Book vs. Show characterisation of SanSan: A TV Critic's Analysis

[gibbles545]

The unnamed producer is, as far as I know, most definitely Benioff or Weiss. Only two of them are producers that actually are on the set, and in charge of it. All those HBO producers have other business, and they're not consulting directors or actors.

As for Locke, I don't know why they removed Vargo, and I think Vargo would be a joy to watch, but Locke doesn't bother me. At least, he doesn't speak moronic lines like great many other characters in the show do. Had all the changes been dealt with as intelligently as Vargo/Locke was, my puristic self would raise no voice against D&D. If it was up to me, I'd put Vargo in the show and not Locke, but Locke is really not an embarrassment on par with Talisa, TV Shae, TV Robb, TV Cat, TV Sansa, TV Theon, TV Stannis, TV Mel...

Didn't think about it that way, yeah that makes sense about said producer being Weiss or Benniof.

When it came to Vargo Hoat and other characters, Daario springs to mind, D&D tend to remove alot of the colourful interesting quirks of characters in both apperance and mannerisms. Vargo Hoat sounds rediculous and unthreatening so it explains, among other reasons, why Jaime is not scarred of him before having his hand cut off. Daario looks like a clown, but is actually quite a dangerous man.

George tends to use what characters look like in his books, to set up expectations and then subvert them. This could of been done brilliantly on a TV show, perticularly HBO with their large production values, but alas in the case of the above mentioned characters and Sandor and Sansa this has not happened.

[Karmarni]

Having an entire season go by where Sansa does not make one reference to Sandor or what he is said to her in parting was a glaring missed opportunity to reference not only their relationship, but how this figures into her character development.

The funny thing is, she never missed a chance to reference him in four books, only missed one chapter.

Shae eclipsed not only Sandor in Sansa's story, but Sansa. Much the same way Talisa eclipsed Catelyn.

Not missing Sandor or keeping his cloak or singing the song to him, Shae's her best friend who would die for her, implicitly trusts Margaery, cannot wait to run away with Littlefinger, thinks her family could come for her wedding to Loras, Tyrion is someone to joke around with, really who is this girl? She is just some redhead running around the Red Keep saying she's Sansa Stark.

[Le Cygne]

Agreed, and so incongruous, looking 21 and acting like she was 5.

[go joff go]

They made the right decision on Sandor and Sansa. The one scene that they shot and cut in season 2 made the hound irredeemably unlikable. Shooting all those other "cut" scenes just would have had the same effect. People romanticize a lot of the book characters in retrospect when in reality as the reading is going on most are pretty unlikable the sort of unlikable that translates badly to television.

[go joff go]

While I didn't like D&D giving LF two important Sandor lines... They did give me one of my favorite Sandor quotes

"You'll be glad of the hateful things I do one day, when you're queen and I'm the only thing that stands between you and your beloved king."

I will admit that I have spent some time thinking that maybe they gave us a hint at a future Queen Sansa..... but probably just a throw away line.

Actually it could have double meaning. It might not mean physical presence but some kind of emotional attachment.

[Le Cygne]

Another example of the showrunners not using storytelling elements in the books that are perfect for the visual medium of film... Jaime's beard.

It was an outward sign of inner change. Jaime before. Jaime after. If he comes back to KL and shaves it, he's the old Jaime.

In the books, he thinks he doesn't look as much like Cersei that way. She won't like it. He keeps the beard anyway. And she doesn't like it. And he keeps it.

Seems like they had him shave it for the show, though.

[Han Snow]

Another example of the showrunners not using storytelling elements in the books that are perfect for the visual medium of film... Jaime's beard.

It was an outward sign of inner change. Jaime before. Jaime after. If he comes back to KL and shaves it, he's the old Jaime.

In the books, he thinks he doesn't look as much like Cersei that way. She won't like it. He keeps the beard anyway. And she doesn't like it. And he keeps it.

Seems like they had him shave it for the show, though.

Jaime shaved the beard initially when he returned to KL then decided to regrow it again if I remember correctly.

On topic: Original poster's analysis of SanSan ship is absolutely dreadful and dead wrong.

[Le Cygne]

He says he's got a beard at Tywin's funeral. That's a couple of weeks after he gets back.

[Miodrag]

On topic: Original poster's analysis of SanSan ship is absolutely dreadful and dead wrong.

Care to elaborate? Especially the dreadful part? I mean, wrong I can understand, many posters here tried to prove I'm wrong, but dreadful... I'm all ears. Curious, that is. Not offensive or defensive, just curious.

[Little Red Riding Hood]

Miodrag, I take my hat off to you, your brilliant analysis expressed almost exactly how I feel about "this show": At last a objective and critical analysis about it!

Your posts put the finger on the pulse of the problem with such precision and are so viscerally honest, especially this one, which I'm going to read me all your posts on the forum.

I've loved almost every opinion yours, and that of other people too, who have been really entertaining to read and I'll be commenting gradually.

( In advance I apologize for my pretty bad English. I will try to do my best effort.)

They made the right decision on Sandor and Sansa. The one scene that they shot and cut in season 2 made the hound irredeemably unlikable. Shooting all those other "cut" scenes just would have had the same effect. People romanticize a lot of the book characters in retrospect when in reality as the reading is going on most are pretty unlikable the sort of unlikable that translates badly to television.

Ehh… Joff. ..Don´t worry about all those gossips about your bodyguard and your fiancée because - as D&D have shown us with a creativity such brilliant :ack:, with such incredibly sensitivity :bang: and in so so so talented and different ways :stillsick: :frown5: :huh: -Those are just rumours from one of those men named … what is his name ...? maybe George? Did he ever existed? or something called "A Song of Ice and Fire"? (when I watched the show I could not stop to wonder to myself: Who, in the seven kingdoms, wrote this televised "product"?.).. :idea:

[Khal-a-bunga]

Miodrag, I take my hat off to you, your brilliant analysis expressed almost exactly how I feel about "this show": At last a objective and critical analysis about it!

( In advance I apologize for my pretty bad English. I will try to do my best effort.)

Clearly.

[Dragonstoned]

'objective' is one of those words like 'hamburger' or 'amen', it's the same in every language. Or what was being faulted was the 'a' instead of 'an' before it.

[Khal-a-bunga]

'objective' is one of those words like 'hamburger' or 'amen', it's the same in every language. Or what was being faulted was the 'a' instead of 'an' before it.

Synonyms of "objective" include: impartial, unbiased, dispassionate, and detached, among others. So the issue has nothing to do with delineating the correct indefinite article.

[Dragonstoned]

Synonyms of "objective" include: impartial, unbiased, dispassionate, and detached, among others. So the issue has nothing to do with delineating the correct indefinite article.

I was saying that no matter what language someone spoke they would understand what the word 'objective' meant since it looks broadly the same across all languages (at least whichever Indo-European one seemed to be the poster's native tongue). Whether they then perceive something as objective is removed from their level of English, don't let that get in the way of having a pop at someone criticising the show though!

[Little Red Riding Hood]

Commercial television, literally B) , has a golden rule:

Be profitable. :wub:

If the artistic qualities increase the benefits, it is welcome, but what we can say for certain is that they will not sacrifice Benefit$ just for to increase the art.

HBO transmits the adaptation of the Books, not for its literary qualities, but because it has millions of fans all over the world, and that makes it a potential source of viewers (consumers of their product) and therefore in a source of profits.

It's a business.

The plus of it would be add-besides of the potential audience - at the regular customers, who don´t know the books, but , nevertheless, they are familiarized with the offers of HBO.

For HBO, the television is its supermarket, and viewers are their clients.

ASOIAF for them is just a market product, like those canned foods in beautiful and sophisticated boxes, with a lot of propaganda and a short and catchy name ("Game of Thrones").

And, like any production line in series, has certain rules.

(Although in the fantastic epic line, "the product" is mainly characterized by its high content of violence, so that in the case of most commercial and shallow television would be more or less):

- Use (and even abuse) of stereotyped characters (the villain bad bad, the.Good Goodddd, the leader, the cool guy, the funny a little silly counterpart of the hero, the intelligentttttt.., the tough guy, the pretty pretty girl with the pretty pretty boy, etc.)

