Westeros

As we mentioned in our Stockholm exhibit report, Linda and I had the opportunity to meet Harry Lloyd, the actor who brought Prince Viserys to life during the first season of Game of Thrones. One of the topics of discussion was an exciting personal project that Harry and his partner Jayne Hong had been working on for the last while, a sort of mockumentary about what happens when the dictator of a certain notorious Asian country turned out to be your biggest fan….

The Supreme Tweeter web series is set to launch on April 1st. The day after, April 2nd, Harry will be at Reddit’s offices to take part in a Ask Me Anything which will start at 3PM Eastern time. Should be a great opportunity for fans to ask him about the project, as well as Game of Thrones (ask him about the cameos from GoT-connected people, and kill two birds with one stone!) and all the other things he’s been involved in over the years (such as The Theory of Everything, Wolf Hall, Manhattan, and Doctor Who).

The US premiere of season 5 is just about to start in San Francisco… but before that, there’s a star-studded red carpet to keep an eye on, with many of the show’s cast and crew members on hand for the celebrations. HBO has kindly provided a live stream of the event for those who’d like to watch vicariously! Also, they promise a special, new behind-the-scenes video at the end of the stream, so that’s something worth watching:

Telltale Games has announced the release of episode 3 of their Game of Thrones narrative adventure game, titled “The Sword in the Darkness”. The game will release starting tomorrow, March 24th for PC and Playstation, the 25th and 26th for other console and mobile devices. Here’s the trailer below:

A bit of a young Drogon, eh? Interesting.  We’ve a trip planned tomorrow, as it happens, so we won’t be able to review this for a couple of days. Until then, here’s our reviews of episode 1 and episode 2.

After attending the world premiere of Game of Thrones season 5 at the Tower of London, Linda and I have written up some brief impressions. We also created a video discussing one particular aspect of the first episode, “The Wars to Come”, which we thought was pretty noteworthy. You can find it below:

George R.R. Martin has been quite loquacious these past few days on his “Not a Blog” personal site, to the point that the media has been taking notice of his remarks. Among them have been his reiteration of his intention (but not his promise) to have the A Song of Ice and Fire series completed in seven books, his struggle to decide whether he’ll be providing a script for season 6 of Game of Thrones (he passed on writing a script for season 5), his thoughts on the “how many seasons” question, and even some passing remarks on a once-proposed feature animated adaptation that he passed on prior to HBO coming into view.

Most recently, however, George’s post on cancelling his attendance to the World Fantasy Convention and San Diego Comic-Con, stating that he simply had too many things to do. It’s worth noting that these weren’t the only events on his schedule (though as he notes, SDCC was never noted as an official appearance), and in particular it seems like he’s still set to appear at conventions and fairs where he’s a Guest of Honor. Still, freeing up some time and space in his schedule sounds like something he feels will be helpful to him given the various tasks he’s dealing with.

But all that said, it’s the last note in his post that has caused wild speculation:

It’s that time of year again, when the intrepid James Hibberd provides us all the scoops that his deep access to the show (this time featuring some ten days worth of set visits and interviews in multiple locations) can provide. This week’s issue—available on newstands, and soon available for digital download—features an enormous thirty pages worth of coverage, and EW and Hibberd have been kind enough to give a few samples.

Of particular note is today’s release of ruminations on just when the show ends, in which it’s made clear that seven years may well be on the table… but so might eight years, or nine years, or even ten, if HBO could have its way. And Hibberd suggests the possibility that seems the likeliest, at this juncture the eight-seasons-in-all-but-name option:

That sounds about right. Read the rest, it’s worth it, and dig around for some of the other new, exclusive coverage, such as these video interview gems and some exclusive first looks

This is absolutely amazing, really—and unprecedented outside of, I don’t know, the Olympics: HBO and its sister networks and broadcast partners around the world will be simulcasting the fifth season of Game of Thrones. Not just the premiere episode (although that episode, it seems ,may air even more widely), but every single episode of the season. What does this mean? That means when it airs at 9PM Eastern on Sundays, it will air at the exact same time in all participating countries and territories. So for fellow HBO Nordic subscribers, for example, will have the pleasure of hitting bed early to then wake up at 3AM to watch it at the same time as fans in the U.S. Fans in Asia will be watching it in the morning. And more.

Full details in the press release below:

Apple’s latest event proved a very surprising location for a big reveal—the official announcement of HBO Now... and the unexpected launch of the second Game of Thrones season 5 trailer. This is a very meaty trailer, and confirms one particularly controversial speculation of ours as having been on the right track:

Currently away from home, but we’ll see if we can’t get our screen caps and commentary up tonight.

