Game Of Thrones -- Book Spoiler Free Thread

Poor Renly.

I think what they were going for there was "sudden" and "shocking". Reminded me of how anti-climatic True Blood could be.

Perhaps it was stuff that was carried over from last week's short running episode? Though I gather there were Shae/Sansa scenes that were cut.

I certainly feel that it would've been more effective if Renly's death had been placed at the end of the last episode.

I still found it pretty shocking an unexpected. I was all "HOLY CRAP!" at that scene which had my jaw on the floor for the rest of the episode.

When Renly started proposing a strategy to save Westeros from more tragedy, I knew he was going to die then, especially given how self-confident he was.

edited 30th Apr '12 5:13:58 PM by Jordan

I disagree because it would only be effective, in my mind, if the character is important to the audience. Ned is executed at the end of the episode because the first season follows Ned, and makes the viewer care for him, and therefore makes the execution that much more poignant.

Renly hasn't been as central to the story this season as Ned was in the first. His death isn't the important aspect of the sequence when compared with the manner of his death(which was revealed at the end of last episode). That's why it makes sense, to me, as to why the end of last episode was what it was, and why this episode starts with Renly's death...

edited 30th Apr '12 5:27:12 PM by Swish

I must admit. It's depressing that Renly died like that right when he had become a powerful ally to the Starks.

I wonder what Stannis would do if he knew Rob didn't care about the Iron Throne? Would he still demand they bend a knee to him or die? I suppose it doesn't matter now since his action have screwed everyone. I have no proof of this, but this is Game Of Thrones, so I simply expect the worst at all times.

Mind you, it's somewhat debatable whether or not Robb would have accepted Renly's terms, and Stannis' hypothetical terms would doubtless have been even worse.

Though it's also debatable which one Robb would be more likely to accept terms from. Stannis has a stronger claim to the throne, but if that was the deciding factor, he would've send Cat to Stannis instead of Renly.

Hard to explain, but it kind of feels like the show is a bit schizophrenic in terms of whether Stannis or Renly is supposed to be the "good guy", I mean they go on about how Renly would be a great king (and have him lament once loving Stannis), but during their parlay, everything he said basically consisted of "Lol Stannis, you suck."

There's also an issue that Stannis got a letter from Ned that pledged Ned's (and by extension Ned's family's) support for Stannis, which gives Stannis a legit reason to be angry that Robb went off and declared himself a king and Catelyn seems to be pledging support for Renly.

IIRC, one of the producers likes Stannis and the other likes Renly, which might explain it.

edited 30th Apr '12 6:00:35 PM by Jordan

Also, having him do basically nothing during the parley but mock his brother and then turn around and say 'hey, I tried to talk Stannis down. You saw it, the guy just can't be reasoned with!'

That's… either sloppy writing, or revealing a lot about what kind of person Renly was.

Maybe it's both.

Yeah, that was strange (you put what I was trying to say more concisely).

Edit- I know this is the Book Spoiler Free thread, but thinking about, I think it's a similar issue here as is coming up with the Yara/Theon scenes. In the books, Stannis and to a greater extent Theon are much less likeable than they are in the tv show, and so when Renly and Asha (Yara in the show) put them down, it's very deserved.

Because the characters are more likable in the show, it makes Renly and Yara look kind of like unreasonable jerkasses when they mock in the same way the characters did in the novels.

edited 30th Apr '12 7:21:40 PM by Jordan

I was just thinking about this: if the character of Renly had been cut entirely from the show, would it have made any significant difference? It feels like they've devoted a large amount of screen time to a character and then gone 'you know, guys, never mind, actually he wasn't that important after all'. And I can't actually think of any reason he's necessary to the plot (Catelyn could have come to negotiate with Stannis and met Brienne there, for example) other than 'we must be faithful to the books or the fans will lynch us'.

I think the hate for Joffrey is not just because he's an ass, but because he's an ass with no redeeming qualities. He's not clever, or brave, or strong, or otherwise competent, and he hasn't demonstrated any real affection even for his own family. To quote Tyrion, he's just a lost cause.

Renly's death is what makes the audience Stannis as a significant threat. Before that moment, he was kind of funny. He was an jerkass grammar nazi who spent his time nitpicking his subordinates. Once we learn that he will have his own brother assassinated, he becomes a much darker character.

edited 30th Apr '12 11:18:17 PM by gregyo

I'm really liking how completely out of control he is. Every parent's worst nightmare, a selfish brat in charge of the household. He's not interesting in an of himself, but he's got the capacity to really fuck shit up for everyone. I'm literally counting the moments until either/and a) Tywin turns up and puts the little shit in his place, or b) Cersei kills him.

