[ASOIAF:] Book vs. Show: Great Literature vs. Pop Art.

we are talking about Game of Thrones
this is my enormous girlfriend she looks taller than me because she's sitting on my knee she's not really talking I have read all the books to death I've got a playlist on this channel of videos about A Song of Ice and Fire Game of Thrones and my girlfriend has not so we went through the experience of me kind of introducing her to this fictional world and this corpus of literature because that's what it is at this point and interestingly we started that not with the TV show we actually started that by reading the Dunkin egg stories right and I really kind of hype there looked up the Duncan egg miniseries we're going to call it is a really good way to get started with the Game of Thrones Song of Ice and Fire universe and now just recently just passed a handful of days or something we watched seasons 1 through 4 together of the TV show the TV adaptation so look what we are talking about this video I mean one thing that came up for me getting into general headings is some things were done better on the TV show worse in the books a lot of things of course are worse than the TV show them in the books and inevitable we talked about this while we're watching the show as boyfriend and girlfriend have double and impossible to it's in electable to talk about those things I think also soninke Meganium was just the issue of good writing and bad writer I mean some things are not well written and watching the TV show of anything reminded me also bad writing in the books you know again really talked about examples that well let's just look you at this stage just throwing out themes to talk about stuff you wanted Agra to come on your head like what what what's on your mind after watching for season 2 the show what makes somebody brave what makes someone honourable oh my god yeah okay big questions yeah yeah we did talk about how to deal with people who are in need of charity poor people how they're treated yeah in the books IRS's in the show oh right okay innocent so basically like how peasants and the poor are depicted if they're depicted at all on the TV sure so right we that's funny we talked about that and then after each other but we could saw a couple of episodes where we did have a few poor people crowding on yeah no that was that was a really good like a good good set of observation your part but I mean I think the topic beneath that is really how do you create viewer interest at all yeah you know I was saying I kind of lose interest in the show I love watching the show with as well because of the commentary that's pretty much why we continued watching it I was not interested in the show subscribe now yeah I wasn't interested in the show before I met ISIL but yeah or the books you hadn't read it read it or seen the book see the show but yeah so I guess it's kind of not interesting as much as it could have been because it's focuses on just about the rich class really narrow class kings and queens rather than I guess there are work a few scenes in the last season with Brooke yeah yeah well if the peasants aren't really characters they show up and they die yeah same thing yes almost those if they show up and then they're evolved and died or something yeah but they do they do show up and get a few lines but yeah that's about it yeah look I think that's really interesting so we do have this assumption in literature you know the traditional definition of tragedy was tragedy is when a nobleman goes wrong that was a definition you Shakespeare you know there's this kind of weird assumption in Western literature that everything is more interesting when it concerns aristocrats but it was really obvious to us watching and talking about this series that it's actually much less interesting to watch a shoe pop out of vote aristocrats or millionaires I mean maybe that's partly because of the nature of the risk involved like even but look even when we talk about rap music to me you rad music is a lot less interesting if it's just millionaires document how much money that yeah yeah and of course it is very often the same album you have that contrast you have so-called struggle rap rap about poverty and lack of opportunity and dealing drugs to get by or taking care of your baby mama whatever you know like the viewing life with struggle and then on the same album is just rapping about how many hood you have how much money you celebrating conspicuously cameras how much ice you wear and yeah but I think I think the stakes are different I mean obviously it's positive level well-written drama in which all of the characters are millionaires but there has to be risk you know there has to be a sense of what for danger and and aspiration right and what have you but yeah that that was interesting against the first time I watched the TV show I didn't think of it that way but the most egregious example NoDo is is Daenerys where Daenerys his own storyline the TV show oh yeah yeah really becomes quite boring yeah the treatment of slavery in the show's right well I think it was done very well okay but okay but look so that's irrelevant so basically okay we have Westeros and Essos you know the West Indies needs their slavery in the West there's serfdom and peasants and poverty and starvation because starvation is another issue in the books doesn't show up in TV show much and kind of alluded to it a few points well you know there was this one very good dialogue with sort of the right-hand man abroad the right-hand man of Syria where he talks about you don't know what it's like during a siege you know first there's no food then the thieves steal all the food you know there's this description of you know basically dishonest and cruel people becoming powerful because as soon as they control the food they control those society and so on okay I think one question is how do you make a society itself interesting on TV how do you make people interested in social problems in a kind of really kind of sociology you know political analysis of a fictional world that's one thing but the other question is okay would it be more interesting if in De Niro's storyline if there was a slave just one who was really a character you know I mean if there was a point of view if you really saw the world through the eyes of a slave in that society for a bit and then but then a very Spanish point in Westeros also what if we really got the perspective of at least one peasant yeah and I think for the TV adaptation that would have been quite easy to do yeah yeah I mentioned you that I thought the scene with Jen drienne Stannis's right-hand man third on unite Yeah right Davos yeah oh no fingers home yeah that was interesting they were discussing how they both grew yeah King's Landing that's weird I guess Davos okay that's you they discuss it it's the same with slavery they discussed slavery but they don't actually show that right this