Just to contextualize specifically the show vs book Red Wedding: in the show it's just another sHoCkiNg tWisT spectacle, albeit one that ends up defining its season; in the book it hits right when the story's narratively been building tension between several distinct arcs and is moving towards resolving that tension, only instead to just cut those strings, metaphorically speaking, obliterating one arc entirely, ending a PoV perspective permanently (although the character ends up still being around, sort of - that got cut from the show entirely), and sending all the other story threads that were being pulled in tension flying.
It's a sickening gut punch rather than a spectacle, made all the stronger by just how the third person limited perspective PoV character chapters drag out and build tension by dividing story progression between them, versus the rapid fire way the show flits back and forth throughout the world with a third person dramatic perspective (not to mention how the show just stops bothering with taking distances into account and effectively has characters start teleporting around the world to where the showrunners wanted them).
Thinking about it a little more, it reminds me of the old line about how "you can't make an anti-war movie" because of how cinema inherently creates a sort of romanticized spectacle: when you see something like that happen in a movie or TV show it's exciting and shocking, while in text it ends up more just sort of sad and nauseating.
Yeah, the showrunners are absolute hacks who leaned as hard into the spectacle as they could, and "you can't make an anti-war movie" is less a fundamental law and more a stark reminder that even a grotesque and tragic spectacle is still a spectacle, and that making the audience feel pain and sorrow is still making them feel.
Which led to me thinking how the scene could have been adapted to film, and while I think a part of it would be fixing the pacing of the show itself to be less frenetic it would also need to slice away at the spectacle, so you just see enough of the edges to know that it's happening but after that you just don't have a pair of the PoV arcs anymore and you only get fragmentary scraps of what happened to them from things other PoV characters hear - it makes it tragic and unjust and awful instead of a thrilling spectacle.
Just to contextualize specifically the show vs book Red Wedding: in the show it's just another sHoCkiNg tWisT spectacle, albeit one that ends up defining its season; in the book it hits right when the story's narratively been building tension between several distinct arcs and is moving towards resolving that tension, only instead to just cut those strings, metaphorically speaking, obliterating one arc entirely, ending a PoV perspective permanently (although the character ends up still being around, sort of - that got cut from the show entirely), and sending all the other story threads that were being pulled in tension flying.
It's a sickening gut punch rather than a spectacle, made all the stronger by just how the third person limited perspective PoV character chapters drag out and build tension by dividing story progression between them, versus the rapid fire way the show flits back and forth throughout the world with a third person dramatic perspective (not to mention how the show just stops bothering with taking distances into account and effectively has characters start teleporting around the world to where the showrunners wanted them).
Thinking about it a little more, it reminds me of the old line about how "you can't make an anti-war movie" because of how cinema inherently creates a sort of romanticized spectacle: when you see something like that happen in a movie or TV show it's exciting and shocking, while in text it ends up more just sort of sad and nauseating.
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Yeah, the showrunners are absolute hacks who leaned as hard into the spectacle as they could, and "you can't make an anti-war movie" is less a fundamental law and more a stark reminder that even a grotesque and tragic spectacle is still a spectacle, and that making the audience feel pain and sorrow is still making them feel.
Which led to me thinking how the scene could have been adapted to film, and while I think a part of it would be fixing the pacing of the show itself to be less frenetic it would also need to slice away at the spectacle, so you just see enough of the edges to know that it's happening but after that you just don't have a pair of the PoV arcs anymore and you only get fragmentary scraps of what happened to them from things other PoV characters hear - it makes it tragic and unjust and awful instead of a thrilling spectacle.
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