FEATURE STORY

New progress update
George R. R. Martin gives the latest on his progress on TWOW and various GAME OF THRONES spinoffs.

Our days are too long,
our lives are too short.
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Read the source material before, after, or never? It's been a dilemma ever since movie producers realized they didn't always have to come up with their own ideas. Millions of books already exist, plenty with great characters and stories just waiting to be translated into a more visual medium. Filmmakers have to be clever, though, in condensing a heavy tome into a two-hour flick for a broader audience while still following their own creative instincts, all on a budget. The end result often upsets the core fans who most wanted to see their page-turners on screen in the first place. Certainly this is one thing that A Song of Ice and Fire readers have had to grapple with as HBO's Game of Thrones deviates farther and farther away from the books. But we are not the first to face this. I can only imagine the outcry from fans of those early adaptations: "Dorothy's slippers are what color?"
Generally speaking, when there's a new adaptation that catches your eye, do you prefer to 1) read the source material before watching the adaptation, 2) read it after watching it, or 3) never read it at all? Have there been exceptions to this rule? Did you read ASOIAF before or after watching Game of Thrones, and has that influenced how you treat adaptations now?
A jaded view all over again. A day with a silly but harmless tradition has now become synonymous with a bizarre phenomenon: characters getting stuck in some kind of time loop. Don't get me wrong, I usually love this plot device. Groundhog Day is my favorite Bill Murray film, "Cause and Effect" my favorite Star Trek episode, and "Majora's Mask" my favorite Legend of Zelda game. More recently, we've seen it play out on Westworld and I'm looking forward to The Good Place's second season, to say the least.
But repetition can be tiresome, too, especially when an audience has been conditioned to expect the unexpected. There are only so many ways an author can make his story surprising before his readers wise up. If he's lucky, we'll call a repetitive storyline "thematic." More likely, we'll see the supposed twist as a variation on one of the author's favorite writing tricks. Generally speaking, what plot twist do you find to be the most tiresome? What type of twist happens in A Song of Ice and Fire a little too often?
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Tower of the Hand is an unofficial companion to George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series and HBO's Game of Thrones, featuring chapter and episode guides, character profiles, family trees, and much more.
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