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Kelly of Water's Edge
Rohan
Jul 28 2014, 4:46pm
Post #1 of 4
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Game of Thrones casting news
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Has anyone else seen the new character casting list for next season?
Alexander Siddig (f/k/a Star Trek DS9's Dr. Julian Bashir) has been cast as Oberyn's older and more even-tempered brother Doran.
Jonathan Pryce has been cast as a character called High Sparrow, a religious leader trying to assist the poor.
From the few sentences I read about the characters, it sounds like High Sparrow will fall into the "good guy" spectrum (although on Game of Thrones you often can't be sure for a while), while the big question about Doran is what, if any, retalitory measures he will take (or try to take) for what went down last season.
Nice to see Siddig in something again, and Pryce is always awesome.
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Sunflower
Valinor
Jul 30 2014, 5:24am
Post #2 of 4
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Interesting (possible spoilers)
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Did you see the fan reaction at the Comic-Con panel? The biggest reactions were for Siddig and Pryce. I'm happy too about the casting for what we have...
Have you read the books Kelly? If not, what I write will be not necessarily be spoiler, but I can't resist, so here goes....
1) I agree about the High Sparrow, but there's going to be, um, shall we say, a bit MORE to him than "helping the poor." I wonder how far Season 5 will go, considering Cersei is a POV character in both books 4 and 5. Will they get to a certain Cersei chapter that takes place mostly outdoors, if you know what I mean? (they're looking to cast Septa Unella.) Personally, I'm frothing to see this onscreen....if for the performance of Lena Headey (NOT her anticipated double for this scene, if you know what I mean...again, I assume you've read the books, but trying not to spoil anything.)
Personally, I can't wait to see the "Faith Militant" onscreen. I'm thinking Templars vibe, to counter the "heresy" of Stannis in the north. The showrunners have played up the "religious zeal" aspect of Stannis/Melisandre even more than the books in some scenes, so it seems they want to make a point. I can't wait to see the costumes.
2) What do you think of the elimination of Arianne? Fans are upset about this, and I am a little too. *three* of the Sand Snakes, with a former A-list star as one of them (*Keisha Castle-Hughes* as Obara? Really? Unless they're combining the characters of Obara, Tyene, and Arianne. I hope. I can't see it.) Dorne had 2 major plot points in the series, and this takes out one of them.
3) No Penny? Well, I can see this, as much as it breaks my heart...she'd be extremely hard to cast, if they wanted her. But if they expand Jorah's role to replace her, I won't argue there. More Ian Glen. Yes, please. *DROOL* (He can betray me ANYTIME.)
The panel was hilarious BTW. John Bradley, Gwen Christie, and Rory McCann in particular.
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Kelly of Water's Edge
Rohan
Jul 30 2014, 6:41pm
Post #3 of 4
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I was aware that it was starting to become a highly regarded series by fantasy fans, but haven't been able to make the time commitment as they don't exactly seem to be light reading. At this point I don't want to be either TV spoiled or upset about discrepancies, so if I do eventually get into them, I think it will be after the show ends.
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Sunflower
Valinor
Jul 31 2014, 11:33am
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I highly, highly recommend the books. To the point where I'd say that watching the show without reading the books would be like watching the LOTR films without reading Tolkien. I'm giving them that high praise...well, nothing can compare to Tolkien of course---his works still have a literary quality and, more important, a timeless moral and spiritual relevance that not many works of fiction can equal, if at all, surpass--but the series "A Song Of Ice And Fire" was already in the process of becoming a literary classic before the TV show was even announced. Strange to say that, and before reading them I would have scoffed, but having read them now, I can see the praise.
I think one reviewer summed up the books quite nicely: "Imagine a series with the literary quality of T.H. White's The Once And Future King, the in-your-face, you-are-there grittiness of a movie like Braveheart, and the sort of intricate character development of a TV series like Lost...." Though oddly enough the books I also thought of when reading them were Frank Herbert's Dune, which I'm surprised critics haven't compared them to, with the all the competing Royal Houses, the fantastic complexity of the plot between them, and the characters' thoughts being revealed in italics as the action moves along, giving us a window inside their heads. And even, in terms of the descriptive wuality and immersion in a primitive culture, a bit of Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series (old Scotland) as well.
I remember in 2011 seeing the HBO publicity pictures of Sean Bean on the Iron throne and thought, "Big deal, they got an LOTR actor for an HBO show, they're really pushing this, aren't they?" (knowing that there was much more to Sean than LOTR, but for the purposes of fantasy fans, etc.) And frankly, I couldn't see the hype, not being a fantasy fan for the most part b/c having read all the big post-Tolkien fantasy authors (Shannara, Wheel of Time, etc) I thought they weren't that good. I suppose b/c they were just too "fantasy"--they lacked that element of realism or grounded in some historical reality that I guess all epic fantasy has to be good.
