This distinction meant it was easy to put it aside for a rainy day, and even when it was announced as the source material for House of the Dragon, I didn’t feel a strong urge to rush out and read it this wasn’t another character-driven narrative but rather a recording of historical events, which offers a more limited insight into how the show will approach the stories within.Īnd yet still my time as a “book reader” created this sense of shame as House of the Dragon has crept closer to being a reality, even though my resistance has only grown. This was one of several reasons I skipped Fire & Blood when it came out in 2018, although I likely wasn’t alone in this it’s written as an in-world history of the Targaryen family told by Archmaester Gyldayn of the Citadel, and Martin himself went to great lengths to emphasize that this was “not a novel,” instead collecting various bits of “imaginary history” together into what he jokingly dubbed the “GRRMarillion” in a nod to Tolkien’s history of Middle-earth. Being a book reader became a burden, and I envied those who could just get angry on the internet about the finale as just a reaction to a TV show and not as A Whole Thing About The Books. And when the show passed the books, we couldn’t dig ourselves out, struggling to grapple with the phantom of Martin’s unfinished volumes and take in the final season as something other than a purple-monkey-dishwasher rendition of his intended ending. It might have seemed silly to an outside observer to have different reviews for “experts” and “newbies” across the internet, but it created a really fascinating insight into the adaptation, and I loved both writing and reading about it.īut as time went on, and the show veered further away from the story in the books, we had dug ourselves so deep into the Lady Stoneheart of it all that the ability to just watch and enjoy the show on its own merits felt out of reach. Our knowledge of the books helped us acclimate other viewers to the sheer volume of characters and the depth of Martin’s world-building, and tracking changes to the story allowed for equal parts meaningful analysis of narrative adjustments and pedantic complaining about the absence of direwolves, two of my favorite pastimes. In the beginning, it felt both fun and productive. Maybe it’s just me, but being a “book reader” during Game of Thrones’ run was exhausting. And I am officially submitting my proposal that we collectively resist the pressure to read an 800-page book to follow along when the spinoff premieres later this summer. And the request made me realize something that I had been too afraid to put into words: I do not want to read Fire & Blood. There was just one problem: I haven’t read Fire & Blood. Club and even wrote a book on the show, Polygon reached out to me to ask what readers should know about the source material heading into House of the Dragon’s August debut. And since I wrote about Game of Thrones from a book reader’s perspective for The A.V. Over a decade later, and three years after A Song of Ice and Fire reached its (controversial) televisual end as one of the most successful shows of all time, HBO is counting on spinoff series House of the Dragon to recapture the magic it adapts Martin’s Targaryen family history, Fire & Blood. Martin’s dense high fantasy series into a mainstream HBO drama. When Game of Thrones premiered in 2011, I was thrilled to be a “book reader.” As a recovering English major, I loved having another version of a story rattling around in my brain as I experienced a new movie or TV show, and much of my excitement for the series came from the seeming impossibility of translating George R.R.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |