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The most important book character that did´nt made it into the tv-show


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6 minutes ago, Caligula_K3 said:

Eh, I think this question is impossible to answer. People seem to have worked out for themselves what will happen in the books (Aegon will definitely take Cersei's place and be a more interesting antagonist! The Dorne plotline will go somewhere! Etc...) but the truth is that we don't know how things will shake out, and we don't know if it will be better. I'm inclined to think that the smartest thing the show ever did was cut a lot of characters in AFFC/ADWD and combine others, and that Cersei was as good of a final human antagonist as this series can get. 

In terms of characters I miss just because I enjoy their presence in the books, Strong Belwas, Val, and Garlan are up there. But I don't know if they're necessarily important.

 

Really that's a double edged sword. I thank D&D every day for cutting out characters like Penny the Dwarf and Lady Stoneheart and I think some of the character combinations work really well, for example Coldhands and Uncle Benjen.

Some of it has been quite disastrous though. Taking out characters such as Arianne and Quentyn really affected the Dorne storyline and made one of my favourite book characters (Doran Martell) into one of the most pathetic television characters of all time. Also I was genuinely interested to see more of the Maesters and was disappointed that Marwyn wasn't introduced.

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Probably the characters GRRM continuously names: Lady Stoneheart, Aegon VI, Ariane Martell. The ones missing that hurt the story at most are probably Aegon VI and Ariane. I am pretty glad that Lady Stoneheart was not introduced. It would deminish the death of Cat, just as it did in the books. Her role is probably killing Freys in Winds and meeting with Arya. 

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31 minutes ago, The Baelish Mockingbird said:

Really that's a double edged sword. I thank D&D every day for cutting out characters like Penny the Dwarf and Lady Stoneheart and I think some of the character combinations work really well, for example Coldhands and Uncle Benjen.

Some of it has been quite disastrous though. Taking out characters such as Arianne and Quentyn really affected the Dorne storyline and made one of my favourite book characters (Doran Martell) into one of the most pathetic television characters of all time. Also I was genuinely interested to see more of the Maesters and was disappointed that Marwyn wasn't introduced.

I'm not sure how I feel about Arianne being taken out; that will have to wait for TWoW for me to decide. Quentyn I thought was a pretty smart exclusion. As for Doran, I was annoyed there that they cast a great actor and did very little with him; I get that they acknowledged that the Dorne plotline had sucked and essentially jettisoned it in Season 6, but I think there was room there for Doran to work with Ellaria Sand and give that plotline more gravitas; much better to lose two out of three of the sand snakes in season 6 and keep Doran than what we got.

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11 hours ago, Caligula_K3 said:

Eh, I think this question is impossible to answer. People seem to have worked out for themselves what will happen in the books (Aegon will definitely take Cersei's place and be a more interesting antagonist! The Dorne plotline will go somewhere! Etc...) but the truth is that we don't know how things will shake out, and we don't know if it will be better. I'm inclined to think that the smartest thing the show ever did was cut a lot of characters in AFFC/ADWD and combine others, and that Cersei was as good of a final human antagonist as this series can get. 

In terms of characters I miss just because I enjoy their presence in the books, Strong Belwas, Val, and Garlan are up there. But I don't know if they're necessarily important.

 

Right because doing nothing but stare out of a window, glower and drink endless supplies of wine is so riveting.

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48 minutes ago, Jabar of House Titan said:

Right because doing nothing but stare out of a window, glower and drink endless supplies of wine is so riveting.

Cersei did a lot more than that, and had excellent scenes with many characters, from Olenna to the High Sparrow in Season 6 to Jaime, Ellaria and Tyrion in season 7. And that's not to mention everything she did before in the show. She didn't get a lot of great material in season 8 until the Bells, but she is definitely one of the show's most well drawn and complex characters, not to mention well acted.

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Maybe Val will be important later, but until she's written with more thought than a stock urban fantasy heroine, I can't take her seriously. She's too perfect and just so un-GRRM. She's either unimportant, or like other seemingly perfect characters, there's something horribly wrong with her. 

fAegon is a big problem. Book Jon looks poised to be stuck in Ghost for a while and they didn't want Kit off-screen that much, so he got Stannis' arc in getting back Winterfell and then he didn't have anything to do because the books ran out, so he got fAegon. The marriage arrangement (and huge, huge problems) are already in the works between Dany and fAegon. If Jon hadn't got that role, we'd have been able to see Jon actually deal with the Others properly rather than have him googly eyed, mouth breathing, and twiddling his thumbs on Dragonstone for a whole season. No fAegon might well have been why we got the Long 82 Minutes which turned Winter is Coming into a bad joke and made the rewatches of the show virtually impossible thus ruining the show. And the KL plotline wouldn't have been left stagnant. :tantrum:

But I'm going with Lady Stoneheart. Michelle Fairley would have rocked that role and it would have kept Jaime and Brienne from getting butchered. GRRM really pushed to keep her and he says she has a very important role that I'm dying to know. 

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About the members of the council:

I looked at the cast credits at IMDB. 

There is a Northern Lord. Actor is Niall Bishop.
The guy at Edmure's right is "a Vale Lord", actor Frank Jakeman.
The Dornish Prince is not credited as a Martell or Yronwood. Just "Dornish Prince". Actor Toby Osmond.
And there's a Ironborn Lord , actor Noel Harron.
I suppose Manderly, Glover, Lady Anya Waynwood and Howland Reed refused to be involved in this shipwreck… :rolleyes:

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10 hours ago, Lollygag said:

But I'm going with Lady Stoneheart. Michelle Fairley would have rocked that role and it would have kept Jaime and Brienne from getting butchered. GRRM really pushed to keep her and he says she has a very important role that I'm dying to know. 

Don't forget Arya too.

11 hours ago, Caligula_K3 said:

Cersei did a lot more than that, and had excellent scenes with many characters, from Olenna to the High Sparrow in Season 6 to Jaime, Ellaria and Tyrion in season 7. And that's not to mention everything she did before in the show. She didn't get a lot of great material in season 8 until the Bells, but she is definitely one of the show's most well drawn and complex characters, not to mention well acted.

No she didn't.

Reread my post.

11 hours ago, Jabar of House Titan said:

Right because doing nothing but stare out of a window, glower and drink endless supplies of wine is so riveting.

That's exactly what she did all of this season and most of last season.

She got absolutely zero great material in season 8 and the actress knows it. And her role in the Bells was super negligible. A couple icily delivered lines and then spending two minutes crying about how she doesn't want to die and how she's glad to see Jaime even though she tried to have him killed twice? Yes, that's truly great material.

Caligula, get real. You really think that Cersei is the absolute best that the show could do as a final antagonist? How can that be if she has no allies with names or lines outside of Qyburn. The Mountain is hardly a character anymore and  you can't say Euron was any better in that regard. Then that's it. And then Harry Strickland went absolutely nowhere.

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without knowing the end-games of Stoneheart, Aegon, Connington, Belwas, Arienne, Darkstar, and Victarion.... (also what Illyrio's end game is).

 

I'd say it was Vargo Hoat and the Bloody Mummers.  I know they were generally supplanted by a band of Boltons... but I felt they really carried a lot of the ambient danger in what would have been seasons 2-4ish.  It was an interesting and brutal collection of villains.  We were also missing elements of Gregor's brutality as well.  Biter and Rorge, while werent missing were essentially written out.

 

The whole "weasel soup" twist with Arya/Jaqen and her 'wasting' her last assassination to speed along the inevitable turncloaking of the bloody mummers, freeing, Northern prisoners, and handing Harrenhall off to Roose Bolton (who was a very grey area 'good guy' at this point).... was a great thread.

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2 hours ago, Jabar of House Titan said:

Don't forget Arya too.

No she didn't.

Reread my post.

That's exactly what she did all of this season and most of last season.

She got absolutely zero great material in season 8 and the actress knows it. And her role in the Bells was super negligible. A couple icily delivered lines and then spending two minutes crying about how she doesn't want to die and how she's glad to see Jaime even though she tried to have him killed twice? Yes, that's truly great material.

Caligula, get real. You really think that Cersei is the absolute best that the show could do as a final antagonist? How can that be if she has no allies with names or lines outside of Qyburn. The Mountain is hardly a character anymore and  you can't say Euron was any better in that regard. Then that's it. And then Harry Strickland went absolutely nowhere.

I re-read your post. I disagree. I've gotten real. Is it really necessary for you to be so hostile?

I agree that Cersei was underutilized in season 8. But even her scenes with Euron in episode 1 and her parley with Dany in episode 4 were great. Her ending was quite fitting for me and Lena Headey acted the hell out of it. She's the highlight of Season 7 for me and gets great scenes; her scene with Tyrion in the finale of season 7 is one of the best in the show, in my opinion. She's a detestable but acomplex character with understandable motivations who's been developed well over the course of the series, which makes her as good as a villain/antagonist as you can get.

As for the anti-climactic nature of her showdown with Dany in episode 5, I thought it was a brilliant choice of how to present the final battle. It's not a glorious, tight fantasy battle where the good guys win in the nick of time. It's a brutal, one sided affair in which Cersei's ambitions are crushed and nobody is a hero. I thought it was a very daring and interesting way to present the climax of the story.

