Why I won't be reading A Clash Of Kings until I've seen season two of Game Of Thrones

[andrewducker]

I loved the book of Game Of Thrones. But only once I'd read the TV series.

I know this is an unpopular opinion in some circles, so I thought I'd
explain why this is the case (and thus why you might feel differently to
me).

I tried to read it twice before I saw the TV series. And although I could
tell the writing style was good I found it almost impossible to follow,
because I just can't "meet" that many people at once and keep them straight
in my head.

I have the same problem in work. I frequently work in teams of 30+ people
(and my last major project was about 70 people), and it takes me _at least_
four interactions with a person before I have a hope in hell of remembering
their name, and frequently several more, if their name hasn't come up in
those interactions.

Names just don't mean anything to me. They're random collections of
syllables that just happen to be associated with a person. And remember
random collections of things is not what my brain is good at (I failed
A-Level Chemistry because it was basically an exercise in remembering all
of the reactions that organic molecules have, and those would just slide
off of my brain like hot butter off a lipid-resistant duck).

And so I read the first chapter, managed to keep the people in it mostly
straight, despaired when I was instantly introduced to another group of
more than half a dozen people (and it became obvious that those earlier
people were mostly not going to be integral to the plot, but were just
there to introduce us to plot), and then when the third lot of people
introduced I quietly put the book to one side.

The TV series helped enormously. Suddenly I was dealing with people. I
could keep track of them easily, because they looked different. And
because they kept using each other's names, I quickly picked up who they
were.

Which meant that after I finished the TV series, I could pick up the book,
follow it without problems, and enjoy all of the extra detail it contained.

So, when the next TV series comes out, I will be watching that, and then
reading the book, so that I can enjoy its expansion of what I enjoyed. But
not before.

Comments

[andrewhickey.livejournal.com]

I have *exactly* this problem with many, many books. I find it especially hard with SF/F, but suspect that's just because of the different names in different cultures - I can remember more easily which ones John and Sarah are than Gartak and N'l'kuma. And there are people I've worked with for three years where it takes me a minute to remember their names.

[steer.livejournal.com]

I can remember more easily which ones John and Sarah are than Gartak and N'l'kuma.

I have exactly this.

Si!

[lsanderson.livejournal.com]

I had the same issue with War and Peace. I'd pick it up from time to time, and bail around the 57th character introduction (or the 57th of a character's name's variation, whichever came first). After I watched a BBC miniseries, I flew through the book. (For some values of flying.)

[steer.livejournal.com]

I know what you mean about keeping people's names straight. Game of thrones (the books) is at my borderline for what I can do. I am fine with the "Western" names but once it goes to the "exotic" ones I'm more lost. It helps if I develop the mental discipline of "thinking the name aloud" several times when I first come across it. (This also helps if I'm meeting large groups of people).

Retrospectively, I think my reading process is to sort of vaguely and lossily parse the character string. It wasn't until the TV series I realised that a leading house is Baratheon not Barathorn -- despite having read all of the books multiple times. The lossy matching seems to work best on names somewhat like names I regularly encounter in real life. This means I find it much easier to read a book if the names are "western" and particularly if they are English.

Incidentally, the books do contain tables of the families and their interactions in the appendix which I believe are spoiler-free by book. By the last part I mean that if you consult the appendix of a book it will not spoil that book (but might spoil previous ones -- so if you read the appendix family table in book 5 you will spoil books 1-4 but not 5). This is tremendously handy for the "So if X is married to Y but brother of Z then who the hell is that guy who seems to be related to all three?" moments

[andrewducker]

Julie had the same problem as you, with the result that she still jokingly refers to the series as "Game Of Thorns".

[alitheapipkin.livejournal.com]

It was the dragon lot that I continually mis-parsed.

[alitheapipkin.livejournal.com]

I generally find I'm okay as long as the names are sufficiently different from each other and I have context to help me remember who they are. I struggle where there are lots of names I can't pronounce or lots of shared names - one of the reasons One Hundred Years of Solitude is such hard going is that half the characters have the same name. Having said that, I haven't picked up the latest of the series yet because I can't remember who everyone is (he never seems to stop introducing new characters which doesn't help!)

You are far from the only person I've come across who has this issue BTW.

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

I was never able to read Dune until after I'd seen the movie.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I think of myself as bad at remembering people and their intrigues, but _A Game of Thrones_ had just enough redundancy for me to pretty much keep things straight.

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

I had the same problem when I watched the show (which was before I read the book) so I just assigned them all Harry Potter character names and then suddenly I could follow it. Otherwise it was all these very similar looking dark haired people, the fat drunk king, a lot of similar looking blonde haired people, a dwarf and a male model who was somehow the king of the Klingons barbarians.

By the time I read the book, though, I had them down pat. I'm not going to read book two until next year because I don't want spoilers for season two.

[alitheapipkin.livejournal.com]

I'm intrigued - did you assign HP names at random or did you have some sort of system? I can see a few tenuous links for some of the characters but I'm really struggling with most of them!

[andrewducker]

http://bart-calendar.livejournal.com/2091304.html is the first one he wrote.

They're about a week apart after that point, and all tagged, so you can work your way through them by reading up the way on this page here:
http://bart-calendar.livejournal.com/tag/game%20of%20thrones

I was terribly entertained.

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

I not only had a system, but did episode summaries for other people who had trouble following the characters - and had comments to the effect that it helped people understand the show better.

Bran = Harry

King Baratheon = Hufflepuff King

Jon Snow = The Mudblood

Khal Drogo = Muggle King

Ned Stark = Gryffindor warrior

Sansa = Ginny Weasley

Etc...

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

This is the link - not sure why my original link didn't work.

http://bart-calendar.livejournal.com/tag/game%20of%20thrones

[alitheapipkin.livejournal.com]

Very entertaining! I was surprised by the Lannisters as Ravenclaw to start with but then I decided that I agree the dragon lot make better Slytherines.

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

And, yeah, you have to have the ones who can talk to reptiles be Syltherins.

[alitheapipkin.livejournal.com]

I had forgotten about that until I read your summaries, Dany and the dragons bored me rather in the books.

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

She's much more interesting for some reason in the series than in the first book - even though she does exactly the same things. I can't figure out exactly why.

[alitheapipkin.livejournal.com]

I found that too. The actress managed to be quite engaging somehow but I can't put my finger on exactly how.

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

It may be that she is the only "adult" female character who isn't a complete idiot (Ned's wife with the kidnapping she didn't have to do that kicked off the whole war) crazy (Ned's Wife's Sister), evil (The queen), a slave or a prostitute.

Strong, smart non evil female characters are compelling and she's the only one they gave us.

[alitheapipkin.livejournal.com]

Possibly. We do get more good adult female characters as the series goes on.

[alitheapipkin.livejournal.com]

Ah, I see, I took you a bit too literally and assumed you had assigned every character a named HP character; assigning houses etc makes much more sense.

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I only assigned specific names when they were close enough. I had no problem, for example, calling that little shit who is now on the throne "Malfoy" or calling Littlefinger "Sirious Black" but others I mostly just needed organized in some matter that made sense to me.

[alitheapipkin.livejournal.com]

Malfoy I can totally see, Littlefinger as Sirius Black is more of struggle because I have rather a soft spot for the HP character and don't see him as greedy, conniving little turn-coat but I'll freely admit that is more influenced by some very well written slash fic I read about him and Remus Lupin than his actual canon portrayal!

[spacelem.livejournal.com]

I agree. I love books, but I'm very bad at visualising things, and often have no idea exactly what's going on (I have similar problems with roleplaying, which is why I like a map at the very least).

I had some friends who were initially keen on Lord of the Rings, but later said they were never going to watch the films because they would spoil the books. I, on the other hand, loved the films, and found the books much easier to follow afterwards.

I fully support watching the film first, and then reading the book second, I think you get more out of it that way. It is important that it is a good adaptation of the book though.

[strawberryfrog.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's a general problem in fiction, made worse when the readership is nerdy. I struggled with Game Of Thrones for a few chapters, re-reading the character names. It got better.

In general I prefer SF to fantasy, and fantasy with actual magical plotlines to political scheming. So I should be bored senseless by Game Of Thrones. But it's a superiour example of its genre-niche. I could see how people could be annoyed that it's more swords and soap-opera than swords and sorcery.

[andrewducker]

I think that the author of that piece falls into the "I want my fantasy novels to evoke feeling X, therefore that's what fantasy is supposed to be like." trap.

Personally, nowadays I'm largely about the character stuff, not the plot. I've seen enough plot to find most of them trite or reminiscient of other plots I've already seen. Character seems to have more possibilities to me.

[strawberryfrog.livejournal.com]

I was actually looking for Ursula K. Le Guin's "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie" essay, which sadly doesn't seem to be On The Internets.

IIRC, she gives an example of how one can take a piece of prose about people disagreeing and turn it into bad fantasy just by changing details (names, clothing, adjectives).

This could have been an error made by A Game Of Thrones. But oddly, it isn't.

[andrewducker]

If you find it I'd love to see it.

I agree that the modern world dressed in fantasy clothing is much less interesting than something with decent worldbuilding. And I think that GRRM succeeds because it has that depth of worldbuilding that makes it feel internally consistent, while also clearly not being our world.

Without The Wall, The White Walkers, Dragons, etc. I suspect it would be much less successful (even though they've played a very small part in what I've seen so far).

[alitheapipkin.livejournal.com]

The fantasy elements do get stronger as the series goes on.

[alitheapipkin.livejournal.com]

By which I mean there is more magic later on (sorry, I realised that comment could be taken several different ways and my meaning probably wasn't the most obvious).

[andrewducker]

I'm looking forward to finding out what treasure type the White Walkers are.

[andrewhickey.livejournal.com]

If you look in http://books.google.com/books/about/The_language_of_the_night.html?id=ksOjjuy3issC you can read the whole essay if you search for Poughkeepsie within the text (I know this because I had to refer to the essay for a piece in my own most recent book).

[strawberryfrog.livejournal.com]

"Would the real Beowulf please stand up an alliterate" - thanks, it's been ages since I read that.

[strawberryfrog.livejournal.com]

I also suspect that there will be very few new characters in Book 2 onwards - a most, people who have been mentioned in passing before will have larger roles.

[alitheapipkin.livejournal.com]

Nope, he keeps introducing new characters and some of them become major POV characters for a while.

[erratio.livejournal.com]

I have the opposite problem, where I have no issues tracking the 5 million protagonists in those books but when I tried to watching the first couple of episodes I got really lost trying to differentiate the characters because my facial recognition is below par. The difference between Robb and Jon (or Ned and Robert) is way more salient to me than the difference between two dark-haired teenage boys or two aging men in furs.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, I figured there would be people with the opposite problem to me. It's all spectra :->

I wonder if it's the same spectrum, or two separate ones.

(see also: prosopagnosia)

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Heh. That is interesting. What about characters the TV series elides or combines or whatever - does your generally-increased grip of the book manage to deal with those regardless? (Note: I haven't seen the TV, I'm just assuming that there will have been elision/combination/whatever, and that the book will still be more complex than the TV. Because that is the kind of assumption that I make.)

[andrewducker]

There are some characters who are mentioned in the books who I didn't catch their mention in the TV series, but it did a pretty good job of fitting in all of the people who are more than passing in the book.

There are events that are shortened, or missed out, in the TV series, and that was what I enjoyed from it.

[alitheapipkin.livejournal.com]

I spent the entire of the first episode trying to work out which of the dark haired teenagers at Winterfell was Theon Greyjoy.

[khbrown.livejournal.com]

Could you use Hungarian Notation, or other variable naming scheme?

[andrewducker]

I like that! I was reading about Hungarian Notation (and the misunderstanding of it) just this morning.

And you could prefix people's names with their surname. Or their affiliation. Or how good/evil they seem to be.

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

I flunked A level chem for pretty much the same reason -- my brain just rebelled at the learning by rote of meaningless junk. First year stuff made sense though, and that I just learnt right off. I can still probably remember how to name organic compounds, because it's a system and it makes sense.

I remember details rather than names. I can meet a person once and they tell me something about themselves and that'll stick.

[tiny-vice.livejournal.com]

AGREE.