George R R Martin - Blog Posts

I think the thing that’s really striking about the got books as opposed to the show is the way Martin never shies away from how physically damaged everyone is left. In the show Tyrion gets a badass scar but in the books he looses half his nose, Briennes teeth are broken and a chunk of her face is literally bitten out. Theon looks like an old man, his body is completely wrecked -

But they’re still not beyond hope. Their stories don’t finish with the horrible things that happen to them, their scars and deformities, they go on, and it’s not pretty and tragic and romantic like a story

And that’s the whole point.

Every single book in the series makes a point about how violence and war is romanticised in literature and history and Martin makes his character a living testament to the reality of war, the ugliness, the trauma, and that depth is just another thing that got glossed over in the show where people stay pretty and everything that made the books special is watered down.

Let your characters be ugly. Let them get hurt. Let them be scarred, and watch them get up anyway.

George R.R. Martin is me

fictional man obsession of the month:

Aemond Targaryen

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She was always on this downward path. She’ll probably burn cities to the ground in the books too, should GRRM ever finish them. 

“Dragons are the nuclear deterrent, and only Dany has them, which in some ways makes her the most powerful person in the world. […] You can have the power to destroy, but it doesn’t give you the power to reform, or improve, or build.”

This is a great essay! I love this show because it allows Daenerys to be a fully formed and complex character, the likes of which most female characters in fantasy and even on television almost NEVER get to be. She feels like a real person because, like a real person, she isn’t all good or all bad. 

Emilia Clarke has really hit it out of the park with her performance, getting us to love Dany and then fear her. 

This is a great character--one of the best female characters I’ve ever seen on television and I’m so glad the show had the guts to let Dany break bad, as she was always destined to do. 

sooo how do you feel about the whole mad queen thing?

Well, like much in the last half of this series, the set up has been rushed and clumsy and occasionally ridiculous.

But given all the crap they have to deal with— time constraints plus two dozen other characters; quickly trying to connect dots that GRRM has been struggling to join for the better part of two decades; the fact that we live in an age where a staggering percentage of people have developed the inability to watch 30+ minutes of television without looking at their stupid phones and can barely follow the plot of of your average sitcom— I pity those poor bastards enough to cut them some slack on that front.

That aside, I’m happier with it than I thought I’d be. Because I don’t think she’s mad at all, at least not yet. She’s just broken and finally fed up with trying to control her ruthless side.

For a long time, I figured the show was going to wimp out and go about “dark D-ny” in the “safest” way possible: she’d spin out of control for an episode and a half at most then snap out of it in time to heroically sacrifice herself.

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Daenerys is one of the best and most complex female characters in recent literature and television history. If she does turn out to be the secret antagonist of this series (depending on whose point of view you take), I will respect the series even more for taking this huge risk you typically don’t see when it comes to female characters, especially female characters in fantasy who are usually either all good or all bad. 

A really really good meta about Daenerys I found on twitter.

This is why I think Dany has always been one of my favourite characters, but I was never really sold on her actually getting the Throne once she got to Westeros, because it really revealed so much more about her motives that her storyline in Meeren sort of hid from me.

GRRM basically saying that Condal has no idea of what he is doing and that HOTD is heading for disaster if they don't abandon the changes planned for S3 and S4 was not necessarily on my 2024 bingo card 💀

George R.R. Martin: dragons are huge ferocious beasts who answer to a master  

Tolkien: dragons are annoying, talking assholes