A Game of Thrones - TV Show Discussion Thread

[Lorizael]

Certainly, but part of the joy of ASOIAF specifically is its depth. If you want slicker stories, you've chosen the wrong series to follow.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Indeed.

[Dinner]

Simple stories for simple minds. Some readers want everything spoon feed to them while others take joy in reading between the lines and puzzling things out on their own from small fragments. The later type of reader are the ones who truly love the depth and detail of the books.

[Imran Siddiqui]

There's nothing wrong with preferring slicker, simpler stories with faster pacing. It's a stylistic choice and a stylistic preference.

Let's turn that around "There's nothing wrong with preferring world building, complex stories with slower pacing. It's a stylistic choice and a stylistic preference."

Right now there is the best of both worlds: The books allow for the more complex, world building narrative, while the show has the slicker, simpler story. Your brother, however, wants both to be the same type of story and therefore wants to say **** off to the people who want the more complex story, because he being himself: a complete tool.

FWIW, a more slicker, simpler story likely wouldn't have gotten picked up by HBO for a show. It was its epic nature that grabbed the imagination of the showrunners.

[Dinner]

This thing isn't just epic, it redefines what epic truly is. I'd say traditional fantasy trilogies, like LotR or Dragonlance, were epic stories but this is well beyond that plus GRRM throws in a huge amount of realism which makes the whole experience better and more emursive. As others have said the level of detail is a big part of that feel plus it makes the story even more interesting because each (of the many, many characters including the minor characters) all saw different events from their own particular point of view and some of them even saw different parts of the events but not the whole event in question. That means you have to filter information based upon what the characters likely motivations were/are plus there is a ton of history and events (a whole time line's worth really) sprinkled here and there all throughout the series so that gives lots of juicy puzzle pieces for readers to work with. One of the reason GRRM takes so long to write each of these books is because he obsessively goes over every tiny detail to make sure he gets the hints and puzzle pieces right.

That means this series is more than just a fantasy story, it also has bits of a detective story in it, bits of drama, bits of romance, and lastly an almost Tolstoy like aspect going into describing things like culture, dress, mannerism, styles, etc... All in extensive detail. After reading Tolstoy you have a damn good idea about what it was really like living in early 19th century Tsarist Russia right down to clothing, interior decorating, social moores, class interactions, food types, etc... The same comes out on the fictional place of Westeros.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Um, let's not get too hyperbolic here. LOTR has the Similarion and an entire invented language that actually made linguistic sense (from what I've heard).

[Berzerker]

I dont want too much info but does the kingslayer dude with 1 hand know he's the father of the king?

[Guynemer]

The guy on the right has your answer:

[Berzerker]

he'd have to know, he's been banging his mom

who's your daddy

[Colon™]

Right, time to stop reading this threads since some tools really can't be arsed to use spoilers tags.

[regexcellent]

It's pretty much just Oerdin doing that.

[DinoDoc]

Right, time to stop reading this threads since some tools really can't be arsed to use spoilers tags.

Why are you in a TV discussion thread if you didn't want spoilers?

[pchang]

Right, time to stop reading this threads since some tools really can't be arsed to use spoilers tags.

So the bit about the Kingslayer dude banging the King's mom was revealed in episode 1. Does this really need spoilers?

[Nikolai]

My thoughts exactly.

[Felch]

Spoiler:

Darth Vader is Luke's father