Not at all. His death motivated a whole bunch of characters, and illuminated means and methods of the others. We have more of an idea about what the red haired witch woman can do, and that's created drama within Stannis's camp. The Tyrells are motivated towards action, as is Brienne, and motive has both been supplied and justified in their animosity towards the king.

Plus, he was plenty entertaining.

If there's anyone's presence on this show we should be doubting the necessity of, Renly's not the most obvious case. It's not like Daenerys or Snow aren't in extremely isolated plot lines.

edited 30th Apr '12 11:22:28 PM by Nicknacks

I'm expecting Jon and Dany to end up being the most important characters/plotlines considering the name of the book series.

I wouldn't be surprised if by the end all the powerplay would seem so pathetic when the dragons and white walkers fuck up Westeros.

Amusing to think that the entire "main" action is just extended pre-amble and world building in order to set the scene for when the other two characters rock back on to the world.

I do wonder whether we could break the setting down into elements in a way; the Starks are ice, and the Targaryens are fire, and the Greyjoys are associated strongly with water. But that's probably me just clutching at straws.

You guys are assuming there is a "main action". This is the sort of series, both the book and TV series, that, in my opinion, that has no protagonist, antagonist, or main plot line. It is first and foremost character driven. Jon and Dany are important because of their character arcs. Renly is important, in part, for his own character arc, but mainly for how he affects other people's character arcs. No character is unimportant in this series because the developments of the characters and the characters themselves are the focus of the series.

Yeah, you're wrong. There's a priority in actors, and therefore a priority in the plot-lines that feature those actors. All but two of the plots concern the warring states of Westeros, so there's a centrality to the narrative too.

And, being character-driven doesn't mean there isn't a main action. Quite the opposite.

And there are protagonists. And antagonists. They're just not necessarily stable categories, and there's no necessity that all the characters fall into them. Same with heroism and villainy; they do exist, they're just not stable. Just because characters are flexible when it comes to these terms doesn't mean they don't exist — hell, in mediating the character with those terms, you're admitting to it.

More generally, all of the plot lines concern Westeros, just as one could look at the lives of a bunch of Americans who are loosely connected, and say that all of their lives concern America, or, going off of all but two concern the War, you could look at them and say that most of them probably concern the War on Terror, somehow, because it's so significant to American policy. Does that mean that there's centrality to the narrative? No, just that the War is significant to the inhabitants of Westeros. You see, you have to pull out too far to get that. Lord Of The Rings, on the other hand, is a good example of centrality to the narrative. Every plot that is followed relates to Frodo and Sam's journey. You can't choose one plot line as the central plot for this series.

That wasn't my argument. My argument was that it is character-focused, and has no main story, therefore every character is important.

I'd argue that there aren't any protagonists or antagonists. I mean, you can make an argument for each character being on either side, protagonists or antagonists, such as Joffrey. You'd be tempted to label him as an antagonist, but from the perspective of the Lannisters, who we definitely follow, mainly through Tyrion, he is a protagonist, just one that is kind of incompetent. This is a symptom of there being no main storyline, which isn't a bad thing, in my opinion, because you see everything from many sides, and the different characters fall on different sides of the antagonist/protagonist line depending on which individual storyline you look at.

Of course, since this is a decentralized, character-focused story, antagonists and protagonists aren't necessary as what's important is how the characters evolve and interact, not how the protagonists overcome the threat posed by the antagonists.

Your metaphors don't work. None of them follow the perspectives of two (or more) sides of a conflict that involves the majority of the action. That's what's going on this season: we're watching multiple strands of the same narrative, outside the Snow and Daenerys parts. Renly was involved in the war. Arya is involved in the war. Kings Landing is involved in the war. Robb is, the North is, the Tyrells and Littlefinger and Brienne and Cateyln and Stannis and Melisandre and Theon and everyone is involved in this conflict. It's the majority of characters. QED.

Oh I know that, you just accidentally erected a false dichotomy to support it when you said this:

(Emphasis yours)

I mean, I know what you're going for here, but the structure is wobbly — the emphasis looks like that the second sentence is a reaction to the first; that it's the answer to it. It's actually just a new point. Perhaps would have been more clear if you'd have split up the 'graphs and then not added the italics? *

That's part of what I'm going for, but you're also ignoring people like Viserys and The Tickler who turn up in the plot with the sole intent of fucking shit up for the protagonists — which means, yes, we've got protagonists too. Arya, Tyrion, Ned, Theon, basically anyone who has a continued plot line that we view from their perspective are protagonists. Other characters are just supporting characters.

And Joffery's an antagonist, through and through. He's fucking shit up for a lot of people right now.

