The Dragon Demands

(grins) I reposted the screenshot the news article posted of the GRRM e-mail saying "it's a real seahorse" - reposted it to Twitter, and it actually got retweeted by Steve Toussaint (the Corlys actor). https://twitter.com/StevieToussaint @Ran

IMDB just updated again, confirming that the new Travel Unit which will be filming in Spain is indeed called "Blood Unit": https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0108798/?ref_=ttfc_fc_cr66 IMDB already listed for some weeks that the home base / England unit filming in Cornwall is "Fire Unit", so we assumed this would be Blood Unit.

I promised @Ran I wouldn't post in the Rant & Rave thread again and I don't think this violates that, as it's not the Rant & Rave thread specifically, not specifically about Benioff & Weiss but the TV show in general, and it isn't actually my own material as such: Recently I became aware of a great article that a fan wrote in Northumbria University Magazine, pointing out the simple logic that even before Season 8 aired, regardless of its quality, it couldn't possibly be "the same" as the book ending, because they're already changed so much: https://northumbrialife.org/?p=1057 TV fans leading up to Season 8 had...I guess convinced themselves that "whatever D&D cut out by definition wasn't important, otherwise they wouldn't have cut it"....when our entire argument is that they were indeed cutting out important things. Thus people convinced themselves that cutting out Lady Stoneheart, Dorne, Young Griff, Tyrion's ongoing Tysha plot, didn't really impact the story that much...when if you sit down to spend 15 minutes talking about it, there's no way you could remove all that without producing a drastically different ending that doesn't reflect the book ending (other than a few beats used out of context here and there). I showed this article to my Twitter/YouTube followers and everything thought it was amazing: eloquent, logical, and succinct. So I asked her if she could record an audio reading of the article, and I'd post it to my channel, along with slides I made up - slides & memes I re-use often, such as "D&D didn't run out of source material, they chose to abandon major book storylines starting in Season 5" (I have to re-use that ALL the time on Twitter...it's like having a stamp ready). Her audio performance was also really great - she didn't just read it off dryly but "performed" it as she read it. Here's the resulting 16 minute video: @Ran @Linda Please give it a watch, I think the resulting collaboration turned out amazing. If you think it has merit please share on Twitter etc.

Ducking autocorrect.

doesn't sound like they canceled it; 3 animated projects now including Yi Ti

Sounds about right. But..."I will show you fear in a handful of dust". Once sentence about the Jade-Green emperors is all we have to go on to cover a sweep of centuries. 2,000 words in the World book, particularly in the Beyond Westeros sections, often covers a LOT more material. Not even comparable to the Westerlands chapter. Dare we hope this will encourage GRRM to put out the remaining Yi Ti materials as a blog post like the Westerlands chapter?!

I remember one or two small details being different in the Westerlands sample - was it that much?

(double post)

(typo - you spelled it as "Yi Yi" in the forum thread title) I thought Hibberd said Flea Bottom was a live-action idea, not animated. That was the whole point; something you could do relatively cheap in live action (shrug). If it was Young Daemon it would have been fun, otherwise not. The fact that one of these three animated projects is Yi Ti increases the chances one of the other two is the Summer Isles; I'm surprised they're doing Yi Ti since it was never even mentioned by name in the TV show. In contrast, the Summer Isles have been mentioned, mostly in context of Grey Worm's ethnicity. That is, if you ask TV viewers on the street what "Yi Ti" is you'll get a blank stare, but if you ask "what are the Summer Isles" they'll go "where black people are from, in the south?" TV show cut out pretty much all the worldbuilding from it, but people at least know the name. And in-universe, the Summer Isles are A LOT closer to Westeros (it's not unusual to see Summer Islander trading ships in ports from King's Landing to Oldtown, but it would be unusual to see a Yi Tish ship). So if they're doing something with such little basis in the TV show as Yi Ti, Summer Isles stands an even better chance.

We may need to merge "Yi Ti" with "Golden Empire of Yi Ti". We also need a map image.

@Ran BREAKING: James Hibberd has a new update on the other spinoffs at The Hollywood Reporter. Given that he was *wrong* about a live-action Robert's Rebellion TV show (it's a stage play), some of the details might be fuzzy: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/game-of-thrones-animated-yiti-1234982593/ The writing of the article is sloppy. The headline is that "2 new animated projects" are in the works, but only goes on to describe one of them....and the body of the article says "three projects", so I don't know what he's talking about. Apparently, HBO is actively considering an animated project about the Golden Empire of Yi Ti (Fantasy China) Meanwhile...in what doesn't even seem animated news....the Flea Bottom prequel pitch has been scrapped. It was "the most nascent" of the prequel pitches and never got far into development. If this was a Young Daemon in Flea Bottom tie-in it might have been nice, but for all we know it was an anthology (which I wouldn't want). Hibberd's report is quite confused, hopefully we can narrow this down soon. Wait...from the way he phrased it, I think he meant "two ADDITIONAL animated projects", as in, in addition to the first one that was reported, for a total of THREE animated projects in all. That makes sense.

Update: VFX team MPC is also hiring for House of the Dragon - they previously worked on Game of Thrones Season 4 https://thefocus.com/news/hiring-mpc-episodic-game-of-thrones-prequel

Digital effects company Pixomondo, which worked on Game of Thrones since Season 2, has announced that they will return for House of the Dragon:

A recent IMDB update has revealed the new casting director: Kate Rhodes James https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0722371/?ref_=ttfc_fc_cr11 She did casting for Raised By Wolves, Cursed, The Terror, Sherlock, Ripper Street, The Tunnel, and more.

....Emily Carey just did an Instagram livestream...in which she acknowledged that "the pre-existing fanbase already figured out Milly and I had joined the cast, based on our Instagram follows" They read our stuff!