean? not challenging you, just not sure i get what you mean to mean.

just like lurid ott unpretentious fun etc

like law & order

fair enough. like makepeace thackery, but gone all fat and beardo.

the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: swords and dragons

m@tt - having a 'little person' in the main cast of characters instead of a beardy, axe wielding fantasy dwarf, is one of the ways grrm is having fun with the fantasy genre. see also the life and times of stubbornly honourable hero ned stark.

ah gotcha

I feel like Martin has a lot more to say about politics, gender, etc. than Tolkien did. It's pretty interesting even if the strokes are broad.

yeah these books are trashy and complex and stupid and sometimes smart and everything else! they are awesome

xp definitely - though not as if that would be hard, how many women are even in LoTR? Galadriel & Eowyn aside, it's alllllll about the boys.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAnsW06v5t4

The sex is in there to replace that most gratuitous of GRRM's literary devices: the internal monologue. Or in certain cases, accompany it-- far better that there's humping going on while Littlefinger explains his fixation on Cat

interview with Bryan Cogman about sexposition/women/etc: http://thinkprogress.org/alyssa/2012/04/20/468061/bryan-cogman/

- there's a clearly demonstrable double standard in Thrones in that we get nonstop T&A and straight fucking but fleeting ON CAMERA DONG and the gay sex is of the mass effect variety with cutaway edits
- i could personally give two shits about the addition or subtraction of any sort of nudity but the suggestion that our at least once-a-show breast and beaver break is "in the book, totally canon" is a little disingenuous
- saying naked women is part and parcel with the corny adventure format suggests your expectations/standards are unnecessarily low.
- the old saw that "not every fantasy show HAS to step outside the Frazetta jacket art mold, but can you name one that does" applies and it doesn't even makes sense from a marketing perspective that HBO _wouldn't_ tone down thrones to at least sub-Dexter levels of softcore as i imagine the core target audience is largely women. people bent sideways to accommodate the incongruities of plot and logic that battlestar introduced mostly because it DIDN'T toe that line... i daresay thrones would be far more interesting and balanced a show if it were a lot less torture/standard porny.
- HBO and Showtime pad the vast majority of their original programming with cheesecake as a ratings booster regardless of the source material; that's pandering more or less by definition
- as per a lot of television conversation on ilx, these are the concerns of someone who watches the show and finds it better than most of what's on television, which is to say better than shit. asking good to be better shouldn't be a cause for affront, trolling and flag waving; it's the suggestion that you can like something and still wish it were better/less problematic/less composed of material for 14 year olds to jerk off to
- ^these are all super obvious points btw

I don't really watch Showtime, so I can't speak to that (nudity in Homeland wasn't absurd iirc tho), but aside from True Blood, Rome, and GoT (to an extent), do any of their shows really trade in excessive nudity, as though they have a quota to fill? I'm also not at all convinced that there's some sort of corporate memo/note to the show creators saying "more tits plz". In any case, I'd rather they continue to shoot it as they do as opposed to going to some sort of hazy softcore filter.

Was told that the Quarth dresses were changed from the book so every female wasn't exposing a breast, but idk if that's true.

Totally agree with forks there that if a show is decent there's nothing wrong with wanting it to be even better by fixing these things.

Don't know why you think that the core audience of GoT is women though.

not sure if this was addressed earlier, but i was pretty annoyed that OF COURSE the first significant African-American role in the show is to play a "savage" from the summer isles. i mean, i know they are described as "dark-skinned" in the books, but gtfo.

- there's a clearly demonstrable double standard in Thrones in that we get nonstop T&A and straight fucking but fleeting ON CAMERA DONG and the gay sex is of the mass effect variety with cutaway edits

― (Name Withheld to Avoid Hassle) (forksclovetofu), Thursday, May 3, 2012 5:48 PM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this bothers me most.

i daresay thrones would be far more interesting and balanced a show if it were a lot less torture/standard porny.

there's very little torture iirc, and i'd love to see a breakdown of viewership by gender

agree that the strong emphasis on tits & (female) ass is kind of lame, given that the show does feature so many strong & interesting female characters. imagine it would appeal more strongly to women if the softcore were less obviously designed to attract the male eye.

I'm also not at all convinced that there's some sort of corporate memo/note to the show creators saying "more tits plz

I remember reading that Party Down literally got these sorts of notes on their Starz show, so it would not be a stretch to assume that this would happen on other premium channels. There is a lot of network pressure to differentiate the content as "for adults", and nudity and violence are the easiest way to accomplish those goals and appease the suits.

hasnt louis ck talked about how on his hbo sitcom they demanded nudity and since he didnt feel comfortable asking his female costar to do a nude scene he did it himself

Starz definitely has that mandate, and I'm sure HBO probably did as well (the guy running Starz's original programming used to run HBO's). I just think HBO has probably moved away from that kind of need to appeal. Nudity in Luck was brief, in Treme it's been largely non-existent (if its been there at all),

I'm also not at all convinced that there's some sort of corporate memo/note to the show creators saying "more tits plz".

there are literally stories of writers for HBO shows getting these notes

not sure if this was addressed earlier, but i was pretty annoyed that OF COURSE the first significant African-American role in the show is to play a "savage" from the summer isles. i mean, i know they are described as "dark-skinned" in the books, but gtfo.

― heated debate over derpy hooves (jon /via/ chi 2.0), Thursday, May 3, 2012 6:01 PM (28 minutes ago) Bookmark

pretty sure that british soundin dude wasnt american

lmao

not sure if this was addressed earlier, but i was pretty annoyed that OF COURSE the first significant African-American role in the show is to play a "savage" from the summer isles.

Both Xaro Xhoan Daxos and Salladhor Saan seem much less savage to me than your average soldier at Harrenhal.

indeed

summer isles-american

Boardwalk Empire has just as much nudity as GOT, but for some reason it seems more organically integrated with the plot

was this most recent episode the first one without any nudity in the series?

Boardwalk Empire has just as much nudity as GOT, but for some reason it seems more organically integrated with the plot

Haha are you serious.

Some of the sex stuff in Boardwalk made me cringe so hard.

The Wire didn't have a huge amount of sex scenes but any time it did they were pretty cringeworthy too

Some of the sex stuff in Boardwalk made me cringe so hard.

― polyphonic, Thursday, May 3, 2012 6:11 PM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i mean at least game of thrones hasn't devoted a totally annoying character to the task of showing boobs all the time

Was told that the Quarth dresses were changed from the book so every female wasn't exposing a breast, but idk if that's true.

Totally true. I had forgotten about that.

not sure if this was addressed earlier, but i was pretty annoyed that OF COURSE the first significant African-American role in the show is to play a "savage" from the summer isles. i mean, i know they are described as "dark-skinned" in the books, but gtfo.

The Summer Isles are where the black people come from in this particular world. I don't get your point.

yeah that's weird they took out the one-boob dresses since they've been so boob centric so far

they could have fulfilled the entire season's boob quota in one Qarth-centric episode

i mean at least game of thrones hasn't devoted a totally annoying character to the task of showing boobs all the time

― l0u1s j0rdan (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Thursday, 3 May 2012 23:24 (Yesterday) Permalink

pretty sure Ros fits that bill