Westeros

Recently, Empire Online reported (beware, spoilers!) that director Neil Marshall—he of “Blackwater” fame—was on board to direct the final episode of season 4 of Game of Thrones. We knew this wasn’t quite right, but we’re glad to see that Variety and its sources were able to clear up the issue: Marshall is directing the penultimate episode—again, beware, there are spoilers—much as he did in season 2.

Not long after we posted our video discussing all Dorne, its people, and its history, George R.R. Martin weighed in on the topic of the Dornishmen as a people, in relation to the casting of actor Pedro Pascal in the role of the Red Viper, Prince Oberyn Martell. Here is Martin on his vision of the “salty Dornishmen”, with our thoughts afterward:

Last week we posted about our fundraiser. Happily, the fundraiser is now complete! We met our goal in just a couple of days, and decided to keep it open after requests from users who would be able to contribute later in the week. The fundraiser is now done, with a hair over $2500 raised—a terrific amount! Many, many thanks to one and all, both those who contributed and those who’ve made Westeros.org their destination for all things A Song of Ice and Fire related!

With the recent news of the casting of Pedro Pascal as Oberyn Martell in season 4 of HBO’s Game of Thrones, it seemed to Linda and I to be an excellent time to discuss the history and culture of our very favorite region in the Seven Kingdoms: Dorne. Clocking in at just under an hour, we cover a lot of ground in this video. Enjoy!

We’ve taken a bit of a break after the rather exhausting season 3 of the series, but of course, the production never stands still: season 4 filming is soon to commence, roles have been cast, locations selected, and more. Below, you’ll find a quick round-up of some other Game of Thrones news over the last couple of weeks, for those curious as to what’s out there and what we know so far:

After a pretty hair-raising Game of Thrones season, with traffic levels that blew away what we saw last year, the server actually handled itself pretty well—certainly, better than last year! The new server’s much more capable than our prior, two-server situation, and thanks to hard work from our friendly host Sparks, it became much more stable. And we’re not resting on our laurels: we hope that next year’s traffic will be a relative breeze, as we look into solutions involving leveraging the cloud to help take some of the load off the server when the traffic spikes.

But of course, all this costs money, so we bring you once again to our annual fundraiser to help cover the yearly costs of having the server about:

This will cover a part of the yearly cost, the rest of which Linda and I will cover ourselves.

Many thanks for visiting the site, making it the #1 site for A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones discussion and commentary, and (we hope) for your donation!

Via James Hibberd over at EW, the first major casting of season 4 of Game of Thrones has been revealed: Prince Oberyn Martell will be played by Chilean actor Pedro Pascal. From the article, here’s Benioff and Weiss on the casting:

This has been up for a week and change now, but we wanted to give your Youtube subscribers the first look at it: our review of season 3, just over 2 hours of discussion between Linda and I as we share our thoughts on the season. You can find the review over at our feature page, and of course as part of our Season 3 playlist.

Enjoy!

New York City’s Slattery’s Midtown Pub will be playing host to an official A Song of Ice and Fire trivia contest! On June 25th, five rounds of trivia questions based on the novels (not the TV show)—questions which we here over at Westeros.org have had a look over and some input on— will see the best teams winning some cool rewards, such as signed copies of the novels and more!

Sponsored by series publisher Random House and arranged by Trivia A.D., the full details of the trivia competition and registration for tickets to participate can be found at the event page.

Usually these posts are titled “Reviewing…” but in this case, for now our episode guide for “Mhysa” contains our complete, blow-by-blow recap as well as our book-to-screen material. The review itself will be forthcoming some time tomorrow. Why the delay? It’s turning a bit into a season overview piece, with a lot of references to past episodes of the series, and I’d like to mull it over a bit more before settling on how to go with it. The season finale is always a tricky thing to review, at least when it comes to Game of Thrones, and it deserves some extra thought.

But until then, check out the episode guide, and feel free to visit the A Song of Ice and Fire forum where there’s some lively, in-depth discussion of the episode going on right now.

We’ve gotten our winner for our 7” Iron Throne contest... but for the final episode of the season, we have an ever grander prize, once more courtesy of the amazing folks at :

This depiction of Tyrion Lannister at the Blackwater was a moment that David Benioff and Dan Weiss specifically suggested to Dark Horse as a possible subject for a statue, and is the first full-figure statue that they have produced for Game of Thrones. Standing 10” tall, the statue is actually part of a limited edition series of just 3,000 figures. Future statues will include Jon Snow with Ghost and a White Walker.

How do you win? This one is easy: follow us on Westeros.org and spread the word about this contest by including the #GoTTyrion hash-tag and linking to this post! We’re thinking that if we cross the 30,000 follower mark, we’ll be offering up an additional prize that some might find pretty interesting in its own right…

And yes, the Tyrion statue prize contest can be entered from any country in the world—it is not US only! (The second prize may or may not be available overseas, so we can’t promise that one will be available to an international entry.) We’ll decide the winner—or winners—come Monday after the final episode, “Mhysa”.

As we reported yesterday, George R.R. Martin appeared on the Conan O’Brien show last night. In the course of his appearance, he discussed writing the novels and keeping facts straight, and (to our delight) mentioned us over here at Westeros.org:

There are other clips of his appearance on the site, and the full episode should be available for streaming some time tonight.

Tonight’s episode of Conan O’Brien will—quite amazingly!—feature none other than George R.R. Martin, according to the full schedule at the Team Coco site. O’Brien included a reference to Sunday’s episode, “The Rains of Castamere”, in his monologue on Monday; suffice it to says, there are spoilers:

  The digital release of the season 3 soundtrack is now available on iTunes and Amazon MP3, with the CD release due next month! See below for the details, straight from WaterTower Music:

As we suspected, the Red Wedding has sort of drowned out everything else about, “The Rains of Castamere”, dominating coverage of the episode. Linda and I have been invited to share our thoughts on the episode in a couple of venues. First off, I was asked to provide some comments to the New York Post, while Linda joined some other “megafans” to discuss the episode’s main event over at the Vulture.

And if you’ve missed it, we made our penultimate appearance on Thronecast for the season, as well as our usual bonus video, which I’m placing below the cut: