Yet that's the theme of this episode -- love, silly love, in all of its sick permutations. Once again into the breach!

In an episode strongly themed around unbalanced love relationships, the focus on Jon and Ygritte we get is lovely. Jon Snow, born and raised a lord of Winterfell and acquainted with the ways of warfare south of the Wall, is charmed -- and challenged -- in equal turns by her bafflement at their formalized ways. On one hand, he knows the understaffed Night's Watch is ill prepared to deal with a Wildling assault. And ill-prepared, too, to deal with an army founded in bravery, independence and self-preservation, rather than the marching orders of some distant lord.

When Ygritte mistakes a tumbledown windmill for a palace, we see both the good and the ill in her lack of acquaintance with Westerosi wealth and order. Yet when jealous Orell challenges Jon's ability to "hold onto her," (this is a woman doesn't even know what swooning is, literally) and when she once again reminds him he knows nothing, we can see him struggle with a value system that began unraveling when he failed to feel at home in the Stark family and that only continues when this new "family" not only rejects him equally, but makes him question his long-held values.

But on the other hand, the Wildlings have made six previous attempts to breach Castle Black and failed. If the Wildlings can win this impending battle, then he must break with everything he used to hold dear. If they can't, then Ygritte is likely to die. No matter what happens in the effort to come, Jon has lost things, and will continue to lose them. Ygritte seems to want to convince him that she can be his center -- that the loyalty of their love is more valuable than adherence to any side they fight for.

Her statement that they belong to each other recalls Shae's similar declaration to Tyrion last season (as well as Arya's plaintive "I can be your family" to Gendry), and illuminates how inherently untenable these promises are in the Game of Thrones universe when the power in the partnership is so uneven.

The scene with Osha back in Camp Bran illustrates the other side of being a woman like Ygritte -- it's a hard life North of the wall, where losing your partner to the White Walkers is a very real threat. Life and death mean entirely different things to Wildlings.

Meanwhile, Robb Stark is wondering how he's supposed to win a war with the distraction of his beautiful, beloved wife lounging around in the nude. How, indeed. And the Young Wolf's Lady Talisa is pregnant, an interesting development for the show to deal with so directly (in the books, the possible pregnancy of Robb's wife is just the stuff of unconfirmed conspiracy theories).

This is important. I had a discussion last week on Twitter about why, if Robert Baratheon could take the throne by rebellion, does, say, Tywin Lannister or some other close heir not now try to take it for himself. The answer is partially because Tywin prefers to rule from behind the scenes, using his children (primarily Cersei's marriage to the late king) to seize power.

But succession is essential to one's power claims -- Robert Baratheon had Targaryen ancestry, and lineage is important to the Iron Throne. It's the late king's (supposed) kids, not their grandfather, who are next in line, even arguably over the late king's brothers. Succession and bloodlines are paramount in this world, which is why Sansa's marriage is such a power play, and why Robb having an heir in the oven is a big deal. Talisa's baby would be a very valuable creature in the war for power among families.

The Stark and Tully family are on their way to the Frey-held Twins for Edmure's wedding to Roslin Frey (why did they have to change Asha Greyjoy's name to "Yara" to avoid confusion with Osha, and not change Roslin to avoid redundancy with the late and much-missed Ros?). Unfortunately they are delayed by weather, a hold-up cantankerous Walder Frey is sure to take personally.

Though Edmure doesn't seem concerned, Lady Catelyn is -- Frey is getting a wedding, though not "the wedding he wanted," she notes, looking pointedly at Talisa. Some of Robb's allies, including his own mother, have warned him all along that his marriage could lose him the war, and making it up to the Freys right now is essential.

Speaking of lineage, Margaery Tyrell tries to make Sansa feel better (Sansa's embittered reflection about being a "stupid girl with stupid dreams who never learns" is painfully striking) about her upcoming marriage to Tyrion by reminding her about the queenship it will create if she bears a child to the man they call "The Imp."

Poor Sansa's gone from believing she'll marry golden rose Loras and become a lady of Highgarden to being consigned to wed the youngest son of the family responsible for her father's death, and it's clear she's not attracted to Tyrion's stature. The books lavish on Tyrion as being quite ugly; it flatters the character to have him played by handsome Peter Dinklage, but I suppose one can suspend one's disbelief.

Margaery certainly can, and as she lightly encourages Sansa to be more open-minded sexually, the innocent younger lady wonders how Margaery, whom she assumes to have a similar upbringing to her own, learned such liberal values.

When Sansa asks if her mother taught her, Margaery's amused, condescending response is telling -- recall that her marriage to Joffrey depended on the idea that she's a maiden, and that she claimed Renly's "predilections" left her first marriage unconsummated. Margaery is clearly no maid, much more cunning than the sweet noblewoman simply obeying her family she represents herself as. It's good for her the Lannisters haven't quite figured that out.

Tyrion, too, wrestles with the moral dilemma of having to be wedded to an innocent young thing who is sure to loathe him. His friend and confidant Bronn counsels him against wanting to be liked by everyone -- a sellsword like Bronn probably couldn't see why marrying a beautiful young virgin and still getting to keep the saucy prositute with whom you're in love wouldn't be a dream bounty for everyone. These aren't thoughts Tyrion particularly wants to entertain, but can he help it?

On to more dark thoughts -- these Theon scenes are getting uncomfortably ruthless. Nearly everyone I know who hasn't read the books (and plenty of friends who have) are confused about what's happening to his character arc, why we need to see an illustration of him being so brutally tormented and broken by a man whose identity and motives are not even yet made clear. As we've said, in the books Theon disappears for a while after losing Winterfell, and emerges much-changed by his experiences since. We are now getting to view those experiences.

Last week readers speculated this choice is due in part to a contract issue; they might lose excellent actor Alfie Allen if the show followed the book's chronology and ignored him for two seasons. But it's hard to watch such unspeakable torture and mutilation happening to a character who was smug, unlikable, arrogant and stupid -- but fundamentally needy, relatable. He was so stellar last season, so touching as we watched his loss and increasing desperation in the name of claiming his identity and pleasing his father.

Onto further crimes of arrogance: Joffrey is cruel and not particularly bright, but he's noticed his grandfather has gently been freezing him out of any genuine tasks of ruling King's Landing. It seems Tywin plans to make good on his promise to Cersei that he can bring the King to heel, very quickly cowing Joff when he climbs the dais to the Iron Throne to fearlessly tower over the boy.

Yet Joff, who we know to be fascinated by the Targaryens' mad legacy of fire and ruin, is actually a little wiser than his elders here, evidencing genuine concern about the stories of dragons coming from the lands beyond. Yes, Daenerys' dragons are still little -- but they can grow big, can't they? Shouldn't King's Landing be concerned?

Remember how coldly Cersei once rejected the notion of sending resources to the Night's Watch to help protect against The Others? She disbelieves that "myths" can have more power than the sort she knows best. The Lannisters are generally too proud to be afraid of things they can't see, whether dragons or White Walkers. As unnatural threats of ice and fire descend on the kingdom from its periphery, we see that the ruling class might tear themselves apart over their own politics before they'll ever be prepared to unite against such things.

They needn't be worried about Daenerys just yet. When she negotiates with Yunkai, a city known primarily for the riches it's earned training and selling "bed slaves," even the promise of wealth and ships doesn't deter her from her slave liberation agenda. For her morals she desires to disrupt the entire economies of places and people she has yet to understand well, even at the expense of her original mission to reclaim her birthright in Westeros.

The Silver Queen's newly-large entourage does need food and resources, it's true, and the dragons -- though maybe still too small for war -- accord her enough power to make no compromises in the desert. She doesn't want to stop until she's freed the world.

Meanwhile, Tyrion makes an unfortuntely-symbolic gift to Shae of gold chains, which of course doesn't please her, as the man who purports to love her suggests she remain a kept woman while he undertakes the marriage in which he claims he doesn't have a choice. He really doesn't -- not so much because he's afraid of his father, but because he wants power, to play the game, and knows gratification from little else. Outside the realm of his status he'd be at an extreme disadvantage. Running away with Shae isn't an option.

And really, it's hard to tell why he even loves her so much. She often evidences admirable savvy and warm bravery in her dealings with Sansa, whom she seems to genuinely want to protect. But with Tyrion she is petulant, jealous, expensive, demanding -- on one hand rejecting the characterization of "whore," but on the other, requiring quite a lot of fancy treatment in order to be contented with their relationship. Whatever it is she wants, Tyrion can't or won't provide it to her, and rather than leave, she increases the pressure on his heart and his system of values.

Gendry learns he's a Baratheon bastard through Melisandre, who sails with him through the wreckage of the Blackwater battle. Recall she feels she could have prevented those losses if only Davos hadn't convinced Stannis to leave her behind (on the incredibly sound logic that nobody would respect a King who appeared to take the Throne by foreign sorcery -- the capital stands firmly in the faith of the Seven and might mistrust a red priestess).

Arya still hasn't forgiven the Brotherhood for accepting gold in exchange for Gendry's person, and when they decide to take a detour and chase a Lannister raiding party rather than continue bringing her to Riverrun to meet up with her family, it's the last straw for her, and she takes off running -- only to be taken hostage by Sandor "The Hound" Clegane. Oops.

In another unbalanced pairing, Jaime is allowed to be escorted to King's Landing by Bolton bannermen, an interesting move on the part of Roose Bolton, ostensibly a Stark ally on his way to Edmure Tully's wedding with the rest of the family. He needs to evade punishment by the Lannisters for what Locke did to Jaime's hand, but he seems a bit eager to curry favor with the Lannisters.

Notably Bolton doesn't seem to want to return Brienne, who should be allowed to go back to Catelyn Stark, if we're all on the same side, here. Jaime's farewell to Brienne is poignant evidence of the fact that despite what they've been through together, he still can do things she can't. The only thing he can do for her is make a promise that he'll see the Stark girls returned -- and you get the sense that Jaime means it.

Once he's departed, he learns more about unethical Maester Qyburn and his illicit "experiments" on dying people who wouldn't be missed. Everyone hates King's Landing's Maester, the crony Pycelle, but would this guy really be a better addition to the Lannister entourage?

Jaime also learns his throwing his weight around might have actually resulted in problems for Brienne. His lie about her being worth sapphires saved her from rape in Locke's camp, but has now stymied hostage negotiations with her father, Lord Selwyn of Tarth. When it dawns on Jaime she'll just be used as the "entertainment" for Bolton's unruly pets, Jaime once again plays the Daddy card to force his escort to turn around.

Side note: I've talked before about how Game of Thrones' factions are balanced like a game, and in the actual Game of Thrones board game, if you play as House Lannister, Tywin is one of the most powerful cards in your hand, and you will probably find yourself literally playing the Daddy Card repeatedly.

But it works, and when Jaime returns to Harrenhal to find Brienne facing a bear in a pit armed only with a wooden stick, he finally gets the chance to use his high-value person for something other than bullying people to do what he wants. By jumping into the pit to save her, the bannermen's cruel game is suddenly over -- nothing must happen to the Kingslayer, else all of House Bolton will be at risk. And he can leverage the Daddy Card to be allowed to leave with Brienne, too.

The motif that plays as the pair leave the dreary camp is Rains of Castamere, the Lannister fight song, so to speak. You can read the lyrics here or listen to The National's cover from Season 2's Blackwater end credits, but in summary it's a tune about what bleak ruin awaits those who stand up to the Lannisters.

What's notable about the song is the way the lyrics frame the historical narrative -- the sin of the decimated Reyne house was not so much its insubordination, but in the fact it even dared to compare itself, to claim its personhood was equal to that of The Lion.

It's an ambiguous anthem for Jaime's leading Brienne away safely from Harrenhal, because ultimately it reminds that despite making the honorable choice, the brave and the caring choice, his triumph over the situation came only from in the fact that in currency of Westeros, he simply had the fortune to matter more than anyone else in that scenario, including her.

For our discussion this week, if this episode was about the complicated fate of love and loyalty in a world of power imbalances, let's ask an easy question: Who's your favorite couple? And less easy, which pairing presented in this episode has the most complicated circumstances?

If Robb Stark were to win the war (and again, no spoilers further than this episode if you know them, please!) -- would it be because of love and honor, or in spite of it?

Finally, I'd love to know what you guys make of Shae. I couldn't figure her out in the books and I can't figure her out now. I look forward heartily to your enthusiastic, spoiler-free and respectful comments discussions every week. Please continue!

]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/05/14/game-of-thrones-s3e7-i-am-you.html/feed 197 http://boingboing.net/2013/05/06/game-of-brogues.html http://boingboing.net/2013/05/06/game-of-brogues.html#comments Mon, 06 May 2013 17:14:16 +0000 Rob Beschizza http://boingboing.net/?p=228594 fantastic article nitpicking the inconsistencies in Game of Thrones' deployment of regional British accents:

"The show has dragons, who cares if the accents don't match?": Well, first of all, I care. Second of all, the cornerstone of science fiction and fantasy fandom is nitpicking. Third of all, the fact that Game of Thrones doesn't take place within our collectively agreed-upon reality doesn't release it from its responsibility to verisimilitude or the maintenance of internal consistency within its own systems.

The latest episode of Game of Thrones was, in my humble opinion, far and away the most exciting one yet. Fire, fire and more fire, fatherhood and impeccable crescendoes. Such payoff for book fans, but what do viewers think?

Let's recap and discuss. I can't wait!