is about Shana tell you don't actually see someone growing up that you just see these guys referring back to it yes and likewise you see people talking about slavery we don't have a care of who actually is a slave living through that and so on so yeah that's I mean I don't know it's funny though that's so it's kind of so obvious I mean just to give an example we could have had one real peasant or one real slave one real poor person instead of for example Podrick Payne now Podrick is an okay character members of Padre Pio always wears on all red shirts yeah and he fights in a few scenes and so on he starts off as as Tyrians right-hand man that moves on to become assistant to free and tabria but you know okay like I'm okay with Podrick fine but it seems to me a writers room sitting around say okay you know instead of having this this character couldn't we have one character who really speaks as a peasant and for the peasants and talks about the impact of the war you know on the other 98% of society or something yeah you know it just it seems that one guard and also the way the geographic focused the show moves around for me as a writer I would have said okay we could have that even if there are comedic characters so you'd have two peasants who keep showing up on different corners of the map because they keep running away as refugees from these wars that break out and that might you know that might like give some weight and substance to the fact that you know there are these wars happening off-camera the most time we don't really see we don't really see the nature of the war itself or wooden yeah tons of consequences you don't even see the battle between the Starks and the Lannisters really you see the criterion get max out and yeah I don't think you see a single battle between the Starks the Lannisters that's right and even so Jamie Lannister the guy was his hand cut off Jamie at one point he just shows up on camera as a prisoner right but like you didn't you didn't see him being taken prisoner yeah you don't have a sense of what that we don't give over sense of why he lost that battle yeah obviously that was more dramatic and more interesting to have some sense of that no so all of that they've just cut out the actual Wars edited out yeah as well as the the consequences of the war yeah oh yeah and I thought the wildlings like the the parts of the season I think it's a season two or three about the wildlings that was because yeah because it showed a different different class those people right okay so to me the welcome start with the wireless for a minute I mean to me as someone who cares about politics but also anthropology and history and yeah let's just stick with anthropology you know the way different ethnic groups live amongst each other we live in an area of China now we live in the border with Myanmar where there are several nationalities or ethnic minorities who until recently were considered savages and who did engage in headhunting and cannibalism and what-have-you these are features of locals IDs and we still have some things that celebrate those aspects of the culture like um just dancing with swords stuff like that yeah but they don't actually kill any people anymore that I know of um some of the best friends the descendants of cannibals aren't there you know but this issue of savagery and barbarism and you know who are you calling a savage this kind of thing I you know many people say of this series that nobody is really good and nobody is really evil that everyone shades of grey I don't necessarily think that's true or useful and I mean with the with the wildlings is certainly the TV shows depiction of them how can anyone sympathise with a side whether society is built on raping and pillaging and looting and and white thing el villagers they're not you know they don't even take slaves they don't take prisoners what's what's shown on the TV show is that they steal from those they kill every single person in the village yeah died you know I mean again maybe the word evil is banal or irrelevant like maybe it's not useful therefore this is good or evil but there's not really no real shades of grey here right yeah and their only justification I mean you may not remember this in the TV show their only justification is that oh we have someone of the live stream from commits interesting okay sorry alright so we're not so far away from you because we know Matias oh is that how we got here all right cool anyway that's cool showed out the could Ming we're just down the road in into home but yeah I mean whether or not you want to use words like good and evil I thought that really showed it in a very different very different moral and ethical framework there's no way you can compromise that to somebody do you have a Treaty of cooperation with that so anyway that kind of goes nowhere if there's so far in the show we have another season coming up but nothing interesting really comes out of the ethical questions stirring the wildlings on the TV show I get the sense in the books that that is going somewhere dressing and even the author's choice of terms you know so the author chooses to describe them as the wildlings from civilized societies perspective and then they describe themselves as the free folk yeah and there's this discussion of what is freedom it's on Doheny all right yeah they refused to kneel they regard kneeling as yes contemptible and so on yeah so I mean they're I think the books haven't done it yet but that's driving towards some sort of you know some sort of interesting set of set of questions and we can get back to just chatting with people and last year this has only been you know 11 minutes so far talking about Game of Thrones we get die oval game of Thrones for hours but look let me just ask you is there anything it stands in your mind as an example of bad writing straight-up when you watch this in terms of how it's constructed or what it is look I just did a digression as much as I praised george RR martin for creating this you know corpus of literature it's a largely improvised work of literature and you know the more I read it the more I scrutinize and I know people say they just like the more they read the books and where they love them I I think there are some examples of bad writing you know on the TV show but some of it is is a product of what's there in the books no for sure yeah I think most of the scenes of tenaris are very robotic yeah very well yeah to me to me it's kind of mind-blowing but I mean wrong actress for the part I agree that the actual acting is robotic but it's also true if you replace that actress if you had it written exactly the same as it is now if you didn't change anything in the script even the best actress in the world couldn't couldn't make those scenes interesting right oh yeah yeah we were talking about that with Joffrey Capri managed to make some Turanian but now it was I watching a thing watching