Maybe the books will come up with a better final human antagonist, whether Cersei or Aegon or Euron. Who knows; we'll find out in twenty years if we're lucky. So far, though, none of these characters in the books are anywhere as interesting as Cersei in the show; book-Cersei has devolved into a one-note character (though entertaining), Aegon has had three chapters of development and doesn't register as much characterwise, aside from being kind of a brat, and Euron is an over the top anime villain.

 

 

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On 5/23/2019 at 5:27 PM, T and A said:

Probably the characters GRRM continuously names: Lady Stoneheart, Aegon VI, Ariane Martell. The ones missing that hurt the story at most are probably Aegon VI and Ariane. 

I don't know… Consider the number of casual watchers who still believe "Khaleesi" is one of Dany's first names… I'm not sure this crowd can handle more characters…

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17 minutes ago, Nowy Tends said:

I don't know… Consider the number of casual watchers who still believe "Khaleesi" is one of Dany's first names… I'm not sure this crowd can handle more characters…

From every aspect of filmmaking it made sense to cut those characters out. And I was first glad that they did. But, then you have to be able to write a decent story without them, and not make Cersei drink Wine and look out of the window for two seasons. 

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24 minutes ago, Nowy Tends said:

I don't know… Consider the number of casual watchers who still believe "Khaleesi" is one of Dany's first names… I'm not sure this crowd can handle more characters…

I still have to actively call Petyr Baelish "Littlefinger" and Jaime Lannister "The Kingslayer" around casual viewers just so they understand who I mean. It does suck that we didn't get some of these great characters due to the confusion it would lead with some of the more casual viewers but it's hard to blame them. Unlike us, a lot of people just move on after each episode. I do the same thing with the MCU as a casual viewer of it. I watch some of the movies and forget about them the next day.

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10 minutes ago, T and A said:

From every aspect of filmmaking it made sense to cut those characters out. And I was first glad that they did. But, then you have to be able to write a decent story without them, and not make Cersei drink Wine and look out of the window for two seasons. 

Exactly.  I don't miss any of the cut characters because I'm pretty sure that they are side trips to nowheresville, but I never expected that the show with a safe full of Emmys would have their favorite actor drink wine and stare out the window for 2 seasons because they were either too lazy/overwhelmed/incompetent to spend the time to write her a decent story or even give her some fucking good lines.  I know people loved the sept being blown up, but perhaps they did that too soon, perhaps that should have happened early in season 7 and maybe a couple of peeps should have escaped to give her somebody to talk to for the next 2 years. 

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On 5/24/2019 at 10:36 PM, Cas Stark said:

Exactly.  I don't miss any of the cut characters because I'm pretty sure that they are side trips to nowheresville,

No, read the books. They had other reason for them to cut the cast.

There were far to many characters in the books for a tv show. They had to cut the numbers. They had to optimize. The question was, in which direction did they optimize?

You can optimize production cost, numbers of actors, number of locations, airing time, comprehensibility...

There are different reasons why they threw characters from the script. In the case of fAegon. The could´nt maintain fAegon alone. To keeping fAegon means, to add several accompanying protagonits and locations to the storyboard. A time consuming and expensive and production intensive procedure. They would have won al lot, but to very high costs. 

Then there are story arcs that only served the purpuse of showing whats going on in the Seven Kingdoms. For example the story of Lady Stoneheart in the Riverlands. With her, the proportion between effort an earning is even worse than with fAegon.

But Val. They only had to add a single person to the cast, no extra location. Just someone to add a specific facet to Jon´s personality. Just to show, how he ist acting in a romantic setting, in comparison how Daenaris handled Daario Naharis. I think, the problem with her was to find an actress that ist on the one hand attractive and talented enough, on the other hand is willing to accept little screen time and a long term engagement for not so much money. The could´nt kill her fast, because she one (IMHO the main) reason why Jon returns to the north.
 

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I feel that Val, fAegon, Arianne, Willas and Garlan, Lady Stoneheart, Jeyne Poole, The Manderlys, Aeron and Victarion, all these characters and stories missing  affect a lot the story in a bad way. Also important plot points like Tysa missing and Jeyne Westerling becoming Talisa Maegir weren't welcome changes for the story either.

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In terms of characters whose arcs are mostly complete, I would have to say Jeyne Westerling.  Her replacement by Talisa left a big hole in Robb's story, and was a butterfly that turned into a fire-breathing dragon laying waste to entire story-lines e.g., "The North Forgets" - because Robb married a foreigner.

As far as ongoing stories, I think it is a tie between Young Griff and Arianne Martell, because they are in the same story.  While I think Aegon VI is a red herring, he is going to be an incredibly disruptive red herring, and parceling his story out to various characters hurt it.

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