Westeros

Via George’s “Not a Blog”, we’ve learned that three of his novels will be recorded as audiobooks, each of them read by a different actor from HBO’s Game of Thrones.  The three books and their respective actors are:

Alyssa Rosenberg, one of the more interesting commentators on HBO’s Game of Thrones, has a great interview with Bryan Cogman (who we’ve interviewed this season) discussing a lot of what goes into the adaptation. Rosenberg touches on some of the topics and concerns that fans have expressed (ourselves included) after this season finale, and Bryan provides cogent answers. Many of them are very much in line with things I’m not bothered by—compression, moving some things around, budget issues, and so on.

Very much worth reading, as Cogman—who, however much he hates it, is indeed the “keeper of the mythos”—is as big a fan of the material as anyone, and is at hand when decisions are made by the showrunners.

We’ve only had one or two outside of contributions this year to our features section, so it was with great pleasure when Miodrag Zarković—a television critic for Serbia’s popular weekly magazine Pečat—contacted us and offered a lengthy consideration on the series to date, in English for an English-speaking audience. Bringing his knowledge of television and literature to bear, as well as his appreciation of the source material, Mr. Zarković shares his views with the readers of Westeros.org in an article titled, “An Adaptation Without Honor, or Adaptation Morghulis - This One’s Dead Already”.

As you can guess, he wasn’t a fan.

His trenchant commentary is not going to appeal to everyone, and there are points we ourselves would happily argue with him about, but his observations come from the heart, are built on a grounding in literary and television history that not everyone has, and some of the points raised seem very hard to argue with. In any case, it is an opinion we felt worth sharing with readers, to provide one unique, thought-provoking perspective from which to consider the adaptation.

(It goes without saying that should a fellow critic or television writer offer up a response or rebuttal, we would be pleased to link to it, or even to publish it on our site!)

The last days, you may have noticed that Westeros.org has been down quite often. That’s because the server just couldn’t handle the amount of load being placed on it. Well, that’s a thing of the past (unless we see exponential levels of growth): the whole of Westeros.org and all of its parts (the Wiki of Ice and Fire, the Forum of Ice and Fire, Blood of Dragons MUSH) is now housed on the same, very capable server. This should mean that the extensive downtimes and great amounts of lag should be a thing of the past (*knocks on wood*).

Many thanks to the community who contributed to help make it possible, and of course to our amazing host, Sparks, who did all the heavy-lifting of getting things together!

Due to severe technical difficulties, posting has been and will be intermittent until we figure out what’s going on and/or move the website to the new server that now hosts the A Song of Ice and Fire forum and the Wiki of Ice and Fire. We’ve posted our lengthy Valar Morghulis coverage, but wanted to catch up with a number of things that have gone on since:

First, apologies for the delay in posting our coverage of “Valar Morghulis”—you have probably noticed that the server has been almost entirely unavailable the last days, and we had similar issues with the server that hosted the forum and wiki, and that occupied… well, way too much of our time. The good news is that we’ve moved the latter server to a much faster box… and we’ll be shifting the website over to that server as well, in time (perhaps even this week), which should vastly improve speed and reliability of the site.

So, in any case, our coverage is up! Check it out and let us know what you think. We’ll be getting our extra video up tomorrow some time, with any luck, but you’ll find our Thronecast appearance (which features a bit more of us than usual—make sure to watch through the end!) and my appearance on the Talking TV podcast embedded in the Extras section.

The HBO Shop has a tremendous range of Game of Thrones items, from clothing to posters and more… but they want to know what you would like to see next.

In partnership with them, we’re running a contest here in our comments. All you need to do to enter? Suggest new merchandise that you’d like to see the HBO Shop offer. Personally, I’m still waiting for the his-and-hers Khal and Khaleesi cologne and perfume set…

Just comment below with your suggestions. I should note that the competition is US only (sorry, that’s the rules), so bear that in mind—I’m sure HBO would love to hear suggestions from everyone, but the two prizes for two lucky winners—a Targaryen hat and the Game of Thrones letter opener—will only be available to fans in the US.

Please, do try and be serious in your suggestions… and good luck!

Three interesting sets of articles about George R.R. Martin have surfaced in the last couple of days. We’ve added them to the So Spake Martin collection, of course, but for convenience here’s the direct links to the three pieces:

• Rolling Stone profiles GRRM at MisCon.
• The Financial Times has lunch with GRRM, discusses the books, sexposition in Game of Thrones, and more.
• Sports Illustrated talks football with George. Ser Bonifer the Good = Tim Tebow!

Just two more days until “Valar Morghulis” brings the season to an end, and HBO has released five stills from the final episode. You can see them at the bottom of the episode page... but in honor of the fact that I interviewed Alfie Allen a bit earlier today, here’s an image of him in Winterfell looking crazily fierce… or perhaps fiercely crazy might be more accurate:

Empire Magazine has a great interview with director Nial Marshall, who directed the fantastic “Blackwater”. Lots of juicy details about directing the episode and crafting some of its moments. And at least one bit that, I suspect, will be controversial in some quarters of the fandom regarding instructions he says he received from an unnamed executive producer…

In his introduction to A Feast of Ice and Fire (Order Now: US, US Kindle, Amazon UK), George R.R. Martin writes that he has been accused of writing “food porn” with his lengthy, detailed descriptions of what his characters eat. Fortunately, it is this very habit of his that inspired the mouthwatering exploration of the food of A Song of Ice and Fire that this book represents.

The two women behind it all, Chelsea Monroe-Cassel and Sariann Lehrer, started their foray into the food of Westeros—and Essos!—by way of a blog, Inn at the Crossroads, around the time of the first season of Game of Thrones. Their attempts to recreate favourite dishes from the books eventually caught the attention of George R.R. Martin and this led to the book that now has been released, just in time for your Game of Thrones season finale parties.

With all the work we’ve had the last couple of days, I forgot to mention that our video looking at Blackwater” is now on-line! We’ve included it in the episode guide’s extras section, along with the penultimate episode of Sky Atlantic’s Thronecast. Good stuff in there, including a nice Skype chat with Kristian Nairn (aka Hodor).

Besides that, we also have the “Valar Morghulis” final trailer, showing some nice hints of what’s to come in the final episode of the season.

Last but certainly not least, I had promised fans on Twitter a special video if SerIanMC—that’d be Ian McElhinney, who played Ser Barristan Selmy last season—passed 1,000 followers after recently joining Twitter for the first time (here’s a photo he shared to prove it really is him!). Well, that happened right after I tweeted. And so a video was made, being a fairly detailed (if not quite complete—and yes, I had to make some corrections after the fact since I didn’t want to spend even more time re-recording and editing!). You can find it, and many more, at our channel, but I’ll embed it here (NOTE: This is really for non-book readers; if you’ve read the books, you’ve seen pretty much everything I have to say!):

If you like it, and you’re on Twitter, do follow Ian!

It’s common practice for cable companies alike to skip airing their headline programs on a big holiday like the Memorial Day Weekend, and we saw that with Starz skipping Magic City and Showtime The Borgias. But HBO decided to go ahead and keep serving up Game of Thrones once a week. I know we’re all glad to have seen “Blackwater” when we did, but it did have one negative impact: ratings, which dipped a bit.

According to TV by the Numbers, while the episode did win the second place spot in the cable rankings (behind yet more NBA playoffs), it dropped to a 1.6 share (from 2.0) in the 18-49 demographic and 3.384 million viewers for the first airing, with a second airing later in the evening adding an additional 863,000 for a total of 4.244 million viewers. It’s genuinely a holiday thing, so no worries, and the finale may well get the uptick some are hoping to see to put it over the 4 million initial and 5 million total viewership some have hoped for.

On the other hand, James Hibbred at EW notes that last year, the seventh episode also aired on Memorial Day weekend and scored 2.4 million… so you can see that the series is way up overall from where it was this time last year. On top of that, Hibberd adds another important piece of information, perhaps the information HBO considers the most important of all: total average viewership per episode has climbed to 10.3 million viewers when factoring in HBO Go, repeat viewings, and On Demand. That secures its place as the third most-watched series on HBO, and if it continues to climb it may well displace True Blood as #2. #1 is, of course, The Sopranos.

Perhaps to help that along, starting on June 2nd at 6PM the HBO Zone channel will be running not one, not two, but three back-to-back marathons of all nine S2 episodes, back to back, with the final airing of Blackwater timed to just before the premiere of “Valar Morghulis”.

James Hibberd over at EW has a nice scoop on some of the new characters that will be introduced in season 3. Some of these we’ve reported about already—Lady Catelyn’s brother Ser Edmure and her uncle Ser Brynden, called the Blackfish, as well as the sellsword Daario Naharis—and others are quite new. You’ll have to check out EW for the whole list, but here’s a couple more fans should be very happy to hear about:

This is not an exhaustive list, as James notes, but rather a sampling of some of the key characters in play for this season. Little birds have told us that Ramsay Snow, Lord Bolton’s bastard, is also being cast, and a leaked audition revealed that the sellsword Vargo Hoat was also casting. We’ve ever heard whispers of some other characters in the East that Daenerys shall be meeting, besides Daario Naharis.

HBO’s placed the trailer for the final episode, “Valar Morghulis”, up at Youtube in HD. Looks interesting, and I can spot a scene or two that comes straight from the books… and one or two that are definitely brand new. Hrm!