I enjoyed the books
I've enjoyed the shows, too.
For different reasons, p'raps.
Personally, I liked the way the books were written. It has flaws, as well, mind. For example - I very much enjoy the conceit of each chapter being written from a characters perspective. I enjoy the way the plot unfolds under this form; how you receive a myriad of perspectives, how this kind of defeats the idea of having a main hero, that it becomes ensemble with many important players. It also somewhat, then, confounds predictability, as there become many different players involved. This is helped by a willingness to kill off important characters.*
There's a downside to this though, I think the reader can become inundated with too many characters to try and empathise with at once. While I like the character now (and even more from the show, which also benefits from some excellent actors**) I reacted this way to Davos. Who the fuck is
this guy? Don't introduce new people! I want to know about what's happening to x y z!! Arghh!
[spoiler]*Note: I think, spoilers for the people who had already read the books aside, this worked better in the show. People were already predisposed to think of Ned Stark as the main hero figure, I think, both due to his emphasis on 'honour' compared to other more ambiguous characters, and the emphasis on his family setting up his motivations. Also, Sean Bean. So I think that shock factor probably worked better in the show. I've known little old ladies to watch and enjoy it, going "they killed 'im orf!"
[/spoiler]
**The actors in the show are almost universally fantastic - I think a good actor can bring more to the original source material than was there originally. F.ex in Harry Potter I thought Alan Rickman bought more to the character of Snape, i.e made him a more interesting and complex character, than was originally strictly on the page. I think this happens on GoT as well. Particularly re: Lena Headey as Cersei. The only representation I can't fully get on with is the gormlessness of Jon Snow, which isn't something I felt when reading the book. Which is no personal criticism of Kit Harrington, as I suspect he's received direction to play the character in this way. But I think that ends up making the character less of a character, and more of a caricature. I.e less than was on the page, rather than more.
I think in the last two-partners of the book(s), Martin had perhaps bitten off a bit more than he could chew, in a sense. Which is not to say he didn't handle the material well, just that...well, as he admitted himself, it took a lot longer for him to get through than he thought it would, and necessitated chopping what was going to be one book into two. (iirc) This is also deeply worrying given he's not a young man >.>
That said, I think he knows where he's going. It's just perhaps not easy to get there while trying to do full justice to the individual stories being told as part of the whole.
Tolkien was an influence for Martin, but so were historical fiction novels, like Maurice Drunon's The Iron King. I think he straddles both genres pretty well, in his attempt to bring more of a gritty realistic element to fantasy, i.e low fantasy. (I also really enjoyed Helen Castor's small article comparing some of his female characters to figures from history
http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2014/mar/31/game-of-thrones-women-westeros-lannister-stark-targaryen)
The books are very rapey, yeah. And also very killy. But y'know, in the society he's depicting, raping and killing are stuff that happens a lot. It's deliberately a brutal setting. I think the show has actually been more gratuitous in that regards, in some senses, though not others. It's a difficult one to unpick fully. While it doesn't harm my own enjoyment of it, there's a definite undercurrent of male-gaze and sex-sells to the show. (Game of Boobs!) This could easily be sorted by the introduction of moar cock into proceedings >.> There's an element of gratuitousness to the violence in the show, i.e the camera focusing on it fully and unflinchingly, which I think is done for shock value. I don't mind this either, really, apart from [spoiler] the red viper scene with I didn't watch all the way through BECAUSE I HEARD IT HAD EXPLODING EYES, AND I DON'T DO EYES. [/spoiler]
It's both simultaneously interesting and disappointing that some of the things that were more subtle in the book become obvious and overt in the show. On the one hand, this is great, because in choosing what things to bring to the forefront and make obvious you're having your own interpretation on the source material. On the other, it does sort of feel that... I know the material is necessarily condensed, but by losing subtlety sometimes it feels like...the tv watching audience is automatically considered more stupid and incapable of understanding nuance than book readers. Which is a bit weird when you're, y'know, both.
On the subject of rapeyness in the books though, I've heard a lot of people condemn them for being misogynistic because of this, which is something I don't really accept. I don't agree that choosing depiction of a
society that views and treats women a certain way, is any kind of reflection of the author or the book itself. I wouldn't agree that depiction of misogynistic
characters shows that, either. If you look at the book you'll see many strong female characters who are doing what they're doing respectively (often intruding into spaces or powers considered primarily masculine)
despite the limitations placed on them externally by the society in which they live. They're outliers in that society (i.e the exception rather than the rule), but they are who the book chooses to focus on as characters. To such an extent (the list of female characters who do this is pretty long, and the amount of conversations had about it fairly extensive) that I'd go as far as to say it's a central theme or preoccupation.
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Topic: Throne of Game of Thronesing. [POSSIBLE SPOILER WARNINGS] (Read 3157 times)