So, finally finished season 3 and moving onto season 4. At this point I wanted to do a season a week which is a bit difficult even with each season being 10 episodes. Doesn't help that it's not streamable on Netflix so I've been borrowing the dvds from my brother and that's a slower way of doing it.
First off, was the third season supposed to be the redemption season? Where people I loathed in season 2 I now feel sorry for? I mean Jaymie, Sandor, and Theon.... especially Theon. I figured after season 2 I'd enjoy Theon getting fucked up but it's painful to watch. And Ramsay is a fucking prick. I think I hate this man more than Joffery. Even Joffery was starting to be redeemed a little.
That's one of the things I heard from one of features where the actors are like "Well, all of the characters are gray... none are truly good or evil. That's the amazing thing about these characters." Yea, sure, okay. It's pretty clear for the most part which characters you root for... Dany, the Stark children, Tyrion, the bastard blacksmith. And which characters you hate... Joffery, Tywin, the Boltons, ect. There are some more gray characters that have redeemed themselves, the ones I mentioned above. But it's obvious who the heroes and villians are.
And then the end of season 3. Fuck. I had heard about this event from the strong reactions from people online when it first aired. But, I thought for sure the event in question was A) a later season, B) happened somewhere else, and C) involved the Lannisters directly. Did not expect what happened to happen, but when the arrows started flying I realized that it was that event. Left me reeling.
Oh, and I kinda knew what was going to happen to Robb in that scene, although like I said, I expected it to happen in a later season. You can thank the GoT wikis for that. I go to the wikis to look up info about characters I don't know about, or locations I'm curious about. And it's very very hard not to get spoiled by the wikis. They're not very good at keeping the spoilers contained to later in the article. Like, split the article into seasons so I know when to stop reading.
Last thought. I love how they change the ending credits music based on what happened when the episode ended. The best ending and biggest surprise was when what happened to Jaymie, and then the ending credits music was this jaunty Irish pub tune. Just... perfect.
It's a lot of that but there are some great battles in the series. S2E9 does have one pretty good battle but not at the scale of LOTR battles. S6 and S5 have (IIRC) the most battles. Most of the seasons have some skirmishes here and there and maybe one big story-event-battle episode. There's nothing on the scale of the Battle of Pelenor Fields or the Battle of the Hornburg. More are closer to the defense of Osgiliath, or the skirmish at Amon Hen. There are some larger ones as well but still not really on the scale of LOTR films. There are some solid battles in the series for sure. In the upcoming last season, we might have a particularly large battle as well.
In one of the bonus features talking about the battle of Kings Landing they said they wanted to do a big battle for season 1, one of the battles between the Northmen and Lannisters, but they had run out of money. Kinda funny to hear HBO say they've run out of money but I guess I can understand considering it was the beginning of the series and it hadn't established itself yet. Still, it's HBO. I heard the Battle of King's landing took up nearly 50% of the budget of the second season which sounds crazy, especially since they used only one prop boat for every ship in Stannis' fleet. And the mud gate wall was just a small set next to a lake. Still was a pretty impressive battle although there were times when the actual number of bodies on camera kinda gave away that there wasn't that many actors fighting in those scenes... the rest of the ships, rowboats, and fighters were CG. Also, Fuck the king!