Ok, let me use this metaphor. Let us look at a bunch of people in the 1860s from America. You could say that all of their lives are about the Civil War, but that would be too simplistic. Sure, everyone is affected by it, but not all of their lives are about the Civil War. One of them might just be, say, trying to get from Richmond to New York, and, while (s)he certainly will go through a war zone, his story is not about the war, but, rather, about going from Richmond to New York, and, while he might have some sort of relation to a guy in Shiloh, his story is hardly the same story.

That was unintentional, which I thought I made clear by making it a new sentence...

Ok, there are a couple of minor characters who are purely antagonists, though I'd argue that Viserys spends most of his time as a protagonist alongside Dany, only turning into an antagonist near the end, but I don't think we have any purely protagonists. I mean, you gave some example: "Arya, Tyrion, Ned, Theon," but Arya is an antagonist to the Lannisters, such as Tyrion, who she most definitely opposes, Tyrion is very much an antagonist to most of the characters, including Arya, Cersei, Sansa, Renly, Brienne, Stannis, Davos, Catelyn, Robb, Bran, and many more, Ned is an antagonist to Tyrion, at the very least, and Theon is an antagonist to pretty much everyone.

Sure, he's an antagonist to Arya, Robb, Catelyn, Davos, Stannis, Renly, Brienne, Bran, and many more, but he's definitely a protagonist to Tyrion, Cersei, and Tywin, though a rather incompetent one.

You see, you're looking at these characters as if they're always an antagonist or a protagonist, but none of them, save a few extremely minor characters, stay in the same role across all times and viewpoints.

This (http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m2xfbqaQVY1r5fyi4o1_500.jpg) is awesome.

Reply, now in reverse order!

1. You can't be the protagonist to someone else. You can be the antagonist to a protagonist, but you can't be the protagonist to someone. I mean, you could, but it'd be mental.

He's an ally. And a debatable one, given the way that Tyrion is fighting him now and Cersei is being overidden by him.

Look, he's a villain. Cersei's a villain. They commit villainous acts in support of tyranny and illegal actions. It's perhaps explicable, but they're in the wrong. Tyrion's a good guy working with the villains. They're all protagonists in their own story, but that doesn't matter. In fact, that's just irrelevant.

2. If you're going to argue that everyone's an antagonist from a certain POV, then those terms fail to be useful in any respect. The eye of Sauron becomes a protagonist and Gandalf an antagonist. Like I said, it's a useless distinction when applied so broadly. It only becomes useful when applied with POV. We get insites into Gandalf, the narrative eye follows him. So he's the narrative protagonist.

So, in Go T, in the King's Landing chapters, we follow Tyrion. We don't do it exclusively — I mean, we occasionally see the Eye Of Sauron and Saruman hanging, doesn't mean that they're holding the burden of the narrative eye — but we do it enough to know their motivations. We might get incites into the other characters, like Cersei, other characters might be pro-active at times, like Joffery, but they're largely closed off to us. And they're acting in opposition to our hero Tyrion, keeping information from him and treating women in ways he doesn't want them treated.

Look, if the plot line was about Cersei, it'd be about her trying to keep the information away from Tyrion and trying to control Joffery. But the story's not about that. If the story were about Joffery, if he was the protagonist of this plot line, the narrative protagonist, it'd be about him not being allowed to assert control. That's his story, but it's not the narrative's story. There's a distinction.

So, by extension, Yara's story is about her pillaging with thirty ships. Theon's is about proving himself with one. Which story does the narrative talk from, though? Theon's. Therefore he's the narrative protagonist.

You apply the same rubric to the other story lines, and you'll find that they're about Arya and not Tywin, Renly and not Loras (until Renly died), ect.

It gets more complicated when you start dealing with Stannis and his crew, since those characters have roughly shared equal screen time. But Davos seems to be the strongest contender so far.

3. Or perhaps a more apropos allusion to Lord Of The Rings: Gollum. He's a protagonist. Fine, for a certain POV — especially from the second film on, where he gets his own plot line and insights into his character and attention from the narrative eye. So he's a narrative protagonist.

Doesn't stop him from being a villain. Villainy's a title independent to protagonist or antagonist. Hence "villain protagonist". Like Theon.

4. Okay, and look, there is a central conflict. All these protagonists are fighting a war or reacting to it on a very immediate level. Again, your metaphor doesn't work. None of these characters are trying to walk through the battlefield to get to their boyfriend. They're all playing key roles in this extended campaign or are being swept up in it.

No, no I'm not.

edited 1st May '12 5:05:42 AM by Nicknacks

Nice one, though you should put a space between the URL and the ), or, else, put a =] after it and a [= before it.