We begin the episode right where the last one left off. With fire! Well, with Sandor Clegane facing trial by combat against the Brotherhood Without Banners. Thoros of Myr may be a witty, drunk sort of character, but we see the way he and his group take the religion of R'hllor quite seriously ('R'hllor' is silly and unpronounceable, so it makes sense he just gets called the 'Lord of Light' on the show). It's a particularly disadvantageous set of circumstances for the Hound, who deeply fears fire.

That we expect he should lose makes it seem divine when he wins: proof of his innocence of various crimes in service of the Lannister crown, most of which have been done by his brother Gregor. Unfortunately for Arya, the Lord of Light can't seem to be bothered to punish Clegane over the death of her little friend the butcher's boy. And he can bring back Beric Dondarrion from the dead a supposed six times, but not re-attach Ned Stark's head. Supposed heroes who claimed to love her father let their religion prevent them from delivering her justice, and plan to sell her back to her family at Riverrun. And Gendry, the only comrade she has left, has decided to stay on in the Brotherhood, as her gender and high birth form something of a ceiling for how close he feels he can get to her.

Poor Arya. All the kid has left is her "prayer" -- a list of the names of people she'd like to see dead.

The main religion of Westeros involves the "Seven", a pantheon of deity figures that represent the various faces of humanity (Father, Mother, Warrior, Maiden, Smith, Crone and Stranger). Robb Stark and Lady Talisa had a marriage that paid homage to the Seven, and that's Lady Catelyn's faith as well, although Ned Stark and much of the Northmen worship the Old Gods, as symbolized by the sap-weeping white weirwood tree we see in the season's opening. In the Brotherhood Without Banners, we see another side to the fire-centric religion of R'hllor -- we confirm it seems to conjure genuine magic, independently of Melisandre's fanaticism and apparent sorcery.

Other fanatics include Stannis Baratheon's wife Selyse, whom we meet for the first time this episode. Our introduction to Stannis' family serves to illuminate his ambivalence toward the fact he has to use the powers of the "Red Woman" to earn a crown he feels is his by fundamental rights -- his own wife is not hurt, but rather delighted by the infidelity he struggles to confess, and feels ashamed of their daughter Shireen, a sweet child deformed by a skin disease called Greyscale.

The jars of Selyse's stillborn sons, I'm fairly sure, are not in the books, and the unsettling imagery helps us empathize with Stannis' private uncertainty about having to consign his purest and most loyal friend, Davos "the Onion Knight" Seaworth, to his dungeons for the treason of speaking against Melisandre.

Speaking of fire, we see redheaded Ygritte continuing to stand up for Jon Snow among mistrustful wildlings like Orell the warg and bearded Tormund Giantsbane. She does this because she wants him, of course, and in this episode we see her get tired of waiting. Snow seems reluctant to fully sell out the defenses of his black brothers to the wildlings' oncoming assault on the Wall -- is he lying when he tells Orell which castles are manned? A thousand seems like a lot of crows relative to how badly the patchy Night's Watch has lately been struggling against the Others and one another.

It almost doesn't matter: Giving up his virginity to Ygritte is probably, to Jon, a more significant break with his old life than anything he's done so far. But what a beautiful little scene: She really, really likes and trusts him. Does he like her more than his black brothers, though?

Brienne and Jaime are delivered to Robb Stark's ally Roose Bolton, who enjoys tormenting the Lannister son by dangling details of the Blackwater battle at King's Landing. After losing everything, the idea that the woman he loves -- his sister Cersei -- might also be dead seems to render him unable to stand any longer. And there's more pain ahead, as malpracticing Maester Qyburn is engaged to try to help save Jaime's rotten stump.

Cersei is fine, of course. After her father rejected her mistrust of the Tyrells, she hasn't let the issue go, and instead engages Littlefinger to help her prove the Golden Rose is plotting against the Lion. Cersei lacks the tact of most of her rivals; threats seem to be the extent of her bargaining tactics, where her brothers seem much more skillful at dangling riches and glory.

We see terrifying Olenna Redwyne as more than a match for Tyrion, eluding his strategies to reduce the extravagant cost of the Royal Wedding, an expense the Crown certainly can't afford. Recall that being unable to pay its debts to the Royal Bank of Braavos might actually cause the powerful lenders to shift its financial loyalty to a rival war effort. Tyrion could just tell his father that, one supposes, but it's meant to be his job to deal with the situation.

We already know Olenna isn't necessarily passionate about the wedding itself -- we've seen her make fun of frippery and classism. But she'd probably prefer to bleed the Crown's cash for her granddaughter's sake: Her offer to pay for half the affair seems generous, but is probably geared at making sure the wedding remains as expensive and frivolous an event as possible.

The Northmen have gotten tired of waiting for their revenge. Robb's taken too many personal detours, and the loss of Jaime Lannister as a prisoner might have been irrelevant from a military standpoint, but devastating from a spiritual one. Mad with grief and impatience, The Karstarks, of a clan of distant Stark-cousins, kill the little boys Willem and Martyn Lannister (they're the sons of Tywin's brother Kevan, if you were wondering). These poor kids were the ill-chosen captives of Robb's uncle Edmure Tully, who for some reason decided to take a mill instead of fighting Gregor Clegane.

Robb's all but lost control of every thread of his war effort, and he can't afford to lose the military power of his longtime Northman allies. But when Rickard Karstark suggests Robb is powerless to actually punish him for his ill-advised initiative, Robb feels he he has to step up, even if doing so means he loses half his army. His family unifies to advise him against executing Karstark, but Robb is loyal to the ideal of justice to an actual fault, just like his dad. He'd rather pursue that than to win the war.

We know he's making a bad, bad choice. Then again, a certain dread has overhung all of Robb's choices so far. Now his last remaining option is to go and seek support from the Frey family, who he's recently spurned against his mother's advice so he could marry Talisa instead. An ominous thematic crescendo builds as Robb moves a wolf's head strategic piece toward the Twins, the fort of Walder Frey. Ah, surely this is going to fix everything. It's all going to work out great.

Why does Jaime Lannister have no problem entering the bath with Brienne, despite her mortification? Because he's disinterested in her sexually, sure. But mainly because he knows that if he, still unwell, passes out, she'll save him. He is absolutely safe with her, because she swore a vow, and even if he mocks her for her impressively-stubborn adherence to her oaths, he knows that in spite of her resentment, she will protect him.

Oathbreaking is the highest on the list of Brienne's list of reasons to distrust and dislike the famous Kingslayer. He's been seeing that aversion in the eyes of every foe and comrade alike since he stabbed King Aerys Targaryen quite literally in the back while the Lannister army sacked King's Landing, and never felt the urge to explain or defend himself until now. Maybe after everything he's been through, seeing that aversion in Brienne's eyes is too much to take, so he confides in her.

If Jaime had kept his oath to the hellish Mad King, had not been a Kingslayer, he would have been forced not only to kill his father, but also to watch the entire city and everyone in it burn to death. It was his father, the strategician Tywin Lannister, who gained access to King's Landing under the guise of aiding the Targaryens against Robert's rebels, and then promptly sacked it. Ruthlessly tactful, that. Then, the Lannisters apparently had the Targaryen babies killed. Next, Cersei's wedding to Robert Baratheon, cemeting the family's presence in the capital.

Then the King's Hand, Jon Arryn, died under mysterious circumstances. Then King Robert himself. Oh, except that was an accident.

We see how tortured Jaime still is by the fact he had to break that vow, and how traumatized he is by the things he had to do and see under Aerys. Most of all, the condescension of moral Ned Stark stings. The books show Ned frequently recounting his sense of apprehension at arriving at King's Landing after the Lannisters sacked it to find Jaime sitting in the throne room. On the Iron Throne, in fact. The memory of Jaime in that weaponized chair seems to have been instrumental in sowing Ned's mistrust against the Lannister family, and in bringing him to King's Landing to try to support King Robert. Yet we learn even though King Aerys' madness was poisonous to the city, Jaime still tried to warn him about his own father, even if taking his head was not something he could have done.

Honorable Ned never asked him though, simply judged. "By what right does the wolf judge the lion," he curses bitterly, a brilliant quote that illustrates the rampant Lannister pride, ruthlessness, as something of an understandable expression of a moral code that simply favors victory -- but is no less moral than a sanctimonious, slavish devotion to imperfect ideals of honor. We see that Brienne has heard him, judged him anew, when she forgets all modesty to rush to him and calls for help when he faints.

Margaery has assured Sansa that as queen, she'll have the power to make a wedding between Sansa and Loras Tyrell happen. In the books, Sansa is disappointed to find out she's intended not for Loras (who joins the Kingsguard and thus, like Jaime Lannister, avoids marriage via the station) but for his much less-appealing brother Willas. But the fact Sansa wants to become a Lady of Highgarden remains the same, and for the show's purposes involving Loras is not only simpler, but more dramatic.

Loras will fulfill his family's request even though he's not interested in women. How did his handsome young sparring partner detect his predilection? Well, Littlefinger must have told him, as the young man was a spy sent to find out what Tyrell plot might be underway. When Littlefinger invites Sansa to finally escape King's Landing with him, a friend of her mother's, and she declines, he has confirmation that the Tyrells have already gotten her to collude with the idea. Sansa seems thrilled that Littlefinger doesn't look likely to insist on upsetting her secret plans, but what she doesn't know is that when he says, "I hope you know I'm your friend," what he means is, "don't worry, you're not going anywhere, anyway."

We see a highly-satisfied Cersei at her father's side, positively glowing at finally having brought proof of the Tyrells' scheming to their dear old dad. That Tywin's plan to thwart the Tyrells by marrying Sansa to Tyrion instead absolutely mortifies her little brother only seems to please Cersei more. Tyrion knows how terrorized Sansa is already, and how disappointed she, barely older than a child nursing fantasies of courtly lords, will be in him as a husband, and protests. Tywin insists. He always insists.

Cersei hardly has long to gloat, either. Though she's proved her usefulness at court to her father and saved their family's grip on the crown, Tywin still plans to wed her to Loras Tyrell, to bring the rival family in line and to quell the "rumors" about Cersei and her brother. Her horror at being used as a "brood mare" again is palpable, gutting. Mean, aggressive Cersei is one of the show's least-likeable characters, but is nonetheless empathetic, a victim of her father's system with even less fortune than her brothers, by virtue of her gender and the mistakes her desperation tends to sow.

Some of the best dramatic moments in the entire series have come from Cersei stricken, calling tremulously for her Dad. When Tywin stages a last-minute rescue of his family at the end of the Blackwater battle of season two, we see her fling aside her suicide plan, forgotten at the first sight of Dad, rising to her feet with the soft cry of "father." In this stunning episode finish, she is begging again, her hard protest giving way to naked, broken pleading -- "don't make me do it again, please," so soft, so sorrowful.

Game of Thrones would be an entirely different narrative if rooting for the Lannisters to simply be stamped out of King's Landing like an infestation were an easy decision. Yet it is possible to respect Tywin, to feel Cersei's pain and anger, admire Tyrion or Jaime's complex, deeply-personal morality in the face of suffering.The house of the Lion is the red, beating heart of this series, and just when you find yourself wishing most fervently for the tide to turn against them, you end up feeling a little sorry that you did.

I think appreciating the Lannister family is among the most interesting choices one can make in the favorites-picking "war" that Game of Thrones encourages in readers and viewers. The narrative is not always sensible reading. It's not always brilliantly-plotted; it's neither literature nor high art. But it's most intriguing feature is the way it exposes systems within a society, and how systems handicap some and privilege others, affecting their value systems, mobility and the framework of their choices for life. It presents an idea that's obvious when you think about it, but radical in the context of a fantasy story or a hero tale -- that morality is in large part relative and dependent on context.

Here, a given faction might find no relevance in the storybook ideal of "the right thing". With an expansive and complicated system exposed, we can empathize with the idea that all most people are able to do is the right thing for them, within the limitations they're given, and that maybe that's heroic enough. Whether intentions are good or ill almost don't matter in a world where fire licks at one edge of the map and cold ice crumples the other.

What was your favorite part of this exciting episode? Yes, I did gloss over the lovely bit where Grey Worm reinforces his fealty to Daenerys, but if you couldn't tell, I was too busy feeling sorry for bad guys this week. Love your discussions in the comments each week. Please, please no spoilers related to any weddings or prospective weddings mentioned in this post. No colors, no initials, nothing. Thank you.

]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/05/01/game-of-thrones-s2e5-through.html/feed 92 http://boingboing.net/2013/04/23/game-of-thrones-s3e4-this-is.html http://boingboing.net/2013/04/23/game-of-thrones-s3e4-this-is.html#comments Tue, 23 Apr 2013 16:20:55 +0000 Leigh Alexander http://boingboing.net/?p=225961

A friend of mine has a very bleak assessment of Game of Thrones: If you love a character, they'll die unfulfilled. If you hate a character, you'll come to learn how they became so hateful and start to love them, and then they try to redeem themselves and die unfulfilled.

It's not quite like that, or else I'd be worried about spoiling by sharing the sentiment. But how the show will deal with the books' long march of constant thwarting and elusive pleasure, while adding additional characters all the time, and still keep interest, was one of the things I worried about last season. How will the show give viewers the emotional boost they need to stay invested while being true to the gruesome, occasionally-grueling canon?

Well, stuff like That Daenerys Scene, I guess. It's time to recap and discuss! I'll bring the words, you bring the animated GIFs.

Let's step out of the episode's chronology and talk about Dany's glorious triumph in Astapor first, since that's the part everyone's talking about in my social circles. A couple recaps back, a couple commenters (and you guys are brilliant, by the way, keep it coming!) said they were just waiting for the grand reveal, whereby we learn Dany's been able to speak High Valyrian all along and has been playing the dumb foreign girl as a strategic move so that the slavers wouldn't see her coming.

