PUBIS AND PABLUM
Point: If You Only Watch the Show, You Don't Even Get It
by Dirk VanderHart
WHEN THE HBO SERIES Game of Thrones returns to the small screen on Sunday, April 6, you will hold a viewing party. You will dress as a zombified Catelyn Stark or drape yourself in red, talk about R'hllor a lot, and be creepy. You might scream "Hodor" at your television (I sincerely hope you will not).
Congratulations. You are an enthusiast. You are a fan.
But let's be clear: If you have not adventured and ax battled and slogged through the thousands of pages of George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire—if you think the books are boring and wish they'd just skip to "the good parts," like the show—you do not "love" Game of Thrones. Like my suspiciously book-averse colleague Ned Lannamann, you don't even get it.
Game of Thrones, the TV series, is a dilettante's epic, a Reader's Digest counterpart. Ned will suggest it hits all the key slaughters, basks in the primary betrayals, glories in the incests. This is the first thing its stalwarts always argue.
They are missing the point. By jamming only the bloodiest, most fantastical elements of the story into viewers' foam-flecked maws, the show neglects the vast reality to be found in Westeros and its surroundings. And that's a terrible shame.
See, the beating heart of Ice and Fire isn't dragons or White Walkers. It's got little to do with the (admittedly pressing) question of warg fealty. The key to Martin's series—the reason all of its drawn-out tortures are better than (most of) the fantasy genre's countless others—is that it's so deeply felt.
Nine long chapters of Daenerys Targaryen dithering on a throne somehow add to the foreboding whenever a lutist strikes up "The Rains of Castamere" a continent away. Fat Samwell Tarly's hapless, maddening route to Oldtown lends credence to Wildling raiders scaling the Wall far north. Each house in Martin's books has its own history, hatreds, and fleshed-out motivations. For a series that's as much about politics as it is about tawdry polyamory, that's everything.
A Song of Ice and Fire is Stannis Baratheon's painted table—thousands of minute knife jiggles and brush strokes that cohere to form an intricate world. Game of Thrones is a collection of set pieces.
I admit I have pettier beefs with the show, and they are the same difficulties I have with any adaptation of a written work I love: I hate an actor's face and mannerisms to supplant the notions I've formed of characters from the page.
Peter Dinklage is a great Tyrion Lannister, but my Tyrion is more grotesque, with a less-booming voice and the correct shade of hair. Sansa Stark is not a gawky redhead. Littlefinger is certainly not Baltimore Mayor Tommy Carcetti.
But these are personal annoyances. Mostly, Game of Thrones chews up a series I greatly admire, and regurgitates its most-palatable, pulpy mush. It's A Song of Ice and Fire simplified and stripped nude for the average slack-jawed, potentially-swinging-a-music-editor-gig-though-they-never-learned-to-read Joe.
Love is accepting something in all its forms—during the sexy good times (Red Wedding! Dragon births!) and the droning recitations of half-remembered dreams (pretty much any chapter titled "Sansa"). It is making a study of your love's object, losing yourself in their mannerisms and curves and errant hairs.
And maybe the people who write and produce Game of Thrones really do love A Song of Ice and Fire. I wouldn't bet against it. There's nowhere to fit all of Martin's machinations in a one-hour time slot.
But if you've studiously avoided the books out of a belief that the TV series is easier, faster, or better, then you, Red Priestess, love a husk.
I'll close by saying that if Ned Lannamann were a character in Westeros, he would belong to House Codd. And he'll never have any idea why that's the sickest burn imaginable.
FULL OF ICE AND FIRE, SIGNIFYING NOTHING
Counterpoint: The TV Show Has Nudity
by Ned Lannamann
THE GOLDEN RULE is this: Books are always better than the movies based on them.
Hogwash. Have you read Fight Club? It's dreadful. Mario Puzo's The Godfather isn't any great shakes, either. And don't get me started on Stephen King.
So the golden rule is bogus to begin with, but it shouldn't apply to Game of Thrones anyway—it's not a movie, it's a TV show. Some people (whose names rhyme with Shmirk Blanderfart) will insist that George R.R. Martin's long, dreary books are superior to the excellent, taut television program that the show's brilliant creators have extracted from them.
But the show is better in so, so many obvious ways that only a blithering idiot would wheeze otherwise. Said idiot, desperately clutching his Kindle loaded with A Dance with Dragons (geez, George, you really gotta work on those titles), is overlooking some very important facts.
First fact: Dragons. Would you like to read a cute little description of a dragon in your fun little fantasy book? Or would you like to see the damn thing, in terrifying scaly flesh, roaring fire and screeching black murder to the pitiful masses below its soaring wings? Of course you'd rather see it. (This is known as "The McConaughey-McCaffrey Ratio": Five seconds of Reign of Fire is worth infinitely more than the entire Dragonriders of Pern series.)
Second fact: Names. There are entirely too many character names in Game of Thrones to keep track of—in both the books and the series. But whereas the page gives you Martin prattling on like it's the first book of Chronicles (this also might be a good time to point out how asinine the word "Ser" looks in print), the show gives you a repertory of incredibly accomplished actors, whose visages and speech bring dimension and depth to the endless herd of characters populating the story.
Third fact: Nudity. I shouldn't need to elaborate on this.
Fourth fact: Charles Dance. The dude's a fucking badass. You can read all you want of Martin's fustian prose, but there is no assemblage of words that comes close to the sheer brilliance of Dance's onscreen performance as Tywin Lannister. Here's the most evil man in the Seven Kingdoms, and you kind of end up rooting for him. BAD. ASS. (Kevin Spacey's Francis Underwood could learn a thing or two.)
Have I completed all five smothering doorstops of what Martin's managed to publish thus far? Well, no. But let me stop you right there: I read all of the first fucking thing, A Game of Thrones, and three-quarters of the second, A Crashing of Kings or whatever the fuck. I've invested a good 1,500 pages' worth of my life into Martin's hacky series. Prior to that, I'd never read 1,500 pages of anything. Believe me, if I could get those months of leisure reading time back, I would. I'd probably use them to re-read T.H. White a few times over (perhaps the greatest fantasy writer of all time—even better than Martin's hero, and middle-initial inspiration, J.R.R. Tolkien).
It stands to reason that A Song of Ice and Fire works marvelously as a TV show. George R.R. Martin is terrific at plot, and his sense of scope is nothing short of astonishing. But he's a schlocky, almost trashy novelist—I challenge you to find, in all 982 quadrillion pages of those goofball novels, a single sentence that makes you sit back contentedly in your wingback chair and ruminate on what a marvelous construction of the English language it is. As for me, I'll be on the couch. I've got the fourth season of Game of Thrones to watch.
