Westeros

Big news for fans of replica memorabilia has just come down the pipeline: Valyrian Steel, producers of officially licensed weapons based on “A Song of Ice and Fire”, have nowannounced that they have secured the rights to produce weapons and armor based on HBO’s hit Game of Thrones series. The first items they plan to produce?

Best of all, Valyrian Steel means to continue to producing replicas based on the novels at the same time. They have a Night’s Watch Survival Kit in the pipeline, each one featuring a unique, hand-made obsidian dagger, and King Robert’s Warhammer is on the way to join Longclaw, Needle, and Ice. All the weapons made under the “A Song of Ice and Fire” license are done with the direct input of GRRM, unlike the Game of Thrones replicas.

The Huffington Post’s television critic Maureen Ryan runs an annual auction for charity called “Swag for Charity”, with items covering the range of swag she gets from studios and networks in her role as a critic. This year, GRRM contacted Mo and offered to throw in a number of signed books to the cause, so there’s an excellent chance to fans of his work to get their hands on a complete signed hardcover set of “A Song of Ice and Fire”, an amazing collection, the start of a superhero saga that’s lasted decades, and much more (including some Spartacus: Vengeance items).

Bid early, bid often, because all proceeds goes to deserving charities, including Partners in Health! The auction on the George R.R. Martin items ends on Sunday.

A new month, and now a new teaser from Atlus for XBox 360, PS3; PC forthcoming). This one features one of the new locations created for the game, Riverspring, the seat of House Sarwyck. One of the two playable characters from the game, the red priest Alester, hails from there.

The teaser certainly seems to be suggesting that political intrigues and currents are going to be an important part of the game’s narrative. More information about the RPG can be found at the official site, and in our earlier report.

That’s what Kit Harington teased to MTV’s Kara Warner at the SAG red carpet.  You can watch the video (US only) of the discussion below:

A write-up of the interview can be found at MTV’s site, for those who can’t see the video.

Thanks to Cunningham’s hint followed by Jolie Lash’s prompting, we now know what Cunningham was doing yesterday—getting interviewed by Access Hollywood about his role as Ser Davos Seaworth! In fact, there’s an excellent video interview with the actor (who’s awfully charming, if I may say so) as well, which covers the same material

Hopefully no one will seriously take issue with their changing the hand from which Davos’s is lacking a few joints!

(UPDATE:

James Hibberd at EW seems to have been thinking along the same lines, and has learned from a network representative that they’ve never had a piece of online promotional content generate so many hits (now standing at some 3.5 million) in so short a time. Amazing.)

The eager fans of HBO’s hit series who flocked to the “Shadows” teaser is quite amazing. A day and a half since it premiered, and Youtube presently reports that it’s been viewed no less than 2,296,806 times. That’s… well, a lot! The intensity of anticipation among fans of the series is growing as we’re about two hit just two months away from the premiere on April 1st (April 2nd in the UK and Central Europe).

In fact, the numbers suggest that the show has been steadily climbing all around, not just in the perception of the fandom on the internet.

We had an inkling of this awhile back, but now it’s official: an enhanced e-book of A Game of Thrones has come out from the UK’s Harper Collins Voyager, containing some really cool features that add to the experience such as a glossary of characters, a dynamic map tracking characters’ movements from chapter to chapter (note: the web-accessible version seems buggy, but one assumes it’s working just fine in the app), and exclusive audio clips from the audio book read by Roy Dotrice (who received a Guiness Book of World Records entry for most voices by an individual in a single audio book).

The e-book is an iOS exclusive, at least at this time, and is sold only from the UK bookstore.

Here’s the full details:

Although the ensemble cast of Game of Thrones struck out for “Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Dramatic Series”—losing to sibling Boardwalk Empire, who had taken the award last year—it was not all for naught for the show. Earlier in the day, it was announced on the red carpet that the show took the award for “Outstanding Perfomance by a Stunt Ensemble in a Television Series”, which is certainly well-deserved when you consider how many stunts went into the series. Congratulations all around to the stunt team! Full results can be found at the Screen Actors Guild Awards page.