A lot of action and crime dramas lean on the tension in that big reveal, when a couple of factions one assumes are equally powerful do the anxious dance around the weapons exchange, and then one of them revels in a breathtaking coup. There's always the moment when you have to arm your opponent and trust they'll keep the deal, rather than use the ammunition you gave them to turn on you.

Keeping nobly mum about her disgust for the slavers and allowing them to underestimate her let Dany betray Astapor, keep her Dragon, and leave a liberated city behind her in a cloud of dust. The great joy moment comes from the fact she gets to have an army of freed men who serve her by choice -- and from the awed looks on the faces of Barristan Selmy and Jorah Mormont, who've been trying to mansplain her out of her agenda all this time.

The dragon who laid waste to Astapor is her largest and most aggressive, Drogon, named after her late husband Khal Drogo. The other two are Viserion, named after her mad creep of a brother Viserys (who died of a molten gold crown in the Dothraki encampment, if you recall), and Rhaegal, named after as-yet rarely-mentioned other brother, the late Rhaegar Targaryen, a charismatic hero and the best-liked figure in the Targaryen's spotty legacy.

The shadow of the Targaryens overhangs this episode, so if you're going to get excited about Daenerys' fire and blood, we might as well fill you in on how she comes by it. It's Dany's late family, former rulers of Westeros, about whose legacy of mental illness Joffrey squeals eagerly in the Sept where he's set to marry Margaery. Before the late Robert Baratheon led a rebellion, Daenerys' father Aerys sat the throne, reviled as the "mad king".

Slaying him is what earned Jaime Lannister the title of Kingslayer, as if slaying a mad king were an essential act of treachery coming from the Targaryen despot's own Kingsguard. As the story goes, Rhaegar Targaryen's two young children, one an infant, were murdered by some Lannister agent (one of the Clegane brothers, many think), to ensure Robert would take the throne and marry Cersei with no rival heirs from the prior house.

Intuiting that history even a little bit helps to shed yet more ambiguity on unfortunate Jaime Lannister, who is still a high-value prisoner, along with Brienne. His reputation is negative outside of Lannister allies, his talent and privilege goes widely resented long after he's lost his sword-hand, which he sees as his entire identity. Brienne seems to experience some sympathy for him, here, and pressures him out of giving himself up for dead by suggesting he's acting "like a woman" by feeling sorry for himself.

When she demands to know why he prevented her from being violated in last week's episode, he doesn't answer -- but then when we cut to Cersei confronting their father, we know why. Jaime has sympathy for how his twin sister has had far less renown than him, presumably just for being born a woman. He's not such a bad guy, this Lannister golden boy.

The Night's Watch, still installed at Craster's vile keep and helping him with chores in exchange for board and scraps, is not having a good time of it, either. Gilly returns Sam's mother's thimble, which he clumsily tried to impress on her as a romantic gesture last time he was here. Poor Sam; you can't really blame Gilly, though, busy as she is trying to spend what she thinks will be her last moments with her son before her father (also the baby's father) sacrifices him to the wights. Sam is bright, sensitive and fair, but action's what's needed here now.

Unfortunately, starvation, fear and dissent about how to handle the Craster issue culminates in a civil war of sorts among the black crows, in which both despicable Craster and beloved "Old Bear" Mormont are both killed, as Sam hustles Gilly and her baby out into the cold, dangerous night.

It looks like Ros and Varys were as confused about Pod's no-charge outing at Littlefinger's brothel last week as we were. Seems like the fact Littlefinger didn't notice the lost income was simply the catalyst for Ros to investigate Littlefinger's shipping documents as the latter heads to the Eyrie to woo Catelyn's distasteful sister Lysa into a strategic marriage.

Seems Littlefinger plans to smuggle Sansa Stark along on a visit to her aunt. Helpless Sansa is little more than a playing piece in the Game of Thrones, now, in that custody of any kind could bring the Northmen, loyal to her late Dad, to heel. Varys claims to be Littlefinger's friend -- he's everyone's friend, that Master of Whispers -- but no one wants to see a relatively low-born, dangerously cunning man gain any special advantage amid the unrest at court.

Varys tells Tyrion the grisly story of how he became a eunuch as a boy, in the service of some sorcerer's ritual -- but it's also the story about how the crafty man patiently worked his way up from the slums of Myr to the Small Council of King's Landing, patiently tending his information network over years, until he's finally able to bring the very sorcerer who harmed him to the castle in a box. The vengeance Tyrion wants for the mysterious attempt on his life during the Blackwater battle could take similar years, Varys implies.

Cersei Lannister and Olenna Redwyne discuss plans for Joffrey's likely improbably-lavish wedding to Margaery. Cersei is cold and short-sighted, and her fatal flaw is the fact she's felt she had to defer to her cruel young son to maintain her family's legacy. As Joff delights in squicky stories about the late Targaryens, whose madness emerges because of their family tendency to wed siblings, we see probably it's Cersei's secret choice of father for her child that's given pale-haired Joff the same violent, uncontrollable tendencies.

The Lannisters enjoy force and wealth; the Tyrells seem to like the simple charm of a golden rose, no matter how the family matriarch appears to disdain their non-threatening family crest. The conversation between Cersei and Olenna is excellent -- surely when the grandmother laments how hard it is to keep one's sons from the grave, it's not a threat, is it? "And yet the world belongs to them," Cersei says mournfully.

For her father's political plays she had to wed a womanizing drunk who apparently died in a hunting accident, just like the late husband Olenna scorns; she now has a son she can't control, and the one person she apparently loves is who knows how far away.

To make matters worse, a radiant, bare-armed and unguarded heroine of the common-folk seems to be better at manipulating her son than she is. When mobs start wailing outside of the Sept, we expect they want to throw more cow pies at bratty Joff -- remember how the royal family barely escaped savaging at the hands of commonfolk the last time they walked among them? But that was before charismatic Lady Margaery took over public relations.

When after plying Joff with a lie about her appreciation for viciousness she suggests he open the doors and greet the people, we wonder whether she intends to lead him to his death. But when they cheer him for standing beside her, the stricken-mother look on Cersei's face is priceless. She doesn't just fear losing her son bodily -- she fears losing her power to this pretty young rose.

Hunted into a corner and bereft of real allies, the Lannister lady approaches her father for help. Brilliantly, this scene is designed to mirror the one in which her little brother Tyrion dared to approach their detached father Tywin for control of Casterly Rock: The brilliant strategist takes his time about important business, making no secret of the fact any number of things are more important to him than his children. He claims he doesn't disdain his daughter's wisdom, such as it is, because she's a woman, but because she's failed her most important job. Which is to be a mother. Thanks, Dad.

We've seen Theon Greyjoy liberated from torture at the Dreadfort by a mysterious groomsman who claims to've been loyal to the Ironborn family. Should have seen disaster coming as soon as the rescuer began plying Theon's ego, which is his fatal weakness. We were able to feel quite sorry for Theon last season, caught between two houses where neither patriarch was totally willing to be his father. We understand his desire to please his origin family at war with his outsider status among the honorable Starks that raised him. "All he had to do was just be," Theon laments resentfully of Robb Stark, who'd been like a brother to him.

We see Theon on the verge of redemption, realizing how he chose wrong. You could almost well up at his revelation that his real father was Ned Stark after all. And that's when we learn the desperately-needed savior was just leading him back to the torture device from which he'd unpinned him and sent him fleeing.

If this episode has a theme, it's that madness is among the most fatal wild-cards in the Game of Thrones world. I imagine they'll finally let us know who this long-awaited character is really meant to be next week, but for now we're given to understand it's a presumably-insane tormentor who liked the pleasure of letting Theon go free just so he could hunt him down and bring him back. Sick, man. Look at that expression on his face when they put Theon on the signature Bolton family X-shaped rack again.

How are we supposed to have hope enough to stay with this story? Well, that Daenerys scene is coming up. My friend wants to make that unholy choir her ringtone. But before that, we find out Varys decides to collude with Olenna Redwyne and the Tyrells to marry Sansa Stark into the Tyrell family instead, which would be a major coup for the golden roses who're quietly "growing strong" all around the Lannisters' crumbling grip on King's Landing. Margaery tells Sansa she wants to be good friends -- but Margaery is also a very good liar.

Porridge Plague? Really? Sansa's crucial failing all along is she believes whatever she is told to believe, especially if it's consistent with the glossy fiction of handsome lords and noble ladies, no matter how many times those minstrels' fictions have let her down in the past. If you ask her to believe she gets to marry Loras Tyrell and become a lady of beautiful Southron Highgarden, she very much wants to. The reason she doesn't want to confide the nature of her prayers is that all she's wanted all along is for Joffrey to die. I mean, come on. It's what we've all wanted.

We close by learning a little more, in a sense, about the fate of the Targaryen babies -- specifically that it wasn't the Hound, Sandor Clegane, who killed them. We know, because he denies being part of the pillaging violations at the Mummer's Ford, and he denies being involved in the death of children, but has no trouble accepting brave Arya's accusation that he slayed her friend Micah, the butcher's boy, mistakenly blamed in her place for injuring Joffrey in a much more innocent time of riverside play with a couple of direwolves and her sister Sansa.

The one-eyed man we see here is Beric Dondarrion, whom Ned Stark assigned to find and bring justice to the Hound's brother Gregor the Mountain. Along with the Red Priest Thoros of Myr, they continue to carry out a dead man's orders, worshipping the Lord of Light (yes, that's the same religion as Stannis' uncanny sorceress Melisandre). Though he denies being involved in his brother's crimes, the Hound will, we learn, receive the fairly-common practice of a trial by combat against Dondarrion.

Recall Tyrion escaped capture by Catelyn Stark at the Eyrie when his now dear friend Bronn agreed to act as his champion; a trial by combat seems to be a fairly overconfident approach to prosecuting serious offenders.

By the end of this episode, the spirited inspiration we need to sustain engagement comes from the rapidly-encroaching, kill-em-with-smiles Tyrell family, and from Daenerys' inspirational victory over the slavers. We even have hope that poor Sansa will finally escape King's Landing, one way or another.

The show's treatment of the Tyrell family, particularly Margaery, has been interesting; the books leave it fascinatingly ambiguous just how independently Margaery acts, how witty she is on her own, whether she has a moral agenda or simply plays along on behalf of her family, whether she has the desire to be queen.

Presented as she is, Margaery Tyrell is almost an unfairly-stacked foe for Cersei at this point, especially in a series that begs us to take pity on anti-heroes. What do you think her fatal flaw might turn out to be?

None of the series' good characters are truly good (or in the rare cases they are, as with Daenerys or Arya, we watch them grapple remarkable disadvantages). And none of its bad characters are truly bad. If you haven't figured it out, I am an incorrigible Lannister sympathizer -- what keeps you watching (or reading, if you're a book fan)? Do you wait to see the evils get their comeuppance, or their redemption? Is this the kind of story where it even makes sense to long for the good characters to win?

Please continue joining the discussion in the comments, but bear in mind we're all trying to avoid any major book spoilers whatsoever for fans who are just following along for the first time. I can't wait to see what commentor "Roose_Bolton" will be able to correct me on this time.

The Targaryen family tree is a tough thing to memorize, and the show hasn't even started talking about Dorne yet. I even wondered whether it was a good time to offer context on the Targaryen backstory, in case the show deals with it, but I erred on the side of assuming some light context that's been implied so far might be useful to people without ruining the pleasure of seeing it explored further, if that happens. Feedback is welcome!

]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/04/23/game-of-thrones-s3e4-this-is.html/feed 94 http://boingboing.net/2013/04/16/priorities-and-privilege-reign.html http://boingboing.net/2013/04/16/priorities-and-privilege-reign.html#comments Tue, 16 Apr 2013 12:26:13 +0000 Leigh Alexander http://boingboing.net/?p=224443 I’ve heard a lot of bewilderment across social media when it comes to keeping up with the ever-climbing number of characters in this show. Even fans of the books are having a bit of a tough time, since the written chronology is odd -- each character’s arc is written separately, so you might read in an entirely unpredictable order about events that are presumed to be happening simultaneously.

The show’s doing an incredible job of streamlining the chronology and making sure stories unfolding at different corners of the world keep reasonable pace with each other, and at uniting disparate arcs under a common theme. It’s titled “Walk of Punishment”, and it’s about the privileges each individual has (or has not), and what those things cost them.

Sigh. Trigger warning for discussion of rape.

Robb Stark and his army have come to Riverrun, the home of his mother’s Tully family, for the funeral of Catelyn’s father. That her brother Edmure wastes several flaming arrows trying to hit the pyre, ultimately forcing their uncle, Brynden the Blackfish, to step in, is a good analogy for how badly the younger generation’s botching this war effort.

The Stark’s greatest failing here is the very thing that makes them noble: the value they place on individuals. Robb sees his enemies by name -- Tywin Lannister, and Lannister-affiliated savage Gregor “The Mountain” Clegane. The Mountain’s been largely portrayed as a concept here, but he’s the brother of The Hound (responsible for burning his little brother’s face as a youth, creating The Hound’s fear of fire and telling you almost all you need to know about Gregor).

Rather than draw the Mountain into a more advantageous position as Robb had hoped, Edmure wasted resources and lives capturing a relatively-useless mill holding, along with two minor young Lannister cousins, who aren’t likely to be worth much as bargaining chips. Good job, family Tully.