-A lot of violence, blood and sex. Sensations without feelings. Shocking images, Commotion but not depression, a lacks of ethics questionings in its most profound sense. A lack of negatives but realistic emotions (the sorrow of Catelyn and Sansa for the loss of the family, etc.) or whatever it is that might cause the viewer- (According to the parameters of the producers, of course) moves away of the TV Set. And it is for this reason that their characters don´t tend to have psychological depth.

We can´t expect psychological depth in the characters. Commercial television don´t leads the consumer towards ethical debates; Commercial television tries to avoid it.

Its target is "entertain".

And it is for these reasons that the relationship of Sandor/Sansa is difficult to do in this type of commercial television. Because George, as pointed out before, deconstructs the stereotype, (at least in some of its most significant characters) But this kind of television, on the contrary, has specialized in make stereotyped characters, market them, and selling them.

Sandor don't fits exactly into the character of the villain. He isn´t BAD BAD. but not good either, don´t fits into the heartthrob either-He is not “pretty” - Because he is a killer , for his behavior and because He is a character who suffers. Suffers. (The same "sin" of Catelyn or Sansa, mentioned above). Another problem is the age difference: Sansa and Sophie are minors, And while Sandor has about 26 or 27 when the book begins (and this I see as a problem in the casting) Rory is in his 40!. Another problem is his performance.

Sometimes I've come to think that he was chosen primarily for his size. (Considering that D&D have butchered the story of both, love story or not love, I don´t want to be so cruel to the actor because it may not be his fault)-but the tone off of his performance-in contrast to the emotional tornado that Sandor is- makes me feel that Mccan was not the hound that Sandor deserved.

However , difficult to do doesn't mean impossible to do. With that in mind, and remembering that HBO had also produced others good series and considering the large number of fans of the Sansan story has, I crossed my fingers, and I thought that maybe, just maybe, they not only would include the strange and tormented story of Sansan, but also they would be more developed on screen. But, do that, imply talent, and that's where I think D&D fail : Not only in art, but also in the Art seen as a business.

Because D&D put aside a whole and large segment of the “market” (viewers/readers of this story), with their lack of vision or talent –I don´t know- they decreased the possible audience and therefore the profits of HBO.

[franko99]

snip

:agree:

...now, I agree with many posters here, and I acknowledge it has many flaws, but I still enjoy GoT, and consider it the best show on TV right now, and it's definitely on my personal top 5

[Little Red Riding Hood]

Khal-a-bunga,don´ t lose sight of the Objective of the thread ;)

Thank you, Dragonstoned. ^_^

[Annara Snow]

Another problem is the age difference: Sansa and Sophie are minors, And while Sandor has about 26 or 27 when the book begins (and this I see as a problem in the casting) Rory is in his 40!.

That's a complaint I find really odd. Sandor's age is not a problem; Sansa's age is. And book Sansa is 12 at the time of the Blackwater battle. Show Sansa is 14 and played by a (then) 16-year old actress. Which is a more inappropriate pairing: a 43-year old man and a 16-year old girl (the ages of the actors*) or a 27-year old man and a 12-year old girl? I think the answer is pretty obvious. (Hint: the man would be arrested in UK in only one of those cases.) If anything, the show makes it much more acceptable (all the more so since Sophie looks mature for her age) - think of how it would be if they actually had a 12-year old actress in those scenes! Which does not happen because the show has aged up the kids to make relationships like Dany-Drogo filmable and acceptable to the audience.

* There is nothing to suggest that Sandor, the character, is supposed to be 40 in the show. Almost all the actors are older than the characters they are playing. If they're going by the book timelines modified by about 3 years, then Sandor is about 30, or in his early 30s. Book Ned is 35, but Sean Bean was 50; that doesn't mean that the character was 50, which would make no sense since he would have been over 30 in the time of Robert's rebellion. I pointed this out recently on another thread: I would find it funny if people expected a 27-year old to play the Hound, when this would make him the same age as the characters playing teenagers, like Richard Madden, Kit Harington, Emilia Clarke or Joe Dempsey. Besides, most of the adult actors being some 10 years older than their characters is justified, because these actors look more like what their characters would realistically look like.

