Westeros

On the heels of our “The Pointy End” episode guide being complete, we also have Pearson Moore’s essay on the episode, “Mighter Than the Sword: The Culture of Duty and Honour in Game of Thrones 1.08”. This is probably my favorite essay from Pearson yet, touching on a thematic topic of great interest to me ... and referencing one of my favorite scenes in one of my favorite films, no less! A man of good and discerning taste, is Pearson.

You can read more of his articles at our Features page, where he is one of our contributors. At his own site, Winterfell Keep, you’ll find additional, thought-provoking essays and discussions related to the episodes and characters. He has also released the second volume of his Dragons & Direwolves series collecting his articles, including some exclusive content, which you can now purchase at Amazon.

HBO has released a few more items to the HBO Store, including some rather neat family tree shirts (for the Starks, Baratheons, and Targaryens—when’s the Lannister shirt coming, I wonder?), fine examples of good design work from the graphics team over there. And, of course, they’ve finally placed the original soundtrack by Ramin Djawadi (more details here), which is due to start shipping on June 28th. Not very long at all!

Our web storefront carries all the items, including the soundtrack (as well as a link to the pre-order page for it at Amazon.com, if one prefers). It’s going to be interesting to listen to Djawadi’s music out of the show, and perhaps see if the music he wrote was minimal or if the discreet usage of it was a choice by the producers.

Yes, very delayed, we know! Unfortunately, our brilliant plan to get our write-up out as quickly as possible proved… not so brilliant, and various delays that followed just kept pushing it back. But, after much effort, it’s all done: recap, analysis, book-to-screen breakdown, and even the audio discussion with our friends at MTV Geek (only Tom, Daniel, and I, as Linda wasn’t available at the time).

No worries, we’ll make sure it doesn’t happen with this next episode, “Baelor”... Speaking of which, below you’ll find the preview for the episode.

The Monte-Carlo Television Festival has been going on, and a number of actors from Game of Thrones were present: Sean Bean (Eddard Stark), Mark Addy (King Robert Baratheon), Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Jaime Lannister), and Emilia Clarke (Daenerys Targaryen). There’s a great picture of the actors together here, posted by Roxanne Centola.

Naturally, there were interviews with the actors, and a couple of video interviews have surfaced on the web with Coster-Waldau and Clarke. Coster-Waldau (whom we’ve interviewed) has a very amusing remark regarding Hodor in “The Pointy End (see our interview with actor Kristian Nairn—where he hinted at that scene—here) and also appears to give first confirmation of the fact that he’s scheduled to appear at San Diego Comic Con as part of HBO’s promotion of the show. As to Clarke? She gets asked about the nude scenes and sex scenes, and has a surprising answer as to what was the most difficult of those scenes to film.

Via the forum, it’s been pointed out that there’s now an audio excerpt from A Dance with Dragons (Preorder: US, UK, Audio US, Audio UK) available at Random House’s site.

Due July 12th, we know from GRRM that the great Roy Dotrice—the popular reader of the first three books, the first of which he won a Guinness Record for the total number of distinct characters he voiced—is back for this book. In the excerpt (available after clicking the Audiobook button), Dotrice reads from a “new” POV, although it’s not all that it may seem… Spoilers below!

The latest Wild Cards title, Fort Freak, is due on June 21st from Tor and the Wild Cards Trust ... and it looks like Tor has decided to promote it by releasing a full story: “The Rook”, by Melinda Snodgrass, one of the original founders of the Wild Cards universe!

It’s a fun read, really reminding us of some of the early novels in the feel and the focus on New York City as the location. The eponymous “Fort Freak” is the nickname for the 5th Police Precinct which is responsible for Jokertown, and which is the central setting of the novel.

Go ahead and check it out!

The auction items are now up on EBay (the descriptions including the text ‘Charity Auction for Joplin Disaster Relief’). GRRM, Neil Gaiman, and others have generously contributed signed books, collectibles, and more to do their part to help with the recent devastation in Joplin, Missouri following a series of devastating tornadoes.

Check it out, and please bid generously! Among the books available are a signed copy of A Game of Thrones, signed copies of various Wild Cards books and RPG supplements, and more.

The Emmy nomination ballots have been published for the nominating voters to make use of. These ballots contain the submissions from various shows and networks for awards, and the nominating ballots will narrow that list down to the final nominees. Naturally, Game of Thrones shows up quite a bit! See our summary of the series’ submissions below.

Sky Atlantic snuck this one up on us, not having told us they were having Michelle Fairley’s interview just then! Very interesting hearing the actress (who doesn’t give many interviews at all) discuss her character and Robb. And, yes, they have Linda and I on towards the end to discuss the episode. Good times!

And “The Pointy End” (yes, recap and analysis of the episode still to come) has hit a new high for an original airing, with 2.715 million viewers according to TV By the Numbers. That’s up 13% from last week’s figure. Overnight, the show’s pulled in 3.6 million viewers, according to Deadline Hollywood.

In the U.K., Game of Thrones is holding steady on the overnights, 523,000 viewers (just 4,000 less than the previous week). More importantly, total viewership across the week is in concerning episode 6, and that’s reached 1.621 million viewers, according to BARB, the Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board.

Thanks to WyvernWood for the U.K. information.

Just to bring everyone up to speed on this and past downtime issues:

In the last couple of months, the A Song of Ice and Fire forum has boomed, becoming the #1 spot on the web to discuss the series, and we thought that was the major part of the issues. We’ve worked hard to address many issues, and have succeeded to some degree. But ... we just discovered another part: the Wiki of Ice and Fire. We never realized just how used the wiki is (as an aside—hats off to our various wiki editors who’ve made it such a fantastic resource! Anyone who’s a member of the forum can join in editing it, BTW), until we put in Google Analytics a couple of days ago….

It turns out the wiki draws even more traffic than the forum does! No wonder the forum was suddenly unable to keep up with the crush: it was fighting for MySQL connection space with the wiki. This led us to experiment with a major increase in maximum MySQL connections allowed, but that was badly advised on my part—we should have waited for a quieter period to try it. It ended up completely choking the server, so much so that our wonderful host (Sparks) could only reboot it in hopes of getting in after it restarted to fix things…. but the crush of traffic to the wiki and forum meant that it was no go. Ultimately, the server had to be taken down and a tech at the data center shut off Apache before putting it back on the web for Sparks to settle it down. The reboots and extreme hard disk and memory usage led to corruption that also had to repaired.

End result? Boy, howdy, Westeros.org is an extremely popular site—thank you very much, to our visitors, the members of the forum, the wiki editors, Sparks, and everyone else who’s contributed to its existence!—but we need to do more tinkering. This may well include a move to a mightier server, and some other back-end changes to help alleviate the problems as far as possible. The serve move, if it happens, may happen as soon as next week.

More info when we have it .. and please, keep an eye out for our annual summer fundraiser, a way to pay back Sparks for the work she’s done and to make sure the forum and wiki can keep on going!

A little bird has pointed out that Game of Thrones has garnered its first nomination, in the Critics’ Choice Awards‘s Best Drama Series category. A big category with some big competition, including fellow HBO series Boardwalk Empire, AMC’s tremendous Mad Men, and AMC’s own page-to-screen adaptation The Walking Dead.

Congratulations to the cast and crew of the series! Although there’s no other nominations, we expect to see a few more of these coming along in the days and months to come.

George R.R. Martin has updated his official site with some an additional event date in “Appearances”, plus some new posts in “Not a Blog”. Of note is this post in which he gives a sneak peek at Valyrian Steel‘s warhammer for King Robert, designed to GRRM’s detailed specifications. That would certainly dent some steel and crack a few bones, we suspect…

Also, in this post, he shares a reminder that he will be signing at Hastings Books in Albuqerque, at 1:00PM, for the release of the Doorways graphic novel adapted by GRRM from his pilot script for a science fiction TV series he developed and which got as far as a pilot. The book, published by IDW, collects the six issue comic book series.

Publisher’s Weekly is first out of the gate with a very early review of A Dance with Dragons (Preorder: US, UK), which is due July 12th, probably off a galley proof with the ink still wet!

The review does contain some spoilers, so beware. Here’s a non-spoiler excerpt, however:

For the full, spoilerish review, go here.

George R.R. Martin and Neil Gaiman have contributed items to Meta-Games Unlimited, a gaming story in Missouri, for their charitable efforts following the devastating tornado that Joplin, Missouri on May 22nd. The items will be placed on E-bay beginning June 6th, and the auctions will last one week.

A number of autographed books and other items are there from GRRM, including a singed copy of A Game of Thrones, a signed pre-release A Feast for Crow chapbook that was released by the publisher back in 20034 or 2005 or thereabouts, a signed Tuf Voyaging (mistakingly titled The Voyaging), a number of gaming books for Wild Cards and the A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying Game from Green Ronin, and more.