It's funny how the best fantasy seems to have to have this element, IMO, the "long time ago" in addition to the "galaxy far away" element, and the best fantasy authors capitalize on it. Fantasy by itself is limiting, but if it's history we can relate to, or if at least we have some distant cultural memory of. Precisely b/c our modern culture doesn't believe in magic. (Tolkien addressed this as we know, but I won't go into that here.) So we have to have something to fall back on. And so we have authors like Tolkien writing a "fantastic" history of Bronze Age Europe, and Robert E Howard of Conan the Barbarian fame going back even farther than that for his world of Hyperboria. And that's the key to it, really: our belief that characters somewhat like this could have existed, once.
And IMO Martin's world of Westeros joins these fictional lands, in spades. At the recent Comic-Con panel there was discussion of how events in the books were taken from Scottish history, and it's a well-known fact by now that the world of the books is inspired by the historical period of I 'd say, roughly 1150 AD. Martin's quaisi-medieval world setpiece for A Song Of Ice And Fire pans out roughly like this:
Westeros: early medieval England and France
Dorne: Moorish Spain, so much so that HBO sought, and got, permission to film parts of Season 5 in Spain,(and here's hoping they save money on set design and film at places like The Alhambra, which are some of the world's most beautiful buildings and would love to see onscreen, even if only the small screen, like I said, I can't wait to see the costumes for this culture!)
The North: this part, goes back further in the time frame, to late Roman England..Hadrian's Wall
The Iron Islands--elements of the Vikings, though other cultures I pick up from the region as well
Essos: Martin's Easterm continent reminds me of Howard' Conan world, and that's a compliment. it's actually more developed as a setpiece than Hyperboria though...it sometimes seems as if Conan is touring his world than living in it..Ive read those stories too)
The Dothraki: the Mongol Horde, of course. Though in keeping with the timeline, in the period right before Ghengis, when they had yet to be united under a single world-conquering leader.
And so on. I'd go out on a limb and say that in itself, Martin' fictional world is no great shakes of imagination--at times, the disguise is thin--("ser" being the title for Westeros knights, for example). What distinguises it from other fantasy is just the fantastic breadth, scope and size of the world, with dozens of Royal Hoises great and small at this point, and within that of characters of each royal House, and that's just the families, not counting the servants, vassals, retainers, etc, each House represents a country and you could easily write a spin-off series on any one House/country at this point, and it only keeps growing. And against this a detailed backdrop of the country or province these characters travel through, and behind all this a vast cast of rdinary "small folk" that peeps though often and captures our imagination. And each House has its own history, legends, songs, lore, etc, and Martin wallows in this. It's not quite the size of Middle-Earth yet, and the backstory is not yet as complex as the Sil, but it's getting there. Its gotten so that at the end of each books Martin lists all the Houses and the cast of characters of each, so fans can keep track.
When I read the books--which I decided to see after seeing Season 1 on DVD, rented from the library a year after it came out-I was immediately hooked. And then something curious happened: far from just being a cracking good yarn, I began to care about these characters, in a way that I hadn't had reading fantast since Tolkien. Heresy, that! Even though the series has become famous for its darkness, realpolitc (don't read this for inspiration; it's delightfully Machevellian at times). But its unpredictability is its delight.
And if there's one other good reason to read the books, it's b/c it's what just what used to be called a good read. With old-fashioned fat, juicy paragraphs full of detail, descriptions, great dialogue, etc. Not like most fiction written nowadays. And last--I have to confess--sorry, Professor, in one aspect Martin outdoes you here. GRRM is a foodie, and you can tell when reading these books. A Song of ice and Fire has also become famous for its food. To the point where critics have written at length at how in Martin's world, characters are identified by what they eat. For example, Sansa's lemon cakes, soldiers chowing down on spits of meat with "juice dripping into their beards" etc. Martin goes on and on about not only what his people eat but often even how it's cooked. His world is a literal feast. In Book 3 Joffrey's wedding contains 77 courses and reading the chapter, in between all the political intruige and mechanations, as the plot thickens so does the royal palatte, Martin takes the time to describe, in loving detail each delicious course. It got so bad that I had to start eating something when I as reading. I kid you not! So I did things like take the books to work and read them on my lunch break:). Recently there was an article where a critic of the TV show had a minor quibble with a scene in I think Episode 5 where a character who's a baker goes on about "how you can't forget the gravy!" for his meat pies. Fans bombarded his inbox with replies that far from being a liability, this was the TV show being faithful to the books! And reading how charater in Dorne is snacking on olives, chickpea paste and flatbread, I thought, "probably the Moors in Spain, or Meditteranean," and yup, I was right!
At some point I thought, "This is insane. Someone ought to write a tie-in cookbook with this, they'd make a lot of money!" Turns out, someone actually has! I think it came out last year.
So in short, don't wait a few years to read the books. In fact, seeing as Book 7 defenitely will NOT come out before Season 7--or 8, depending on how the showrunners want to tell it, based on what they know of the plot and the books' release schedule--it will be impossible. They take 5 years to write at this point. We book fans are wondering how we can avoid being spoiled by the TV show until then. I guess we'll end up watching the last season anyway, until the "real" canon is revealed...
(This post was edited by Sunflower on Jul 31 2014, 11:47am)
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