We’re halfway through the third season of Game of Thrones, a year that’s seen the elevation of female characters—and consensual sex—suggestions that one religion, the worship of the Lord of Light, could be gaining precedence and validity in Westeros, and some of the best swordfighting the show’s ever seen. I talked to executive story editor Bryan Cogman about how the show’s handled changes in characterization from the page to screen, how he wrote those steamy sex scenes in last week’s episode, and how the action choreography of the show comes together. This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

To get started: halfway through the third season, Game of Thrones remains largely true to George R.R. Martin’s novels, but there are diversions in both plot and characterization. As the story editor, I’d be curious what the conversations about those changes look like. And in the case of characterization changes, do they tend to be driven more by the actors cast in the roles? The need to pace the story? Or a mix?

Oh, good you started with an easy one! Well, for one thing, now that we’re in Season Three — a lot of the changes stem from changes/alterations we made in previous seasons. Now, Margaery Tyrell, as we’ve talked about before, is an important character in the novels in terms of plot but she isn’t a point of view character and you don’t really get to know her until later in the saga. And even then, she’s not really driving her own storylines. Now, in Season Two, we always planned to go behind the curtain, if you will, with Renly and his relationships, but even with that, Margaery was still planned to be (more or less) a minor character. Now, Natalie Dormer was original considered for another role. I’m not sure who’s idea it was to have her be Margaery, but casting her immediately changed the character and the possibilites for her before we even started writing. It allowed us to move up the Cersei versus Margaery dynamic–that’s a big part of a later book).

And this solved a few problems we needed to deal with as we started adapting A Storm of Swords. If you break down A Storm of Swords, there isn’t a ton of King’s Landing story in the first half of the book, and virtually nothing for a few characters (Cersei, Littlefinger, Varys) to do. So having Margaery be a greater presence on the show (coupled with her arrival of grandmother, Lady Olenna) allowed us to dramatize the arrival of the Tyrells and their effect on the Lannisters (and Cersei, Joffrey) in particular. And the idea of Margaery as a sort of Princess Di type was very interesting–and that’s definitely in the books–her popularity with the people is mentioned, we just took that ball and ran with it.
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A Song of Ice and Fire author George R.R. Martin can write one hell of a palace coup or behind-the-scenes political maneuver. So it’s no surprise that when he gets fired up about a real-world issue, like efforts to make it harder for eligible voters to actually cast their ballots, he has words for the people he believes responsible. He wrote on Saturday:

It is one thing to attempt to win elections. But trying to do so by denying the most basic and important right of any American citizen to hundreds and thousands of people, on entirely spurious grounds… that goes beyond reprehensible. That is despicable.

It would really be nice if there were still some Republicans of conscience out there who would stand up and loudly denounce these efforts, a few men of honor and integrity for whom “win the election” does not “win the election at any cost.” There were once many Republicans I admired, even I disagreed with them: men like Everett Dirksen, Clifford Case, Henry Cabot Lodge, William Scranton… yes, even Barry Goldwater, conservative as he is. I do not believe for a moment that Goldwater would have approved of this, any more than Robert A. Heinlein would have. They were conservatives, but they were not bigots, nor racists, nor corrupt. The Vote Suppressors have far more in common with Lester Maddox, George Wallace, John Stennis, and their ilk than they do with their distinguished GOP forebears.

The people behind these efforts at disenfranchising large groups of voters (the young, the old, the black, the brown) are not Republicans, since clearly they have scant regard for our republic or its values. They are oligarchs and racists clad in the skins of dead elephants.

Maybe we could have a kingsmoot, the one functional form of democracy in Westeros and Essos, instead of elections? It would be hard to a significant percentage of Americans to show up and then stick around for days to argue about the future of the presidency, though. And Mitt Romney would just show up and offer everybody car elevators and plunder and run off with the election anyway. But I think we can all agree, across party lines, that if finding ways to ensure broad poll access to all Americans who are eligible to vote while also ensuring the integrity of the ballots they cast will help get The Winds of Winter to us faster by giving Martin fewer things to be distracted by and angry about, that’s a worthwhile priority.

In the never-ending quest to milk George R.R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” franchise for every last piece of Lannister gold, enterprising developers have turned to another medium: Facebook. Via Kate Cox of Kotaku:

“Game of Thrones Ascent will take place in HBO’s version of George R.R. Martin’s sprawling fantasy world. Developer Disruptor Beam plans for the game to focus on the spirit of backstabbing political wheeling and dealing that forms so much of the backbone of the series, by using Facebook’s social connections to let players forge critical alliances. Players take on the role of petty nobles in the Seven Kingdoms, who ‘claim their birthright by choosing which of the great houses they’ll swear allegiance to, securing their holdings, developing their lands and personal reputation, and assigning sworn swords to quests.’”

In the wake of the HBO series’ breakout success, there have alreadybeen several botched attempts to produce a Game of Thrones video game. I’m not much of a gamer these days, but I am a noted sucker for video game tie-ins based on my favorite TV shows; in my younger years, I was fan enough of both The Sopranos and Lost to play their awful, wholly unnecessary video game adaptations to completion.

Game of Thrones is the latest series to draw the attention of game developers. Last year, developer Cyanide released A Game of Thrones: Genesis, a bland real-time strategy game set centuries before the events of the series that used the Game of Thrones setting as the barest of window dressing (masochists can but the game on Amazon for $5). Though A Game of Thrones: Genesis was poorly received, Cyanide got another crack at the series with last week’s new release Game of Thrones, an action RPG that features voicework from several of the HBO series’ actors and a Stan Lee-esque cameo by George R.R. Martin. While both Game of Thrones and its reviews are more impressive than its real-time strategy predecessor – and it includes quests with options that at least attempt to offer some nuance – it’s clearly nothing on the level of, say, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, or even Mass Effect 3.

Why is it so hard to make a video game of Thrones? It’s certainly easy to see why video game developers would be drawn to the Game of Thrones universe: there’s already a large, passionate built-in fanbase, and many of the all-time best video games are set in worlds full of swords and sorcery. But any Game of Thrones adaptation that starts with fighting has already missed the point. We’ve seen how far fighting gets you in Westeros – just ask Khal Drogo or Ned Stark. A Game of Thrones game that invites the player to cut through swaths of cookie-cutter enemies undercuts one of Game of Thrones’ central themes: every death matters, and every killer is risking their life by doing the killing.

The real survivors in Westeros are characters like Tyrion, Varys, or Littlefinger, who have largely shunned swords in favor of politics. That’s the experience that a Game of Thrones game should attempt to replicate, and that’s why Game of Thrones Ascent is the first adaptation of “A Song of Ice and Fire” that has piqued my interest. I’m inherently skeptical of all Facebook games – once Farmvilled, twice shy – but it seems to me that Disruptor Beam’s concept cleverly uses the complex, amorphous social network of our actual lives to replicate the complex, amorphous social network of Westeros. That’s what Game of Thrones does best, and that’s what a video game of Thrones should do, too.

Longtime readers know that I love Tamora Pierce’s novels, and I just got around to finishing the last series of hers I’d never read, the Protector of the Small Quartet. For those not in the know, most of Pierce’s novels (except the Winding Circle books) are set in a fictional medieval-style kingdom called Tortall where some people have magical abilities, and most of them follow a female character as she goes through the process of becoming part of a larger institution, whether it’s a girl disguising herself as a boy to train to become a knight; a young woman going through training to become a full officer in Tortall’s equivalent of a police force; a woman with unusual magical abilities undergoing training by Tortall’s top court mage while also helping out the people who run a unique paramilitary unit; or a girl who ends up running an insurgency in a rival kingdom.

The books are very different from George R.R. Martin’s Song of Fire and Ice Novels: they’re more optimistic about human nature and substantially less dark; they’re about a country in the process of reform rather than in need of revolution; there is a lot more magic; and they’re young adult novels, so they are for a younger reading level (though still I think very enjoyable for adult readers) and they’re shorter. But read together, I think Pierce’s Tortall novels are a fascinating multi-perspective alternative to A Song of Ice and Fire for people who find Martin’s books beyond their trigger level, and would make really interesting and useful reading for folks who like A Song of Ice and Fire but are interested in alternative ways of exploring some of the same themes and using some of the same tropes.

East Meets West

I tend to think one of the fairest, strongest criticisms of A Song of Ice and Fire — and I think particularly of the HBO adaptation — is the way the franchise treats the Dothraki and people in Essos generally. The novels at least give us some sense of Vaes Dothrak and Dothraki culture in a way that’s completely cut out of the show, which explains neither the way the Dothraki treat other religions nor the tradition of eating the horse’s heart nor Dany’s visceral terror of becoming part of the Dosh Khaleen, and essentially forced into permanent cronehood before she’s had a chance to live. But the novel does spend much more time on the cultures of Westeros and in the heads of Westeroi characters. It’s not entirely without justification — this is a Westeroi throne they’re fighting over, after all. But even if the novels are exposing the idea that Westeroi and Dothraki culture are equally brutal (and Dothraki culture may be more meritocratic), it introduces Dothraki brutality much more quickly and leaves it much closer to the surface.

By contrast, Pierce’s novels introduce an artistically and theologically sophisticated nomadic culture, the Bazhir. While initially, Tortall is trapped in a dynamic where forces led by knights fight on Bazhir raids, the two cultures eventually forge an accord. The Bazhir introduce the Tortallan heir to a new way of governing that brings the two cultures together. That doesn’t mean the dynamic is easy; Bazhir gender roles are even stricter than the already somewhat strict ones in Tortall, and that’s a flash point as Tortall attempts to incorporate the Bazhir into the kingdom. But Bazhir warriors are sometimes more progressive than Tortall is about new kinds of magic, and they also introduce new fighting tactics to the realm. A clash of cultures turns out to be worth working through for the benefits to both sides.
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I’ve written a great deal lately about the way that nerds can be less than progressive, whether by failing to establish anti-harassment policies and ethos at conventions or by relying on continuity and fidelity to text as a way to disguise an antipathy to diversity. But if we want the nerdosphere to be a more progressive place, I think it’s important to mount critiques that will actually be effective, rather than ones that can make the critics feel self-righteous, which is why I’m so dismayed by Sady Doyle’s condescending and willfully misleading critique of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series and the people who read it.

First, there’s the explicit statement that Sady thinks nerds are inherently inflexible morons incapable of accepting criticism or thinking deeply about the material they love with an eye towards its political flaws:

Because here’s how it goes, when you criticize beloved nerd entertainments: You can try to be nuanced. You can try to be thoughtful. You can lay out your arguments in careful, extravagant, obsessive detail. And at the end of the day, here is what the people in the “fandom” are going to take away: You don’t like my toys? I hate you! So, get it out of your system now, because, guess what, George R.R. Martin fans? I don’t like your toys. Deal with that. Meditate for a while. Envision a blazing bonfire in a temple, and breathe in its warmth and serenity. Then, imagine me dumping all your comic books and action figures and first-edition hardback Song of Ice and Fire novels INTO the bonfire, and cackling wildly.

Shockingly enough, saying things like this doesn’t actually make you cool. It makes you another iteration of the kind of person who insists that feminists like, say, me or Sady Doyle are shrewish harpies incapable of nuance or conversation. Now, sexism is more entrenched and more broadly impactful than disdain for nerds. But that doesn’t actually mean that these kinds of statements are useful or clever when they’re deployed by feminists against nerds in a way that they’re not when they’re deployed by misogynists against feminists.
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Spencer Ackerman, in the world’s most generous takedown of my review of A Dance With Dragons (warning, copious spoilers to follow), argues that I’m wrong to see Jon Snow as a visionary for redefining the realms of men by letting the wildlings settle in the Gift, and trying to save the Night’s Watch by bringing them, men and women alike, into his brotherhood. I’m going to return the complement by saying I think Spencer may actually have a more optimistic vision of George R.R. Martin’s project than I do. He writes:

But there’s a lesson in the stabbing of Jon Snow. (No one really thinks he’s dead, right?) The Realm, like the world, is made of institutions. If you wish to change the realm, you have to engage in the painful, arduous task of building legitimacy through these recognized institutions so that your changes don’t inspire the backlash that undoes them all. One of the strengths of George R.R. Martin is that he’s brutally consistent here. The same hubris that runs through Cersei when she cynically reconstitutes a group of religious warriors runs through Jon and Dany when they admirably attempt to focus on the White Walkers or banish slavery from Meereen. As a wise woman once exclaimed in a different story, “It’s Baltimore, Cedric!”

