Fandom: God There’s Like NO Content Anymore. I Wish We Could Get More Art And Fanfics :(((

THE DANCE OF DRAGONS for the Game of Thrones: Season 5 blu-ray

Last year I had the opportunity to work on an animated featurette for Game of Thrones! 

The Dance of Dragons is a 20 minutes animation based on G.R.R. Martin’s novella The Princess and the Queen, which takes place 200 years before the events in Game of Thrones. It tells the story of the struggle in which Targaryen turned against Targaryen, resulting in civil war and destroying most of their dragons in the process.

In addition to being in the blu-ray, it was shown at a few events in the run-up to the season 6 premiere. Pretty much a dream project, thanks to the people at  Buddha Jones + LAssociates - particularly the producer Adam Vadnais.

(Tumblr // Twitter // Instagram)

(Just a note: I was in charge of drawing the characters + dragons; the colours and background were handled by other people for the finished product. So it looks fairly different to these frames.) 

only one bed

morning after dialogue

"Please, don't make this awkward."

"Did you know that you snore quite a lot?"

"We don't have to talk about it."

"You stole my blanket and fought me for it."

"I need to use the bathroom, could you let me go please?"

"See? That was alright, wasn't it?"

"Never thought you would be a cuddler."

"You're seriously like an octopus."

"How did you sleep? I slept surprisingly well."

"I can't feel my arm anymore, you were laying on it all night."

"You are like a furnace, I felt like I needed to get my clothes off."

"Has anyone ever told you that you talk in your sleep?"

"I couldn't leave, you were lying basically on top of me."

"When did you decide that I was the pillow?"

"Can we delay getting up for a few minutes more, please?"

More: bed sharing scenarios + only one bed dialogue

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Happy Star Wars day! May the Force be with you! @swsource Star Wars Week: Day 6

A Song of Ice and Fire + PoV characters

“Nobody is a villain in their own story. We’re all the heroes of our own stories.” - George R. R. Martin

If you're a writer you're supposed to write a lot of bullshit. It's part of the gig. You have to write a lot of absolute garbage in order to get to the good bits. Every once in a while you'll be like "Oh, I wish I hadn't wasted all that time writing bullshit," but that's dumb. That's exactly the same as an Olympic runner being like "Oh, I wish I hadn't wasted all that time running all those practice laps"

First five ASOIAF portraits are done!

F!Aegon

Theon Greyjoy

Quentyn Martell

Sansa Stark

Shireen Baratheon

having a bad start doesn’t mean everything is ruined. having a bad week doesn’t mean your whole year will be bad. everything could be going wrong right now but you can still have a nice ending.

"Fire and Blood is biased propaganda by the maesters so nothing in the real Dance of the Dragons actually happened like in the books, you can't critique the show for showing things as they really were!"

I'm so tired of this take...

GRRM wrote the original ASOIAF series as an anti-monarchy and anti-war story. He's an author who makes a point to flesh out characters and motivations, he understands that there isn't truly a good vs bad narrative to any large-scale, real-world conflict like war, and he understands the sociopolitical factors involved. His series highlights that it's the most vulnerable people in society who suffer when those in power play their game of thrones and make consequential decisions based on their own personal motivations without thought to the consequences to those that will have to the pay the price for them. That's GRRM's entire point with the original series: war destroys everything, it is never really justified, and through war the powerful set in motion terrible events that the most vulnerable are most like to suffer.

So the idea that all of a sudden with the prequel book Fire and Blood GRRM pivoted to write a biased textbook that purposefully misconstrues a conflict where the real story behind the pages is that one side of a dynastic civil war was led by a faultless, pure woman whose divine right to rule was stolen from her, and she's justified in plunging the realm into war to reclaim her throne because the other side was uniquely misogynist against her and was made up of selfish flawed people who just wanted to steal her power from her because she was a woman...

Sure, Fire and Blood may be a history book with unreliable narrators and sources that are trying to recount long-lost histories of the realm and possibly failing to capture the totality of what actually occurred. But I can absolutely guarantee you that the intended real history of the Dance of the Dragons as it took place in the world of ASOIAF was not some black and white, good vs bad tale of morality where one side was right and the other side was wrong like the show and some fans are insisting.

The actual Dance of Dragons as it exists in the ASOIAF timeline and universe, keeping in line with GRRM's original intention and message of the ASOIAF books, is 100% a story of a flawed, ultra-powerful family that fractured into two ideologically different factions that led to a pointless civil war in which neither side was justified in their attempts to seize power from the other. The result was that the family killed themselves until the only survivors were the traumatized children left over from either faction. In this pursuit of absolute power within one family thousands were subjected to the abject horrors of war: pillaging, famine, torture, sexual violence, being burned alive, and so much more. Neither side was faultless. Neither side had "the right" or justification to enact this conflict. Neither side bore sole responsibility for the conflict. Neither side was good or bad while the other was the opposite.

It really just fits outside of the world of ASOIAF to think that Fire and Blood's account of the Dance of the Dragons was uniquely biased against a single woman and her side of the conflict wherein this woman and her supporters were actually good people that had bad things done to them and all accounts in the book relating to them are inaccurate, yet most accounts of everyone else in the story were more or less true and accurate to how events played out. Like are you actually serious that this is how you think this story and history played out in this world of ASOIAF? That ultimately the story of the Dance of the Dragons is not anti-monarchy and anti-war in line with the original ASOIAF series but actually it's the story of a uniquely good woman in this terrible world who had a rightful claim to the throne and whose power was taken from her solely because of misogyny so she was justified in going to war to take it back? Like that's your analysis and interpretation on this conflict?

The way that the show is presenting this story is so unbelievably and ridiculously reductionist and simplified to the point where you begin to question why someone wanted to try to adapt the material at all... but then of course you remember that 1) Game of Thrones made a lot of money for a lot of people 2) its later seasons of mediocre, oversimplified writing continued to be rewarded with huge budgets, profits, and awards nominations despite the obvious downgrade of quality 3) so many modern writers believe the general audience needs to be spoonfed ideas and that they can't handle complexity, so it's more important that they shape an existing story into something that is a palatable, profitable hero vs villain tale that everyone can casually enjoy (and ideally appeals to modern sensibilities) than they try to create a compelling, thought-provoking, interesting and faithful adaptation of the source material.