This is not the kind of mistake Tywin Lannister, the ultimate general, would make. The only prisoner he really cares about is his son Jaime, a prioritization that doesn’t seem to escape the notice of his other two children. As the small council convenes to discuss strategy at court, we get a priceless sequence whereby Cersei determinedly moves a chair to sit alongside her father, across from the men (that’s Littlefinger, gossip-master Varys, and the Maester Pycelle). Tyrion one-ups her by pulling his own chair to sit at the table’s end, directly opposite their father.

As reward for his service to the crown, Littlefinger, who’s been running the books at King’s Landing, has been entitled Lord of Harrenhal, but given that Roose Bolton’s currently holding that awful shell of a castle for Robb Stark, that title hardly means much. Instead, Tywin “suggests” Littlefinger court Lysa Arryn, Catelyn’s sister, who’s fancied him since they were children.

Since the murder of Lysa’s husband Jon kicked all of these events off by bringing Ned Stark to King’s Landing in the first place, Lysa’s been hiding out in her mountainous tower home, The Eyrie, with her awful, sickly little son Robert, whom she still nurses at her breast even though he’s got to be six or seven years old by now. Marrying Lysa would bring the territory into Lannister hands, though, and give Littlefinger a better title, so he agrees to go -- leaving Tyrion to be assigned into the role of Master of Coin.

We join Jaime, Brienne and their Bolton-bannered captors. As presumed Stark allies, this group here couldn’t have a more high-value prisoner on their hands than Tywin’s favorite son, the famous swordsman. This group is led by a man named Locke, which I only know because of a wiki search. In the novels Jaime and Brienne are held by a group of contract grotesques called the Brave Companions, but the Bolton banner is meant to simplify the number of factions in play.

The song they’re singing is “The Bear and the Maiden Fair,” a popular ditty about a bear that poses as a knight to rescue a lady. It’s often used as a motif in the books, especially when one grotesque ends up in an alliance with a more vulnerable individual -- think of the Hound visiting Sansa Stark during the Blackwater battle, or Jaime and Brienne. Except in this case, the “maiden fair” is definitely the Lannister golden boy.

Brienne, less impressed by Jaime’s swordsmanship during their brief duel than she expected, insinuates that perhaps Jaime’s reputation owes a bit more to Lannister privilege and fame than perhaps Jaime would like to admit. In fact, he wouldn’t like to admit it at all, and revenges himself on the idea by reminding Brienne she’s liable to be raped in camp. Yet in his way, he also advises her not to resist, counseling her for her safety, even though he can admit he’d rather die than be in her position and he’s thankful not to be a woman.

At the village site of Thoros of Myr’s ragtag liberation group The Brotherhood Without Banners, Arya’s friend Hot Pie decides to stay behind at the camp. Having lost her pal Lommy in an earlier skirmish, she’s down to just one friend, now -- the young blacksmith’s apprentice Gendry, who doesn’t know he’s one of the late Robert Baratheon’s black-haired bastard (getting a look at Gendry was part of Ned’s research into the revelation that Cersei Lannister’s children are all inbred).

Help me out here, commenters: Why does Arya ask Sandor Clegane if he remembers the last time he was here?

Losing her father makes Catelyn worry about her own children -- remember when Theon displayed two child’s bodies of about the right size at Winterfell? Rumor must hold that Bran and Rickon are dead, but Catelyn and her uncle need to have faith, if only to keep Robb’s war effort spiritually strong.

Legends hold a lot of power in this world, of course. Note how Lady Talisa, of whose name no one’s been reminded since before her wedding to Robb last season, indulges in scaring the little Lannister boys as she treats their wounds.

And how thanks to their skin-changing warg, the Wildlings believe hundreds of the Wall’s black brothers might have been killed up north at the Fist of the First Men. Mance Rayder thinks it’s a good time for his army to breach the Wall, a long-standing boundary between the Wildlings and the rest of Westeros. That it’ll also breach the boundary between the White Walkers and the rest of Westeros doesn’t seem to concern him.

But they find only horse corpses, presuming there must be undead, instead of bodies, nearby. However, Jeor Mormont’s party of crow rangers is safely at Craster’s Keep, where Craster continues being the most awful person in the world. Remember that this man lives beyond the wall so that he can keep a homestead where he has children on his own daughters and sacrifices all his boy children to the White Walkers.

Even given the imminent threat of the undead, Craster saves his best food for his pigs, pitiless to the painful birthing cries of one of his daughters, and suggests everyone should eat Samwell Tarly, because he’s so fat. Sam is a bit tired, justifiably, of being made to feel worthless because he’s so fat, and Craster’s remarks prompt him to seek out Gilly, a girl he’d been fond of at their last visit to the keep, and watch her deliver her baby. Unfortunately it’s a boy baby -- but we think now Sam might have the chance to try to be a hero.

At Dragonstone, where Stannis is licking his wounds after his last decimating loss at King’s Landing, Melisandre is leaving to do who knows what in the ritualistic service of her Red God, the Lord of Light. She says Stannis’ “fires” are too low for her to birth another murderous spectre of the type that assassinated Renly, but hints that sacrificing someone else with Stannis’ “king’s blood” -- maybe one Robert Baratheon’s bastards -- would create enough magic for an advantage.

The books never tell us if Stannis is physically or romantically interested in Melisandre. He’s obsessively puritanical, rejects the idea of prostitution whatsoever, demands rigid order among his men, and supposedly maintains a loyal marriage to his wife (known to be ugly) and his daughter, who has a skin disease. That makes the fact he’s constantly in the company of the red sorceress more ambiguous, provokes more curiosity about his character. Seeing him patently crave her here makes Stannis seem a little more objectively distasteful.

Still in Astapor, Daenerys continues to be horrified by the consequences of slavery. Despite her promises to take her rights in fire and blood, she instead is negotiating for an army. Her close advisor Jorah Mormont (the son of the Old Bear, the Night Watch’s leader) thinks having an army of perfectly-trained slave soldiers is a better proposition for Dany’s value system than imperfect, personally-motivated men who often show their ugly sides as they raze and pillage in wartime, but last-gen Kingsguard veteran Ser Barristan Selmy believes in the value of personal loyalty, while Mormont doesn’t seem to think nobility gets you much.

The tension between Selmy and Mormont (“’We’ already, Ser Barristan?“) over Daenerys, in a sense, is quite interesting. We see Dany patiently considering both trusted viewpoints -- but neither of them think it’s a good idea for her to give away her biggest dragon in exchange for the Unsullied warriors. She does it anyway, and gains the translator Missandei as a companion in the bargain. She seems potentially drawn as an interesting character here, versus in the books when she’s often creepily referred-to as “the little scribe”.

Tyrion enters Littlefinger’s domain of prostitution to collect a wagon full of royal ledgers, where Littlefinger asks apparently-innocent questions about why Ros was punished by Cersei for Tyrion’s sake. There are no innocent questions at court, however -- Cersei mistakenly believed Ros was Tyrion’s lover, and nicked her instead of Shae. That Tyrion is keeping Shae (and hiding her as Sansa’s handmaiden) is a crucial weakness to him, since the consequences to the couple are liable to be dire if Tywin ever hears of it.

But when Littlefinger suggests Tyrion reward his squire, Podrick Payne, for saving his life, Tyrion takes the bait, leaving Pod alone with four of Littlefinger’s women. When Pod comes back with the money Tyrion paid still in hand, Tyrion and Bronn realize Littlefinger must have gotten something out of him. Not only that, but Tyrion’s got his work cut out for him, learning that Littlefinger’s manner of accounting mostly involves borrowing impossible sums. If the deeply in-debt Crown can’t make some restitution to the Iron Bank of Braavos, the Bravosi will fund Lannister rivals instead.

Theon’s set free from torture at the Bolton family's Dreadfort[*] by the mysterious sympathizer who’s promised him his sister Yara Greyjoy is waiting for him nearby. But he doesn’t get far before he’s hunted down again, and his mysterious savior somehow arrives just in time to rescue Theon from inevitable rape and murder. This guy’s pretty good with a weapon for someone we met holding a broom in the dungeon corner, and the last man to die at crossbow-point seems to know who’s killed him -- “you little bastard,” he marvels.

Brienne doesn’t seem able to either talk or fight her way out of what the men in Locke’s camp plan to do to her. Jaime is a talker, though, and manages to convince them to leave her alone by telling Locke she’s worth a load of sapphires to her father in Tarth. Tarth gets its name from its sapphire waters, not from any load of gemstones[**], but Jaime’s a charming liar. Brienne then gets to watch the special privilege the fancy, high-value Lannister prisoner looks likely to get from camp because of his rich father.

Jaime tries to impress his gift for fancy language was just due to the education his father forced upon him, but this expression of his privilege seems to alienate Locke, who slowly, insidiously reveals he’s a bit more clever than he looks and doesn’t appreciate Jaime’s efforts to manipulate him with the promise of his father’s gold, nor the automatic assumption that he ought to be grateful for whatever glories a Lannister wants to buy him with.

Is it his talent that makes Jaime special, or simply his father’s power and money? In a brutal attempt to force an answer to that question, Locke removes Jaime’s sword-hand, as The Hold Steady’s rousing cover of “The Bear and the Maiden Fair” plays over the credits roll. In the end, privilege pays the highest cost and it’s Jaime, not Brienne, who loses something permanent in that encampment.

Jaime is my personal favorite character in the series. He has all the arrogance his class has bought him, but the mantle of Lannister privilege has harmed him, too. He’s carried the mantle of “Kingslayer” for his entire career, and it’s assumed he was simply the ultimate traitor -- slaying the mad king he’d sworn to protect. He’s famously handsome, but has only ever been with his sister Cersei, as the twins bonded during a tough and lonely childhood. Now, he’s simply the most high-value prisoner at large in the war effort, having lost the only thing that he truly owns -- his ability to use a sword.

Game of Thrones wants us to hate the way that privilege challenges others, but it also illustrates that incredible misfortune doesn’t discriminate. These are the more interesting subtleties that make us attach to the series’ major characters, and not mind so much when it starts throwing minor ones at us. I wonder if one is even meant, ever, to maintain an all-seeing grasp on the plot, its different factions, and their complicated constituencies; maybe it’s possible to just pick a favorite family or two and focus on them.

In last week's comments discussion, we talked about our favorite women characters. Whose narrative arc do you find most interesting (try to avoid spoilers, if you know them?) How tough of a time are you having keeping the story and characters straight, if you're new to the series? Do you do the special-nicknames thing (King, king's mom, jerk, jerk's friend, wizard lady, Jon Snow)?

[*I'd previously incorrectly-claimed Theon was being held at Winterfell, which House Bolton is meant to look after on Robb Stark's behalf now that the Ironmen have left. Instead, commenter Roose_Bolton (of course) lets me know they're more likely at the Dreadfort, the Bolton family home. I can't even tell you why I think he's right, because spoilers. **I'd also made the mistake of thinking there used to be sapphires in Tarth but aren't anymore; my pal Pete (of Anamanaguchi fame) reminds me that it's really just the water that derives the 'sapphire' legend, which makes Jaime's lie a bit bigger.]]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/04/16/priorities-and-privilege-reign.html/feed 111 http://boingboing.net/2013/04/09/game-of-thrones-s3e2-ladies.html http://boingboing.net/2013/04/09/game-of-thrones-s3e2-ladies.html#comments Tue, 09 Apr 2013 13:00:31 +0000 Leigh Alexander http://boingboing.net/?p=223445 The Game of Thrones universe is all about how disadvantages are balanced against advantages: Every major character or faction has a unique set of challenges, and then a trump card. Tyrion Lannister's unfavorable height, scarred face and status as the family black sheep is balanced by his superior wit and endless disposable income; as Queen Regent, Cersei almost has the power she wants -- but then of course, she's tasked with mothering and managing awful Joffrey. Daenerys' dragons were her trump card even when she had nothing else. And young Bran Stark has lost everything, including the use of his legs, but he has "green dreams."

Magical phenomena in Game of Thrones are applied with a light hand, generally. You could almost forget you're watching a show about a fantasy universe instead of a show about medieval wartime politics until it asks you to believe in undead wights, or in skin-changing wargs, people that have the ability to project themselves into the bodies of animals. Bran's dreams of a three-eyed crow and a peculiar, small young man are more than ordinary dreams. When he sleeps he roams the world in the body of his direwolf, Summer.

After fleeing occupied Winterfell, Bran, along with the wildling woman Osha, his dear steward Hodor and his little brother Rickon, plans on going to the wall, from whence Bran doesn't know his half-brother Jon Snow has defected on a spy mission against the wildlings. But in this episode Team Bran meets the crannogfolk Jojen and Meera, who've presumably found Bran through the boy's nighttime searching in Summer's skin, and we get the impression this three-eyed raven of his dreams might become a more important quest.

The lost Stark children seem endlessly to orbit their family -- mother might be at Riverrun, Jon at the Wall, Robb on the warfront -- and as the courses of their travels attract new potential allies (will Littlefinger really help Sansa reunite with Catelyn, or use her for his own ends?), they seem always a step behind. The Stark family's wish to reunite drives what might be the primary narrative arc of Game of Thrones. We just want to know if their mother is going to get her children back.

Things aren't good for Lady Catelyn right now. Her eldest son blames her for the fall of Winterfell, the rest of her children are missing or captive, and she's just gotten word from Riverrun that her father, Hoster Tully, has died.

To make matters worse, Robb has broken an alliance with the Freys that saw him promise to marry one of their horrible daughters in exchange for passage at the Frey-owned Twins holding last season. He's married a Volantene girl, and you see how deeply Catelyn mistrusts this choice. If there weren't already enough people blaming her for the botched-up war effort, she confides she thinks the gods are exacting vengeance on her because she once wished for Jon Snow, her husband's bastard, to die, and then failed to be a mother to him.

