Westeros

James Hibberd at EW has the exclusive new trailer for the second seasons of Game of Thrones, with a decidedly different style to earlier trailers as it uses the song “Seven Devils ” by Florence + the Machine (note: big fans!) over images of war and turmoil in the Seven Kingdoms. Many of the shots are those we’ve seen before… but there’s a slightly better glimpse of Pyat Pree, some new dialog from Tyrion that comes from the novel, and some nice shots from Iceland.

Check it out!

We’ve seen the invite and the red carpet photos from Wednesday’s extravagant DVD launch party in London… but now you can listen in on some of the interviews with many of the show’s actors, and get more of a glimpse of just what was going on inside the Old Vic Tunnels, thanks to this video showing the festivities between clips of the actors being interviewed:

And then there’s this excellent series of inteviews, conducted by Helen O’Hara for the UK’s leading film and television magazine, Empire Online. This one’s nicely edited, with some excellent back-and-forth.

Just a few days away from the release of the Blu-ray and DVD sets of the first season of Game of Thrones on both sides of the Pond (UK DVD, UK Blu-ray, US DVD, US Blu-ray), and it seemed like the right time to give a more in-depth look into the production of the set. If you’ve read our review, the production values of the added features completely blew us away.

Thanks to HBO and Bryan Cogman, we learned a lot of this could be put down to the hard work of Herzog and Company, a creative production company who specializes in producing added content for DVDs and Blu-rays, among many other things they do. HBO put us in touch with Adam Vadnais, executive director of digital design at the company, and he was happy to answer seven (not a coincidence, that) questions for us!

Read the interview!

Access Hollywood continues on its Game of Thrones interview tear, this time talking to Tom Wlaschiha, who plays the mysterious Jaqen H’ghar. Good interview, which reveals that the character’s long hair—dyed red and white—and his penchant for speaking in third person have all been retained for the show (huzzah!)

With any luck, Jaqen will be as much of a favorite character for fans of the TV show as he’s become for fans of the books.

... in another interview, that is, this time with NY Magazine’s Vulture. There’s some spoilers in there, so beware if you want to stay unspoiled. Here’s the most spoilerish bit, and some speculation below:

Tonight was the official launch party for the season one DVD and Blu-ray set, and it was a star-studded affair over at the Old Vic Tunnels in London. A great deal of work and planning went into it according to all accounts, including the hiring of top-notch caterers, bringing in all manner of props, performers ranging from Masai drummers to bellydancers, and more.

As to those stars? Getty Images has a fine gallery of all the actors who were present. A bit of confusion with Harry Lloyd (labelled as Richard Madden) and Richard Madden (labelled as Kit Harington), but all you can really say is that it’s full of a lot of really, really pretty people.

I suspect a leak of this image earlier today had something to do with this… but fans can rejoice, now that it’s official. EW has the exclusive first look at the poster, that art of which will be gracing the tie-in editions of A Clash of Kings in both the U.S. and the U.K.

The image features an upraised, bloodied fist gripping the antlered crown of King Robert—and a nice detail is that the golden metal reflects what looks like a scene of battle or, in any case, quite a lot of soldiers and knights with spears. Some had expected the second season official poster to feature another character, as with the iconic image of Ned Stark on the Iron Throne, but this more example of graphic design seems to fit the idea of the clash of kings very well indeed.

The annual Saturn Awards—which focus on genre television—have just released their nominations. Some oddities here and there… but Game of Thrones did pretty well for itself, nominated in the TV Presentation (10 episodes or less) category, best actor for Sean Bean, best actress for Lena Heady, and Best Supporting Actor for Peter DInk

... wait a minute; Kit Harington? Interesting! Not that he doesn’t deserve it, not at all, but Dinklage was certainly the one that first came to mind in this category for other awards.

The awards will be presented on June 20th.

Bigpoint, creator of various free-to-play, browser-based games, has opened up its official website for the licensed Game of Thrones massively multiplayer online roleplaying game. At present, all it features is a place for interested fans and gamers to sign up for their e-mail updates…

But Venture Beat has the very first images from the game, showing off the third-person 3D action. According to the article, Bigpoint will be offering a sneak peek of the game at next week’s Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco.

All in all, the graphics look pretty good, though the images seem small. But they’re fairly generic—nothing recognizably from Game of Thrones, not yet in any case, and we still know nothing about the gameplay. Something to keep an eye out on, though!

The interviews keep on coming in! This time it’s the Daily Record, talking with Emilia Clarke about her role as Daenerys Targaryen. Topics such as nude scenes, imaginary dragons, and her character’s journey are covered.

Also of interest, Clarke names two other projects she’s involved in: Overdrive (also starring Karl Urban and Ben Barnes—that’s a pretty cast all right) and Spike Island, a UK film set in 1990 about an indie band traveling to see the Stone Roses in concert.

For those who’ve eagerly been waiting for the chance to see the new trailer—dubbed “Power and Grace”—from HBO, you’re in luck:

For our scene-to-scene breakdown and speculation on what we’re seeing, see our original post when the trailer was released on Friday evening.

Shadowlocked has a great interview with the terrific Gethin Anthony, who plays Renly Baratheon, the youngest of the Baratheon brothers and the first to claim the crown after King Robert’s death. Good stuff!

Thanks to @manders555 for pointing this interview out.

Via HBO, the titles of the first two episodes (missed the first last week while we were on a trip) have been released through their on-line schedule. The first episode is titled, “The North Remembers”—an interesting choice, as that phrase comes only from A Dance with Dragons

A Storm of Swords (and becomes iconic only with A Dance with Dragons, where it has a lot of meaning and resonance)—and the second is, “The Night Lands”, which refers to the afterlife of the Dothraki.

Dark Sword Miniatures has unveiled their latest addition to the George R.R. Martin Masterworks series of miniatures. This time, the incredible Tom Meier has sculpted all six of the Stark direwolves, four of which are now available and two more (Lady and Shaggydog) are being prepped for production. As always, these miniatures come at 28mm scale (sometimes Dark Sword puts them out in 54mm, but not in this case), which makes the level of detail just stunning (human-size figures are not much past an inch tall!)

Speaking of the miniatures, George has a poll asking fans to share which of a set of characters they’d like to see made into figures. Among the options? Khal Drogo, Ser Barristan Selmy, Prince Doran Nymeros Martell, Olenna Tyrell (the Queen of Thorns), Margaery Tyrell, and Davos Seaworth.

As we run the largest English-language wiki (and the largest wiki, period, in terms of total number of articles) dedicated to A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones, it seems appropriate to point out that efforts are being made in a number of other languages to bring the wiki content to as many fans as possible. Some of these are very far advanced, and are already part of our interwiki scheme, while others are just starting up and could really use more help.

First, the two wikis that we’re already interwiki linking:

• French: Le Garde de Nuit, which until very recently was the largest wiki out there, and is hands-down an amazing resource that helped the Wiki of Ice and Fire get off the ground as quickly as it did.
• Russian: 7kingdoms.ru

And now lets mention three nascent wikis that we’d love to see more support for:

• Spanish: Hieloyfuego.wikia.com
• Chinese: Zh.asoiaf.wikia.com
• Brazilian Portuguese: Geloefogo.com.br
• German: de.eisundfeurer.wikia.com

Those that are being hosted at Wikia.com could not only use active participants, but we’d be glad to interwiki link them if Wikia would add the Wiki of Ice and Fire to their list of acceptable interwiki sites. Anyone who wants to learn more about that, or who would like to get advice about improving or even starting a foreign-language wiki is very welcome to visit the Wiki sub-forum where our wiki editors are happy to answer questions and provide advice.