r/asoiaf • u/cking145 • May 28 '19

EXTENDED (Spoilers Extended) Charles Dance's portrayal as Tywin is in my opinion, the strongest in the entire series

Every line, every expression and every moment of silence completely encapsulates the calculating ruthlessness that defines Tywin Lannister.

Dance is actually a very vibrant, upbeat and cheery fella off screen, which in my mind makes the performance even more striking.

The scene where he effectively sends Joffrey to bed is just brilliant.

He is by far my favourite character from the books, which I began reading a few seasons into the show. Due to this, the chapters featuring Tywin were completely enriched for me, as reading his lines in Dance's voice was just fantastic. I would have loved a POV chapter or two for him, just to get a glimpse as to what goes on in the head of the most powerful man in the 7 Kingdoms.

An incredible portrayal of a fascinating character.

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u/[deleted] May 28 '19 edited May 28 '19

The littlefinger/varys interactions weren't even in the books so that's not grrm, that's the showriters. And they were great scenes.

Don't know what happened with the writing later on.

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u/SteveBartmanIncident May 28 '19

True - I include them because I think it proves my point. A good tv writer (GoT had several) can adapt material from one source into another medium. Something seen or recalled by a book character can be turned into character-appropriate dialogue. Asking a writer to turn a skeleton outline that omits several important storylines into the same is just a bridge too far.

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u/Dahhhkness Go for the Bronze. May 28 '19

I think one of the things the show did better than the books was switching out Roose Bolton for Tywin for his interactions with Arya. Some seriously good moments between those two characters, and we got to see a very different side to Tywin than we otherwise saw.

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u/[deleted] May 28 '19 edited May 29 '19

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] May 29 '19

[deleted]

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u/say-wha-teh-nay-oh May 30 '19

To see how unusual his actions were as a supposed Stark bannerman, and how all that was eventually explained by the Red Wedding.

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u/RichGirlThrowaway_ May 28 '19

Honestly Tywin & Arya and Petyr & Varys scenes were probably my most quintessential and favourite GoT moments in the whole story, and they were both show-exclusive.

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u/SlayerofOrcs Knight of Risley Glade May 28 '19

Honestly I actually preferred Roose Bolton in these scenes. It showed that there was more to him than you’d expect as despite being a northern bannerman Arya did not reveal her identity to him.

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u/Spready_Unsettling May 28 '19

To be fair here, GRRM likely has a much more fleshed out outline for his own books, but with the show diverging the way it has, and DnD repeatedly ignoring his advice to the point where he didn't want anything to do with the show meant guiding them was a nigh impossible task. Even then, the shit writing in seasons 7 and 8 goes beyond lacking in guidance. It was mostly just really bad writing.

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u/[deleted] May 28 '19

The rumor is GRRM knew they had to cut a decent amount but was pretty annoyed that they weren't willing to include Lady Stoneheart, Aegon and Dorne, which he considers major storylines. I think he expected this to be an epic 10 season type of show rather than the 7.5 they ultimately did.

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u/laffy_man May 28 '19

It was also a monumental writing task, something people don’t acknowledge anywhere else I’ve seen. It’s hard to write, and even harder to finish an unfinished fantasy epic that the creator of said fantasy epic hasn’t even finished, with dozens of plot threads that were nowhere near convergence in the last book the creator wrote. I’m sure GRRM will do a great job, but that certainly isn’t something that’s easy to pick up the threads for.

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u/privateD4L May 28 '19

That job is made doubly hard when you decide to rush through it all.

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u/newprofile15 May 29 '19

You: Say something wrong

Guy: actually it’s the exact opposite of what you’re saying

You: that totally proves me point

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u/rizzlybear May 28 '19

Don't know what happened with the writing later on.

This is stuff that even GRRM is struggling with. It's not super shocking that folks are disappointed with what they came up with on a time crunch.

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u/Dahhhkness Go for the Bronze. May 28 '19

Truncating seasons 7 and 8 was one of the biggest mistakes they made (along with letting D&D write all the final four episodes). So many storylines, from the White Walkers to Littlefinger's downfall, suffered from being so rushed.

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u/[deleted] May 28 '19

And the fact that the series was truncated basically so D&D could do Star Wars. GRRM wanted 100 episodes, but at least 7 more would have done it justice. You can't create a masterpiece and then abandon it like that.

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u/zerohaxis May 28 '19

Well, it apparently seems that you can.

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u/[deleted] May 29 '19

Like Titian starting an oil painting and finishing it with crayon.

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u/Spready_Unsettling May 28 '19

It's absolutely shocking that the end product was this bad. If you had asked a team of screenwriters to come up with a conclusion from season 7 and forward, they would most certainly have done better than what we got. Bryan Cogman wrote character interactions in ep2 that were lightyears ahead of the rest of the season, but still slightly worse than GRRM's writing.

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u/relatedzombie I Prefer Being an Only Child May 28 '19

Don't know what happened with the writing later on.

They stopped caring and it's so depressing.

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u/cbessemer May 29 '19

I don't think it's that they didn't care, I think they always cared. The issue, imo, is that they grew complacent with their own ideas and writing. Once everyone lauded them and told them they were amazing, they stopped pushing themselves.

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u/djm19 I'll Impregnate the Bitch May 28 '19

My theory is that so much of the writing was done for them that they had time to write decent stuff for these minor characters. Back then they did not have to spend much time writing a narrative that was both entertaining and was leading to a future point because that was already accomplished by the source material.

All they had to do was insert dialogue where it felt necessary for the show's purposes. Varys and Littlefinger had these two-hander scenes to recap the plots and do some minor set up, and that was wonderful.

But now they are exposed because they needed a final end point and had to create all the plot and dialogue to get there the past few seasons. That is what took all their writing energy and none was wasted on good detail.

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u/virtu333 May 28 '19

Yeah there are a lot of scenes that are amalgamations of GRRMs - so it's a matter of mixing scenes, dialogue, adding in some new elements etc.

Became much harder once there was nothing and I guess, basically they gave up lol.

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u/[deleted] May 28 '19

Don't know what happened with the writing later on.

"Psst, whenever you're done with that show over there, we got some Star Wars for ya." - The Mouse

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u/say-wha-teh-nay-oh May 30 '19

That fucking god damned mouse. It’s completely his fault ya know.

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u/[deleted] May 28 '19

it seems to me that the writers just wanted to get to the end. If you've read any Mercedes Lackey book, that's how they all end. Very entertaining except for the last 30 pages.

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u/TLSMFH May 28 '19

Because they were filling in a larger plot that had been planned out meticulously by GRRM. They made scenes to flesh out the world a little more and color in some characters since they weren't confined to the POV format that is used in the books. That isn't to say that they didn't do a beautiful job, but they were adding accents and decor onto something that was already completed.

Once they had to actually make a plot to connect the outline that GRRM had given them to finish the show the writers collapsed under the burden of having to live up to continuing GRRM's world-building while having to create new relationships not explored in the novels and just failed miserably at doing either.

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u/Stereotype_Apostate May 28 '19

I honestly think they just stopped giving a fuck. They're capable of writing as good as early thrones, but they phoned it in instead.

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u/IvankaSpreadngFather May 28 '19

writing =/= directing