People have different thresholds regarding spoilification, something we deal with in many comics, today’s included - but the way these break down for the true Game of Thrones enthusiast is apparently quite nuanced.
There was a lot that I enjoyed about the first book in the series. I liked that it quite fearlessly fucked with the conventions of series fantasy, conventions which have long comforted readers, and I wasn’t aware of this propensity when I read it, being brutalized thereby.
I honestly couldn’t endure the second one.
I chose that word carefully: I felt like it was pressing down on me the entire time I read it. I know people love these books, and I’m not here to tell them they’re wrong to. Kiko loves them, and somehow we’ve managed to remain friends. It wasn’t for lack of trying, though. I wanted to like the Goddamn things! It was never my intention to become a professional contrarian, I would much rather just tell you things that you already believe, but I can’t. I picked up the second book immediately, as in perhaps ten seconds after closing the first. It’s how I intended to live, leaping to the next book in the series at regular intervals and clutching it to survive. Couldn’t do it.
This is why I’m excited for the show: now I can know what my friends are talking about, without having to read the books. I can watch Sean Bean being rad, again. The profound expense of converting these novels to video will act as a natural sieve, seizing the largest chunks of the excess. They can just show me a tender shank right there on the screen, or a table with a bunch of food on it. I don’t have to hear how a woman has beef juice running down her arm and onions in her hair or whatever other calcified smut that rancid old coot has clanking around in his braincase.
There are differences of opinion here regarding how bad the Sony intrusion is. Well, not how bad it is. It’s pretty fucking bad. it's mostly about whether or not the Internet will even remember something like this in another week's time. It took almost a week for them to speak with any clarity regarding the intrusion, and then when they did, it was worse than the rumors. Which I guess explains a lot.
They suggest that people might have stolen your credit card number. Not that they did, but that they might have, which is worse, and in my own (not especially complex) risk assessment utterly identical: cancel everything, full stop, consider this an opportunity to simmer a new password schema, activate 2-Step Authentication where available. Fume publicly. Alos: shake my tiny fist at the unknowing and insensate sky.
(CW)TB out.
