"Golden Crown" (Game of Thrones - spoiler)

[Jester]

The last episode didn't blow my mind nearly as much as several other episodes did. Like, say, the one before it, where Joffrey proved what a jackass douchebag king he's going to be.

Though I was amused by the part of the final episode where King Jerkoff says that his mother has told him a king never hits his lady....then has his henchman do it for him. That said SO much.

[AnaKhouri]

OK, I know this is old news, but I just finished watching “A Game of Thrones” last night (a wonderful friend DVR’d it and then put it on VHS for us…so glad I kept the VCR!). I’m a huge fan of the books, but in my expert analysis (rambling) I won’t mention anything that happens beyond the first book, in case anyone actually reads this and doesn’t want to know.

Looks like they aged everyone up for the series, which is a good thing- I rather think Martin wrote himself into a quandary by making a lot of his major characters very young at the beginning of the series (Arya 9, Sansa 11, Dany 13). Not to mention the discomfort involved in seeing 13 year old Dany having lots of sex and giving birth. I call BS on HBO on that though; if she was in her first trimester of pregnancy she would have been waaaaay too exhausted to have sex with Khal Drogo all the time. Caitlin looked older than I expected (people get married way young in this universe) but I guess that was part of the aging up.

For some reason I always thought Lysa was fat. I don’t know why, breastfeeding is supposed to be good for losing weight after all. : ) The Aeyrie looks gorgeous.

Peter Dinklage is perfect as Tyrion, if not picture-perfect; Tyrion is supposed to be really ugly, and even my husband commented that Dinklage is good-looking. He’s one of the best parts of the series, for sure.

Renly and Loras though…totally miscast. I hardly believe a guy who looks about 13 could unseat the Mountain, even using trickery. And I always saw Renly as having a more dynamic personality. They’re just kind of boring. And the ‘man-scaping’ scene (my husband told me it’s called man-scaping) was just kind of weird. Everyone else gets to give exposition while having vigorous sex, but they have to do it while shaving? Come on, HBO.

Cersei and Jaime are not nearly as attractive as I’d pictured them; Jaime at least is terribly charming but Cersei has the personality of an annoyed wolverine. If she’s not going to be stunning, she has to at least be charming, even superficially. Even Jaime seems to dislike her.

Robert is incredibly unlikeable, even though I recall liking him in the book. He was more of a frat boy in the book, I think, but in the series he’s pretty vicious. I found myself feeling a little sorry for Cersei. I really feel sorry for Joffrey’s actor; the kid is great, and I’m sure he’s a really nice kid, but now 8 million viewers want him dead. It was a bit satisfying though, watching him throw Cersei for a loop in episode 9.

Varys is more likeable than in the book, and Littlefinger is pitch-perfect. I remember when I read the book I was on break at work when I got to the scene where you find out he’s betrayed Ned, and I called my husband (who’d urged me to read the series) and left a scathing, garbled, profanity-laden voice mail on his phone. He might still have it, come to think of it.

The butcher boy the Hound killed resembled my oldest nephew.

Bran is a beautiful little boy (I can say that and not sound creepy because I have a beautiful little boy of my own). Rickon got zero screen time but he’s not very interesting anyway. The girl playing Sansa really is beautiful, though my husband disagrees. So is the girl who plays Dany, but he does agree on that one. I can’t stand Jason Momoa but at least he barely opened his mouth. I always thought of the Dothraki as being Mongolian, but I guess it would be hard to find enough Mongolians in Hollywood to make a hoard.

Arya is awesome. She’s so adorable and scrappy (and adaptable, which is why she survives). And Syrio Forel was also exactly as I’d imagined.

And Tywin Lannister is the guy Ripley banged in “Alien 3”, who then had his head crushed like a melon by an alien proboscis. In case you wanted to know.

Theon is a perfect little punk and Jon is great. The Wall looks AWESOME.
Dragons! They’re so cute. They have little hooked beaks like Terror Birds.

The guy playing Gregor is enormous. I know the Hound’s actor is big, 6’4 or 6’5, and that guy is even larger. We went to a RenFaire once and one of the jousters was introduced as “The Mountain That Rides” (Gregor’s full nickname). The husband and I looked at each other and laughed.

And now to my favorite part of this series: the Hound. I feel like he got kind of shafted by the TV show. Granted, he’s in the next couple books a lot more, but he’s shoved pretty far in the background. In the book he and Sansa are thrown together a lot more than in the series; since Joffrey can’t be bothered with her most of the time, the Hound is ordered to take her places or show her where things are. And he can’t stand her. He seems to get a kick out of telling her how stupid and false all her courtly daydreams are (he hates knights, because his brother is a knight) and scaring her. I was really annoyed they had Baelish tell Sansa what happened to his face, because in the book it’s a great scene where the Hound tells her himself. But they did keep the scene where Joffrey makes her look at Ned’s head; the Hound really is the only person to show her even a shred of kindness after her dad is executed.

It was kind of hard to watch the series, my husband kept saying, “NO NED DON’T TRUST HIM!” or “NO DANY SHE’S LYING!”. But I am definitely looking forward to the next series, as the second book is my favorite (so far!).