Fandom Spotlight: A Song of Ice and Fire

Well, you had to have seen this coming based on my posts on ASOIAF figures and the Game of Thrones HBO series, right? I partially blame a certain LiveJournal community called Westeros Sorting for my sudden bursts of ASOIAF fan-ing; getting together with fangirls (and fanboys) to have some good clean fun with fanstuff (i.e. fanart, fanfiction, fanmade graphics, speculations and theories, and crazy interpretations of characters/events) does funny things to your brain.

Though George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series has been around for around thirteen years now (A Game of Thrones, the first book, was first published in 1996), I only got around to reading the books early last year.

If I had to choose just one word to describe the series, I’d have to go with “epic”. The series is set in a fantastic world with roughly 8,000 years worth of history, and revolves around a cast of dynamic and three-dimensional characters. The books’ chapters are written from the third-person subjective (or limited) perspective, and Martin does a fantastic job of switching perspectives and keeping to his characters’ personalities. The story itself is epic; it involves wars, conspiracies, and myriad of subplots and secrets that one can never really tell what to expect. And he doesn’t sugar-coat the kind of things that happen in ASOIAF’s medieval world that is in constant anarchy, which is something that I find to be a welcome reprieve from fantasy books that idealize everything and/or leave the gritty/dark/disturbing details out. Not that I’m a huge fan of psychos who smash babies’ heads in, warriors raping women after razing their villages, people being beheaded, and descriptions of people performing normal bodily functions like pissing and taking a shit; it’s just that those details make the world of ASOIAF more real and believable.

I think that the only relatively disappointing thing about ASOIAF is the delay in the production of the HBO series and publication of the fifth book in the series (there have been no updates since December), A Dance with Dragons (the expected publication date has been moved from late 2006 to September 2008 to April/September 2009). I’m dying to know what’s going to happen in the fifth book, and I’ve only been waiting for a year (give or take a few months). I can only imagine how hard it must be for fans who have been waiting for it since 2005.

Review: The Alehouse Murders

Like I said back in December, The Alehouse Murders by Maureen Ash is a book that I just happened to pick up while I was browsing at a bookstore. Apart from the interesting cover design, the fact that the book is labeled “A Templar Knight Mystery” piqued my interest. I’ve always found the Knights Templar to be interesting (despite my being a non-practicing Catholic), and I honestly never delved in the Mystery genre of literature. So I decided to add it to the pile of books I was purchasing that day, and I just finished reading it over the weekend in lieu of me cramming my thesis, no less.

Bascot de Marins, a Templar knight, was sent to Lincoln Castle to recuperate after being imprisoned and tortured by Saracens in the Holy Land for eight years. His imprisonment severely damaged his faith and left him with a blinded eye and a lame leg. And as if recovering his health and restoring his faith isn’t enough of a challenge, he winds up being assigned to investigate the deaths of four individuals at a local alehouse. As Bascot’s investigation goes underway, the plot thickens as he unravels the lies and schemes that concealed the true perpetrator and his/her motives for committing the murders.

While reading the book, I found myself to be more attracted to the main characters and the setting rather than the book’s plot. Bascot is interesting in that he has a complex personality. He tries to remain as devoted to his vows as a Templar as he was in years past, but the trauma of being held captive for eight years have obviously shaken his beliefs to the core. His constant companion is Gianni, a mute Italian boy whom he found malnourished and wandering around in the streets. Gianni is completely devoted to Bascot, and together they make for an effective detective-and-sidekick duo. Gianni’s curiosity and youth make him endearing to me, and I find it cute that both he and Bascot like to chew on candi. With regard to setting, I think that Maureen Ash managed to paint a portrait of medieval life that draws her readers into it. She takes the time to describe Bascot’s surroundings and experiences in Lincoln while not overdoing it to the point of boring readers to sleep.

Though The Alehouse Murders falls under a genre of literature that I’m normally not interested in (I mean the mystery genre, mind you; historical fiction is an entirely different matter), I enjoyed reading it. The murders and Bascot’s investigations got me to thinking of my own theories regarding the murders, and Bascot himself certainly got my attention for being a well-rounded character. I’m definitely going to buy myself a copy of Death of a Squire, the second book in the series — in fact, I’m reading a preview of it over at Google Books, and so far it looks like it’s as good as the first one.

The third installment of the series, A Plague of Poison, will be out in March of this year.

A Game of Thrones Pilot Script

Lex of A TV Calling has the script for the pilot episode of HBO’s upcoming Game of Thrones TV series up for download this week. Click here to access the post and download it for yourself!

[Edit: The script is no longer up for download, and I have no intention of sharing it without consent! Please look elsewhere for the script.]

I just got around to reading it this morning, and I think that David Benioff did a terrific job so far. The script stays true to the book even though some alterations were made and some scenes/dialogue were added. Some of the dialogue has been shortened or cut, of course, but I don’t believe that any of it was detrimental to the story.

One added scene was of Tyrion and Jaime Lannister having a conversation at a brothel. I like that it actually shows the closeness between Jaime and Tyrion, which wasn’t much emphasized in the book at first. It also shows that Jaime has some natural wit in his system; the book gave me the impression that he was all brawn and good-looks with little to no brains.

The other added scene was Ned Stark and Jaime having a bit of a confrontation at Winterfell. It was interesting to see the contrast between the two characters, and I think it’s beneficial to those who have not read the books to have some source of background information on Jaime without being whisked away into a flashback sequence or a boring historical account of who he is.

They also aged a lot of the characters; for example, Robb Stark and Jon Snow are seventeen as opposed to being fifteen in the books, Viserys Targaryen is twenty instead of fifteen, and Daenerys Targaryen is fifteen as opposed to thirteen. Personally, I’m really happy that they decided to do that, given that the stuff that happens to them might be more shocking (and potentially traumatizing) for a lot of viewers if Benioff stuck to their original ages.

There isn’t any news about casting just yet; only that Benioff and the rest of the crew working on the series have encouraged fans to suggest actors/actresses for the roles over at the Westeros forums. That, and an “untested source” stated that it’s highly likely that Peter Dinklage (who starred as Trumpkin in Prince Caspian), will be playing the role of Tyrion Lannister.

I’ve been anticipating this mini-series for a while now, and seeing the actual script makes me even more excited.

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Image shown is a scanned image of the 2002 edition A Game of Thrones, published by Bantam HC. Taken from the Cover Art Gallery section of George R. R. Martin’s official website.

Akinator, the Web Genius

Think you can stump Akinator the all-knowing genie?

I know I just posted something below, but I just had to share this link: http://en.akinator.com/.

The idea is to think of a character (real or fictional), and Akinator will ask you questions and guess who it is based on the answers you select. So far I’ve tried around ten characters, and Akinator got six correct…but the thing was the wrong answers were characters from the same sources as the characters I was thinking of (i.e. it answered Cersei Lannister when I was thinking of Daenerys Targaryen from ASOIAF, and Clare when I was thinking of Irene from Claymore).

While not 100% accurate, this site has me temporarily amused; I’m sure I’ll get sick of it after…oh, say, 100 characters? I’m a fangirl, I know/like/fawn over a lot of characters from various sources. LOL.

Looking forward to Coraline

While some fans are reacting negatively to the changes made in the film adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, I for one am pretty excited about the film. Well, at first I was iffy about the thought of it being an animated film (I personally imagined it as a live action similar to Mirrormask or Pan’s Labyrinth), but I changed my mind after seeing the trailer.

While I’m fully aware of the difference between the visuals in the original book and the film (Dave McKean’s illustrations are things that I would describe as “brilliant, but seriously creepy“), I’m not going to complain about the cartoony-style used in the film. I think that Coraline is a story I would like to share with children, but I don’t want to scare their little pants off with things like a real human being with buttons instead of eyes (for some reason, that reminds me of The Pale Man in Pan’s Labyrinth, who gave me nightmares for a while).

And come to think of it, Neil Gaiman stated in his blog that “… Coraline the book is much creepier for adults than it is for kids, who tend to read it as an adventure. I suspect that this will be true of the film as well.” I guess what I’m trying to say is that it’d be interesting to see Coraline the way kids see it (i.e. minus the creep-factor automatically generated by my presumably grown-up brain).

…not that I don’t like creepy things (note: creepy things, not scare-me-witless things), but it’d be a nice change.

Coraline hits theaters this week (February 6, 2009), but I’m not sure if it’s coming to the Philippines on the same date. Ah well. Here’s to hoping I manage to actually watch it when it does make it here.