Game of Thrones, episode 1 impressions

[aslant]

*spoilers ahead*

I watched the first episode of Game of Thrones last night, which was interesting after this lengthy discussion with mordicai last week about rape and misogyny as a convention of the fantasy genre. Mind you, I haven't read the books, which I really feel I should do in order to fully understand it, but it also means I can view the tv series without thinking about what has been altered or left out.

Awesome stuff: Peter Dinklage! Not his best but still pretty awesome. The amazing clockwork cities credits sequence. Beautiful rich sets and real investment in costumes and sets in general -- they are not messing around. Definitely introduced enough characters and plots (and hello, obvious cliffhanger) to keep me intrigued and watching for a long time to come.

Stuff that made me cringe (please note I am too lazy to look up names/care):

1. The queen and her brother having sex
2. The semi-naked weird dance/rape battle scene at the wedding? what?
3. The freaky brother touching his sister who he's groomed to marry the "savage"-coded warrior dude, that whole "I would let 40 men and their horses fuck you if it would get my kingdom back" line (to paraphrase loosely)
4. The "tribe of savages!" coding going on throughout, not as bad as it could have been but still, geez.
5. The whole trembling-girl and savage-coded-warrior scene on the wedding night. Please give this girl some goddamn agency, writers. Has she really been groomed to marry this guy and be some kind of sex goddess? Can we see her be awesome instead of trembly/regretful/freaked out or whatever? Really took this out of believability and went straight into "stock shots of trembling virgin" cliche territory. Lame.
6. The scenes in the whorehouse -- mainly because it made me remember the Rome series and how their whorehouse scenes seemed more realistic (i.e. women who are not giggling caricatures who look like they could be Neutrogena models...this was an uncommonly clean whorehouse and the giggle soundtrack made me think, are we eleven years old, giggling constantly? Wtf, maybe sloppy sound editing but still.)
7. The lusty beer wenches scenes at the feast in general, ugh. Someone needs to make a compilation of clips of these scenes. I have seen ten million of them. They are all the same. There is always some dude grasping the buttocks of the lusty beer wench character.
8. Entrails and beheadings!

Maybe this stuff made me cringe because it was unsubtle; and not as a narrative choice but in the sense of cringing for the filmmaker. Maybe it's just bad storytelling, on the part of HBO writers adapting Martin's work. Maybe the actual effect of some of the scenes was palpably shocking, but there was a pretty obvious male-gaze bias to how they were shot. Sometimes it seemed like I was being shocked/dismayed even though the aim was more about titillation.

I've been thinking about Rome a lot, actually, because I feel that series did so many things right in terms of making an urban place gritty and real when showing the lower class scenes, and showing off the bizarre ethereal realm of the royal class, even when they were also engaging in weird sex or incest or committing rape. It wasn't a perfect series, but I didn't feel like I had to consciously re-orient my mind to remember "these are the conventions of their world" the way I did when I watched Game of Thrones last night. And it's not just because Game of Thrones has its own conventions and is a world foreign from our own, ostensibly: I think sloppy writing and the director's choices can either make you slide easily into an unfamiliar place, or it can make it tricky, and i don't think it was a conscious choice in this case.

And there were other jarring moments. The north warden dude and his wife had a startlingly modern-seeming marriage, warm and talkative and intimate in a way that seemed a bit of an anachronism to me, or out of keeping with the general swords-and-wenching atmosphere; and then she kind of became an exposition puppet in order to ask why he had to do a certain thing or obey the king or whatever -- that was just sloppy writing (and, as I see from Mordicai's review, is definitely handled better in the book; it's a complete mystery why the tv writers made this choice, bad form all around). And how about the freaky blond brother character scheming to get the throne -- has there ever been a more "this guy will lose because he is desperate and stupid" character? I'm desperate for a little complexity and realness. Maybe that character gets better; I certainly hope the writing and acting does. He had zero dimensions last night: cruel stupid villain.


This is not a developed critique and position on the series, which I would like to develop as I watch more of it. But I did want to note down my impressions -- I'm curious to hear what others think!

