Weekly Question - Better Than The Book

As readers and writers, we love to defend books above all else. If we were ever to charge into battle our war cry would be “The book was better!” and for the most part it’s accurate, but this week we’re going to try and see things from the other side.

For this week’s question we’re asking, “What are your favourite movie adaptations, and which aspects of them do you think were done better than the book(s)?”

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For me this is a tricky question to answer because it involves a series that overall let me down, yet there were quite a few things in the early seasons I thought were particularly well done.

Major Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire spoilers ahead.

Game of thrones had such an incredible start to its run, and for the first four seasons I thought it could do no wrong. I hadn’t read the books at this point and seeing such an complex story being told through so many refreshingly layered and realistic characters, on television no less, was absolutely shocking to me. I didn’t start watching until season four was wrapping up and binged the first three seasons almost without break over a single weekend. At this point in my life I cared little for reading and had never even tried to write, so I didn’t really have any conscious appreciation for how well the show was written. I just knew there was something about it that made it better than most else on television, or at least Australian television. After finishing the show I craved more, and so I decided to pick up the books. Given that I didn’t read at all my reaction to the books was different to the show, though powerful in its own way. It wasn’t so much a “Why aren’t all tv shows doing this?” moment as an “Oh this is why people read, I get it now!”

So I finished the books, and since the show took so long to film and the books even longer to write I found myself still with a tonne of time before I could get another fix of this literary drug that I had now become addicted to. So I did what a lot of people do in that situation. I went for the next best thing. I went to YouTube and started binging every theory, every news update, every interview or talk given by G.R.R.M or the showrunners/actors and basically sunk deep into the waters of fandom.

This is the part in this blog where I realise I was supposed to answer the question but have instead told a rambling story. Forgive me, you all know what it’s like when you’re given a chance to talk about your fandom. It can be hard to stop. Time to veer back toward the question.

Despite the books providing me with far more hours of entertainment than the show, I couldn’t help but find myself enjoying the show more(at least for those first four seasons). Given that the majority of my time was spent thinking about it for a good three months, I did come up with a couple reasons why that was.

The first was the actors. My attention has a tendency to wander as it is, and so often will I find that iffy acting will completely ruin the immersion of a television series or movie. Books can get away with a lot as even somewhat cringy lines of dialogue can be saved with the ability to imagine a flawless delivery. GoT might have had the odd questionably acted moment, or iffy line of dialogue but for the most part it was just minor characters and was always overshadowed by those simply jaw-dropping lines.

Next up we have Robb Stark. Robb has no PoV chapters in the books, and we don’t really see much of anything he does after calling his banners and going to war. G.R.R.M himself said he felt that showing Robb’s journey in the show was the right call and I think I know why. There are two tropes that George subverts with Ned and Robb’s stories. First with Ned we have the honourable good guy who always does everything the right way. By placing him in King’s Landing with the extremely difficult task of running the city in place of a lazy King, George endears Ned to us while setting us up to expect a long eventually satisfying story for Ned only to subvert that expectation by having Ned’s honour instead make him inadequate to deal with the people willing to forsake honour in order to get ahead which eventually leads to his death. So what does this have to do with Robb?

Ned’s death was a very tactical pivot towards setting up our next expectation. That while Ned may not have been able to defeat the corruption in King’s Landing, his son would learn from his father’s mistakes and make right what was wrong. This is reinforced when the northerners name Robb to be King in the north, elevating him to a position of power beyond what his father held and creating the assumption that we will now see him change as a result of his newfound status. Instead, Robb’s is unable to overcome his youth, inexperience and naivety and these things eventually lead to his death as well, subverting the second expectation and finally driving the point home to the reader that this story is not one of good triumphing over evil.

G.R.R.M takes us on an epic, emotional journey with Ned and Robb Stark, and I just don’t feel it’s nearly as impactful in the books where we don’t actually see the journey that leads Robb to come to be standing in Walder Frey’s dining hall.

On a side note, while I did find the scene itself far more impactful in the show, the book version of “The Red Wedding” does leave a very intriguing question open to the reader’s interpretation. See, in the books Robb doesn’t marry the easterner Talisa but the daughter of a Lannister bannerman named Jeyne Westerling. Jeyne does not attend the wedding and is spared her husband’s fate leading many to ask. “Was she in reality planted by Tywin Lannister? Did he have her seduce Robb in order to trick him into breaking his vow to the Walder Frey?”

I think I’ve rambled on enough for now so I'll finish this here. You can give your own answers in a blog, leave them in a comment below, or write them on a scroll placed inside a bottle and throw it in the ocean. I’ll find it. to use #betterthanthebook.

Art Credit

Cover           - Chris Caviness

Background - Michael Komarck