Westeros

At some point, I need to gather up all these interviews with actors that have been sneaking out the last month or two, and just make a big post with them all. Until then, however, here’s a interview with Rose Leslie, who plays Ygritte on Game of Thrones, courtesy of Access Hollywood. Nice to hear from her, as she didn’t get much in the way of attention for the second season when her role was something of a late entry into the series.

James Hibberd at EW has another scoop regarding season 3 of Game of Thrones. Just as with last year’s reveal that The National performed “The Rains of Castamere” for the show, indie rock band The Hold Steady are performing a rendition of—get this—“The Bear and the Maiden Fair”, a very popular bit of song in Westeros.

Hibberd quotes the producers:

So, that will be rather interesting to hear. I’m guessing it’ll be included on the official soundtrack for season 3, as well… and may well be released as a single before hand.

Over at “Not a Blog”, George R.R. Martin reveals that the success of the 2013 A Song of Ice and Fire Calendar, and the very promising work in Gary Gianni’s 2014 A Song of Ice and Fire Calendar (Pre-order) , has led Bantam to contract the amazing Donato Giancola to illustrate a 2015 A Song of Ice and Fire Calendar. One of the foremost artists working in SF/F, he has won multiple Chesley and Hugo Awards for his artwork.

We’ve always hoped Donato would illustrate characters and scenes from the novels in a more substantial body of work than he has previously—his Melisandre painting (Melisandre painting for the cover of Dragon Magazine2 #307 has been his lone piece of ASoIaF art for far too long. Finally, that’s being rectified. We’ve been fans of his work since his gorgeous “Joan of Arc” painting was used for the cover of Mary Gentle’s Ash: A Secret History (a fantasy series we very much recommend to fans of ASoIaF, by the way).

It’s now live, quite surprisingly—we had supposed it’d premiere on Sunday, but nope, HBO has given us a little early gift. Some nice new moments, though it’s not in fact a full 2 minutes long:

Valyrian Steel, makers of replicas based on the novels and the TV series, have announced the latest replica in their Game of Thrones line: the Stark infantry shield, an exact copy of those used on the television show. These are already available for preorder, and should be released for Spring 2013. Fortunately, they’re not a limited run (as the ASoIaF-based replicas, made with George R.R. Martin’s direct input, are) so there should be plenty of time to save your pennies and groats.

The official Game of Thrones Twitter channel has just started unleashing a series of official character posters for season 3, which shall soon see an extended version of the season 3 trailer hit HBO, HBO On Demand, and (we suspect) the internet.

These posters will begin to appear in print and outdoors promotion (think bus stops and buses, posters, etc.) from next week. You can see them all below:

Many expected it, and now it seems it’s true—a 2 minute, extended version of the season 3 trailer will be available via HBO On Demand on March 4th… and so shall almost certainly be airing on HBO proper on Sunday evening, probably somewhere in relation to Girls.

Guess it’s just as well I hadn’t had time to screencap it, I suppose. I’ll just screencap the extended version.

I wonder what the extended trailer will show us that we haven’t seen yet? Anything fans are hoping to get a glimpse of that they haven’t yet seen?

Been a busy week for us here at Westeros.org, with a trip taking me out of commission for a couple of days… but I did pick up some interesting information along the way. And now that it’s out, we may as well share it as well: titles for most of the episodes for season 3.

• “Valar Dohaeris” (pairing nicely with last season’s finale)
• “Dark Wings, Dark Words”
• “Walk of Punishment”
• “And Now His Watch is Ended”
• “Kissed by Fire”
• Still untitled
• “The Bear and the Maiden Fair”
• Still untitled
• “The Rains of Castamere”
• “Mhysa”

We’ll be adding these to our Episode guide once we dig our way out from under mail and screencapping and manuscripts everything else we’re up to at the moment!

And here it is, folks, what many have been waiting for:

What’d you think?

Normally we’d screencap this right off, but as it’s almost 6:30AM, that’ll have to wait. But definitely some things to digest. Two notable things we’ll note:

Over at Entertainment Weekly, James Hibberd has the scoop with the exclusive premiere of the season 3 poster, featuring a silhouette of one of Daenerys Targaryen’s young dragons in flight. An interesting image to choose from. As Hibberd notes, the first season was Ned Stark on the Iron Throne, the second was a hand grasping a crown. These both refer to the central storylines of the previous two seasons, with Ned in King’s Landing as Hand and the War of the Five Kings. A shift to Dany suggests they may be emphasizing her storyline this year.

Well, this is a surprise: the season 3 trailer for Game of Thrones will get its world premiere on Jimmy Kimmel Live this Friday, with it going up on Youtube immediately after the East Coast airing. Here’s the press release, straight from HBO:

Disruptor Beam has now rolled out their Facebook social strategy game, Game of Thrones: Ascent as part of an open beta. We took part a bit in the closed beta, and though social games aren’t usually our thing, this one did a good job of capturing the atmosphere of A Song of Ice and Fire within the framework of social game mechanics. Here’s the official trailer for the game:

It sounds like the Union Square Bluray launch event was a great success, with many fans turning up to share the experience that HBO put on with the help of Best Buy and Campfire!

See below for a few photos from the event, as well as reports from the good folks at the UNSpoiled! Podcast and fellow early entry winner Christine Cemelli:

HBO has just announced a traveling exhibit that will start in March and appear in five different countries from March to June. It sounds like it’s going to feature some pretty remarkable things. Locations include Toronto, New York City, Sao Paulo, Amsterdam, and Belfast, Full details below:

The official Making Game of Thrones production blog has a post detailing the ending of season 3 filming late last year in Iceland. The environment they were in sounds rather amazing:

As to what they were filming? Despite it being at the very end of the shoot, it’s an opening scene from the first episode, directed by Dan Minahan. Some spoilerish details follow: