(Part 2) Best products from r/gameofthrones

"Well, unfortunately, any kind of exposure indirectly helps ratings. Of course, nothing will boost ratings more than the show itself being good, but the more people that can be attracted to it, the better chance there is of their ratings staying high or (I'm sure) even increasing."

Well, I don't know anyone who would start watching/reading because they saw a direwolf iphone skin, but since your so doggedly determined that keychains are going to sell the show more effectively than something legitimate like word of mouth, I take it that's how you became a fan. You can have that one, I suppose.


"It sounds like you're still stubbornly defending the idea that he "sold out" without offering enough support for that claim. If you can somehow demonstrate that the literary quality sharply decreased after he shared his writing with other types of ventures, I'll believe it."

I understand you're a newbie to the ASoIaF world, and therefore a little late to the party. I've been there for the 8 years of blog posts about the Giants and Wildcards and of him hocking his latest piece of craphenalia in real time. You haven't. I don't get into this "I've been reading since before it was cool, so I'm better than you" rhetoric alot of the old guard seem to - that's silly - but it does give me better insight to the things we are discussing here than someone who just discovered these were books last summer.

I'm not going to sit here and go through with you every piece of merchandise until you are satisfied. In fact, I won't go through any of them with you other than the things I've already mentioned. It is apparent that you can only find your way to HBO.com

Uh, AGoT ACoK ASoS AFfC ADwD

I don't really have the inclination to get too involved in this so I just gave you the Amazon links. There's a star rating near the book titles. These ratings summarize the quality of the product listed. As you can see the first three books of the series have exceptional ratings: 4.5+ stars, but then starting with Feast and continuing through Dance (current) you see these drop down to 3 stars. There's your demonstration. I'm not going to continue to take you by the hand and point to things as obvious as this.


"There's the Cyanide's track record, which is mostly just a bunch of cycling-related games, and it's pretty clear from the post you linked that GRRM declined Cyanide at the time because he basically felt they were too amateur a studio to be able to do a good job on the game. Years later, (years!) this little company is still determined to do it, especially now that they've opened up another studio and hired enough people to pull the game off"

That's pretty bold to pass that off as fact based on the information in the blog post. We'll go ahead and chalk that up in the "good faith" and "benefit of the doubt" column.

"I think AFfC and ADWD should be considered special cases given what it took to write them."

I don't know exactly what you're intending with this, but no. It shouldn't.

I've been reading Game of Thrones and Philosophy, and early on in the book the author highligts Dany's core beliefs about magic and how closely she keeps it in her thoughts. She takes the maegi's prophecy close, and [ADwD](/b "and the Green Graces") amongst others related to her family lineage; they're close and held tight. When [ASoS](/b "Jorah is punted"), it's a fulfilment of a prophecy but when the incident happened, I wasn't surprised she recalled the maegi almost like it guided her decision in the first place. When she ate the heart for Drogo, she recognized the political and social advantage to it, but also believed in the spiritual aspect. Failure to finish it meant the prophecy would be false for her, and her entire reason d'etre would have been a lie. For this she wears the belief in foresight and magic like armor, as duty and honor did for Eddard.

A place like the House of the Undying prays on people who divination inclined like Dany. When a man or women holds just a small place in their heart for the higher mysteries, the Warlocks can achieve power and gain respect (although wide spread loathing). For this reason, I feel that is why they are not as powerful globally as the Lord of Fire; they can achieve their aims in Qarth because of their roots.

Dany escaped partly by Drogon and her realizing the limits of the warlocks hold on her --in the book, at least, the show credits the dragons entirely. The warlocks found and exploited her belief in magic early on, put her to the test, and lost gravely. It seems no noble born leader gets to the age of 25 without defeating some savage opponents, and at 16 we get to see first hand her path to greater glory. History's own Alexander didn't conquer nations without a good Prophecy or two.

>Jerusalem instead opened its gates in surrender, and according to Josephus, Alexander was shown the book of Daniel's prophecy, presumably chapter 8, which described a mighty Greek king who would conquer the Persian Empire. He spared Jerusalem and pushed south into Egypt.[82]

The thing with cosplay is you have to choose whether to go recognizable or not. In some geek circles (like Star Trek) people go out of their way to be obscure characters. Since you're looking at a screening, you could go a bit off the path, but I still doubt there are that many hardcore fans out there (yet?) who know every sigil. For that reason you may want to stuck to more obvious identifiers.

If you go with a House (my recommendation for price and ease), you could make a cheap and comfortable costume based around a tabard. For that you only need some cloth remnants (you can get them cheap from any store that sells fabric) and compatible street clothes. Wear boots of some kind, pants-that-aren't-jeans, and a long-sleeve shirt that ideally is in the right color scheme of your chosen House. If your boots don't look right and/or you can't lace them over your pants, you can use a cloth remnant to wrap around the bottom of your pants, around the boots and just X-lace it to your leg using another strip of cloth. The same trick can be used on your forearms if your sleeves don't look that great. When it's done in matching colors it can look really good for something so simple.

The key to this though is the tabard that'll cover up the rest of the street clothes. It's the only piece requiring real crafting skills. Make a tabard from the cloth remnants; you can cut out a sigil design for the front of it and just sew it. It can be as nice as you want to make it, like contrast-color borders, or a quartered pattern, etc. I just googled up this guide. I'm sure there are many, many more online.

For accent you can belt it with any wide leather belt. If you can get your hands on (or make) a leather ring belt you'll look even better. Any knife/dagger/sword can help complete the look, though a long blade is usually not that comfortable to deal with when sitting in modern public settings. If you do have leather availability, a simply set of vambraces can also cover the ends of your sleeves and look nice.

The beauty of that is the ability to take it off and be wearing street clothes very easily.

Oh and another thought I had a bit ago for cosplay on the cheap, if you want to go the Maester route. These link toys (another example) are in every generic store, Target, Wal-Mart, etc., for next to nothing. They are very lightweight, come in different shapes, and are easy to link to whatever length of chain you want with whatever color combination. They're a little big, but it's hard to beat the price, and an exaggerated chain would help with cosplay identification. The plastic also should take spraypaint very easily if you want a shiny metallic look. The main drawback to Maester though is the robes. Even if you can find or make them, robes can be heavy, bulky, and hot, so fair warning.

Middle school art teacher here! Good job! You'd get an A for sure! One thing that I like doing with my students portrait art works is see if it can fool a computer, I take a camera phone and see if the phone recognizes the picture as a human face. (Note, this doesn't work well with dark skinned or darker images, computer AI is dumb, but I guess if Skynet takes over dark skinned people will be able to move around undetected.) Anyways, your picture passes my camera test! So that's cool!


Constructive Criticism: Is this the reference? Overall, you placed major structures of the face well in relation to each other, but you drew them to big compared to the size of the head. This raised his eyes further from the center of the face upward and shortened his forehead. It's probably easier to fix the head shape vs shrinking the eyes, nose and mouth. To fix this next time, you could move his hair upward (expand the top of his head). If it ends up going a bit off page, that's ok. Proportions are very tough to get and until you've drawn a lot you're going to have a tough time visualizing where things are supposed to be on the page. I'm not sure your training, or past experience, but I would look into the term "eye-length", or if you're using google "eye-length drawing". In my class, I use some pages out of Drawing The Head & Figure by Jack Hamm and from other sources to help students. I'd look into those older books to help because they cover the same stuff as newer books (human anatomy hasn't changed much, lol) and the older books are often cheaper.


Keep this drawing. Keep practicing and try to draw the same image in a few years to challenge yourself to do better. ♥♥♥ : )

I don't necessarily disagree that this would be a copyright violation of the official maps (I haven't seen them, and don't know how much OP lifted); but just to add some thoughts re: fan-fic works: just because a work is licensed doesn't mean it needs to be, and they are certainly not always licensed. The trademark ("Star Wars") most certainly would need to be licensed, but fan spin-offs wouldn't necessarily need to be licensed unless they centered around, e.g. a character with a developed personality from the original. So, say, a fan fiction about young Ned Stark would probably need to be licensed (Salinger v Colting), but a fan fiction of an unrelated family from Mole's Town (that doesn't otherwise infringe the trademarks of GoT) would probably not be. A recent Star Trek universe case that might have put some finer bounds on this was settled this year; the defendants didn't survive summary judgment (meaning it wasn't clearly fair use) and they would have had to go through a lengthy trial to determine whether the accumulation of copied elements constituted infringement. Not fun.

Also looking at the official map alone doesn't make it a copy- if he did all the individual city artwork himself, picked and chose what cities to include, took artistic liberties with shading, borders, the compass rose, etc., then it's a pretty gray area whether he infringed the copyright of the original maps. I see that his map does have "A Song of Ice and Fire" at the top, which he would obviously have to scrub to sell.

On the other hand, methinks if the fine borders of the map, which obviously can't be derived from the stories independently of other copyrighted maps, were copied from those maps, that would weigh pretty heavily against OP. But then, see The Lexicon, whose authors all but won a suit against J.K. Rowling (she "won" but they were allowed to publish their book with some directly copied passages removed).

I also hear The First Law Trilogy by Joe Abercrombie is pretty genre breaking and similar to the "grittiness" of ASOIAF. I read the first chapter of Best Served Cold (not from the trilogy but same world) and liked it so far.



EDIT: (added link to Amazon) I would also like to plug The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson. I enjoyed the political maneuvering of Dalinar and his son, the 'fuck yeah' moments of Kaladin, the worldbuilding of Shallan's sketches and various interludes, the neat stormlight Lashing/soulcasting magic system, interesting pace, and overall excellent quality of the book. I don't think it had the same tone as Martin but I enjoyed it far more than Dance. Just my $.02!

A really good writer that does a good job at making everyone fleshed out, is A. Lee Martinez.

If you like high-fantasy read In the Company of Ogres

If you enjoy the supernatural elements read Gil's all fright diner

If you want a detective read the Automatic detective

If you want a modern mythological read Divine Misfortune

If you want a a strong female lead with bouts of comedy try A nameless witch

If you want a book that has plenty of monsters try Monster

If you want eldritch horrors threatening the world try Chasing the Moon

And if you want a contrast to the heroes saving the day here is a story of a kobold housemaid who ends up in a perilous situtation Too Many curses

I can't stress enough how wonderful this writer is, his ability to make likable and strong characters is phenominal even when he jumps genres.

I strongly recommend that you pick up at least one of his books, his books were released a while ago and they should be fairly cheap. The Amazon prices were under $10 USD so it shouldn't be hard to get one or two, but he does a good job at making sure no-one you meet is just another cog to play a role.

This is 2 wolves short of being an Amazon best seller.

For those of you who have no idea what I am talking about please read the hilarious Amazon comments.

(I couldn't resist the joke OP. Sorry!)

South of the Frostfangs, you have "The Gorge"

This is essentially a Grand Canyon-style gorge with a river at the bottom. In short, climbing the wall would be easier than repelling down the gorge, sailing across the river, and then climbing up the other side.

Westwatch-By-The-Bridge is not named so for shits and giggles. It is the site of the Bridge of Skulls. The Bridge of Skulls has a long history of being the source of many wildling vs. Night's Watch battles (and where the Lord of Bones began his famous uniform). For years, the NW has held off the wildlings in this funnel of a bridge that crosses the gorge.

As far as sailing goes, it becomes a bit tricky, logistically, for White Walkers (Others). The Others have minions called "Wights". These are people who have been turned to the Others' cause via death and reanimation. They're semi-intelligent zombies with no recollection of their past. In order to sail a fleet across the Bay of Ice, they'd expose themselves to those northern waters that are very treacherous, as well as risking a landing among the Mountain Clans of the North (landing on Mountains is not fun). They would need to sail much further south in order to make it worth while, putting them very near to Winterfell loyalists and again, being met with opposition.

Finally, you have the Bay of Seals. This bay is notoriously awful to cross. The waters are choppy and sink ships brave enough to conquer it more often than not, and there are rumors of beasts living in the waters there. If anyone were to brave the waters of The Bay of Seals, they would be seen by the towers at Eastwatch and met on shore with forces.

In short, The Wall works in conjunction with several "natural" barriers preventing Wights, White Walkers, and Wildlings from going around it. The only sure-fire way into Westeros is to go through The Wall.

EDIT: For more in-depth looks into the geography, literary context, and connections in the books, check out Beyond the Wall. It's an excellent read that can answer a lot of questions you might have about the series/lore.

Just some ideas from a brief search.

House Stark tournament banner, no prime shipping

Really awesome mug, Prime eligible

Collectible doll thing. I'm not into these but one of my friends is.

I have them, they're good if you like comics.

Volume one

Volume two

Pretty unrepresentative choice of reviews to display. A Storm of Swords had a 4.5 star rating on Amazon in November 2006. (link)

They aren't even through the first book yet, and each volume takes like a year to come out, so I'm not sure if they are even worth checking out yet.

Volume 1

Volume 2

I can do you one better, I can give you 3 wolves

Have you tried Amazon reviews?

http://www.amazon.com/Dance-Dragons-Song-Fire-Book/dp/0553801473/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1319141391&sr=8-1

I found all of mine on Amazon! https://www.amazon.com/Calhoun-Thrones-House-Tournament-Banner/dp/B012EVJ2WO

Upvote for having the same problem as me!! I recently started on "The Name of the Wind" by Patrick Rothfuss. I believe it has two books so far; I usually look for series since I get so wrapped up in the stories. So far, I'm completely entertained and enthralled with the story.

Amazon Description

Yeah so supposedly GRRM was working on a companion book with the guy that runs westeros.org.

But apparently it ended up being an anthology of sorts with essays about ASOIAF from various writers. The reviews don't look that good.


http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Wall-Exploring-Martins-Thrones/dp/1936661748/ref=sr_1_17?ie=UTF8&qid=1345217859&sr=8-17&keywords=a+song+of+ice+and+fire



There's also a map book coming out this Fall.


But really, most things about the series including a lot of the background info can be found in the wikis.

Targaryen Banner

Stark Banner

The Stark and Lannister banners came from Amazon. I think the Night's Watch and Targaryen ones are from Hot Topic.

here you go

Seems likely.

AGOT

ACOK

ASOS

AFFC

ADWD


Only A Dance With Dragons? Huh?

Is this the right one?
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1118161998/ref=olp_product_details?ie=UTF8&me=&seller=

Here's how the Jaime/Cersei scene should have gone:

http://www.amazon.com/Storm-Swords-Song-Fire-Book/dp/055357342X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1398364588&sr=1-1&keywords=A+Storm+of+Swords

http://www.amazon.com/Dance-Dragons-Song-Fire-Book/dp/0553801473

And the 5th book costs as much as the other 4 combined... whee!

I bought all five last week *twiddle*

Because none of the others include it, either?

Got mine off amazon, it says 1216. http://www.amazon.com/Storm-Swords-Song-Fire-Book/dp/055357342X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1311560561&sr=8-1

My bad.