Robb decides to divert his troops toward Riverrun so that the family can attend his grandfather's funeral. Family is core to the Starks' identity, and yet Robb's consistent choice of love and loyalty and the noble pursuit of vengeance over strategy is clearly threatening his bid for the throne. Northmen loyal to the Starks are getting restless, and grizzled Arnolf Karstark tells Robb of his bride, "I think you lost the war the day you married her." Ooh, was that the prickle of foreshadowing? I sure hope not.

Legendary swordsman and charming incestor Jaime Lannister is, at the behest of Lady Stark, remains in the custody of Brienne "The Beauty" of Tarth. She's clinging doggedly to her mission to bring this incredibly high-value prisoner to King's Landing, believing he can be traded for the Stark girls. The Lannisters, of course, have made sure nobody knows they only have one Stark girl -- Arya is, of course, posing as a sword-wielding boy in the countryside with her friends -- but let's worry about that later.

The characters discuss the late Renly Baratheon and his "degenerate" "proclivities" often during this episode. Renly, of course, was gay, and in love with Loras Tyrell, the handsome Knight of Flowers, but the books always made that fact implicit. The show's decision to deal with it explicitly, and even to portray the physical relationship between Renly and Tyrell in earlier episodes, is an interesting one.

I always felt dealing with issues of discrimination and oppression through period dramas is sort of the easy, or lazy thing to do -- of course everyone is racist and ableist and sexist and homophobic, that's just the world they live in, and so forth. But the show has taken pains to create empathy for the ways characters try to move within the limitations their universe has prescribed, so we feel for Loras and Renly's unexpressed love, and the fact that most characters seem to feel Renly's orientation would have made him unfit to be king.

Jaime insults Renly to Brienne and makes fun of her both for what he perceives to be her own "masculine" qualities, and for the fact she fancied Renly, but it seems he really just wants to upset her. Jaime is someone who behaves in an openly-arrogant fashion, but may conceal a more thoughtful moral code, if a personal one, than many of the other characters.

You can almost forgive him for having children with his sister Cersei, because through the horrible circumstances of a ruthless, motherless Lannister childhood, he's genuinely in love. When he's had his fill of tormenting poor Brienne, he relents, with probably this episode's finest quote: "I don't blame you, and I don't blame him either. We don't get to choose who we love."

You don't get to choose what your kids turn out like, either. It's hard to say what's a bigger challenge for Cersei: Her monstrous son, or the inconveniently young, beautiful and merciful Margaery, who stands a chance of upsetting the Queen Regent's sloppily-constructed power balance.

Desperate to control Joff, Cersei's expelled all of Tyrion's efforts to undo the damage the boy's done, and has replaced her most intelligent counsel with the kind of thugs and sycophants that will tell her what she wants to hear. Sad to see Cersei digging herself into a trench of destructive paranoia when there's someone out there who really loves her, but this isn't a series that likes happy couples.

The appealing Tyrell family represents a meaningful threat to Cersei, but Joffrey's so excited at the military power the Tyrells add to his kingdom that he derides his mother's insecurity. Luckily it's his very disgust for women that makes him utterly blind to any threat Margaery and her family could pose to his rule. He just sees a lady to impress and control.

The Tyrells also represent the possibility of salvation for Sansa, who, disappointingly, is still too much in love with fantasy courtly ideals for her own good. It's clear she's attached to the idea of picture-perfect Loras Tyrell helping her out, here -- she doesn't know she's not his type.

Book fans have been eagerly waiting this episode's introduction of Olenna "Queen of Thorns" Redwyne, the Tyrell family's intriguing matriarch (her son, Mace Tyrell, is Margaery and Loras' father, mostly renowned for eating too much). Her power seems to be in plain speech -- "the cheese will be served when I want it served, and I want it served now," she tells a manservant, and that's that.

She's summoned Sansa presumably to hear the truth about Joffrey. Terrified into silence at court, it's the Stark girl's first chance to speak anything other than the pleasant lines she's been parroting for her own survival, and she even has trouble at first, before at last she can confide to Joffrey's monstrousness. It's a risky move, of course, as the Tyrells are ostensibly Lannister allies, but with this woman in charge, you get the sense that if they have their own agenda, they have a good chance of executing it.

Speaking of executing, this episode brings us the most awkward conversation about anal sex that's ever taken place over a crossbow. Awful little Joffrey is clearly much more comfortable with weapons than with women, and we see Margaery tread into dangerous territory as she pretends to show an interest. There's a lot of subtext going on in this conversation -- unless she confesses her first husband (and her brother's love) Renly was gay, Joffrey might think she consorted with a "traitor", and failed her "job" of bearing a child to boot. A displeased Joffrey is a physical threat, but Margaery defuses it by claiming to share his appetite for violence.

Yet I wonder how much pretending Margaery's actually doing. We heard her grandmother tell Sansa that it's Margaery's father who insists the girl needs to become a queen, even if that means marrying whichever contender is the closest. When Joffrey tells her that she no longer belongs to her father, the reaction this elicits seems genuine, and when she lets Joffrey embrace her over the weapon, it looks like there's a real thrill there, a secret desire to claim some of that shameless, violent male power for herself -- even if it's at their own reflection in the mirror she ultimately ends up pointing the thing.

Ah, and Theon is back. Alfie Allen's portrayal of the character, desperate and insecure and ultimately hunted to a cliff, was among my favorite things about the last season. But his pointless seizure of Winterfell means Robb Stark's supposed ally, Roose Bolton, is sending his people to clean up the mess, and now Theon is a prisoner who'll continue to pay for his juvenile error of judgment and his betrayal of the Starks.

House Bolton has some issues. I mean, their house sigil is a flayed man bound to an X-shaped torture device. Now we see why. And when we see Jaime and Brienne set upon by a posse bearing that flag, we know suddenly the Beauty and the Kingslayer have much bigger things to worry about than one another [*].

Arya is in trouble, too. She and her companions (including Gendry, who doesn't know he's one of Robert Baratheon's black-haired bastards), encounter the Brotherhood Without Banners, a ragtag group of unaffiliated freedom fighters led by Thoros of Myr, a red priest. We were supposed to presume the posse pro-Lannister, as they were singing "The Rains of Castamere," but not so. Arya and friends were going to be allowed to go on their way, but unfortunately an inconvenient prisoner arrives just in time. Sandor "The Hound" Clegane's nightmarish brother, Gregor "The Mountain," has been wreaking havok all over Westeros, but it's the Hound that gets dragged in by the brotherhood.

Recall how, terrified of fire, he fled the battle of King's Landing and has, we assume, been drinking himself into a stupor ever since. Despite everything else Arya has tried to be, Clegane immediately outs her as a "Stark bitch," and we're left wondering what this will mean for her future.

A strong theme in this episode is what women can do with the poor hands they're dealt in this world; one can become ruthless like Cersei, charming like Margaery, or, like Catelyn Stark, root oneselves in motherhood and prayer. We see how the wrong marriage to an apparently-excellent, loving woman can do Robb just as much harm as a decisive battle, and we see how the blunt, fearless candor of Lady Olenna is what makes people fear her. Even Shae, who seems to be interested in securing some genuine safety for Sansa, wields a certain power over Tyrion, easily able to twist him into begging for her forgiveness when it comes to the roving eye of his past.

I'd hardly call Game of Thrones a feminist story, but it does emphasize the way that while the power and movement of women in this world is limited, they use whatever resources they can find to tilt a little favor in their direction. Throughout this episode, we see the male heroes disadvantaged -- Robb making every wrong decision, Theon in brutal torture, Jon Snow lost in a foreign society -- in favor of examining what the women are able to accomplish behind the scenes. "Men use brawn, women use wiles" is the sort of trite concept typical of reductive fantasy universes. And the exceptions to this rule -- Brienne's nobility and incredibly-confident sword hand, Arya's warrior ambition -- are somewhat blunted by the fact that in order to have access to that type of power, they need to essentially pass as men. And at the end of the day, what matters most about Arya on a practical level is simply that she's a "Stark bitch."

But there's still enough nuance to make it a pleasant journey for the heart, if one is willing to suspend some disbelief. Terrible things happen to everyone in this story, and we can find a point of empathy for everyone we're watching thrash in the grip of inevitability. We had a lovely discussion in the comments last week, so I'll ask you a question in the hopes of fostering another: Who's your favorite woman in the series, and why?

Finally, another reason it's fun to follow along with Game of Thrones is the social media culture. Here and there I'll try to direct you to neat things I find online, like Marissa Nadler's awesome, haunting a-capella cover of the opening theme. Or Arrested Westeros, my current favorite site, which combines Game of Thrones with quotes from Arrested Development. You wouldn't believe how well it works.

[*CORRECTION: I originally (incorrectly) presumed it was Ramsay Bolton who'd led the party capturing Brienne and Jaime, but friends remind me it's supposed to be the Brave Companions that take them captive here. The book's creepy Vargo Hoat seems to have been replaced with a Bolton-affiliated man-at-arms called Locke who's in charge of recapturing Jaime Lannister, whereas the novel's Brave Companions were mercenaries ostensibly favoring the Lannisters, if I recall. Was Vargo Hoat too awful for TV? Did the writers worry that introducing the Brotherhood Without Banners and the Brave Companions simultaneously would confuse people about unaffiliated teams? Either way, they're probably going to Harrenhal, and awful is awful, right?] ]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/04/09/game-of-thrones-s3e2-ladies.html/feed 51 http://boingboing.net/2013/04/02/game-of-thrones-returns-with-c.html http://boingboing.net/2013/04/02/game-of-thrones-returns-with-c.html#comments Tue, 02 Apr 2013 12:21:38 +0000 Leigh Alexander http://boingboing.net/?p=222480 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.

I think the premiere deserves some extra details to make sure everyone knows exactly what's going on; if you just want some analysis, scroll to the end.

The season three premiere picks up quite literally where we left off: With unlucky Night's Watchman Samwell Tarly struggling through the snow as the blue-eyed, undead Others -- and the legion of Wights they seem able to reanimate -- begin approaching the Wall from the mysterious, inhospitable lands beyond it.

We've seen glimpses of this unknowable dread before in the series, but here's the point where we realize a legion of undead is going to be an issue for Westeros. An under-funded Night's Watch staffed mostly by ex-convicts and aging retirees is going to have a hard time holding these guys back -- and a harder time convincing anyone in the Seven Kingdoms to help out, given that their attention and their funds are tied up in their own wars for the throne.

We presume it'll be harder without Jon Snow, who's been dispatched to infiltrate the society of the Free Folk, who live beyond the wall so they can avoid the oppression and war that comes with living under a traditional king. In this episode, we meet Mance Rayder, leader of the free folk and former crow of the Night's Watch himself.

Mance is unimpressed when Jon awkwardly parrots rhetoric about freedom, but appreciates his more-truthful story about how the Watch's Lord Commander, Jeor "Old Bear" Mormont, ignored the sacrifice of male infants at Craster's Keep last season. Mance also probably appreciates the genuine romantic sparks he senses between Snow (who is adorably lateblooming about women) and Ygritte, the firehaired freewoman who's been his biggest advocate here.

Back at King's Landing, we join Tyrion, who's recovered from his war wound -- less so from the complete untangling his sister Cersei's done of his attempts to restore some degree of power and balance in Joffrey's mad kingdom. We find him examining a mirror and noticing his scar makes him even uglier than he once was -- a hallmark of this series is taking people in bad situations and making them worse.

Not that Peter Dinklage is actually ugly, mind. In the books, Tyrion actually loses part of his nose; the more restrained scarring he sustains here shows a healthy appreciation for his charismatic face. He will probably always be the best thing on this show, and HBO's April Fool's prank about him being replaced was momentarily sick-making, even knowing what day today is.

Lannister patriarch Tywin has come to town, after arriving at the last minute to save the city from certain ruin. Tywin brought me my favorite moment of last season: Cersei, about to take her son's life as she trembles with wine and brutal terror, leaping to her feet with all the delight and relief of a young girl when it's her father, not the invaders, who strides into the throne room to reveal he's saved her. There's an incredible dichotomy in Tywin Lannister, who as a character is getting one of the best and most luminous treatments of anyone on the show -- he's ruthless, yet we can admire him; we see why his children both hate and long for him. His scenes with Arya Stark (posing as his cupbearer) last season were some of the show's best.

Not that Tyrion can expect any similar sense of salvation from his father, who never conceals his open loathing for the son he views as twisted and deformed, and whom he will forever blame for the death of his wife in childbirth. Tywin is an excellent general but no kind of parent, and his attitude to strategy and efficiency strains and overhangs his dysfunctional, love-starved children.

Cersei's heard Tyrion requested a meeting with their dad, and comes to find out what he wants. "He's my father," Tyrion replies."Do I need to want something?" That's some elegant dark humor, there -- but there's also the leaden ache when we hear Tyrion describe to his sister how he lay with his face split in half, yet no visit from his only parent.

Tyrion may have had all his power taken away, but Cersei fears him anyway: She says she's afraid he'll tell lies, but it's plain it's the truth she's afraid of her father knowing: The nightmarish way she's let her son Joffrey trample the kingdom and run the family into the corner. Oh, yeah, and the whole bit where Cersei's kids are her brother's kids. That's kind of the big one.

