Member-only story
Winter Came, I Guess
Where will “Game of Thrones” go after the (Not Particularly) Long Night?
For many people, myself included, there is a paradox at the heart of Game of Thrones fandom: the quality of the show motivates you to read the books, which then compels you to complain about all the ways the series has failed to live up to them. In my case, I never would’ve even heard about the books if it weren’t for the show, but that’s never stopped me from complaining about the latter on the former’s account.
The foolishness of that exercise actually runs deeper than that, because it isn’t just that I never would’ve heard of A Song of Ice & Fire if not for Game of Thrones: it’s that I never even would’ve heard of the show if they hadn’t immediately started dumbing down the original story from the jump.
The pilot, which is allegedly so bad that no member of the public will ever see it, hewed closely to the source material in ways that apparently made it unwatchable. In keeping with the rigid social norms of the actual Middle Ages, the Starks barely interacted like a family —a not-at-all-maternal Catelyn nagged Ned into going to King’s Landing for the sake of their social standing. The Dothraki were dressed like actual Mongols, and Daenerys was portrayed by an actress with more of the otherwordly Wizards of the Coast vibe that the…