The rumors have been out there… and are now confirmed with HBO’s press release announcing it’s HBO Now service to launch in April (just in time for Game of Thrones season 5—coincidence? Don’t think so!)

Here’s the full details:

Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (aka Jaime Lannister) was in Stockholm on Friday to help HBO Nordic ring in the opening of the Game of Thrones exhibit, which meant a bevy of interviews by various Scandinavian media outlets. We ourselves arrived too late in the day for the panel interviews, but fortunately at least one English-language interview came out of it thanks to Sverige Radio PP3, a culture and music program on P3 radio. We’ve embedded the interview below—bear with it a few seconds, it opens up in Swedish and then the interview and Nikolaj agree that their respective grasps on one another’s language is poor enough that English will work better:

In January, nominations opened for the 2015 Hugo Awards, which will be presented at the Worldcon in Washington, Sasquan. The ballots will close on March 10th, so if you’ve yet to nominate but are eligible to do so, best get cracking. Locus Magazine’s Recommended Reading List is always a good place to start reviewing some of the literature from last year… but we’ll focus on things connected to GRRM, one way or the other:

George is again each eligible this year for Editor- Short Fiction, thanks to Rogues, and co-editor Gardner Dozois is eligible several times over due to other collections and anthologies he’s edited in the previous year. And speaking of Rogues, all the stories therein are individually eligible in their respective categories. The Locus list linked above notes several of them, by writers such as Joe Abercrombie, Patrick Rothfuss, and Scott Lynch, but it’s worth noting that Martin’s novelette “The Rogue Prince” is also eligible. (And as to Best Editor - Long Form, Jane Johnson of HarperCollins Voyager and Anne Groell of Random House should be perennial nominees.)

Also eligible, of course, would be Game of Thrones in the Dramatic Presentation - Short Form category; we’d recommend nominating “The Watchers on the Wall”, the spectacular Neil Marshall-directed penultimate episode, and GRRM’s own contribution, “The Lion and the Rose”.

While Linda and I were out to Sweden’s beautiful capital of Stockholm for the Game of Thrones exhibit’s opening gala—more on that tomorrow, but there’ll be photos, possibly some video, and a few odds and ends—it looks like Spoiler TV scooped everyone (again—they often get ahold of these earlier than most) with the titles of the first four episodes of the highly-anticipated fifth season. We’ll put it below the cut, for those who want to avoid the possible spoilers inherent in the titles (as well as brief log lines for the first three episodes):

According to the Huffington Post, an uproar about the casting of the Sand Snakes, the daughters of Prince Oberyn Martell by various women. The recent Weapons of Dorne video which gave many fans their first really clear look at the actors in costume made a few on Twitter realize that the characters did not really look very much like the characters described in the books… but the outrage isn’t about that, but rather by the fact that all the characters are “white”.

Unfortunately, this says more about reader myopia than it does the show’s casting. The outrage is based on the reading of the Dornish as being “another race” than the people you’ll find in the rest of the Seven Kingdoms, but in fact that divides in Westeros are not really racial but ethnic in nature, largely about culture and not skin color. According to George R.R. Martin, this is how he envisioned the Dornish when he created them:

Not sure how we missed this one, but a few days ago HBO released a video on its Youtube channel concerning the weaponry we’ll see in Dorne. Narrated by weapon master Tommy Dunne, who points out a few very specific weapons, there’s at least one somewhat spoilery piece of information contained therein (well, besides the fact that we’ll see Dorne this season):

Despite Michelle Clapton’s protest, it certainly seems the “nipples” on that leather armor of Obara Sand’s will be pretty obvious on film. Doubtless, as she said, it’s an artifact of the moulding process, but the association’s pretty clear.

As to the spoiler?

Courtesy of HBO, we now have the official poster for season 5…. and it’s quite a sight to behold, to say the least.

Featuring Tyrion Lannister’s familiar figure at the bow of a ship or boat surrounded by mist, the familiar (and increasingly-large) figure of Drogon, Daenerys’s great black dragon, hovers into view. It’s very eerie, and a very tantalizing glimpse of what’s to come for Tyrion, a glimpse that confirms speculations following the release of the trailer for the upcoming season. Season 5 will premiere on April 12th in the US, April 13th in the UK.

Speaking of tantalizing glimpses, HBO’s “The Sight” campaign—somewhat controversial among fans, for its randomly distributed, extremely short, and mobile-only focus—has come to an end with two (randomly distributed) sneak peeks at brief scenes from the upcoming season. You’ll find them below the cut, as the official Game of Thrones channel very kindly had mercy and posted them online: