Westeros

HBO has kindly dropped us a note revealing that they’re set to announce a brand new book, a companion to the TV series, titled Inside HBO’s Game of Thrones (Pre-order: Amazon US).

This book, written by Bryan Cogman (the designated keeper of the lore for the series, writer for both seasons, story editor, and the man behind the first year of Making Game of Thrones set reports) with a foreword by George R.R. Martin and an introduction by executive producers David Benioff and Dan Weiss, is due fall 2012. Here’s the press release with more details—but in brief: exclusive interviews with cast and crew, photos galore, a map of Westeros, material on the Dothraki language, and more!

You can pre-order the book at Amazon US.

April is coming, and it’s time for HBO to kick Game of Thrones promotion into high gear. Earlier today we shared the news of the “You Win or You Die” video being put online… and to follow it up, there’s a bevy of new character images to be seen. Starting here, you’ll find images of a number of the new cast members, including the very best shot of Ygritte yet.

Besides that, HBO’s also provided us a Q&A with executive producers and chief writers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss which, for the most part, is quite good… but we had to leave a little editorial preface, because sometimes the show’s producers and actors put forward one particular notion that we find a little bit questionable! Read it for yourself here. This will be the first of two Benioff & Weiss interviews we’ll be bringing you, as our account of the roundtable interview we took part in with the executive producers will be up some time next week.

HBO is being very generous indeed, now having released the whole “You Win or You Die” promo—which, so far as I recall, doesn’t air on the HBO channel until the 25th—online, via Youtube. Great inteview bits, mostly recapping the first season for viewers… but also giving a taste of season 2!

David J. Peterson, the constructed language expert who was hired by the production of Game of Thrones, will be on Reddit today taking part in the Ask Me Anything series they have there. Great chance to learn more about his work on the show, his views on conlang in general, and anything else you can think of!

Based off of early viewing of the second season—screeners went out to critics beginning two days ago (our set will be arriving this Thursday, with any luck)—Ken Tucker over at EW.com gives the first several episodes an overall A- score in his overall impressions. His wrap up makes for a choice quote:

A pretty good start, and we now that the Daily Beast’s Jace Lacob has been very positive on the first three episodes he’s already viewed.

Continuing our series of interviews leading up to the April 1st (or April 2nd, if in the UK) premiere of HBO’s Game of Thrones! At the press junket the day after the episode 1 screening which I intended, I had the opportunity to interview a number of actors, as well as the executive producers, about this season of the show. You’ve already seen our interview with Charles Dance, and now we bring another veteran of the show: Michelle Fairley, Lady Catelyn Stark herself.

To say that this is an opportunity I’ve long been looking forward to is an understatement—Fairley happens to play my favorite character in the novels, after all, and I was eager to learn more about her views on the character, and the series in general. Below you’ll get some hints about what’s in store for Catelyn this season, and maybe what’s in store for House Tully, too… and you’ll learn a bit about what it’s like to suddenly become so recognizable as the show’s burgeoning popularity grows by leaps and bounds.

Read the interview!

Game of Thrones isn’t just about allegiances. When people describe the series, a lot of pithy words are thrown around: war, honor, gritty, brutal, intrigue, and more, as people try to encapsulate all the things it means to them. HBO’s now taking that to the next level with their latest social media initative via HBO Connect, the site that provides fans and viewers of HBO’s television programs an added layer to what they watch and a greater sense of fan community with such things as real time interviews with actors and creators,  or feeds for trending HBO-related topics in Twitter.

And, in particular, visualizers which allow fans to share in the experience, connect with one another, and get a sense of the social landscape surrounding their favorite programs.

The newest of these Twitter visualizers? The #got140 visualizer is a nifty one that releases a new word each day, asking fans to use that word in a tweet that tries to describe the show. Previous words have included “power”, “murder”, “blood”, “winter”, “war”, and “honor”. And today’s word? “Betray”. So get working, Twitter fans of @GameOfThrones and @westerosorg! Me, I’m curious as to just how many Twitter user avatars (and their tweets) the page can display at one time…

A brand new promotion for the series has been launched on Facebook, Pledge Your Allegiance, where fans of HBO’s Game of Thrones can pledge themselves to one of the warring houses. A fun idea… and one that’s being promoted in part by the release of a series of “Pledge Your Allegiance” videos offering choice moments from each Great House. This includes our first and most extensive looks at Pyke and Balon Greyjoy, as well as another lightning-quick glimpse at Yara

Asha Greyjoy, as well as some other new glimpses of scenes we haven’t yet seen.

See them below:

HBO has sent out a hot new poster (quite literally) to promote the second season, much in the style of the first official art.

Besides that, the release of the poster coincides with this announcement from HBO regarding the on-line Viewer’s Guide:

At the end of February, I had the privilege of joining international press in a two-day junket to London. The first day featured a screening of the first episode of the new season of Game of Thrones—more on which later, when we’re allowed to say more about it!—and the second day featured several hours of round-table interviews with a number of actors, as well as executive producers David Benioff and Dan Weiss. Those will all be going up apace in the days to come. Of all the interviews, however, one of our personal favorites was the one with veteran, respected actor Charles Dance, who plays Lord Tywin Lannister, the uncompromising, ruthless patriarch of the Lannister clan, and we’ve decided that it was very well suited to leading off the interview.

Having acted for some forty years, Dance had his start with the prestigious Royal Shakespeare Company, and went on to roles in many television and film productions, including parts in The Jewel in the Crown, Bleak House, The Last Action Hero, and Gosford Park. In the interview that follows, Dance discusses his role as Tywin Lannister in some detail, the scale and scope of HBO’s production, and his future legacy as an actor.

Read the interview!

The editor of Game of Thrones and Philosophy (Order: US Paperback, US Kindle, UK), Professor Henry O. Jacoby, will be interviewed on the Secret Lives of Men at 3PM Eastern—that’s about an hour from now—concerning the book and the source material that’s inspired its essays from a number of philosophers.

If you miss the interview, it should be in their archive shortly afterward… and while you’re waiting, here’s our own interview with Professor Jacoby regarding the book, for which we were honored to provide the foreword.

HBO has been generous with the character profiles, and has now placed Robb Stark and Stannis Baratheon profiles out on Youtube. They contain quite a bit of new stuff—including a great look at Oona Chaplin as Jeyne of No Last Name and Lucian Msamati as Salladhor Saan:

Last night HBO premiered a brand new trailer on its channel, but they’ve very kindly made it available on HBO.com. Titled “Price For Our Sins”—not our favorite line revealed from trailers thus far, we must say—it largely features images we’ve seen before, but there’s a handful of new shots to get excited about.

Besides that, we’ve forgotten to note that the Making Game of Thrones website has a great little feature on the weapons of the show, featuring the weaponmaster Tommy Dunne. Some really amazing swords and their accoutrements this season, beautifully crafted. Lightbringer and Hearteater are especially impressive!

TIFF has posted the very last part of the “In Conversation” interview with GRRM, at its Youtube channel. And for fans of the novels, this one’s particularly cool—the last nine minutes feature his reading a short excerpt from a The Winds of Winter chapter! Definite spoilers for those who’ve not yet read all five novels in the series:

Yesterday, the news rolled in that Game of Thrones had secured the #2 overall sales spot for DVD and Bluray sales according to Nielsen VideoScan, registering about 78% of the sales of another newcomer, the film Immortals and well ahead of last week’s top sellers, Puss in Boots and Hugo. 57% of sales were in the Bluray edition, as well, which is an enormous figure for a television series.

Now Yahoo.au was among the first to post this Reuters report, which states:

On top of that, the show is said to have, “set an HBO series record for sales of digital downloads from outlets such as iTunesapple, the network said, but it did not provide figures.”