All Tyrion wants, it seems, is stewardship of the family home back in Casterly Rock (his brother Jaime, having joined the Kingsguard, forfeits the right to hold lands). But even though Tyrion was the only Lannister kid to show any bravery during the fight at King's Landing, Tywin's venomous at the suggestion: In his eyes, his youngest son is the only thing he's ever done imperfectly.

Note dad's extreme offense at Tyrion's whoring; Tywin's own father apparently shamed the family by taking in a courtesan who indulged herself in the family's riches, and he can't abide the idea that his own son has brought a whore to King's Landing. Recall Tyrion confiding in Bronn and Shae about the nasty business his father put him through when he briefly married a whore as a youth. We see quite plainly how Tyrion came to be how he is: The cleverest of the children raised in the cunning Lannister mode, yet the least-loved. His closest ally right now is "upjumped cutthroat" Bronn, who's just asked for a pay raise for his "friendship."

Davos Seaworth has survived the wreckage of Stannis Baratheon's fleet during the Blackwater battle by clinging to a rock in the middle of the sea. When rescuers arrive, they demand to know what king he's served. The wrong answer, here, could have ended his life, and you see on his face how dearly he knows this. Yet Seaworth would die loyal, declaring himself for Stannis, the "one true king."

Seaworth is arguably one of the most moral and loyal characters in the entire narrative, yet Stannis is clearly twisted 'round the finger of the Red Woman, the sorceress Melisandre, and her fanatical worship of the Lord of Light. The pirate Sallador Saan, who contributed 30 ships to Stannis' war effort, believes Stannis' cause is lost and is bailing on Stannis, his ominous sorceress and her apparent penchant for burning nonbelievers.

Yet after everything Davos has sacrificed, Stannis, himself an obsessive, fanatical purist whose own late brother Renly told him no one wanted for king, sends his most loyal man to the dungeons for speaking agains the sorceress. We see how manipulative the priestess is when she implies she could have prevented deaths, including that of Davos' own son, if only Davos had not convinced Stannis to leave Melisandre behind during the Blackwater battle.

As for the Starks, they lost their Winterfell home primarily due to former ally Theon Greyjoy's prideful muddling, but it's clear Robb Stark's army blames the Lannisters, ignoring some of the subtleties of war in favor of a simplified -- and deeply personal -- vendetta against the family they hold responsible for the death of Robb's father Ned. In Robb's mind, the conflict is even more dangerously oversimplified: His main enemy is Jaime Lannister, and therefore the fall of Winterfell (and the slaughter of Northmen they discover here at Harrenhal) is the fault of his own mother, who set Jaime "free" (into the custody of Brienne of Tarth to be brought home, really) in a desperate exchange for her daughters.

Ros, the prostitute who ended up as Peter "Littlefinger" Baelish's business partner, tries to bond with Shae over having come up in the world; Shae, still successfully posing as Sansa's handmaid, evades the idea that they may have shared experience.The woman never says anything about herself, and wholly rejects Sansa's attempt to play imagination games with her. Littlefinger's attention to Sansa is slightly creepy, given the degree to which we know that he once desired her mother (and the degree to which we know he can't be trusted), but Sansa's finally brave enough to tell him to help her leave King's Landing.

The charismatic Tyrells have now joined the Lannisters via beautiful Margaery's wedding to Joffrey. But unlike the cowardly, squeamish and violent boy-king, she has no problem entering the poverty-stricken Flea Bottom to give gifts and food to the children -- and her willing vulnerability is an incredible foil to steely Cersei. The look on Cersei's face when Joff, who himself seems as interested in pleasing Margaery as anyone, suggests his mother is getting older is priceless.

Of course, no one in this show is simple, and viewing Margaery as simply a naively-charitable heroine would be a mistake. When she urges the head of the orphanage she visits to come to her if they need anything, her emphasis of "directly to me" could be viewed as a potential allusion to her motives. It'll be interesting, actually, to see how the show treats Margaery's objectives, since the books keep them obscured, and never let us get to know her well.

Finally, we rejoin Daenerys, who has reclaimed her dragons and escaped the incredibly inhospitable Qarth with a ship and the riches she's won from her enemies. Next, she needs an army, so she her right-hand man, Jorah Mormont, are headed to Astapor to check out some slave soldiers for sale. We see how the silver queen aches for her Dothraki, who are suffering sickness and terror for her, having never been on the "poison water" in the history of their tribes. We see how firmly the idea of slavery at all disgusts her; she'll be able to get a terrifying army bred from childhood for war, but given that each of them has to murder a baby in their training to ensure they have no "weakness," will she compromise?

Does she have a choice? Amid all the conniving and mistake-making of the Westerosi throne contenders, Daenerys' white-haloed morality is supposed to make us want her most of all for the throne. I wonder how people of extreme moral character manage to fare in this series?

For some analysis, I want to talk about Daenerys, because her story arc is obviously going to be the most challenging for the show's writers in the season ahead. Early in the story, hers is one of the most interesting narratives: She begins a terrified girl, estranged from her royal background and at the mercy of her vicious brother Viserys. She's managed to dodge the Targaryen family madness; he hasn't. While he makes a desperate, irrational bid for power, she simply dreams of having her own home. When she's sold as an adolescent bride to a terrifying, wild horselord, we feel for her, and when she falls in love and learns to claim some power within a society completely foreign to her, we root for her. By the time Khal Drogo dies and Dany takes leadership of the Khalasar, we believe she can be a contender for the Iron Throne in her own right.

But in the books, she often feels like an off-note from the time she comes into power onward: it's hard to forget she is written in lavish physical detail by a nerdy old guy who likes describing her breasts or her various states of arousal. There is a certain theft of dignity that happens to Daenerys that doesn't happen to Cersei, Arya, Sansa or Catelyn; Daenerys is a very young woman learning to become a moral authority, and this episode presents the way her desire to right impossibly large and deeply-ingrained wrongs such as global poverty or slavery in cultures that have a certain peace with slavery will conflict with her ultimate goal of queendom.

Emilia Clarke as Daenerys often wears an expression simultaneously noble and soft, the kind you expect to see etched on a royal seal, and the way the camera lavishes on her -- a small, beautiful but insistent figure surrounded always by eerie predators -- is currently maintaing a delicate balance between the ways we're meant to see her as simultaneously righteous and powerless. Readers who are Dany fans seem to often feel like they don't know what the books will do with her; it's interesting to see what the show will do with her (I've read that Clarke begged George R.R. Martin to know; if I were her, I'd be the member of the cast begging the hardest, too).

As the premiere closes, we see longtime Kingsguard commander Ser Barristan Selmy save Daenerys from a trap that exploited her own faith in people (believing a child offering her a ball was simply that, and not a warlock offering her a scorpion). Recall how Selmy was dismissed by Joffrey for being too aged? Now, Dany has a new champion -- and look how anxious this seems to make Mormont.

Loyalty is really the overarching theme of this episode; its title, Valar Dohaeris, is High Valyrian for "all men must serve" (versus the title of the Season 2 finale, Valar Morghulis, or "all men must die"). How important is allegiance, Jon Snow is wondering as he tries to prove himself to Mance, and what happens when you misplace your loyalty -- or in the case of Robb, or Tywin, or Cersei, or Davos, your blame?

This season's set to be disaster porn -- book fans are especially excited about season 3 because they cannot wait to see terrible things happen to important characters. Saying so is hardly a spoiler; it's Game of Thrones! If you want to see empowering narratives, watch Girls... er, wait. I got nothin'.

I want it all, and I want it now. [Video Link]]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/03/14/game-of-thrones-1995.html/feed 20 http://boingboing.net/2013/02/21/censored-versions-of-game-of-t.html http://boingboing.net/2013/02/21/censored-versions-of-game-of-t.html#comments Thu, 21 Feb 2013 18:47:29 +0000 Mark Frauenfelder http://boingboing.net/?p=214514 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.

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?

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.

Inside HBO's Game of Thrones

“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]

We’ve had a couple weeks to let the Game of Thrones finale breathe, so now we can talk about it, and we can reflect on season 2 as a whole. If you don’t like spoilers, you may not want to read an article about an episode you haven’t seen that concerns a point in the story you haven’t reached.

Have you heard the joke about how Game of Thrones is like Twitter? There are 140 characters, and terrible things are always happening. I didn’t make that up; I wish I knew who did. From reading Twitter (and Facebook, and occasionally actually talking to people), I gather a lot of people found the season 2 finale to be a little disappointing.

The preceding episode, about the Blackwater Battle, was a tough act to follow, centered on an epic confrontation for King’s Landing and the throne. The mostly-loathed Lannisters seemed poised to lose everything, and somehow or another they’d never been so empathetic doing it. But in order to portray all that dramatic tension, the show had to back-burner nearly everyone else’s story arc for an episode, leaving Jon Snow, Robb Stark, Bran and Rickon and friends, Arya, Daenerys, and Theon to be wrapped up in the finale.

Visually, the finale featured nice contrasts between ice and fire, in a nod to the books’ unifying language. I continue to be impressed the show’s creators are managing such sprawling and – let’s be real – often boring material as richly as they are. Still, the idea of a finale episode that ostensibly spends time catching up on the character stories that weren’t part of the real narrative climax isn’t exciting in concept.

Nonetheless, the finale actually did quite a good job of bringing everyone tidily to their next major precipice, while managing to unite them under the series’ thematic umbrellas: First, all of this throne-squabbling ignores the actual threat of unnatural evil in a slow but inevitable descent from the forbidding north. Second, all these people who scheme for power really want loving families even more, and they’ll actually make strategically-unsound decisions because of a desire to be closer to a parent or child (even if one’s children are dragons).

Serious Game of Thrones fans have been telling me they fear this is the point that the show might lose viewers who aren’t fans of the books, by virtue of the plentitude of characters and the odd, if faithful pacing. And it’ll get ever more challenging to wrangle this long, populous tale into something that makes sense on television: There will probably be edits and embellishments, and purists will complain.

But now that the season’s done and we have until 2013 to wait for season 3, it might be a good time to look at what the show’s doing right – and where we think it might run into some trouble.

The biggest complaint I hear from book fans is some of the liberties the show takes, occasionally sacrificing perfect fealty to the novel in favor of creating better dramatic structure. For example, in the novel it’s tough to tell much about Margaery Tyrell; the show created a more complex identity for her and crystallized her stated goal (to be queen at any cost) based on the most logical inference.

The show also brought to the forefront the clandestine love between Margaery’s handsome brother Loras and the now-late Renly Baratheon. The books only alluded to this affair on occasion, never making it explicit. This means more drama at the expense of ambiguity, true – but that’s the breed of ambiguity that works best in books.

The result of the trade-off for the viewers is more relatable characters, and that’s absolutely essential in a story that has so damn many people in it. In fact, most of the time the show trades restraint for big tells it’s to the benefit of the characters. Here’s another example: In the finale we see Robb wed his true love, flagrantly risking his family’s entire alliance with the cantankerous Frey family. Robb is clearly the kind of character who’s passionate and sincere to his own peril, so when the books let us know as almost an afterthought that oops, Robb’s just married someone, it’s not implausible.

It just makes the Stark son more vibrant, more of a pleasure to invest in, when the show lets us see it happen, lets us meet the woman worth risking a kingdom for. Small quibble: Lady Talisa is a Volantene, which means she’s from outside the Seven Kingdoms Robb wants to win. This would probably have implications on any son she’d bear, in that she brings no political advantage to the bloodline. The family of the books’ Jeyne Westerling is not particularly highly-placed, but they do have the Lannisters for allies, a fact that comes into play later on in the novels. Precise bloodline calculations often seem to bear on one's claim to the throne.

But yes – most plot adjustments pay off in that we see these characters in spectacular, plausible detail thanks in no small part to the impeccable casting and strong acting. Theon in particular has been an incredible addition to the forefront; the book’s mostly-repellent troublemaker has become a desperate “lost boy” whose vile behavior makes sense. In the books we just wanted him to die or something already; we want the show’s Theon to see the light, to have a chance to learn and be saved.

And therein lies what’s probably the biggest danger for the Game of Thrones show: They’ve taken intellectually-compelling characters and have made them present, dimensional and empathetic (for the most part -- I hate how Peytr "Littlefinger" Baelish's ambiguous but omnipresent role has just ended him up an annoying brothel-creeper in the show).

Where will the Stark children go now that all five of them have been relieved from some present tension and cast into new and dangerous territory? Will the kids find their mother? When is Joffrey going to get what he deserves? What about that slow-encroaching undead threat from beyond the Wall, and when is Jon Snow going to get with Ygritte already? These are things we’ve come to care about.

But the series relies on its bleakness. I’ve heard many people wonder why cast Sean Bean as Ned Stark, why make him essentially the first season’s anchor, and then kill him off? Because that’s just how the story is. It makes you care about people, and then it takes them away. It makes you want the emotional salve of seeing them succeed, and then it withholds it. If Game of Thrones is “fun” at all, it’s because just when you think things can’t get any worse, they do.

How long will the show’s complicated universe and all its citizens keep the average viewer’s attention without the gratification people come to crave at the end of that hour they’ve waited a week for? We keep hearing about how the show's success is evidence of how the appetite for high fantasy stories has become mainstream, but this tale, with its non-traditional pacing, will test how much this is true. We want to root for those we love; we want to see who wins. But Game of Thrones is vast, a marathon. We will wait a long, long time before it reveals those victories to us. We’ll lose people along the way. Oh yeah, and some characters , too.

The phrase that Jaqen H'ghar teaches to Arya Stark before he says farewell -- Valar Morghulis -- is High Valyrian for "all men must die."

I guess they happened to have a fake head of George Bush in the props department? Maybe that's where the Phil Dick android head is, too!

According to the creators of Game of Thrones' DVD commentary, the head of ex-POTUS George W. Bush made an appearance on a spike in the show's 10th episode from the first season.

Creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss explain "it’s not a choice, it’s not a political statement. We just had to use whatever head we had around."

Game of Thrones easter egg: George W. Bush's head on a stick

Ravens are a big deal in the Game of Thrones universe. They’re used to transmit information from one place to another, and often seem to be portents of death. This week’s episode begins with a whole dead basket of ‘em, as Prince Theon, in his latest act of swaggering idiocy, has killed all of Winterfell’s birds so that no one can send word to Robb Stark.

Of course, sending notes tied to birds is generally a slow and imperfect form of info transit, especially in the world of this story, which is well-established as massive and hostile to easy passage. I’ve previously written that one of the reasons the series appeals in our current clime is its bold, dialog-provoking approach to patriarchy and sexuality – I wonder if its lavishing upon the preciousness of information and the incredible conveniences we now enjoy in the internet age is another?

This episode in particular illuminates the disadvantages of being unable to communicate well in wartime. Catelyn releases Jaime Lannister in the hopes of getting her daughters back fom King’s Landing – would she have done that if she’d been able to know that King’s Landing only has one of her daughters? People in Westeros are just now finding out that Daenerys is fast becoming a desert queen wreathed in dragons – no one knows, of course, that the Qartheen have stolen them from her. Arya's current ability to kill quickly with just a word, via her odd ally Jaqen H'ghar, is her biggest salvation right now.

We also see the extent to which the TV series is devoted to fleshing out relationships in ways the books don’t -- the books are written in a way that lets you infer sentiment from actions, but that doesn’t necessarily work on TV, where we’re analyzing the subtleties of behavior (and falling into Robb Stark’s eyes, like I was this episode).

 So we’ve been getting this extensive development of the probably-not-a-good-idea relationship between politically-betrothed Robb and Talisa. She’s a character that could turn out to be entirely an invention separate from the books, which see Robb’s duty in conflict with his feelings over Jeyne Westerling of The Crag, not a runaway lady incognito as a battlefield medic.

It’d take a bit of creative writing at this point to make Talisa turn out to be the same woman, but it doesn’t really matter – sorry, purists, but at least when it comes to TV, this is a much more dynamic and more interesting arc; the books see Jeyne as herself barely a footnote, the kind of girl you can’t really imagine anyone thinking of risking an army, a war and a kingdom to marry.

Of course, the idea that the woman actually wasn’t especially worth it would enforce Robb’s major weakness – that he’s not disciplined or experienced enough to manage this highly complicated martial situation on his own, might bungle into such an impulse conflict. But this Robb is too likeable to be quite that dumb, so he gets the kind of woman a guy with good values would admire.

I'm okay with it, especially as that love scene between Talisa and Robb was so incredibly naturalistic, simple and clumsy, relieved of the touch-of-porn grotesquerie that sex in this show usually gets. I always suspected it’d be kind of awkward having to deal with so many leather laces in one’s leather jerkin or doublet or whatever, and look! She laughed, and it felt so genuine.

Tyrion is also someone for whom romantic love can be a weakness, which is why the only thing that’s struck an odd note to me about the show so far is that Cersei seems to have figured out her brother may be falling in love with “his whore” (even though she identified the wrong woman to keep as a hostage)  before that’s even been clear to we the audience.

We know he confided in her and Bronn about his only traumatic experience with love as a young man under his dad’s thumb; we’ve seen him take pains to hide her in the castle – but also her stark refusal to surrender much of the material comfort she expects as the consort of a Lannister son. I guess we see it once Tyrion is out of Cersei’s sight, his panic when he runs to Shae, who is nonplussed, as dutiful about holding and kissing him as she is about brushing Sansa’s hair.

I suppose Tyrion is a person who’s learned well to veil his most vulnerable emotions -- which is why the scene of his pledge to protect her felt so vibrant, felt like it came from such a private, fragile place in him, even as the pair are positioned such that his physical smallness, face upturned, is emphasized relative to her.

We very much want, for his sake, to believe that she loves him, and not just the Lannister gold, but can you really tell?

The other whore, though, the one Cersei has kidnapped thinking it’ll force Tyrion to let her son Joff sit out the upcoming battle with Stannis – this one has seen some things. Remember her flashing her naughty bits farewell to Theon from the back of a horse-drawn cart, heading to the big city hoping to find better fortune?

She seems to have found her way into a leadership role at King’s Landing’s fanciest brothel, and now she’s in favor at the palace itself. Since then she’s been forced at crossbow-point to sexually abuse another girl in front of the young king and now she’s brought out before the queen with a badly-lashed back and a bloody face, accused of being the Hand’s woman.

I like this character; she’s sort of an avatar for the greatest disadvantages of Game of Thrones’ sexual patriarchy, and it feels like a more meaningful decision on the part of the show to represent prostitution and exploitation through a single character we can like and recognize, rather than portray a litany of nameless “whore” characters whenever the story required one, which it frequently does.

But despite the increased attention to romantic and sexual nuance, this episode thrives on its roots in family love. Since Theon seems stubbornly dedicated to his humiliating course, Yara shifts from shaming him in front of her men to talking to him in private about how her presence could soothe his screaming when he was a “terrible” baby. Catelyn has tried to give her son the space to win his war, but he can’t forgive the way her fear for his sisters broke her down and led her to interfere.  The wincing agony of Tyrion’s ongoing cat-and-mouse with his sister continues; like Yara and Theon they have a ruthless parentage in common, but cannot bond as adults.

It’s true that Cersei is motivated by bitterness about how being a woman means she’ll never get the power she wants, so putting her son on the throne is the next best thing. But she really does love her children, and like any mother is desperate to keep them safe. Just like another “mother”  -- Daenerys will risk her life to get her dragons back, because they are the only children she can ever have, now.

In all cases, major world events and the lives of smallfolk all around Westeros are being affected by subtle, complicated family attachments, whether that’s a mother’s love for her children or the burdens that adults have inherited from their parents. It’s that sort of detail that keeps Game of Thrones from being a simple war drama.

It’s not the fault of the show that Daenerys’ bit of the story has become the least interesting, after last season’s fascinating tale of a child-bride’s coming into her own in the arms of a brutal horselord – and losing a black-magic infused fight for his life, and hatching dragons in a fire.

I mean, you probably do have to go downhill from there. But watching her ineffectually crisscross foreign cities and lose some things and then get others isn’t very engaging – we want her to just reach the scene of all the action already, and it feels like it’s taking forever. Fortunately, these exotic cities she’s been in are breathtaking to look at, and so is actress Emilia Clarke’s expressive face.

Aren’t you glad that Bran Stark and his little brother Rickon are still alive after all? They're really the only full innocents in this thing, poor kiddoes. Wily Osha has hidden them away (along with Bran’s lumbering pal Hodor) in the crypts below Winterfell. Can’t wait to see what they’ll do now. This episode is called "The Prince of Winterfell" -- at the end we know that refers to the little boy that really holds that title, not the manchild that pretends at it.

A work of fiction doesn't have to be scientifically accurate. It just has to make sense. All it has to do is maintain an internal logic and consistency strong enough that you, the reader, aren't inadvertently thrown out of the world. If you're frequently frustrated by detail accuracy in fiction, that's likely your problem, not fiction's. Chill out. Breath deep. Smell the flowers. Experience some imagination and wonder.

I fully endorse all the sentiments outlined above. And yet. And yet. There are some fictional details that drive me crazy. Like the seasonal shifts in George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series, where winter and summer last for years—sometimes decades—and nobody knows exactly when the seasons will change. It's not that I feel a burning need to prove to Martin that this can't work. Instead, it makes me ravenously curious. I keep wondering whether, given what we know about astronomy, there's any way that this could actually work somewhere, in a galaxy far, far away.

A couple of weeks ago, io9's George Dvorsky put together a little round-up of five possible scientific explanations that would make Westeros' magical reality make more sense. I chatted about Dvorsky's list with Attila Kovacs, an actual astronomer who has a postdoc position at the California Institute of Technology. They've got differing perspectives on how unpredictable and ridiculously long seasons might work. Thanks to both these sources, I feel like I better understand our universe, and can read Martin more comfortably.

Dvorsky's list starts with planetary tilt. Specifically, what would happen if the planet Westeros is on had a particularly wobbly tilt.

Earth's seasons are caused by the tilt of its axis of rotation - a 23.4° offset of the axis to be exact. The direction of the Earth's rotational axis stays nearly fixed in space despite the fact that we're also revolving around the Sun. As a result, depending on the Earth's location during its orbit, the northern hemisphere is tilted toward the sun, causing us to experience summer. Half a year later, when the Earth is on the opposite side of the Sun, the northern hemisphere is tilted away from the Sun, resulting in — yes, you guessed it — winter. The seasons are, of course, reversed for the southern hemisphere.

The seasons themselves are the result of shifting daylight exposures. In temperate and polar regions, the seasons are marked by changes in the intensity of sunlight that reaches the Earth's surface. The less sunlight, the colder it is. Makes sense. It's important to note that the Earth's axis of rotation is extremely stable. If it wasn't, the Earth's tilt would be very wobbly, resulting in inconsistent and unpredictable seasonal lengths like the ones portrayed in Game of Thrones.

But thankfully we have the Moon. Or more specifically, we have a very large moon. The Earth's moon is disproportionately large compared to other planetary satellites in the solar system. And without it, there might not be any seasons, or the seasons could be very different than what we're used to. The Moon has the effect of stabilizing the tilt of the Earth's rotational axis. Without it, Earth would be a wobbly mess.

Kovacs, though, says Dvorsky has this backwards. Our Moon isn't a stabilizer at all.

Rotational axes of planets are almost impossible to nudge (IO9's #1), unless by a powerful tidal force — such as the one exerted by our large and close Moon (short of a catastrophic collision with another planet). IO9 has this completely upside-down. Earth's rotational axis would be extremely stable were it not for the Moon. Because of the Moon, it is constantly changing — precessing — with a 26,000 year period.

Basically, Earth does experience some erratic, hard-to-predict changes to its orbit which probably result in changes to observable weather/climate patterns. In fact, it's a big part of some theories on why Ice Ages happen. It's just that, here, unlike on Westeros, those changes happen over thousands of years, not tens or dozens. Instead, Kovacs offers two potential causes for unwieldy seasons that weren't mentioned in the io9 piece at all. First, he says, you could get a very irregular orbit—and thus, irregular seasons—just by having there be two suns.

IO9's list is missing my favourite explanation, that of a disrupted planetary orbit, a.k.a the 3-body problem. Earth goes around the Sun on a nice regular orbit, only because the effect of all other planets on Earth's motion is tiny, so one really only needs to consider the Earth orbiting the Sun (2 bodies) or the Moon orbiting Earth (2 bodies again). However, things get hairy with more large bodies close by — such as with planets orbiting binary stars. Around binary stars, most orbits would be chaotic. So much so, that in the long run planets would tend to be either ejected or collide with one of the stars. But, perhaps, Westeros got lucky, and stayed around long enough by slim chance... And, the second object in the binary could be a brown dwarf (essentially a very large planet, that is just short of becoming a star itself), which would explain why it still only has one real sun still...

And, here is one more possibility, just for fun: What if Westeros' sun has a variable energy output? It could have structural instabilities (resulting from changes in its stellar structure, or from recently swallowing a large inner planet). Or, it could have a close binary companion from which it accretes material at an unsteady rate...

Of course, Kovacs' "three-body problem" explanation has implications for the seasons on Tatooine, as well. But that's a whole 'nother issue.

Read the full io9 piece on the theoretical astronomy that could cause weird seasonal changes like the ones depicted in Game of Thrones.

Read astronomer Attila Kovacs full response to that piece.

Image from a T-shirt Of the Day on RIPT Apparel

When I wrote about Game of Thrones last week, I talked about how I – someone generally averse to swords-and-dragons culture – found myself fascinated with the way this particular fantasy universe and its translation to high-concept television drama had some things to say about our modern environment. You know, the whole “questioning traditional social roles,” “finding value in diverse identities” “challenging the gender binary” thing. With that in mind, I’m quite excited that this most recent episode gives me so much to work with. Allow me to recap for you?

We open our episode with the fascinating condition of Theon Greyjoy. After having reunited with his family, he’s got something to prove to his father Balon, who has precious little pity for his son’s long lifetime away from home as a ward of the Starks of Winterfell.

His sister Yara (Asha in the books; the show’s creators feared audiences might get confused with the wildling Osha)  recently took the time to mock her long lost brother’s sexuality before revealing she’s been proving her worth as a conqueror in her own right. As retaliation, Theon has somewhat clumsily taken the Stark’s homestead of Winterfell from its prior lord – little Bran Stark, paralyzed from the waist down. Good victory, bro.

It’s not a good day for Theon; his most recent act was to messily hack off the head of the man who first taught him how to use a sword, in a misguided attempt to gain Winterfell’s obedience. And now Osha, herself a Stark prisoner who became sympathetic to the family, has seduced Theon so she could sneak herself, Bran, his littlest brother Rickon and the slow-witted Hodor (who carries Bran in a basket on his back, thereby acting as Bran’s legs) – out of the occupied Winterfell. Mission accomplished.

Before you feel too sorry for Theon, keep in mind he's betrayed the family that raised him over a handful of childish daddy issues and the fantasy of being a prince with an armload of "salt wives" . But he's been thwarted at every attempt to prove his manhood: He’s let a “half-wit,” a “cripple”, a “whore” and a little boy out of his sight, and he must recapture Bran and Rickon if he’s to keep everyone believing that his ownership of Winterfell is really a “thing.”

The books portray Theon as a sad and disgusting creature who smiles too much and bullies too many women for his own good, but in Alfie Allen’s portrayal of the character we see some nuance – here’s a kid subjugated to his dad’s ideas about manhood, struggling to get right with himself. It’s surprisingly sad. One of the great things about this television adaptation is that we can see the flicker and flux of emotion of individuals forced into highly literal, pragmatic circumstances.

Meanwhile, the late Ned Stark’s bastard Jon Snow, a “crow” of the Night Watch, has gotten in over his head, too. While investigating the wild lands beyond the wall that separates Westeros from madness, he’s ended up alone with a captive, the fiery-haired Ygritte – and who knows who’s actually the prisoner between the two of them?

 In the face of his chaste watchmen’s vows, the woman teases him relentlessly about the hard-on he got while they were forced to snuggle through the night for crucial warmth in the brutal cold. He has her bound on a rope lead, but he’s lost in the snowy lands while she needles him about his blue balls. “You know nothing, Jon Snow,” she tells him.

The core of the tension between Ygritte and Jon is sexual, yes – but she takes it further than that. His vows have prohibited him from flesh acts, but have also separated him from her people’s world of lawlessness and freedom. Her mockery of him as regards abstinence becomes a treatise on political liberty– who made any of these laws, anyway? Who has the right to claim governance of any place?

One of the more interesting liberties taken by the show is to shed some light on an inevitably complex relationship. There's Lord Tywin Lannister – architect of the war against the late Ned Stark's vengeful son Robb, and father of the incestuous twins that’ve secretly birthed Westeros’ current brutal brat-king Joffrey – and Arya Stark, the incognito daughter of our dear Ned. Arya’s stayed alive by posing as a boy, until Tywin’s keen eye found her for a girl and plucked her from Harrenhal’s torture pits for his cupbearer. You get the sense that he knows there’s more to her than she lets on, especially when he learns she can read – but this little short-haired tomboy keeps a straight face and a level head in the face of the lord whose family killed her dad and wants to kill her brother next. His underestimation of Arya is almost cute, and her resilience is incredible.

Last week, her mother’s friend Peytr Baelish almost spotted her, and Tywin’s knight Amory Lorch almost caught her stealing a message about her brother – good thing her unlikely pal Jaqen H’ghar assassinated Lorch on her behalf (that’s two out of three deaths H’ghar owes her for saving him from a fire). This week, little Arya’s wit keeps her one step ahead of Lord Lannister, universally adored and despised in kind by everyone from his subjects to his own golden-haired children. In the world of Westeros, dirty-faced girls always seem to be a little more powerful than the men with swords at their disposal. In an impromptu conversation about history, Arya reminds Tywin that two out of three of the prior age’s conquerors (who burned the very place they stand, even) were female dragonriders, where "a million men would have been repelled."

Back at King’s Landing, Arya’s elder sister Sansa continues to endure some brutal penalties for her girlish fantasies about noble princes and royal ladies. Virtually imprisoned at court as the vicious young king Joffrey’s fiancée, she barely escaped rape at the hands of an angry citizens' mob in our last episode – Sandor “The Hound” Clegane, the brutal knight with the burned face that Joff calls “dog”, was the one to save her.

Lots of people “ship” Sansa and The Hound, and the show seems to be capitalizing on this; he makes sure she knows that his particular brand of brutality is no less than what’s required to serve the royalty she so fantasized about as an innocent girl. The grotesque Hound is the perfect reality check for her naive dreams. We see Sansa's panic as she gets her very first period, a nightmare given that it means she must tell the nasty queen she's ready to bear kids for awful Joff. The first day a girl sees blood is scary enough without those implications -- even her biology is her enemy within her poignant captivity.

We see Joff’s mom Cersei Lannister, the duplicitous queen regent, shed some tears in front of her “half-man” brother, the uncommonly witty Tyrion Lannister. She says her kids are the most important thing to her, even as brutal and uncontrollable as her wicked boy Joffrey is – and no matter how heavy the mad spectre of the prior Targaryen dynasty’s incestuous heritage hangs. Meanwhile, her number one love – her twin brother – remains a prisoner in the Stark camp.

Jaime Lannister is a fascinating character. He and his siblings have all felt the burn of having Tywin for a father, but he’s always lived by his own code – even though he’s known for killing Westeros’ previous Mad King, you can tell he did it for probably a good reason. And even though he’s had three kids with his own twin sister, he purports to have never been with anyone but her (even though Cersei’s been hooking up with cousin Lancel in his absence!)

 Yet when a previous squire gets thrown in prison alongside him – and confides that his day serving Jaime in a jousting competition was the best time of his life – Jaime has no reservations about strangling the poor lad in order to cause a ruckus that gets him out into the stockade. Although a much-honored knight, honor hasn't done too much for Jaime.

Robb Stark is beholden to a very important political marriage, but it can’t stop him – a little bit too righteous, too loving, too young to win this war, we can tell – from continuing a flirtation with a battlefield medic, the enigmatic Talisa. Meanwhile in his camp, the fervor for Jaime Lannister’s head grows. Only Robb's mom, Catelyn, can intervene on behalf of Jaime, the most valuable bargaining chip in her dreams of having her daughters returned. She’s going to let him go, isn’t she.

An ocean away, throne hopeful and Mad King descendent Daenerys Targaryen has lost her dragons to her manipulative Qartheen hosts. Her knight (and would-be suitor) Jorah Mormont investigates on her behalf, only to be witness to a creepy insurrection by the blue-lipped, magical Undying. Ygritte taunts Jon Snow to his limits and manages to escape, leading him into a wildling ambush.  And at the episode’s close, Theon Greyjoy displays two tarred little bodies that he purports to belong to the unfortunate Winterfell children, much to everyone’s horror.

There were no boobs in this episode, actually. It was entirely a narrative about what insecure people do when their assumptions about power and privilege are challenged and threatened – there’s king Robb Stark’s inadvisable romance, Lord Tywin’s strange dialogue with his underestimated cup-girl, Jon Snow’s total failure to manage his fire-haired captive, Theon’s desperate actions at Winterfell.

This is a world where a sadistic child king is enabled to run rampant over his people, shattering noble ideals left and right as his prisoner-cum-child-bride still mourns her father, and where disempowered folk must grasp desperately for every advantage, for good or for ill, they can get. There are a lot of people with swords, but those with wits and wiles seem luckier still, no matter how fragile or how small.

 The title of the episode is "Men Without Honor." Yes, all these mighty men have been disempowered -- but, okay, you've gotta feel for them a little too, seeing how little honor buys you around these parts.

I became involved with the Game of Thrones TV series and books against all odds. After all, I don’t think of myself as a “geek” or a “nerd”, even if I am a video game journalist.

My interest is in unnatural universes and the potential in interactive fictional worlds, but the traditional wheelhouses of SF and high fantasy—and as terrified as I am of the people who won’t like to hear this, I’ll come out and say it—feel like something I grew out of. When I was adolescent, I ate up entire novel series about thrones and dragons and mages. In my work—where I look at the cultural context of the things we play, and the reasons we’re attracted to playing them—I click, tap and button-mash through countless products that owe everything to Tolkien.

Wandering though these exalted realms, I’m way tired of serving wenches and noble knights; weary of sack-clothed peasants and their thatched-roof cottages; sick to death of bikini armor, sigils, scale helms and sacks of holding. Enough, already.

So I thought it’d be more than safe to overlook Game of Thrones, a niche-bound, overcomplicated slice of knights-and-dragons that, for whatever reason, was becoming an ornately-armored TV show.

People will eat up all kinds of garbage; ‘media criticism’ often means gritting your teeth, convinced of your rightness, through the latest pop culture feeding frenzy until the blood has dissipated into the sea. This is what I was going to do about Game of Thrones, even though all of my friends—all of my people!—were stoked about it.

But then I heard about the boobs.

If you know nothing else about Game of Thrones, you know that there are boobs in every episode, that according to the TV show the world of Westeros (and the lands beyond the narrow sea!) seems preoccupied with relations after the canine manner. Even if you do not watch Game of Thrones and you never intend to, you’ve heard someone say that there are a lot of naked women, there are a lot of woman-subjugating sex scenes, and there'ss generally a lot of fleshy eye-candy in this show.

There are entire articles, from high-end magazines to lunatic blogs, which analyze, deride or scrutinize this particular element. And like any new media feminist, I got suckered into the debate before I’d read a stitch of text or seen a minute of the show. Voraciously eating up all of the discussion, the dread premonition settled in: I would end up reading all of George R.R. Martin’s books. I would tune in, with the fervor of religion, to the television series.

This happened to me before—and I take no pride in it—with the Twilight series. When something attracts so much online discussion (wondering why adult women would be attracted to an absurd tale of supernatural creatures warring over a clumsy, ordinary girl) I consumed it as thoroughly as any superfan. Twilight's disturbingly anti-feminist fantasy is compelling escapism, a deferral of obligations in the face of complicated things, a fear-response to overwhelming female empowerment rhetoric.

In an age where we’re whisking shame away from sex like so much stale old smoke, what woman wouldn’t daydream about being treasured by many even if she never puts out—even if she’s a powerless loser? In an era where it’s nearly a sisterly obligation for each woman to stand wholly on her own, who wouldn’t find some guilty pleasure in the admission of fear of male anger (facing the werewolf, Jacob) or of male sexuality (the chilly, chaste restraint of Edward)?

I kinda loved it. So in kind, I wanted to know: Why Game of Thrones, why HBO, why now?

I ate up the first book over the course of a work trip late last summer, and the first season of the show, always making sure to keep ahead in my reading. That way, a new episode carried with it the distinctly geeky pleasure of instant recognition: I already knew the television characters for who they were.

First, there's the brilliant casting. Every character reveal is a subtle delight, which alone seems a reason to keep watching: a fascinating translation from the text to the imagination and to sight. It shares this quality with the Harry Potter movies—fiction that captures the imagination creates a compulsive urge for imagery that’s more tactile, more relatable. Most of those who roleplay Harry Potter on the internet uses the series’ film actors for their avatar pictures, not the books’ official art nor any of the impressive fanart that exists.

There’s something about Game of Thrones that makes it more interesting than anything I’ve ever seen step over the crossmedia threshold. Martin’s writing style is frustratingly unsentimental—he’s like a lover who spends the night with his back to you. He describes incredibly complicated relationships in elaborate political climates; yet he creates empathy for these would-be rulers without giving us much insight into their inner worlds.

Events and behaviors are drawn as they are, and his skill is in letting his readers know plainly who the “good guys” are without writing anyone as particularly good. Much of the appeal of his novels lies in the pleasure of emotional inference; behavior hints at subtext, and you root quietly for your favorites, knowing that most of them will never gratify you, and may be yanked away at any moment for an inglorious death.

Well-cast and talented actors given such roles are light blades of clean light shone through a prism—suddenly everything bursts into color. Certainly, the show has taken liberties. As faultlessly loyal to the books as it often is, it feels somehow different; the actors add nuances to the book's characters without making meaningful change to their story arcs or to their dialogue.

How human written creatures are once we can look into their eyes! Game of Thrones is a fascinating essay in how television and literature are alike yet different; what does one medium excel at versus another, when telling the same story?

Back to the boobs, though, since that’s why most people know about Game of Thrones. If the fiction is as political as The Sopranos, and as socially complex as Mad Men, why does it need to rely on “sexposition,” the much-bandied term that refers to using erotic scenes as backdrops to illustrative revelations about plotlines or characters?

The fabric of Martin's universe, with multiple families, motives and allegiances, is pretty taxing. Perhaps HBO needs a way to keep people with short attention spans tuned in. Okay.

But through all of the banners and battlefields, through the trenchers of bacon and the heels of black bread—more on the books’ truly elaborate food fixation later, maybe—it’s a narrative about marginalized people triumphing in ironbound, ancient and ugly structures.

It’s a world that allows magic to creep in at its fringes, a variable that just might create future fortune for those who most need it. Whether they’re little-person “half-men” (as in the series’ best character, Tyrion Lannister, as portrayed by Emmy-winning Peter Dinklage), unwanted bastard sons, or frustrated women powerless in a patriarchal structure, Game of Thrones is about the heroism of fighting fate and the social order.

In The New Yorker, Emily Nussbaum recently pointed out that Game of Thrones is just one of many high-concept television dramas fascinated with the nuances of old-fashioned “patriarchal subculture”. Meanwhile, our pop television breathlessly fans itself with White Girl Problems, 2 Broke Girls, Sh*t Girls Say, The New Girl, and—oh, wait, what’s that one?—oh yeah, Lena Dunham’s Girls.

Boobs on TV aren’t just boobs on TV at a time like this. Power structures are changing, so it’s not so surprising people would be drawn to a fantasy series about how power structures limit and exploit women—structures suddenly fragile in a fantasy world at war, ideologically and literally.

It’s the kind of thing that I feel rewarded by exploring instead of just talking about. You can be one of those people who calls "misogyny!" at the first sight of a naked woman on TV. Just as you can be one of those people—as I almost was—who sees Game of Thrones as just another sugary slice of fanservice.

Either way, you’d be missing out on something that’s not just a fascinating exercise in crossmedia storytelling, but probably has an under-addressed role in expressing our own culture's quiet revolutions.

A Game of Thrones (A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 1) is available from Amazon and bookstores.]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/05/11/gameofthrones.html/feed 152