Funny thing about recaps: Some of the early feedback I got on the handful I did last season suggested people wanted less blow-by-blow, more macroanalysis. But I wonder how well that works for Game of Thrones: Friends, I've read all the books and watched every season so far twice, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't reach for a wiki a few times to make sure I had everything and everyone straight as we begin the third season.

I'm often afraid the show is going to shake less-obsessive Game of Thrones fans like a beauty in a bear pit, since we're reaching a critical mass of characters and politicking. Yet this is the season readers have anticipated most of all, and if the television adaptation has had one major strength so far it's its ability to abstract the muddy stuff and highlight over-arching themes.

I'll be your guide this season, and I'll try to focus on some of those themes, while seeing what I can do to help everyone keep their names, faces and facts straight as we return to the world of Westeros and beyond after a long, long winter.

Read the rest

I want it all, and I want it now. [Video Link]

My 9-year-old daughter is an avid World of Warcraft player, and enjoys reading Dungeons and Dragons manuals (We are joining a twice-monthly game that my friend is setting up). So it's no surprise that whenever she hears my wife and I discuss Game of Thrones (which we do a lot), her ears perk up. She wants to know everything about Arya Stark, the young female sword fighter. She begs us to let her watch the show. I wish she could watch it, too, but I don't want her to see the sex and nudity scenes. (I don't really mind her seeing the violent scenes.)

Out of curiosity, I searched Google for "censored game of thrones" and discovered that there are quite a few versions of Game of Thrones in which the sex and nudity scenes have been removed. The first search result is for censored GoT seasons 1 and 2 on the Pirate Bay. The person who uploaded them wrote:

Yep, you read it right. This is Game of Thrones censored. What does this mean?

-All of the nudity has been removed, some extreme swearing removed, and some other small things.

Don't worry, it has been done in a way that that will preserve the story. If a sex scene had anything important to the story in the dialogue, the dialogue was preserved without the nudity.

Why would someone want this?

-You don't want to watch a show with borderline pornography.

-You've seen it, but want to watch it with family, or a friend who would disapprove of the nudity and sex.

Enjoy!

I have not downloaded it these, even though I'm a paying HBO subscriber. I wish HBO would release a nudity-free version. I'd buy it in a minute.

UPDATE: My friend Peter Bebergal (author of the terrific book Too Much to Dream: A Psychedelic American Boyhood) emailed me about this post. He wrote:

Just looking at the comments on your Games of Thrones post. I kind of wish we were having the Gweek chat after this.

But yes, it's a complicated issue and I appreciate you being honest about it. I lean towards your feelings and I think it does have a lot to do with what is easily perceived as fantasy (outlandish violence) and what is easily perceived as not (rape, sexual bargaining, sexual power and abuse, etc.)

Well said, Peter. This is why I feel the way I do about the violence vs sex and nudity in GoT.

Winter is here. Which means it's time once again to start science-wanking the climate of George R.R. Martin's "Game of Thrones" series. Back in May, i09 had a great piece on possible astronomical explanations for Westeros' weird seasons, where Summer and Winter can each last a decade. The hard part (which prompted lots of great conversations here) is that the lengths of the seasons are apparently totally unpredictable. Here's an eight-year-long Summer. There's a Winter that lasts five years and another that lasts a generation. The implications for food storage, alone, are enough to drive one batty.

Word of Martin says this is magic. But it presents so many science-related questions that it's really, really fun to speculate about how you might explain the differences between that world and ours in purely naturalistic terms.

Now, at The Last Word on Nothing, Sean Treacy brings up a different sort of food-related problem that I'd not even considered while I was busy trying to figure out the volume of the average Westerosi grain silo. How do you grow wine grapes without predictable seasons?

... grapevines have a life cycle that depends on regular seasons. In winter, grapevines are dormant. Come spring they sprout leaves. As summer begins, they flower and tiny little grapes appear. Throughout the summer the grapes fill up with water, sugar and acid. The grapes are finally ready for picking in early autumn, then go back to sleep in winter. This cycle is why wineries can rely on a yearly grape yield. Obviously, in Westeros, something must be different about how grapes work.

