Though it feels like a decade ago, Game of Thrones, the massive HBO phenomenon, ended last year in a way that left, I think, a fair number of people unsatisfied. Partially, I think it's in how quickly things are settled, the baffling notion that Bran, of all people, seems to the characters to be the "obvious" choice to become king, and the penultimate heartbreaking and a bit out-of-left-field descent into murderous madness of Daenerys.
Oh, by the way, spoilers for a show that ended a year ago and everyone was talking about.
Game of Thrones exploded into public consciousness in 2011, bringing movie-level production quality to television with a fantasy series that was not afraid to be unrelentingly hard-R with nudity and graphic violence. And the show helped to popularize the series of books upon which it was based, George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, already a titan within the genre, but not in the mainstream.
The first of his books, A Game of Thrones, was published in 1996, and the fifth in a planned series of seven game out in 2011, just a few months after the show premiered.
In the nine years since A Dance with Dragons, the subsequent book, the Winds of Winter, has yet to come out. As such, once the show caught up with the books, it was forced to push forward and effectively "adapt" Martin's outline rather than actual books.
The show ultimately brought the plots that had been started in the books to a conclusion, and I'm relatively confident that some of the major story beats - including Daenerys' transformation (or, arguably, reveal) as a dangerous villain - were part of the plan.
I'm not really here to talk about the relative merits of the show versus the book - I think the show was very good for most of its run, and it's a bit of a shame that the shaky ending has killed a lot of the enthusiasm for the property as a whole.
Instead, what I'm kind of fascinated by is the amount of detail found in the books.
Despite getting ten hours per season to tell its story, it's clear that just about every screen adaptation of a book requires cutting things down. I recently listened to a Quinn's Ideas YouTube video/podcast episode about the connections to Lovecraft found in A Song of Ice and Fire, and one of the commenters made a really good point: that Martin overwhelms the reader with detail so that major hints are buried among other details.
Martin's (as far as I know unnamed) world is profoundly dense with history and details in a way someone who had only watched the show - or even who had only read through the books for the main plot - might not realize.
On its surface, A Song of Ice and Fire is a low-magic fantasy setting. While the supernatural certianly exists, it's something the the average person never deals with. The introduction of dragons at the end of the first book, or the looming threat of the undead, are the major supernatural elements of the story, while most of the courtly intrigue and conflicts between Lannisters and Starks involves no magic whatsoever.
But Martin's world is absolutely filled with odd magical elements. Not just that, but also a suggestion that many other strange things are going on in the background.
Here's an example that is pointed out in the video referenced above:
The Ironborn's connections to Cthulhu are pretty obvious if you know anything about that most iconic figure from Lovecraft's works. Their house words of "What is dead may never die" are a pretty clear reference to the Necronomicon quote from Call of Cthulhu: "What is dead may eternal lie, but with strange aeons, even death may die." That, and their house sigil is the kraken, which pretty accurately describes Cthulhu's head. And they worship the "drowned god," which makes sense given Cthulhu lies at the bottom of the ocean in his deathly sleep.
But another point they make is that this could explain the size of Harrenhall, the massive castle that seems to curse anyone occupying it. Harrenhall is the largest castle in Westeros, and has a super spooky vibe given that the guy who built it was burned alive by dragons despite building it to be this impregnable citadel.
But, as the commenters point out, Harren, who built the castle, was an Ironborn king, and it seems possible that he was trying to re-create his drowned god's city on the surface. If we assume the drowned god is basically Cthulhu, then he presumably lives in some terrifying, R'lyeh-like city - a city of utterly massive size and strange angles that don't seem to make sense with a human understanding of geometry. Is that really what Harrenhall is? And is it possible that this is the source of the curse - not just Harren's death, but its connection to a Lovecraftian deity?
It's remarkable how much posthumous characters play a big role in A Song of Ice and Fire. Rhaegar Targaryen and Lyanna Stark - confirmed in the show to be Jon Snow's actual parents - both have numerous stories surrounding them that flesh them out as a character. For instance, there's a masked knight at a tournament (I believe the one in which Jaime swears his fealty to Aerys) in which a "knight of the Laughing Tree" shows up, and it's subtly hinted that this knight was actually Lyanna, competing in disguise because she was a woman.
The point is, the books are just dripping with massive amounts of detail that would never be economical to fit into any screen adaptation.
To me, it also explains why it would be so hard for Martin to finish his books - we're expecting him to wrap up the 20 or so character plots that we're thinking about, while he's got about a hundred going on in the background.
Great though the show was in its early seasons, I do now wonder if it was wise to start the adaptation before the books were complete. I wonder if Martin, not as distracted by the demands of fame and the reactions to the show, would have had an easier time keeping up with the books.
But I also think that, even if you've watched the show, it's probably worth reading the books anyway, given the massive trove of stories contained within.
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