Rewatching Game of Thrones in 2022

(Warning: I ramble a bit in this introduction. Scroll down for the actual insights.)

It's been an interesting year for me as a fan of ASOIAF. I've got around reading Fire & Blood, which had been gathering dust on my shelf since 2018; I've finally acquired The World of Ice and Fire, which I've always coveted but never quite made the plunge due to how relatively expensive it was; and I am very much enjoying House of the Dragon. I haven't been this excited about this franchise since 2016, when I obsessed over Season 6 and got around reading the books and rewatching the show. I've grown less excited about it during the years, though: when Season 7 came out, I was so embroiled in The Wheel of Time and the Stormlight Archive that I didn't really care that much about this one universe (although, truth be told, I think I've grown rather nostalgic for that season, even if it is unquestionably the second worst season of the show). And, of course, I got back to it in 2019, for the accursed Season 8. I did something quite unique back then: I decided to rewatch one episode of GoT a day, starting sometime in February and ending with S7E7 the day before Season 8 began. And the funny thing is that I don't quite have that many memories of doing so! I certainly couldn't do something like that today - I'm much more burst-driven today than in the yesteryear, and I often watch 3-5 episodes at once, with some days of rest inbetween. It is, I think, the ideal approach to binging when it comes to retaining strong memories of the content. That's how I have been rewatching GoT in 2022, and so far it's been a genuine blast.

All of this to say that I have rewatched GoT plenty of times: some seasons more than the others, with S7 having only been rewatched once in 2019, and Season 8 having never been touched upon after its airing. Everything that could be said about this series has already been said, so I'll focus on small details that I caught or noticed this time (or, at least, thoughts that I already sort of knew before but never quite formalized). As a fun aside, this originally started as a rewatch of Seasons 7 and 8, in order to see if time made them any kinder. My idea was to make a post about how far we'd need to grasp at straws in order to justify some of these seasons' oddest choices, but to be honest Season 8 is so irredeemably broken that I just couldn't come up with any reasonable "from a certain point of view" kind of excuses. This was particularly disappointing, as I had begun working on that post in 2019, as Season 8 was coming out. It was supposed to be the post I'd use to open this blog, if I hadn't waited almost 3 years to actually create it... Alas. I still plan to eventually tackle that, though I do not know when.

Anyway, here are some of my thoughts:

Stannis is everywhere in Season 1

Stannis always has the most relatable moods

Let's start with a quick one: Stannis is absolutely everywhere in Season 1. Characters name him left and right, which is quite the protagonism for a character that wouldn't be cast until Season 2. I very much respect and appreciate this, but I wonder if show watchers back in the day, when watching Season 2, remembered that this new Stannis guy was so thoroughly established in the previous season? I sure didn't catch that back in the days of yore.

King's Landing geography is extremely messy

King's Landing is on a peninsula, or cape, surrounded by fairly steep hills. Sometimes. It depends on the season

This one is something I was always very much aware of, but I decided to pay closer attention this time around... and it's perhaps even worse than I originally thought. Not much about King's Landing geography makes sense. Season 1, with its relatively low budget, mostly refrained from showing anything other than what was absolutely necessary. It was only with the move to Dubrovnik in Season 2 that we started to get some big establishing shots, and they are not good. Sometimes the city is very big. Other times it is smaller. Sometimes the Great Sept of Baelor is huge, and on other times it is smaller (a larger focus on the Sept happened midway through the series, as the weddings and the Sparrow plotline came into the fold).

King's Landing is also often a peninsula with high hills on the far side, but there are times when it is completely flat. And oh, the islands surrounding the bay... Whenever we got a shot from the gardens, or Jaime's training ground, those Croatian islands were always in the background, but then when we got some sweeping shots, they weren't there. Except when they kind of were. Sigh. It's a complete mess, and I hope that in a future rewatch I can actually capture every single establishing shot and try to build a "reference" map of GoT's version of King's Landing. I did that back in the day with Hogwarts in the Harry Potter movies (whose morphology changed with each movie), and it might be fun to do the same to the city.

At least Hot D seems to be free of such issues, for now, with a version of King's Landing that seems compatible with many of the establishing shots we've seen in GoT, while avoiding addressing all the silly islands and steep hills that appeared in the previous show.