My understanding of much of A Song of Fire and Ice is as an inquiry into how you tell when institutions are so rotten that they need a radical regutting or replacement, and how to carry out that process. I do agree with Spencer that Martin’s consistent in this regard. Cersei’s reinstatement of the Warrior’s Sons is an error and an act of hubris that eventually turns against her because she’s foisting reform on an institution that is self-governing effectively, and doesn’t need external alteration. Similarly, Dany’s quest against slavery may be moral, but she disrupts institutions that however brutal they were, worked effectively from a pragmatic perspective, and were the lynchpin of a continent’s economy. Dany is a practical and a moral failure. She totally misunderstands the institutions she’s attacking and fails to replace them with viable alternatives, guaranteeing upheaval because she’s wrecked trade in the region. And her failure to rebuild those brace struts of society means she’s failed to provide the basis of a state that can exist without slavery or any moral investment in a vision of that world.

I think that Jon, by contrast, is dealing with an organization that’s wholly shattered. The Night’s Watch doesn’t have enough people to serve its function, and its mechanisms to bring more into it no longer function to bring either the numbers or quality in that the organization needs. The internal discipline and obedience to the hierarchies of the Watch are totally broken after Jorah Mormont’s murder, which would be the equivalent of fragging a general in deployed in Afghanistan. That the Watch manages to hold an election might be a sign that it has some respect for its own rituals left, though Sam only manages to force a resolution through trickery—he tries to build legitimacy through recognized processes and institutions, and his efforts help break the organization he’s trying to preserve. If the Watch was meant to be a neutral force that stood between the wildlings and the Realm, prioritizing the interests of the Realm, that relationship has become polarized in the face of a greater threat. A gradualist, reformist approach to rebuilding the Watch to serve its original purpose would be suicidal. I think Spencer is right about the process President Obama took to accustom the American military to the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, but I’m curious if thinks the existence of that policy means the American military was as shattered, illegitimate, and underresourced as the Night’s Watch appears to be.

So far Martin hasn’t given us a definitive answer for how we know if an institution has failed, and what we do if it has. The implication is that you need dragons and dreams to scorch a realm clean. But we haven’t yet seen proof of that, and we have no certainty that this story has a happy ending.

Given our debates here over whether the sex scenes and depictions of gender politics in HBO’s Game of Thrones are sexist, I thought it was interesting to see what George R.R. Martin told my friend Rachael when she interviewed him in advance of the release of A Dance With Dragons tomorrow (programming note: I’ll try to have lots of blog posts in the queue, but I intend to spend much of the day knocking the book off so I can write on it). Martin said of the charges that the sex scenes are gratuitous:

Well, I’m not writing about contemporary sex — it’s medieval.

There’s a more general question here that doesn’t just affect sex or rape, and that’s this whole issue of what is gratuitous? What should be depicted? I have gotten letters over the years from readers who don’t like the sex, they say it’s “gratuitous.” I think that word gets thrown around and what it seems to mean is “I didn’t like it.” This person didn’t want to read it, so it’s gratuitous to that person. And if I’m guilty of having gratuitous sex, then I’m also guilty of having gratuitous violence, and gratuitous feasting, and gratuitous description of clothes, and gratuitous heraldry, because very little of this is necessary to advance the plot. But my philosophy is that plot advancement is not what the experience of reading fiction is about. If all we care about is advancing the plot, why read novels? We can just read Cliffs Notes.

A novel for me is an immersive experience where I feel as if I have lived it and that I’ve tasted the food and experienced the sex and experienced the terror of battle. So I want all of the detail, all of the sensory things—whether it’s a good experience, or a bad experience, I want to put the reader through it. To that mind, detail is necessary, showing not telling is necessary, and nothing is gratuitous.

I guess I find that answer partially, if not entirely, satisfying. I’m a big believer in the idea that period pieces should reflect the sexual norms of the period rather than being fantasies of consent, reciprocal pleasure, and mutuality if those things don’t make sense for the relationship and the circumstances in question. But I think this is a bit of a dodge, and doesn’t answer a larger question about Martin’s intentions. Does he write sex scenes the way he does because he’s telling stories about women coming into their power after they’ve been mistreated in gendered ways? Or does he write medieval fantasy because he’s engaged by images of women being brutalized? I tend towards a charitable reading of A Song of Ice and Fire, but this is one case where I’d really like to have that reading confirmed by the author.