ETA: My super-secret piratey place to watch GoT is here: http ://whoe2010.blogspot.com/search/label/Game%20of%20Thrones and the password for the protected episodes is waddyh. For MegaVideo n00bs: click on the red arrow, then close the pop-up window/tab that appears, then click the green arrow and it will play. Enjoy!

Comments

[kingtycoon.livejournal.com]

I never heard of these books before the TV show was announced and what you're telling me is that they're both crap. Is that true? It seems kind of crap. Tavern wenches...

[mordicai.livejournal.com]

On to your points!

1. Well...I mean, that is what is going on, there. See also number 3-- the Game of Thrones universe has less of an incest taboo with Targaryen dynasties being pharaonic like that. Anyhow, it IS supposed to be jarring.

2. In the books, this is less rapey-- more like a rave-- but yeah, there are murders at is. Like, 15?

3. Yeah, they aren't being subtle with that character. In the book, he's clearly an ineffectual ponce, but also seemingly dangerous-- the petulant abusive brother.

4. This is a touchy subject. The Dothraki do have a culture, & that gets explore as it goes on, but yeah-- any portrayals of non-white barbarians you've got to be careful about. I think the books are careful but the show remains to be seen.

5. You've just summed up her character arc. Not as a sex goddess, but as a woman realizing she needs to have agency.

Or...now I'm done because I have to work!

[aslant.livejournal.com]

Kirk (my husband) is a huge fan of the books and from everything I've heard, they are good solid writing and complex and layered and etc. Martin is definitely above Fantasy 101 in terms of his use of the genre; but he still gets into tricky territory, into which the HBO writers have blithely followed him, in some instances. I've heard the books get a bit better, as they were written in successive decades and had the benefit of a more enlightened viewpoint (cribbing from M here).

[aslant.livejournal.com]

1. I disagree with the pharaonic comparison here, because these two were just fucking, no? They weren't, like, keeping the throne within their family. I'm not saying it shouldn't have been jarring.

2. I could see how they were trying to make it rave-y, actually. I got the central idea of their culture, I just thought they didn't show it very well in that sequence.

3. yup. eh. this ties into my whole thing about him being too obviously The Bad Guy. very very sloppy writing.

4. I still think they have a lot of explaining to do. Almost all the sequences we saw of the Dothraki were the faceless-galloping-horde variety, or the giant-rave thing. Do they genuinely have no conversations? No real language? No conferring amongst themselves? The only action and developed storytelling we got was from the POV of the blondie siblings and the guy from the villa. If they're planning to develop the Dothraki guy into a real character, why was he an absurd piece of hot scenery during the whole episode? It's nice, but it's not a way to build a character.

5. I've heard that the getting-some-agency thing was in the future, vaguely, from Kirk. I just find it weird -- from the undressing scene at the bath I assumed the rapey bro was grooming her in a sexual way for this union. So did he not groom her in a sexual way? Was her training or whatever overwhelmed by scary Dothraki dude? That (those questions/confusion) was another thing that took me out of the reality of that final sunset scene.

[mordicai.livejournal.com]

1. No, the Targaryens are explicitly pharaonic; the siblings fucking was incest, but there is precedent, is more my point.

4. I tooootally agree. We'll have to see, but it is more nuanced in the book (duh). Same for 5.

[aslant.livejournal.com]

But that was her brother, not her husband! To me, it's only really pharaonic if they were married and doing it to keep royal blood in the family. Pharaonic incest was not about making sweet love in the hayloft while you're on vacation in Canada.

[mordicai.livejournal.com]

Not THOSE Targaryens-- I see where I am not being precise-- the Targaryen dynasty, I mean, the family as a whole.

[aslant.livejournal.com]

lol @ distinguishing among MULTIPLE INCESTUOUS PAIRS. this series, whatever.

[pravda.livejournal.com]

My guess, and I don't feel like I'm being spoilerly because I'm still reading the first book and this is just a guess, is that maybe their plan is to eventually rule together.