Image via Complex Original
We are Blackwater-deep in another season of Game of Thrones and that means it’s time for all of those GoT experiences you know and love. Thinkpieces about the show’s representation of women and misogyny? Check. Spoilers and complaints about spoilers? Check. And of course, the A Song of Ice and Fire readers have returned to shower us with winking hints we never asked for, complaints we don’t care about, and a smug sense of superiority for having red five entire books. *Begins to slow clap*
Sorry that we’re a couple weeks late with this, but we’ve been busy dissecting the Purple Wedding Zapruder film and drawing straws to see who has to write our Jaime/Cersei thinkpiece to do pretty much anything else GoT-related. But now, we finally have time to pay our respects to the book readers out there. The TV-show watchers send their regards with Shit People Who’ve Read the Game of Thrones Books Say.
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"It's not your typical fantasy series. It's darker, grittier, more realistic."
This isn't really a hard bar to clear. The most popular fantasy series in the game involve short, fat people who eat eleven meals a day (Lord of the Rings), mice (Redwall), tweens (Harry Potter), and tweens who love Turkish Delight (Chronicles of Narnia).
Also, everyone knows this. Pretty much every critic sold us on the series as The Sopranos meets The Lord of the Rings. That's why we watch. It's not that we hate fantasy because it doesn't read like a Richard Price novel. It's just that if we're going to read 5,000 pages, we would rather get the smug sense of superiority that comes with toting Infinite Jest around on the subway.
"He/She's way cooler in the books."
For many of the characters, there is just simply no way that this is true. Daenerys (Emilia Clarke) is about as cool as she can possibly be without being played by the fantastical child of current Jennifer Lawrence and Paul Newman circa Cool Hand Luke. She swagged out so hard last week, I thought that lancer was just coming to give her a ride to the city keep.
Charles Dance (Tywin) and Tyrion (Peter Dinklage) are turning in GOAT performances week in-week out, too. In light of all the great things about the show, it really doesn't matter much that Shae (Sibel Kekelli) is a bit more opportunistic or that the TV version of Xaro (Nonso Anozie) is a bit more powerful in the books. The third spear-carrier to the left has a far richer inner life in the novels as well. Sure.
"If you don't read the books you're missing out on so much detail."
If I wanted to read descriptions of food for pages and pages, I would read the food blogs my high school classmates started to keep their marriages alive. I don't read these food blogs for a reason. They say that writing about music is like dancing about architecture. If that's true, then writing about food is like dancing all over my brain until I beg for mercy. However, if there was (is?) some kind of fake Yelp for Westeros created by an enterprising Internet-er, I would totally read that.
"Just wait until the next big thing happens."
No kidding, this is my usual experience with television shows. On a television show, you can expect that every few episodes something exciting will happen unless you're watching Mad Men, in which case you can expect someone to look pained in a knowing way every half a season.
All that a book reader's giddy anticipation amounts to is spoilers or annoyance. Ain't nobody got time for either.
"The ages are all wrong."
Outside of Freaks and Geeks, teenagers on television are played by super-model twenty-somethings. This always has been, and always will be. And that isn't a bad thing. If we had to watch fourteen year-old Khaleesi have rough sex with Khal Drogo, this would stop being the fun epic fantasy you Tumblr about real fast. Until the Game of Thrones gets its own Talking Dead that has elements of To Catch a Predator, we'll take our sex legal, thank you very much. It would be great if it were consensual, too.
"Yeah, that prostitute wasn't in the books. Or that one. Or that one."
Here's the thing: Ros does appear in the books. In the first novel, she is thoughtfully named "The Red-Headed Whore" by old Georgie Boy. While that name has a certain ring to it, "Ros" might be a tad bit more humanizing. And that's important, even for a character who only really serves the story by getting naked and catching a crossbow bolt in the chest.
That said, on this issue, generally, you have to concede that the book readers have a point. As of the end of season three, the TV series had added almost a dozen sex workers that R.R. hadn't thought up. Weiss and Benioff went a little crazy when they realized that Westerosi geography lessons were a lot easier to swallow when given during threesomes. To the show's credit, they've walked back the courtesan-driven sexposition a bit recently.
"That's not her name."
Nothing in life matters less than the changing the name of a fictional characters. Sure, you might be confused for a minute, but then you investigate context clues like who the character is married to/boning, what family they're in, and who they've murdered in order to bridge that name gap. Don't worry whether her name is Asha or Yara, she'll still bore you to tears. Whether her name is Talisa or Jeyne she'll function as a plot device. It's going to be okay. A rose by any other name can be objectified just as sweetly.
"It'll make a lot more sense when you read the books."
Or perhaps it'll make more sense when I watch the next episode. Surprise and suspense are an important part of the television experience for some of us. Part of the joy of experiencing television in single-episode installments is the excitement, suspense, and confusion of waiting for next week. The best episodes of Game of Thrones leave us craning our necks toward the TV whispering to ourselves, "That's it?" hoping that the credits will give way to scenes we know deep down will never come.
We spend the next few days combing over the recaps, thinkpieces, and power rankings trying to come to terms with what we've just seen. This experience, the last closest thing we have to water cooler talk outside of sports, is valuable to some of us, and we don't want it interfered with.
"That was way more graphic in the books."
That's your selling point to get me to read the novels? "Sure, they cut the guy's dick off and then raped his sister, but it's so much worse in the books." This show already makes some of us (me) cover our eyes more than senior swim time at the YMCA; we don't necessarily need more graphic violence. If we want to see even more graphic violence, we'll go watch True Detective, Hannibal, The Following, Criminal Minds... man, the television landscape really is horrifying. Maybe I'll just watch Parks and Rec re-runs instead.
"Oh, you haven't read the books?"
Just because I haven't read the books, doesn't mean I haven't read a book. When you confess to a book reader that you haven't found six spare months to make your way from A Game of Thrones to A Dance With Dragons, they look at you like you just told them that you don't recycle or that you find it impossible to be creative in a coffee shop. To those who have sung the entire Song of Ice and Fire, please understand that there are many books, more than you could ever hope to have time to read in a dozen lifetimes (which is what, forty-seven Westerosi lifetimes?).
Not having read a particular book truly has no bearing on your intellectual credentials, and certainly has no impact on your ability to enjoy a television show. Give us lowly TV watchers a break. We would rather read these books than work our day jobs, pay our bills, and listen to you lecture us about how we should read the books. But, right now, we have time for an hour-long TV show, not a year-long appointment with our reading glasses.
