Watchers on the Wall

Note from the author: well before I found my way to the Wall, I had envisioned Anatomy of a Throne as an irregular feature back during Game of Thrones’s second season for Comic Related, a site that I regularly contributed to at that point in my (relatively) nascent freelancing career. I ended up moving on not long after that; over the course of the next few years, two different sites would call the column home, with the last being, of course, Watchers on the Wall.

While Anatomy is as dead as a doornail until George R.R. Martin finishes The Winds of Winter, not many current readers/viewers have probably been exposed to those early, tentative days – and, well, we are in the middle of a rather in-depth stroll down memory lane, which makes the occasion perfect for a re-visitation.

Here, then, is the very first installment of the column I ever did, for the second season premiere, “The North Remembers.” I will follow this up with the six subsequent Anatomies of a Throne that were originally published over at Comic Related as we continue to work our way through the second and third seasons – and, who knows? Maybe I’ll even throw in a new, exclusive surprise or two.

HBO’s Game of Thrones brandishes a consistent and high degree of fidelity to the nearly 5,000-page-long source material of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire novels, but there still, of course, are differences. While most of these gaps from the page to the screen are small and detail-oriented, it is nonetheless the case that the most subtle discrepancies often hold the biggest insight into the adaptation process, into the demands of filmmaking, and into the rigors of the literary narrative.

This, then, is the anatomy of a key scene of Thrones – not because of its dramatic importance or visual effects whizbangery, but because of the telling nature of its realization.

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