Now many of you have seen this book series on TV and I must agree that it is a great show. But did you know that Game of Thrones is the title of the first book and that the book series is actually called a Song of Ice and Fire? I think the TV show has a better title quite frankly. And that’s not all, before the show I actually read the books and couldn’t really get that into it. The problem with this series is that I didn’t really resonate with the characters. There are a lot of scummy characters so the true hero is hard to find. Jon Snow is kind of glossed over in the beginning and we have Ned Stark. But Ned is friends with the King who is portrayed as a good warrior but horrible at everything else. He cheats on his wife Cersei regularly and he also beats her. On top of that he is a drunk and dies while drunk and on a hunting trip (although it is believed he was actually murdered). But being the drunkard he is it’s not questioned.
Now Cersei is painted as very evil but I was reading some reviews and I agree: she’s a product of her environment (her father is a horrible man himself). It’s not hard to see why Cersei is evil. Also in the beginning of the books Jamie throws Bran off the top story when he finds out they are making love. This was done for survival too but crippling a young man is a very bad thing to do. So Jaime and Cersei are evil. Ned Stark is good but gets killed fairly quickly. Now when you start a book and kill the main hero, while unexpected and trail blazing it served for me to no longer be interested. There is also the fact that there are so many characters and situations going on in the series that it gets a bit confusing. Now later in the books it’s even worse because they break down the latest books into something like 3 characters each and the ones you were interested in are no longer being covered. The books were just not handled well and frankly the TV show is doing better than the author. They are actually going to outpace George RR Martin’s work. Now if you ask me and if this series was written by Stephen Dent – this would never happen! I would die before I let a TV show steal my own series and ideas. But that’s just me; apparently George is too busy writing NY Jets propaganda to be bothered.
One thing I will say for the first book is that it does a good job covering all of the noble houses and the sigils. For example Sir Jorah Mormont is a bear. And King Robert is the stag. House Targaryen is of course the dragon sigil and is maybe the coolest. The problem is that we don’t really see House Targaryen into later in the books; we just see the Starks vs the Lannister’s essentially. The books get better when we see the white walkers and the other locations in the Game of Thrones universe as well as the war between Stannis and Renly, and the Starks vs. everyone else (the red wedding is fantastic and the craziest part of the series).
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