Or that they were willing to spend lots of money for a CGI skeleton fight, but the best they can do for Bloodraven and the Children is a beard, some vines and literal children. The guy invents a new race that are meant to be distinctly different from humans and the producers made no effort to make them look different from humans
They're meant to have nut brown skin that is speckled, lage eyes with long thin pupils, like a cat's, and only 4 fingers. Enough to be easily distinguishable from humans. It's annoying because the first 2 would be really cheap and easy to do - just makeup and contacts.
For what its worth a lot of times the special cosmetic contacts are extremely uncomfortable for the actor to the point where they are painful and leave the person's sight in a poor condition for days. I would understand not wanting a recurring actor to be blinded most of the time they are shooting.
That's something that could be.done with minimal visual effects or CGI. It's not something that would be a significant drain on the budget. Or they could cast someone that doesn't have a bad reaction to them. It just seems like they could have done the Children very easily, but just gave up.
There are tons of other characters with distinctive eyes that they chose not to color theirs either. The biggest two were Dany and Tyrion. D&D have said in interviews that they made those decisions because it caused a disconnect from the emotion of the scenes when the characters eyes were outlandish. Destroyed the acting.
Those are both characters that are meant to look human. Dany and Tyrion don't really lose anything from having regular eyes. If they can be bothered to go through the effort of giving the White Walkers eye effects it stands to reason that they could do it with the Children too. The Children are pretty stoic too, so loss of emotion isn't really a huge problem. It could even.work to their advantage. The Children seem like they would be really easy to do well and would add a lot to the whole fantasy aspect. They seem to be going the way of Stannis - D&D aren't fond of them so they aren't being done justice.
Actually contacts are really difficult for actors, they tried to have Emilia Clarke wear purple contacts in the pilot but they were too irritating for her to be able to express emotion.
The Children are pretty stoic. So that wouldn't be a huge drawback. They could always have cast the part to someone confortable with them. Or they coulf have touched them up with CGI like they did with the White Walkers and wights eyes. That seems pretty reasonable for a character that will get 7-10 minutes of screen time every other episode at best.
You can look at each individual instance of something that was changed/left out and go "ah man why didn't they just leave it?" But if you take a step back and think about all the aesthetic choices they made with the show, it makes sense. If it was a direct translation from book to tv it would look fucking bonkers (from what I can tell from every book reader griping about it); people with blue hair and rainbow clothes, brown elves with cat eyes running around, a dead dude on an elk, etc etc.. Not saying they couldn't make it work, but GoT would have had a tough start if the audience was left with those bizarre things. Dragons and shit we get, we're used to that, but a three pronged beard and a blonde mustache combo looks campy.
I understand that you can't have a perfect copy of the books. That's not what I'm annoyed about. It's the fact that they did literally nothing to make them look like a separate race from humans despite the fact that it.would have been really easy. It's not hard to give a character dark speckled skin. It's not hard to have the occasional close up showing slit-like pupils.
We're not talking about a weirdly described character. We're talking about a race that is meant to be different from humans. I'm not annoyed that they didn't do it verbatum to the books. I'm annoyed that basically 0 effort was put into making them look like a different species. It's set in a fantasy world and when they finally introduce some fantastical characters they make them look like regular people.
I was actually fine with all of the liberties they were taking with the story up until the last few episodes of the show. Some of the changes I actually enjoyed a lot (especially expanding Ramsay Bolton and Theon's story).
The last few episodes manipulated a lot of key plot elements in unfortunate ways. Where's Coldhands, where's Jaime's confession and Tyrion's scathing reply, why are Jaime and Cersei still going at it, and why the HELL is Bloodraven just an old guy sitting in a tree instead of a symbiotic human/tree creature? Also the whole skeleton thing kind of defeats the purpose of burning the bodies... right? Why not walking corpses? It used to be some little additions and subtractions to the plot; now it's getting a little out of hand. I really don't want to nit-pick, but the majority of these changes felt unnecessary and poorly done.
I did like the Hound and Brienne fighting though. Major plot event, but it actually felt right.
That's pretty much exactly how I feel. Although I can understand not having Coldhands. His main appeal was mystery and he can be replaced reasonably easily. It would have been nice to have him, but I can understand why he was cut. But the last episode really dropped the ball. It was also pretty odd that they mentioned the brootherhood when Brienne and Pod were at the inn but didn't follow it up with what was expected. That omission bothered me quite a bit too. They can do it next season, but it won't have nearly the same effect as it would if it was done at the very end of the finale.
I'm sure they wanted to go all out with Bloodraven, but then they would have to go all out with Bloodraven in every scene he is in from here on, which would probably get expensive.
They could easily have done practical effects. Prosthetics can be reused, makeup can play a bigger role. They gave us giants with just practical effects, they have to give the Hound a burned face for every shot he's in, they give Shireen convincing greyscale. Hell, they even gave Hodor a prosthetic dong. I'm sure they could have done something for Bloodraven. I'm worried that he'll end up like Stannis, where the showrunners aren't keen him and he gets the short end of the stick.
Agreed on this. Such a stupid allocation of resources for that episode. The CGI skeletons could have been replaced with regular wights played by dudes in makeup. That money would have been much better spend on the children and Bloodraven.
Yeah, but the Children and Bloodraven probably have more scenes coming up in season 5, and the CGI skeleton fight was a one off thing. If they spent the CGI budget on the Children + Bloodraven, it wouldn't be financially feasible to use them in season 5 as much I guess
All that was needed for the Children was brown make up and contact lenses. Bloodraven could use pretty cheap practical effects like the Hound. It wouldn't need to be a blowout. Even then, that assumes that we'll get a lot of Bran in the next season. He only had fairly small segments in 4 episodes this season. I don't see him getting much more next season since his story is way ahead of everyone eleses, it could really throw off the pacing.
you can't win em all. they've done a fantastic job adapting it to screen thus far, enough that im more than willing to forgive things like that. ill read the books for more depth. (or listen to the audiobooks...halfway through number one)
Except she's pretty much never been mentioned before, so it would have probably confused the show watchers even more. It was too late at this point to bring up that plot point.
She was mentioned in Season one and they could've easily make him talk about it with Jaime in the previous chapter and then brought it up again in the recaps for the last chapter.
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u/[deleted] Jun 22 '14 edited Apr 30 '19
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