Many of the named background characters from the novels also appear in the show

It should be obvious to everyone who has read the books that GoT has a much smaller cast than ASOIAF. It saves on casting, it saves on complexity, and it saves on forcing people to memorize the countless names of characters that have relatively small roles in the stories. This leads to most plotlines being much more streamlined than in the book, with some main characters "absorbing" the plotlines and individual quirks of others: Jorah is not only Jorah, but also part Jon Connington (mostly in regards to his greyscale); Mathhos Seaworth, Davos's son, is a functional merger of all of Davos's sons; Gendry has absorbed Edric Storm; Loras is the only son of Mace Tyrell, having absorbed the matrimonial duties and inheritances of his two book brothers, Willas and Garlan; and Euron Greyjoy probably has more of Victarion in him than actual Euron.

Ser Aron Santagar, an extremely important character in all his splendour. And is that Arys Oakheart with Myrcella? Oh my god, is this the GoT version of a Glup Shitto?

Still, many of the smaller characters in the books do end up appearing, or at least receive a namedrop. It was really fun to actually pay attention to that this time around. Some that I noticed are:

• Dareon, a Night's Watch recruit that in the books is known for singing really well. He was namedropped (and I guess briefly shown) in Season 1, when he is sent to Eastwatch. Later in the series, Sam talks about how well Dareon sings, so I guess he might have made a return to Castle Black. Hobb, the Castle Black cook, also makes a very brief appearance during the battle in the castle, where he uses his massive cleaver to cut down wildlings. He also gets namedropped a few times, here and there;

• Cleon the Butcher gets mentioned as ruling Astapor. Slaver's Bay has been severely simplified in the show, but we still get these tidbits here and there, which please me greatly;

• Ser Aron Santagar, master-at-arms at the Red Keep, is in Season 1. We know this because Sansa greets him;

• Most of the Kingsguard that exist in the books should also exist in the show - Preston Greenfield and Balon Swann get namedropped, while others are unidentified. I wonder if the Kingsguard who accompanied Myrcella to Dorne is Arys Oakheart? He's a POV character in the books, but what happens to him in the show? The Game of Thrones wiki seems to suggest he comes back to King's Landing and stays there until the very end, but they don't really cite any sources. The character is also never named in the show, so I guess we will never know. All we know is that the Kingsguard who accompanied Myrcella must have returned at some point;

• And speaking of minor POV characters from the books, I think Victarion might have been in the cards at one point. In Season 1, Theon is referred to as having "uncles", in the plural. Now, one of them is Euron, but who is the other? Or even others? Aeron is also in the show, but weirdly enough, they never talk of him as being Theon and Yara/Asha's uncle, and his relation with his supposed nephews and brother seems to be purely cordial. And if that wasn't enough, Euron mentions that he and Yara are the only remaining Greyjoys in the last season (discounting Theon, an eunuch), which either implies that Aeron died, or that he was never their uncle all along. Apparently an official HBO family tree confirms that Aeron is their uncle, but still... it is very odd to see them never mention it, and it makes me wonder exactly when they decided to cut Victarion;

• Some other minor book characters that make appearances (or get namedropped), and that I caught, are Ser Lothor Brune, Lady Dustin and Ser Axell Florent (I was surprised to see that they did burn the Florents in the show, as that seems to have somehow evaded me. Now, it is the wrong Florent to burn, but it's still something!).

Joffrey spoils one of the endgame events of House of the Dragon

Yeah, the royal cunt himself tells us of a major Hot D spoiler. He tells it to Margaery, when they're visiting the Great Sept of Baelor. I won't get into it here, but alas, it now makes it so that Hot D must absolutely go down that route in its final season. I think they would have done it either way, since Hot D doesn't play around, but it's still good to have some pressure on it. Stannis also discusses the Dance of the Dragons with Shireen, as she is reading Munkun's The True Telling. They even touch upon the tale of Byron Swann maybe trying to kill a dragon during the Dance, so we also need to see that in Hot D. And that's a particularly interesting one, since no one really knows which dragon he tried to kill (it was most likely Syrax).

There is a ridiculous amount of minor nods to the books

There were many other nods to the books that I delighted in catching. Here's the ones that come to mind:

