re: GoT S3: Episode 6 "The Climb" <<<Book Readers Thread>>> SPOILERS

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But the thumping obviousness of everything he does has, alas, begun to grow tiresome; he’s not far from the mustache-twirling cartoon villain or, if we’re kind, a James Bondian villain. The Varys-Littlefinger colliquies were something to look forward to in the first two seasons, but it’s becoming a tiresome device when it explains everything in an overt way as if viewers would miss something if they weren’t guided straight to it. Is it a well-written speech? Sure. But it would have been a much more interesting moment had the show been able to obscure the depths of Littlefinger’s duplicitousness until that particular moment, but it seems a luxury that the novels have and, for some reason, the television show doesn’t.

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I have no problem with the TV show making Littlefinger more obvious. It is after all a TV show that has to encompass a ton of material, so some characters intentions have to be more obvious. It doesn't have the luxury the book had of slowly revealing Littlefingers intentions. For the TV show to work, some things must be plainly stated to the audience, while other things can take their time to build on.

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But one must ask: with such a talented cast, and such a wealth of material and storylines to draw from, would giving that 10% of screen time to some other character and some other story not make some sense? Perhaps the writers have some grand plan, but presently it feels as if the justification is not much beyond presenting the suffering and torture of Theon Greyjoy in all its visceral ugliness. It’s becoming hard to wait and see where they’re going with this.

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This is just another example of the book being a better medium to display Theon's transformation. In the book, we rarely saw any actual torture of Theon, but we did get to see Theon constantly obsessing over it. The TV show isn't able to portray Theon's transformation without showing the audience the pain and abuse he goes through. Without showing it, Theon's change would lose some depth.


Basically both complaints are just that the book is able to do it better, which is true for the vast majority of movies/TV shows adapted from books