Yes, but you can be a secondary protagonist to someone, or on the protagonist's "team". I'm just lazy, and shorten it to say "protagonist to X".

Hero and villain are roles in a story that roughly equate to protagonist and antagonist. One can be the story's "hero" without being good, see Paradise Lost.

Also, calling Tyrion a good guy and Cersei a bad guy are horrible simplifications. Tyrion is a man loyal to his family, and with certain boundaries, but willing to do whatever it takes within those boundaries, even working against members of his family who are incompetent, to help his family, and Cersei is a woman who is loyal to herself, loves her children, and is willing to do whatever it takes, even work against members of her family she feels are against her, to protect herself and her children, and give them power.

2.

Yes, but, in the story of Lord Of The Rings, we follow, and get the perspective primarily of, just one side, the side that is against Sauron, and for Frodo and Sam. However, in Game Of Thrones, we see the different sides in more of a balance. We saw in the first season a rough balance of Tyrion, Catelyn, Eddard, Bran, Jon, Robb, Daenerys, and the Stark sisters. In this season, we see the story from Cat, Tyrion, Renly/Loras, Davos, Arya, Rob, Theon, Dany, and Bran. Because of this, we have to treat the perspectives with balance, so the roles from each of those perspectives we must treat as equally balanced.

3.

No, in Lord Of The Rings, we never see the story from Gollum's perspective. We see it from Frodo's, and Sam's, with the two of them acting as the narrative protagonists, and Gollum acting as a supporting protagonist or supporting antagonist.

Villain and antagonist are roughly the same, but only roughly. For example, one could say that the hero of Paradise Lost is Lucifer as he follows the Hero's Journey, and fights against the villain of the story, God, who serves the role as villain as he is most decidedly the character who is creating the obstacles, rather than overcoming them. One can be a Villain Protagonist, but usually one isn't. Villain doesn't equate to evil, just the creator of the obstacles that need to be overcome, while Hero is the one who overcomes them, or fails to. Game Of Thrones definitely does have heroes and villains, but it does not have Protagonists or Antagonists, at least none consistently so.

4.

On the contrary, my example works perfectly. The person trying to go from Richmond to New York is like a young girl trying to go from King's Landing to New York, such as Arya.

Arya's story is not the story of the War, but the story of a young girl going from point A to point B through a warzone. Tyrion's story isn't the story of the War, it's the story of a man trying to keep the King of his country, his nephew, who is out of control and making bad choices, under control for the good of his country, during a war. Dany's story isn't the story of the War, it's the story of an exiled Princess trying to return to her country, which is having a civil war, and reclaim her throne. Cat's story isn't the story of the war, it's the story of a mother who's son is leading her country into war, and is seeking to find a way to hurry about the end of it so that she can return home to her children. Theon's story isn't the story of the War, it's the story of an estranged son returning home, only to find he doesn't fit in, and having to fight in a war to prove himself to his family. Jon's story isn't the story of the War, but the story of a young man tasked to defend a country that is torn apart by a civil war from an outside threat that none of the sides of the war believes exists.

While each of these stories features the War prominently, they aren't about the War, and could exist on their own as separate stories. We could follow the story of Arya, with the exclusion of the other stories, and it would still be an effective story. We could follow the story of Tyrion, with the exclusion of the other stories, and it would still be an effective story. We could follow the story of Dany, with the exclusion of the other stories, and it would still be an effective story. We could follow the story of Jon, with the exclusion of the other stories, and it would still be an effective story. It wouldn't be as complex or interesting of a story, and it wouldn't need as many seasons, but it's possible to choose one, and follow it, and we'd still get a good story from it. You can't say the same of, say, Lord Of The Rings. You certainly could've followed just Frodo and Sam, but if you followed just Aragorn, the story would've ended on an utter Anti-Climax as the story peaks off screen. Not so with Game Of Thrones. Each of the lines had a climax during season 1. Ned, Arya, and Sansa's with Ned's execution, Tyrion's with his father finally acknowledging him, and sending him to King's Landing or the battle of the River Trident, Cat and Robb's with the KING IN THE NORTH scene, Jon's with the Night Watch setting out to the Far North, Bran's story with the dream, and the subsequent reveal to him that Ned died, and Dany's with the dragons hatching.

Well, that's what it seems like to me...

edited 1st May '12 5:49:50 AM by deathpigeon

Right, that's season one over and done with. What an ending!

On another note, I needed a stiff drink after watching Viserys' death scene. What a way to go, man. I have to wonder, though; considering the low melting temperature of gold, would it have been hot enough to burn through his skull and cook his brain that quickly?