By Melissa Spady (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: July 3, 2013
If you didn’t hear about the last two episodes of Game of Thrones, you must be living under a rock. Whether or not you keep up and consider yourself a fan, everyone was talking about the Red Wedding and the finale of season three. An internet meme was created of people who had read the books filming the reactions of those who had not. The man himself, George R.R. Martin, weighed in with delight and amusement on Conan – he had actually seen some of the videos already.
When I first started watching Game of Thrones, I felt overwhelmed at the intricate storylines and frustrated that I couldn’t remember who was whom, or more importantly, who was on the same team. I made a promise that if I still hated it after one episode of the second season, I would stop and proclaim that Game of Thrones wasn’t for me. I was, however, surprised at how much I enjoyed myself once I knew everyone’s names. I remember being told on numerous occasions how the television series was made for people who had already read the books, but I would disagree wholeheartedly. A slow start is not always indicative of the entire series’ flow. I am now making my way through the books in a purposefully slow manner to preserve shocking moments like the Red Wedding, but also because it alleviates me of that sense of authority I find a lot of people taking over the decisions made by the writing team.
I hear a lot of complaining about how the writing team is “doing it wrong.” I’m going to stop you all right there. Have you ever adapted a book into a script? Almost all of you will answer no, which means you have no idea how much gruelling work goes into adapting a book, nay a fantasy book, into a television series. You don’t know what it’s like to pore over the same pages over and over again trying to encapsulate the essence of a story in a very stripped-down style, or how difficult it is to adapt thousands of pages of description, inner monologue and symbolism into a visual medium. I do happen to have experience in this field; I recently adapted one of my favourite novels into a movie for a directed studies project. Many hours were spent arduously going over character quirks, and writing timelines to make sure every detail was correct. I laboured over it for months, and still didn’t feel like I did it justice. That was just over 200 pages. There are (so far) five novels in the series and each stands alone at roughly 1000 pages. I feel compelled to shush all those who hem and haw over the differences.
I have mad props for a writing team who knowingly undertakes such an outlandish project and ends up creating a wildly popular television series out of it. The TV version isn’t supposed to follow the books to a tee, and if it did it would have been boring, slow-paced, exhaustingly expository and cancelled after the first three hour episode aired. HBO can’t do Game of Thrones the same way BBC did Pride and Prejudice, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing at all. The writers make the decisions to adapt the novels based on what will be best for the show and for the viewers. If it isn’t physically viable to show or to depart central plot lines to introduce one character then they won’t, and that’s for your sanity. It wouldn’t be a cohesive piece of work if they tried to, and what they’ve done lets everyone enjoy Game of Thrones, not just the people who have read the detailed back story of every character. That’s a good thing. Contrary to popular belief, Game of Thrones wasn’t created to strictly cater to those who have read the books. It was made to take an awesome story with interesting characters to a larger audience. It was created to visually tell the story to those who know it, and hopefully bring in new faces to the fandom by telling the story in a different way.