A 30-year old man in a medieval-like world =/= a 30-year actor living in the 21st century. Due to medical conditions, poor hygiene, lack of cosmetic products etc. not to mention constant fights and wounds etc., a man like Sandor Clegane would, at the age of 27 or 30, realistically look a lot more like a 40-year old man of today, than a 27-year old one. In Hollywood, if you're 27 or 30, chances are you're still playing high school kids on TV or in movies.

And a 30-year old man today is considered young. Sandor is not considered young in Westeros. He's a man in his prime. But nobody thinks of him as a young man. He's compared to Kettleblacks who are "younger and quicker". A 25-year old Tyrion is not considered young. Heck,. even 22-year old Beric is not considered particularly young. "Young people" are those under 20, maybe around 20. Over 20, you're already mature enough. Over 40, you're over the hill; 50, you're an old man; and a 60-year old Barristan is treated like a Metusalem.

And this quote from "The Hedge Knight" encapsulates this: "The old man.... He had lived a long life, he wascloser to sixty than to fifty, and how many men are that lucky?" Ouch!

In short: did people actually expect a 27-year old actor and an 20-year old actress as Sandor and Sansa? Because that would so faithful to their book dynamic, right? Hm...

Second reason why this argument makes no sense to me: if the show producers were supposedly so worried about romantic implications between Sansa and Sandor, that they had to downplay their relationship, despite the fact that nothing sexual happens between them (except in her mind) - then can someone please explain why they are overplaying her relationship with Littlefinger (who is canonically even older than Sandor, and played by Aiden Gillen, who is also in his early 40s - one year older than Rory McCann), even giving him Sandor's lines - Littlefinger, who is perving on her as early as the Hand's tournament, and who is later going to implement a classic sexual predator scenario, making her completely dependent on him, force a kiss on her and go on to molest her with unwanted kisses while making her sit on his lap and call him "father"? We haven't seen it playing out yet, but the creepiness has only been emphasized in the show.

Or how is it that they had another female character telling Sansa that being forced to marry Tyrion (played by also 40-something Peter Dinklage) is perfectly OK, and that she should be grateful because he's handsome and sexy and good in bed?

How does that make sense? Unless it's because she's attracted to Sandor, and it's a similar kind of logic apparently used by the MPAA, who supposedly gives sexual content in movies a higher rating if the woman seems to be enjoying herself, while sexual molestation and harassment are more "acceptable". By a similar crazy logic, I guess it's OK to see a teenage girl forced into relationships with older men, but a teenage girl having feelings for and fantassizing about an older man is a no-no? Or something? :dunno:

Personally, I think the truth is simply that D&D suck at writing the dynamic between Sandor and Sansa (as we can see by their atrocitous deleted scene from S2). They wanted to do the Sandor/Sansa relationship but they just didn't know how, it's too complex and they aren't quite getting it, just like they don't seem very good at writing for either of those characters separately.

[Mr Fixit]

Because D&D put aside a whole and large segment of the “market” (viewers/readers of this story), with their lack of vision or talent –I don´t know- they decreased the possible audience and therefore the profits of HBO.

Let me get this straight.

Your whole, sizable might I add, post concerns itself with pitfalls of commercial television (quel horreur!), how it puts profit ahead of Art with capital A only to reach the conclusion that because of their base commercial instincts and a lack of vision, D&D cost HBO even larger profits.

Yeah. Totally makes sense.

Commotion but not depression, a lacks of ethics questionings in its most profound sense. A lack of negatives but realistic emotions

Excuse me?

[Dragonstoned]

Let me get this straight.

Your whole, sizable might I add, post concerns itself with pitfalls of commercial television (quel horreur!), how it puts profit ahead of Art with capital A only to reach the conclusion that because of their base commercial instincts and a lack of vision, D&D cost HBO even larger profits.

Yeah. Totally makes sense.

Excuse me?

If it's obvious that English is not a poster's native language but they are trying anyway then perhaps lay off the parts of their post which don't make linguistic sense. Alternatively, find less rude ways of asking what they mean than simply saying 'Excuse me?'. Maybe start a foreign language yourself so as to build empathy, I would suggest French as you will then know that 'horreur' is feminine, should therefore have 'quelle' before it instead of 'quel' and in the future you can write this phrase properly.