Edric Baratheon, first of his name

• One of Selyse Baratheon's jar fetuses is named Edric, which was the name of one of Robert's bastards in the books. In the show, Gendry absorbed his plotline (as I mentioned above), but in the books he is the one set to burn in Dragonstone;
• In one of Arya's scenes, they say the work "canal" the exact moment a cat zips past an alley, which may be a nod to "Cat of the Canals", Arya's moniker and chapter title in A Feast for Crows. Another book nickname, "Mercy", appears when she is infiltrating the theatre troupe. This nickname, the troupe, the play and the characters of Izembaro and Lady Crane are all from a preview The Winds of Winter chapter, and thus technically information from the yet-to-be-released book. It would be funny if GRRM ended up discarding that chapter, or rewriting it completely;
• Mace Tyrell tells a story about King Maegor III. Now, there is no king Maegor III, but this is intentional, as Mace is a bufoon who wants to sound more knowledgable than he is. He tells this story to the Bravoosi of the Iron Bank, which are also probably not that knowledgable about Westerosi history. This is a fun detail that only book readers will be able to figure out, and adds a bit more impact to his frankly inconsequential visit to Braavos (he loses a Kingsguard, but it's Meryn Fucking Trant, so who cares, really);
• There is a ton of background locations in the books that get namedropped in the show with almost as much frequency. Asshai is namedropped countless times, while the cities of Tolos and Mantarys are mentioned here and there. Every Free City is also namedropped at least once, though that is not as impressive. There are also mentions of the Summer Isles, the Jade Sea, and Yi Ti (on a book);
• The Graces of Mereen are mentioned multiple times, which is interesting considering, again, how much they cut from the Meereenese plot;
• When Tyrion regains consciousness after being knocked out and kidnapped by Jorah, he says something like "this isn't the Rhoyne". This might be a nod to the books, when he was in fact kidnapped during his trip down the Rhoyne. Further credence to this nod comes from the stone men attack that follows soon, as in the books Tyrion was attacked during the trip down the Rhoyne, as opposed to Old Valyria. In the show, this trip down the Rhoyne does not exist, as Tyrion made it to Volantis by carriage.
• The show introduces two Volantene characters that do not exist in the books: Talisa Maegyr, Robb Stark's wife and Jeyne Westerling's show equivalent; and Belicho Paenymion, one of the three slavers who negotiated with Daenerys and Tyrion during the Battle of Meereen, and who was executed by Grey Worm. Of particular note is their names, which come from two current triarchs of Volantis: Malaquo Maegyr and Doniphos Paenymion. We also know that GRRM himself came up with Talisa Maegyr's character name, so the implication that she is related to the ruling body of Volantis adds an interesting layer of complexity to the character.

I also know that plenty and more book details and lore get explored in the bonus material included in the home releases of GoT. I haven't acquired those myself yet, as I have been relying on streaming, but it only goes to show how important they are to establish a deep and rich universe in an adaptation. The Wheel of Time is a recent example of how to do this, as their Origins series of animated shorts are nothing short of amazing (pun definitely intended).

Season 5 is the most interesting season in regards to adaptation

You want the good adaptation, but you need the bad Dornish plot

Finally, to end, here's something that I think will become its own post in the near future - although I'll give you the short rundown now. Look, I love A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons. I see them as a single book, as GRRM originally intended, and if I ever reread them, I will make sure to use a combined order. But they are also extremely flawed books, with the biggest offense being the missing climax for two of the major storylines across both books - the battle of Ice (i.e., Stannis's onslaught on Winterfell), and the battle of Fire (the siege of Mereen). So, how does the show go about handling this ludicrous number of storylines, some of which with no resolution?

The answer is Season 5 and, to a lesser extent, Season 6. Season 5 also decided to do the same thing as AFFC and ADWD, and left some plotlines to be explored only in the next season: Bran's plotline, everything surrounding the Iron Islands and Jaime's involvement in the Siege of Riverrun are all part of Season 6. These are, for the most part, good choices: the Iron Islands plotline could be shifted to pretty much anywhere, and Bran does need to spend some time training to be the Three Eyed Raven. The delaying of Jaime's Riverlands adventure, though, is a bit more questionable, since they sent Jaime to Dorne in the meanwhile to involve him with the Dornish plot. Guess they figured that they could not rely on the Sand Snakes, Doran, Aero and the non-existent Arianne to carry that plot by themselves (which is sort of reasonable, as it doesn't really go anywhere in the book). Involving Jaime and Bronn, two characters we know and love, is a way to make this plot more enticing for a casual audience... except that they failed, and failed hard. So much so that the first thing they did in Season 6 was to completely neutralize the Dornish plot. A mercy kill, if you will. They are still relevant going forwards, but only as a shadow of their former selves. I could go on and on, but I am saving it for its own post.

Conclusion

Game of Thrones is as phenomenal today as it was back then, and I think it will always hold up. It's timeless like that, it's like rewatching Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies. It is true things start to go a little downhill in Season 5, and that Seasons 7 and 8 are outright bad. But you know what? There is still quite some things I enjoy in those last two seasons, and rewatching them did not feel like a chore. Hot D further serves as a palate cleanser, and I rather respect how it is actively trying to acknowledge that the ending of GoT did exist (or will exist, considering it is a prequel). But more on that soon, just like the three or four other articles I promised I'd do in this breakdown alone. This rewatch really got my proverbial juices flowing, and that's a good thing.