the second time the actor who played Joffrey Wow I had so much respect for that actor I don't know if he's going to go on to do other things but yeah yeah he's a great example of that but no I mean there's no agonizing you know there's so many issues in Mereen that could be interesting what is slavery and what is freedom and how do you end slavery and how does she regard the society how do they regard her she's a foreign barbarian has conquered the society she's not welcome there but you know what does it mean to rule she's never been a king before or queen before sorry she's never been in charge of anything before really except a band of refugees in the middle of the desert now she's actually a queen who was an actual Kingdom there are a lot of ways a good filmmaker or good screenwriter could play that up including you know maybe she's just not used to living with servants and the servants still refer to themselves as slaves and she says the servants know you're not a slave I mean it seems to me any decent Hollywood writer could sit down and brainstorm you know around a table and come up with a whole lot of interesting ideas just to illustrate that scenario and the discomfort and like in the book it's again it's not great writing but in the book at least to give an example there's there's tension around whether or not she's going to start dressing like a local person you know whether she's going to continue to dress like a foreigner or he's gonna adopt the style and dress the local people and even then she's not just addressing that she's not adding self a local person she's adopting the style of a local slave master that's the reality and you know that's kind of powerful and interesting you know so there's an opportunity there that the show just seems to squander and the scenes they do have even if they sound dramatic there was nothing dramatic about Daenerys receiving the the bones of a dead child there was nothing interesting out that it was totally robot I mean all those even if I described them in an interesting way just you know there was nothing interesting about it there is a scene with the chicken the hound asked first okay that was in trouble writers yeah the owner of the shop just refused to write I'll give him write em a chicken for free then they just fought to the death and everybody in the tavern would you are yeah now look around everybody in the tavern yeah anyway to it so we're doing this never warm and obviously the next scene this is before the next season the show starts broadcasting I assume we'll watch that together and comment on it but I don't know most you'll stable to show is that the best thing about the show is that it inspires people to take the time and read the books and I guess that is true but it's also true that you know whenever the show falls short of what the books have to offer it's just crushing it just feels awful you know it just feels awful to the whole so we didn't miss the whole treatment of Shaye you know shade the prostitute with a heart of gold that turned you know that turns out to be a heart of whole you know we're you know I don't know I had mixed feelings I had mixed feelings about about I mean obviously you know a lot of the audience I think I think loved that storyline I love that play oh yeah there was too much too much torture affion oh okay okay well look this is another thing we didn't even mention this one of the main reasons she never watched the show previously was this reputation for nudity and violence yeah and the new idiot is new in violent you know the extent to which it just seems like the screenwriters sat down and said how many different scenes can we set inside a brothel you know and the nudity is not sexy and it's not interesting it is gratuitous and the worst sense of its if anything it's sort of obstructive you know what I mean like the whole treatment of sexuality is is awful and I think that does I think it does corrode the plot you know what I mean like because you know human sexuality is a significant part okay big big theme big trope so you know the whole the whole question of littlefinger sexuality yeah and Littlefinger's lifelong obsessive crush on his high school girlfriend or prior to even primary school girlfriend we know but they go back fishing right okay so I mean there's there's a certain view of human sexuality there and then there they're exploring that or examining that it it's literally set inside a brothel with these corny new dancers and needless lesbian sex scenes happening in the background yeah and I was there the scene with Podrick yeah so I know three [ __ ] I speak no payment I know I know I know I know sir but that I mean they're there they're in this they're on the same set I mean it's the same character in the same milia you know like it really does destroy any attempt to do something meaningful or interesting and looking at love really love so we're talking about here but you know love and sexuality in terms of little fingers whole plot and Catlins plot and there's also Santa's plot so that's that's destroyed and you know I mean there were other opportunities I mean what does love mean to the Hound the on the TV show they choose to make the Hound someone who's obsessed with killing in this really boring shallow way but I mean he's really not I mean love and romance are part of his storyline and fans of the book know that God is the show so there are a lot of opportunities that and of course all the female characters who adopt the sword you know the different female characters who want more of a male role in society which happens again and again and again McLean was obviously Brienne and then Brienne does fall in love with Jamie to some extent right there's some kind of romance so there's a lot there to explain you know this this thing of just having as many scenes as possible inside a brothel it really does hamper this as a work of art you know both as an adaptation of the book and in terms of you know examining examining on its own so yeah it's wince-inducing yeah look you know just say this in closing I remember where the liner notes to a CD that was like a Greatest Hits jazz CD blue no jazz and it said you know there was a time in American history when popular music was also great art oh the great way to put it and we are going through a brief period here with Game of Thrones where a mainstream hit TV show is also a great work of literature it's a very rare circumstance and I'm making the most of it hey for me the best news was hearing on the internet the george RR martin plans to do a total of ten Dunkin eggs stories yeah so I hope I live long enough I hope he lives long enough because that man is not vegan he's teetering on the edge of a heart attack and worse I mean I hope I hope he gets on a healthier diet but for me that was a ray of hope so I do look forward to the rest of the duck nails okay guys that's enough for this video we are out