Game of Thrones Trailer

I've been a fan of George RR Martin's "A Song of Ice and Fire" for a long time. It was recommended to me early on in college, long after I had sworn off reading fantasy, and it brought back a fondness for the genre for me, helping me expand my view of weird fiction and allowed me to discover my one true love, the Conan stories of Robert E. Howard. Martin and Howard have very little in common with each other writing wise, but Martin allowed me to peak my head back into the dusty and B.O-smelling world of fantasy literature long enough to stumble upon the Conan stories. The hundreds of dollars I've thrown at the Howard estate would never have made it there had it not been for Martin reminding me to give the genre another go.

"He will not thank you, so I will thank you for him."

But Conan-fanboying aside, Martin's books are really, really good, holding a gritty, realistic place in fantasy where most authors fear to tread. It's dirty, violent, sticky, and sexy. It's like the exploitation cinema of fantasy, except, you know, actually of artistic value. I recommended the series to a fantasy-reading coworker of mine and he handed it back to me about a day later, saying it was  "Too Rapey". I'm only glad he hasn't borrowed any of my movies.

"Oh, hiya Hanzo."

However, you might come for the brutal decapitations and the horribly scarred grown men lusting over twelve year old girls, but you stay for the incredibly well-characterized personalities, the lush storytelling, the complex plots, and the horribly scarred grown men lusting over twelve year old girls.

SANSAN 4 EVA 

Martin's slowed the pace of his writing over the past few years, and I've no intention of griping about that, mostly because others, with better capabilities to back up their death threats, have already done so to little avail. The next book, A Dance with Dragons, will eventually come out,  or Martin will die like Robert Jordan did, and we'll all get to make up our own endings.

I know what my ending is gonna be.

What I'm here to touch on today is the fact that HBO, in their infinite wisdom, decided to pick up A Song of Ice and Fire as their next big budget TV series. Named after the first book in the series, "A Game of Thrones", the series has had the online fan community buzzing for a long time, and very recently, HBO released a teaser,  which gives fans of the books something other than fan art to masturbate too.

There's a ton of this stuff, seriously.

Now to be honest, due to Martin's...shall we say...relaxed writing pace, a lot of my enthusiasm for the series has died down. But when I heard they released a trailer, I was really, really excited. There's some big names in it, like Sean Bean, who, in a staggering change of pace, will not play a support character who the main character totally trusts and who betrays that main character and winds up as the villain. This time he plays a genuine good guy! I know, I was surprised too. To be honest, the character he plays, Eddard Stark, is one of the few genuinely good characters in the entire series; its a very much grey-and-gray morality world, which is very very rare in fantasy.

See?

Anyway, here is the teaser:

Upon seeing it, the feeling of excitement I had sorta...went away. Not because it looks bad. It looks great, I mean, what we saw of it looks great. But that's sort of my issue. Its a twenty-odd second teaser. It doesn't show us shit. After a long time of talking about it, of debating casting on Internet forums, on wondering how they'll handle certain unpalatable situations in the narrative, this trailer is kinda anti-climatic. Everything's so quick and subliminal. I mean, for Christ's sake, what precisely is going on in this shot?

Or this one?

I guess I'm just griping because it went by so quick. I wanted a three minute movie trailer. I want the prime rib, not a junior bacon cheeseburger. I wanted more recognizable characters! I wanted huge men with horribly burned faces making bedrooms eyes at little girls! I guess I just wanted more. Is that too much to ask?

"Yes."

Oh well. I'm still excited for the show, even if half of me wants them to totally fuck it up and run off the wall like they did with Dexter and that show about the southern lady with the psychic powers who hangs out with vampires. Or the Sword of Truth TV show, Legend of the Seeker. I mean, as long as the show is entertaining, deviating from canon wouldn't be the worst thing in the world.

I missed you guys.