But it turns out there is a real-world way to produce wine throughout an endless summer. São Francisco Valley is a wine-growing region in tropical Brazil that is only about 600 to 700 miles south of equator. Despite the constant warmth, they pump out two and sometimes three grape harvests a year. How? By depriving the vines of water and removing their leaves after every harvest, which forces them to hibernate. “They trick the plant into thinking it’s wintertime,” Busalacchi said.

The whole post is really interesting and you should read it. Who knew that the Arbor would lead me to be more educated about real-world booze?

Image: Wine, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from isante's photostream

DeviantART users Curtana and Kaleadora have both collaborated on an adorably violent mashup of George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series (which inspired HBO's Game of Thrones) and Edward Gorey, depicting some of the author's most gruesome events in the style of the darkly funny illustrator. Borrowing from the abecedarian format of Gorey's The Gashlycrumb Tinies, the artists have depicted exactly 26 of the most well-known and, ahem, gory scenes from the series of books. (Let that be a spoiler warning for events that have not yet taken place on Game of Thrones.) See the full set, entitled "A Very Gorey ASOIAFabet," on DeviantART. (via A.V. Club)

Larger sizes here. Boing Boing reader jojo.edtan's Flickr stream is full of wonderful photographs of cosplayers, and he shared a bunch of great shots from the recent PAX Prime convention in our Boing Boing Flickr pool. Here's a "Game of Thrones" cosplayer, as the character Daenerys Targaryen. I'm afraid we don't know the name of the cosplayer herself, but I'll update the post if/when someone identifies her! More of jojo.edtan's Pax Prime shots here; more Game of Thrones cosplayers at that event here. Check out this one incredible shot of a cosplayer as courtesan Fiora Cavazza, a character from Assassin's Creed 3.

[Video Link] Game of Thrones is not only one of best TV shows I've ever seen, it's also the most visually interesting (apart from the opening to Land of the Lost, of course). No wonder the show won six Creative Arts Emmy awards. Inside HBO's Game of Thrones is an excellent book that reveals the artistry and craftsmanship that goes into the making of the sets, costumes, and props of the TV series.

This official companion book gives fans new ways to enter this fictional world and discover more about the beloved (and reviled) characters and the electrifying plotlines. Hundreds of set photos, production and costume designs, storyboards, and insider stories reveal how the show's creators translated George R. R. Martin's best-selling fantasy series into the world of Westeros. Featuring interviews with key actors and crew members that capture the best scripted and unscripted moments from the first two seasons, as well as a preface by George R. R. Martin, this special volume, bound in a lavishly debossed padded cover, offers exclusive access to this unprecedented television series.

How can you go wrong with a lavishly debossed padded cover?

Inside HBO's Game of Thrones

If NFL players were characters from Game of Thrones —

Rob Bricken of Topless Robot has compiled a list for Maxim Magazine, a magazine that generally has nothing for me to look at. However, this list is a list of NFL players if they were characters from HBO's Game of Thrones. And it's slightly biased towards the NY Giants, so, therefore, I am biased towards this list. It's the perfect combination of nerdery and football! (via Rob Bricken on Twitter) — Jamie •

The man behind HBO's Game of Thrones, George R. R. Martin, is often asked about all that sex they have on the show (and in the books he wrote that inspired the show), like "Why do they have to have so much of it and show it on television?" He has provided Reuters a very astute and sensible answer that I think we can all appreciate:

“I can describe an axe entering a human skull in great explicit detail and no one will blink twice at it. I provide a similar description, just as detailed, of a penis entering a vagina, and I get letters about it and people swearing off,” he said.

“To my mind this is kind of frustrating, it’s madness. Ultimately, in the history of [the] world, penises entering vaginas have given a lot of people a lot of pleasure; axes entering skulls, well, not so much.”

There you have it: sex makes the world go 'round, violence makes us sad. I believe we are done here. Thank you, George R. R. Martin.

George R. R. Martin explains that there's a lot of sex in 'Game of Thrones' because sex is awesome [Warming Glow]