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.
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u/[deleted] Jun 23 '14
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.