Game of Thrones/A Dance of Dragons

   Now an argument could be made that this entry belongs in my blog rather than my fictional rants, but I feel this is exactly why I created fictional rants; to rant about something fictional.

    You should not read this unless you've read the 5th book in the Song of Ice and Fire series, A Dance of Dragons, and/or seen episode 9 of season 5 of Game of Thrones. This will be loaded with tons of spoilers. So don't continue if you don't want to be spoiled.

***SPOILER WARNING!***

    The point I mostly want to talk about right now is the arena scene, which, in my opinion, is one of the best scenes in the entire series.

    So in the book Dany is presiding over the arena games with her husband, Barristan Selmy and Strong Belwas. Tyrion mock fights in the arena with Penny, another dwarf. They only survive because Dany prevents the release of tigers meant to maul the helpless dwarves.

    Dany's husband tries to convince her to eat seasoned locusts that Strong Belwas eats rather happily in her stead. A warrior fought a boar in the pit. The warrior is gored by the boar and men come in to get the beast back to it's cage. Belwas gets sick from eating the locusts. Drogon descends upon the arena.

    In the show it's quite a bit different, Barristan is dead, for one, Tyrion and Daario are at Dany's side, and Jorah fights in the pit. The sons of the Sons of The Harpy attack during the games and Jorah kills one behind Daario. The assault continues and the cast flee to the center of the pit where they are surrounded on all sides by Sons of The Harpy. Dany's husband dies just before they flee. When all seems lost, Drogon descends.

    Now I stopped both scenes her because this is the key point I mostly mean to go over, before I continue; the reason Drogon descends differs drastically between the media. In the show Drogon descends to rescue his mother, this is clear by the fact that he blasts fire in every direction except where the main cast is huddled together, whereas in the book Drogon's descent is actually more brought on by the sounds of battle and the smell of the boar. I'll go into more in a second after I describe what happens next.

    As mentioned above, in the show Drogon comes to save Dany. He swoops in through a burst of flame and immediately begins to burn Sons of The Harpy. They wound him but he holds his own for quite awhile. Dany approaches and removed a spear from him, he turns to roar at her, the stops, smells her and clams himself. Dany hesitantly reaches for him, then moves around behind him to climb on his back. The fly off to safety leaving the others in the pit, which has to be a bit worrying for them as they are still surrounded.

    Now Dany's hesitation with Drogon bothers me a little, because in the show Drogon isn't wild and aggressive, if anything he's been shown to be kind and protective. So I don't exactly understand why Daenerys is so hesitant around him.

    In the book everyone froze when Drogon appeared, he had fled the city when he had turned aggressive toward his would-be capturers, his returns was not exactly welcomed. He swooped down into the pit burned the boar and began to eat it and the warrior it had gored. Strong Belwas threw up in the background. A lone spearman takes it upon himself to defeat Drogon, and spears him at the base of his neck, which causes a scream from both Drogon and Dany. Drogon kills him quickly, and then Dany's husband, Hizdahr shouts for the other spearmen to kill it.

    Barristan tries to restrain Dany but she commands him to do otherwise and ran from him. She jumped into the pit and ran toward Drogon. Drogon killed his assailants, and Dany began shouting his name as she closed in. He turns towards her, she stumbles and his jaws snap inches from her face. Dany realizes that if she runs Drogon will kills her, she cannot show him fear. Barristan is in the pit beside her trying to get Drogon's attention away from Dany. Dany found and whip and Drogon snapped at her again.

    Dany whips him and shouts “No,” and keeps whipping him and shouting “No,” then finishing with a “Get Down!” Drogon slowly got down on his belly. Dany vaulted onto his back, ripped the spear from his neck and tossed it aside, and Drogon took to the air.

    In the books, Drogon is wild and dangerous, in the show he's just illusive and protective. In the show Dany's hesitation causes trouble for me because in the book version of the scene Dany shows how strong a character she is, whereas in the show, even in her strongest moment she doesn't compare to the strength had by her literary counterpart.

    To me this is more of the difference between what we can do with visual rather than literary media. Now for the show, I think the scene was good. It worked for what they had, I only felt that it was more drawn out than was necessary.

    Now I would talk about the Stannis scene in the middle of the episode, but I don't really know what to say about it, in the books it never happened, which is true, but in the books Stannis has help from northerners. Melisandre and Shireen are at the wall, and Davos is off at white harbor. So there no way for sure I could say if Stannis would have acted the same in the books had circumstances been different. As with Daenerys, Stannis is a different person in the show than he is in the books. We shouldn't attach the same affections to him that we do to the book Stannis, he's his own character, and he's going to develop differently.

    I think the reason the Dany scene bothers me so much has to do with that feeling. I'm attaching affections for Book Dany to Show Dany, and that's not fair to Show Dany. She's a different character, they share the same name, and same backstory, they have endured many of the same things, but ultimately they are different people. The same is true about every member of the cast, including the direwolves and the dragons.

    It's a different story being told by different people, they may have many of the same plot-lines, but they are their own. We should give them the dignity of separating them from their previous counterparts. That should probably be universally applied to everything that has been brought from one medium to another.

    All that being said, I still don't like The Walking Dead show.