The nice thing about the ensemble being nominated, it must be said, is the fact that so many of the actors—especially the younger actors—turned up at the award ceremony. Here’s a recap of who was there:

• Kit Harrington was there, and was even featured in a red carpet interview.
• Emilia Clarke looked lovely in a Chanel dress from the Fall 2012 collection. There’s even a poll about the look and what fans thought of it.
• Alfie Allen looked relaxed with his open collar.
• Nikolaj Coster-Waldau was on hand, too!
• Jason Momoa and wife Lisa Bonet were there as well, and were glimpsed on camera… but it doesn’t look as if they managed a red carpet photo. From what we’ve read from one of HBO’s publicity people, the photo line was quite horrendous and many actors chose to skip it.

That video had a lot of new images, didn’t it? Some excellent material for consideration and discussion, and to help that along, we’ve posted screencaps to our Previews gallery, beginning with this first look at Dragonstone. It goes on for 45 more images, giving us added looks at Brienne of Tarth, Xaro Xhoan Daxos, and even Pyat Pree. There’s one image I failed to capture, of Catelyn, but we’ll be adding that tomorrow. Today… well, it’s 5 AM and bed is calling. Enjoy!

And here it is!

Screen caps can be found here, beginning with this image at Dragonstone.

Over at “Not a Blog”, GRRM has been making recommendations for this year’s Hugo Awards—the oldest and most well-known award for science fiction and fantasy—in various categories. His own work, A Dance with Dragons, is eligible for the Best Novel category, and of course Game of Thrones is eligible in the Dramatic Presentation, Short Form category… but, intriguingly, it’s also eligible for the Dramatic Presentation, Long Form category. There’s some interesting discussion on that topic in comments.

The take out? I’d say fans of the show who nominate should all nominate it in the Long Form category, and maybe not vote for it at all in Short Form (a category which will, with 99.99% certainty, be won by the Doctor Who episode “The Doctor’s Wife”, written by Neil Gaiman) so that the administrators have an easy choice to make as to category. It worked back in 2008 when fans nominated Heroes in Long Form and almost no votes were thrown in for Short Form. That’s what we intend to do, in any case, having gotten a supporting membership of our own.

All members of last year’s Worldcon, and current members of this year’s Worldcon at Chicon in Chicago provided they get their membership—any membership, even the $50 Supporting membership, which has a number of perks such as receiving e-books of all the finalist novels - on or before January 31st), can nominate. And you should do. And if you can actually attend the event, even better—five days of SF/F/H goodness, academic tracks and film tracks, parties and meeting many of the luminaries of the genre past, present, and future, parties, art dealers and memorabilia and books upon books, parties…

Did I mention the parties? The Brotherhood without Banner will be making a strong showing, and their parties are famous. And of course, George will be there, and as he always says, a con’s the absolute best setting to see him, not just at signings and readings, but also on panels and, yes, in the party rooms.

While you’re counting the hours and minutes to Sunday evening’s premiere of a new trailer with fresh footage from the upcoming season 2, The Hollywood Reporter takes us back to Season 1 with this long, 5 minute behind-the-scenes footage from HBO’s forthcoming DVD (US, UK) and Bluray (US, UK) box sets. This video features Emilia Clarke as Daenerys, as well as director Daniel Minahan and executive producers David Benioff and Dan Weiss, as they discuss the infamous heart-eating scene:

Straight from the horse’s mouth:

Mark your calendars, folks. And for those who are True Blood fans, HBO also says there’ll be a “short graphic tease” for season 5 of that show at 8:58 PM.

Over at his “Not a Blog”, GRRM has posted details of a book sale he’s holding through to the Super Bowl, in honor of his beloved New York Giants making an appearance there.

In brief:

• $10 off hardcovers
• $20 off limited editions

And to quote instructions:

As always, GRRM’s happy to personalize inscriptions on books sold through his official website. (At a guess, that GO GIANTS requirement may make this a non-starter for Pats fans…)

Ian Ruhfass, a lead 3D Artist at A52/Elastic, popped over to Reddit to share the fact that he’s worked on the Emmy-winning title sequence, and that he’s been working on the title sequence for season 2. He’s coy with details, but yes, there’ll be some new locations featured in the title this season… and one of them sure sounds like it’ll be Harrenhal, which is to be expected.

He goes on to discuss his work more generally, and offers some good advice for budding 3D artists. Well worth checking out.