Westeros

Over the five seasons of the show, the title sequence has surely become one of the most recognizable on TV, and not just because of the theme music. The visuals, too, have taken on a life of their own and several homages have been created over the years. A key feature of the visuals is the astrolabe and this summer a replica of that will be available from Insight Collectibles as part of a collector’s edition package with the popular pop-up book Game of Thrones: A Pop-Up Guide to Westeros. The astrolabe is described as follows :

“The astrolabe stands over 13 inches high and is fully articulated, with moving rings that dynamically replicate the oscillating movement of the astrolabe seen in the Game of Thrones intro sequence. The astrolabe is supported by a stand that features the sigils associated with the four Great Houses of Westeros, Stark, Lannister, Targaryen and Baratheon. Each sigil is highly detailed, from the coat of the Stark direwolf to the talons of the Targaryen dragon.”

In addition to the astrolabe and the new edition of the pop-up book, Insight Collectibles is also releasing a set of Deluxe Stationery Sets for Houses Stark, Targaryen and Lannister and a set of Hardcover Journals for Houses Baratheon, Lannister, Stark and Targaryen.

Edited to add: We don’t yet have a specific release date for any of these products beyond “this summer”. The astrolabe (with the pop-up book included) will retail for $495.00 and the stationary sets for $34.95.

A pleasant surprise here, as podcast Starship Sofa proudly reveals that its 389th episode features “The Men of Greywater Station”, a science fiction novelette by George R.R. Martin and Howard Waldrop.  As host Tony C. Smith notes, the novelette has never appeared on-line before, so it’s quite the coup for the Hugo Award-winning podcast.

And yes, it’s no coincidence that “Greywater” appears in the title. GRRM is well-known for certain words, phrases, and names cropping up in a multitude in his works.

As brought to our attention by Spanish fansite Los Siete Reinos, at least two new locations in Spain are lining up for filming in season 6, which starts filming this July but the Spanish segment appears set for September and October. According to Barcelonan paper La Vanguardia, HBO has apparently confirmed that the Catalonian city of Girona will be used in filming—its famous cathedral being cited as one location of particular interest—as well as the Valencian medieval town of Peñsicola which is known for retaining many medieval and Renaissance buildings and structures. James Hibberd of EW adds that other locations may be used in Spain, though those have as yet to be confirmed (in particular, James Hibberd notes that there’s no word whether Seville, the main site for filming Dornish scenes, has not been confirmed as a filming location at this time).

Both Los Siete Reinos and La Vanguardia speculate that Girona would serve very well for Oldtown and the Citadel, citing the narrow streets of the Jewish quarter, the edifice of the cathedral, and so on. Peñsicola is more of a mystery, although Spanish fans are tentatively suggesting it could serve for Casterly Rock. In support of this, note that the Wikipedia article notes that Peñsicola is sometimes known as the “Gibraltar of Valencia”, thanks to being a prominent fortified peninsula, and George R.R. Martin has often likened Casterly Rock to the actual Gibraltar, while at the same time he has noted that Casterly Rock will appear in future A Song of Ice and Fire novels.

It’s certainly as good a guess as any.

We’ve gone and updated our episode guide for “Hardhome” with our book-to-screen breakdown—the analysis and video review, as well as the recap, will take a day or two more to get out. We’ve also added HBO’s videos (just two, this time around; usually it’s been four videos) for the episode in the Extras section.

Also, HBO’s released the trailer for episode 9, “The Dance of Dragons”. It’s worth watching, to say the least!

HBO has been sitting tight on releasing information on the finale of season 5, but it has now sent out a press release. See the details below, including the brief logline regarding the events of the episode:

Following the airing of “The Gift”, we managed to get up the book-to-screen breakdown in our episode guide.

Since then, we’ve released two other parts of the guide. First up is our video review, which you can see below:

Last night, we also provided our written analysis of the episode, which touches some points that we didn’t cover in the video. You can find that here. The primary thing left is now our complete recap, which we’ll definitely do, but that particular part of our regular episode guide raises a question.

Just a few days ago, we posted about the trailer being released for the fourth entry in Telltales Games’ Game of Thrones adventure, titled “Sons of Winter”. Now that episode’s available on Steam. We’ll be playing through it and giving it a review—as well as a brief look back at episode 3, which we weren’t able to review due to time constraints—in the coming days.

Another episode done, just three to go to wrap up the fifth season of Game of Thrones. We’ve now updated our episode guide for “The Gift” with our book-to-screen breakdown of the episode, as well as HBO’s post-episode videos which include an appearance from GRRM discussing the poisoner’s art as depicted by Oberyn Martell and his bastard daughter Tyene Sand.

Our video, written analysis, and detailed recap of the episode will follow in the next few days; we currently hope to get the video out first, this time around.

HBO has also released the preview for the next episode, “Hardhome”, which you can see below:

We posted about  the Coldplay/Game of Thrones Red Nose Day special “mockumentary” that aired last night, and now today Coldplay’s official Youtube channel as released the full piece. Filled with actors from the show and quite a bit of humor (some quite broad, some razor-sharp), it’s a fine way to spend slightly less than a quarter of an hour:

Highlights include Emilia Clarke going all out on a reggae piece, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau crooning the first romantic ballad concerning incest in Coldplay’s career, a creepy trio in Ewan Rheon, Charlotte Hope, and Alfie Allen, and of course Liam Neeson (yes, him) providing narration. Definitely a must-see!

Telltale Games has released a teaser trailer for the fourth episode in their Game of Thrones

Looks like it’ll be fun!

Today sees the airing of Red Nose Day, NBC’s charity event that will run from 8PM to 11PM eastern time. Packed with celebrities, the reason it has some special relevance to fans of Game of Thrones is the fact that a dozen members of the show’s cast will be on hand to take part in Game of Thrones: The Musical, a mockumentary-style spoof in collaboration with Coldplay. The internet near exploded with humor when Peter Dinklage first appeared in a teaser singing about all those who’ve died and the few who’ve survived, as seen below:

This was promptly followed by Nikolaj Coster-Waldau performing “Closer to Home”, Jaime’s ode to Cersei, which you can see below:

We’ve not yet had time to fully write up our wonderful visit to Spain to promote the Spanish-language release of The World of Ice and Fire by Gigamesh, but at least we thought we should share some of the interviews and photos from our events in Barcelona and Osuna.

In Barcelona, we had the great pleasure of speaking before a packed room of fans at Gigamesh’s amazing bookstore (easily one of the finest SF/F bookstores—with added attention to games and comics besides—we’ve ever visited, right up there with Sweden’s own SF Bokhandeln). This was live streamed, and you can see it below:

But before that happened, we managed an interview with the extremely amiable Javi Marcos of the Podcast de Hielo y Fuego.  The interview was done on behalf of Spanish fan site Los Siete Reinos, who’ve released the first part of the interview in written form (in Spanish). But they’ve gone the extra mile. Not only have they released the original, English-language audio of the interview, but they’ve released a dubbed version as well! Javi “dubs” himself (hah), while his partner-in-podcast Carlos handles dubbing me and the fan we know as Lady Ashara (who gave us a lovely necklace and bracelet featuring the arms of our mutual favorite house, the Daynes of Starfall) handling dubbing Linda.

Fans curious about some of the details we cut from the world book due to space constraints may find this one particularly interesting, as we drop a few tidbits of information.

Our other visit was to Osuna, and though I’m not sure our presentation of the book or the separate interview we did for it have been released, Gigamesh has released some terrific photos of the visit we and their team had there. More about Osuna in particular later, when we’ve some more time!

All in all, it was a fantastic visit and a terrific opportunity to meet some of the world’s most dedicated A Song of Ice and Fire fans, and Linda and I are already trying to figure out when we’ll be able to make another visit to Spain.

The closing event of “Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken” has stirred huge amounts of controversy among the viewership, as a lead character is subjected to a chilling, horrifying act of sexual violence.

For my part, this led to about 3 hours worth of discussion on Twitter with fellow fans of the novels who responded much more negatively than I did. But it led to the below video, which we feel sets out our response to some of the arguments.For those who want more in-depth, written discussions of the topic that share something of our view on the issue, see Amanda Marcotte’s piece at Raw Story, and Laura Bradley’s article at Slate.

And for those who missed it, we have posted our video review of the episode, which you’ll find in the episode guide, but we’ll embed it below at the point where we discuss the final segment of the episode:

After much tiring work at a late hour, the book-to-screen breakdown—as well as HBO’s video extras for the episode—are now live on the “Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken” episode guide. The rest—the written analysis and the video review, will come out in the next day or two.

We’ve also included the short preview for episode 7, “The Gift”, courtesy of HBO.

While we’re traveling in Spain, it doesn’t stop us from trying to start off our episode guide!

To begin with the “Kill the Boy” guide features our book-to-screen breakdown, going into detail of some of the differences between the show and the novels (differences which are, it goes without saying, increasingly major; this show features a few very significant deviations or compressions). We also have HBO’s post-episode videos included in the Extras section.

Hopefully we’ll have the episode review up some time Monday, and the recap some time after. The video review, alas, will have to wait until later in the week, but until then, enjoy!