#fandomentals

...the logistics here are absurd. In a period of crisis in King’s Landing, the High Septon snuck off to Dorne, all sneaky-like, and annulled Rhaegar’s marriage? When 'where’s Rhaegar' and 'where’s Lyanna' were two of the most pressing political questions in the realm? And nobody noticed the High Septon taking a vacation? It might be easier if you have teleporter access—I don’t know. Then there’s the fact that annulments don’t work like this. It’s not a divorce. It makes the marriage as if it had never happened, which is serious, serious business in this case. Rhaegar’s wife Elia was a Princess of Dorne. They had two children together, one of them a boy. Annulling the marriage would have been a grave insult to Elia and her family, and taken Elia’s children out of the line of succession for the throne. There needs to be a good reason for this. Political, legal, religious, something. Mind you, the show has botched annulment before, with Sansa’s marriage to Tyrion (so she could be married off to Ramsay and raped). ... Next is the issue of how much of a dick show!Rhaegar is for this. Book!Rhaegar was thoughtless and reckless bordering on callous already, but show!Rhaegar’s actions are incredibly cruel. He left Elia and their children in the capital with his racist, murderous, dangerously insane father, headed off to Elia’s own birthplace to unilaterally and secretly annul their marriage and remarry his mistress, and when he came back, he pressed Elia’s relatives and countrypeople into fighting and dying for his family. The family he’d just kicked Elia and their children out of (while leaving them as hostages to her brother’s good behaviour). Just…holy crap, this guy is a massive douchebag. And finally, Elia Martell herself. Humiliated, raped, and murdered, along with her children, never receiving justice. On top of all this, we’ve now had the reveal that her husband threw her aside like so much trash. Without even mentioning her name, in spite of a powerful scene where her brother demands that her murderer acknowledge what he did to her, by name. Why is this reveal here? To serve Jon. To make Jon more special. For that specialness to occur, another woman had to be mistreated. It wasn’t necessary.

An adaptation can get away with a lot of changes to the source material as long it stays faithful to the tone. A Song of Ice and Fire certainly has its serious and dark moments, but Martin counterbalances them with moments of genuine humanity. He also serves them up with a good deal of irony and black humor. In many cases, the reader is left wondering if they should be horrified by what they're reading or burst out laughing. Almost none of this makes it into GoT. Most of the moments of humanity are cut as is most of the humor, though they do occasionally try to add their own humorous moments, most of which are painfully unfunny. It's almost like the writers and showrunners have an inferiority complex. They want to show the world that fantasy can be a serious and adult genre too so they crank the "mature content" up to eleven, consequences to the story be damned.

Apologies for the interruption, Fandomentals fans, but we're back!