The above image, via Reddit (click to enlarge), is of Bran Stark in season one versus Bran Stark in season three, which just shows you how much those kids have aged since Game of Thrones began, and what kind of continuity issues the series may face. Also, puberty is a bitch. This is why, of course, that in addition to the other differences between the books and the series, David Benioff will also have to add an extra year to the show’s continuity timeline. I’m not sure how old Bran is supposed to by Book 6, but at the rate the show is going — two seasons per book — Bran may be in his 30s by the time the series is finished. If he gets much bigger, no one’s going to be able to Hodor him. Plus, what’s Benioff gonna do when he has to work around Maisie Williams’s pregnancy?
Also, you must check out this guy’s arm cast (also, via Reddit), which is not only seriously bad ass, but must have been a bitch to paint with one arm. Props to you, sir! You win most devoted fan.
In addition, there’s a few new images, via Collider, from season three of Cersei, Jon Snow, Osha, and the Little Sh*t.
![[avatar]](http://p.uproxxcdn.com/photo/4006/thumb)
![[image]](http://cdn.uproxx.com/wp-content/thumbnails/130/110/2013/06/gameofthrones-portlandia-mashup-game-of-portlandia-21-uproxx-150x150.jpg)
![[image]](http://cdn.uproxx.com/wp-content/thumbnails/130/110/2013/06/all-the-game-of-thrones-mashups-and-psas-you-can-shake-a-sausage-at-150x150.jpg)
![[image]](http://cdn.uproxx.com/wp-content/thumbnails/130/110/2013/06/drink-150x150.gif)
![[image]](http://cdn.uproxx.com/wp-content/thumbnails/130/110/2013/06/check-out-this-jon-snow-80s-style-game-of-thrones-training-montage-uproxx-150x150.jpg)
Well, in the books, Bran is no more than 6 or 7, which means he was cast too old to begin with. #nerd
All the kids got upped about 2-3 years. Jon and Robb are both only supposed to be in their mid-teens, not their late teens/early 20s. I have a feeling it was mostly about making Dany old enough to show her boobs (or for her to have boobs at all).
No doubt nudity (and sex, implied or otherwise) was a concern, but you have to assume it was also the fact that it’s incredibly difficult to find capable child talent. Upping ages a few years opens up casting quite a bit.
It does, for sure, but with Dany specifically, I can’t see them casting an underage girl for the rape scene. It just would not have gone over.
That said, I do have to wonder how seriously they thought about issues with these kids growing. I can’t imagine anyone else playing these parts, so how much of the script will need to get changed?
Arya being a teenager later on works for part of her story, but not the element where she needs to be sneaky and small.
GRRM said he regretted making the kids so young in the books, so the older TV characters works out anyway.
You do tend to forget just how young the kids are supposed to be when you’re reading. My guess is that is they were cast as their book ages, it would have been really difficult for the audience to accept them as realistic.
It would’ve been, at the very least, *probably* illegal as shit to film a large part of Dany’s story with a more age-appropriate actor. It’s not just that people would be put off and raise objections to it, it would be literally illegal. Unless we were going to expect HBO to exercise serious restraint in the handling of sex scenes, which is just isn’t bloody likely, and shouldn’t particularly have to be when they largely tie into story and character, for a change.
Besides, it utterly baffled me when I first realized that each of those books was supposed to be spanning for a few months at most. That was literally risking the suspension of disbelief for me, for a while. The kids aging in-universe is perfectly fine. It won’t particularly take away from much, aside from Littlefinger’s thing for Sansa being marginally less creepy, possibly.
What! No fucking way. That’s not the same kid. There’s some CGI shit going on here if you ask me.
Would that his quiver were a time quiver.
Wait. Maisie Williams is pregnant?
^^ yeah isn’t she like only 15?
That’s the joke.
[www.youtube.com]
Since you are unfamiliar with sarcasm, I will close the drawer at this point.
Hormones > Hodor
Poor kid. This gonna happen to Carl next season on the Walking Dead too.
That kid has being playing Carl like a 50-year-old sage all season, so at least if he grew to the height of a man, it would come off less precocious.
Does this mean that we’ll continue to get more Osha than the books? I’m all for it.
Well, you figure that since they never introduced the bog kids, she’ll be filling in their roles.
I think I heard the swamp kids are showing up this season….
The Reeds are in this season. Jojen’s in the trailer.
Agreed … the Reeds have been added to this season … Osha totally disappears in the books for a long while so I wouldn’t mind her sticking around in the series.
Maybe we are going to see more Osha in the books too – it is known.
Osha and Rickon won’t just spontaneously be written out of the story, thankfully. Maybe Rickon will actually get to be a tangible character at some point, as he ages and interacts with the Reeds, Osha and Bran.
If its any consolation Bran is close to the least interesting character in all of the books thus far so few people would care if they made some changes.
Of course I can see that Martin intends for this super gay story arc to ultimately be super important.
Bran the least interesting? You obviously haven’t reached the Iron Islands chapters have you?
Nah, Bran is the least interesting. Which is a shame, because given what happens to him, he had (and continues to have) a ton of awesome potential. But instead he just wanders around and complains.
“Wah, I don’t want to learn to paint with all the colors of the wind!”
Ignoring, for a moment, that Bran has always been one of the more compelling POVs, “least interesting” is hyperbolic, right? I mean, have you read a Dany chapter after A Game of Thrones (okay, MAYBE A Clash of Kings)? Or just about any Davos chapter, for that matter?
Eh, I like Davos chapters. But yes. Bran is the least interesting *because* he has the potential to be so great. Dany’s chapters are like that, too, but at least now and then we get some dragons.
Bran’s stuff is just unfolding way too slowly. Maybe it’ll pick up in the next couple of books, but I feel like GRRM has no real plan for what he’s doing at this stage and is making it up as he goes along. My guess is that he has endgames for Bran and Dany and doesn’t know how to fill up the time in-between, whereas characters like Jaime or Sansa, neither of whom anyone would have guessed would progress or develop as they have, are the most interesting because you can feel the wildcard element to their storylines.
Arya’s getting back there as well.
But Bran? I suspect that there is a very big endgame for him and GRRM isn’t bothering to fill the interim with anything else, so he’s just stretching that storyline out as far as he can. And so it’s boring.
The endgame theory is really what makes the story feel like it’s dragging at this point. It’s as if GRRM is behind his readers. He has instilled this idea of some impending event, specifically with the likes of Jon, Dany, and Bran, but then he’s sort of hit pause to expand his world rather than continue his story. I can’t be the only one who gives zero fucks about Dorne.
Well, and apparently he’s frustrated/angry that readers have pretty much figured out who Jon’s mom is, so there’s talk that he might change it just to fuck with people.
I don’t care about Dorne either. And I wouldn’t mind the world-expansion if I did feel as though it was setting things up for another Storm of Swords-style bloodbath. But where A Clash of Kings felt like a necessary pause, A Dance with Dragons felt like an aimless wander.
Changing Jon’s mom to fuck with us would be…off-putting. I remember when it finally clicked for me, and how much that knowledge has added to the story, both dramatically and for the overall feeling that GRRM knows where he’s going with all of this. It’s one of the more complete and substantial elements, it would be a shame to toss it for some shock-value twist.
“Super gay”? I keep forgetting that grade-schoolers have internet access these days…
@Phrasing — Yeah. I mean, I can see how GRRM might have thought he’d left things subtle enough, but I don’t think he was quite counting on the desperation of fans coupled with his glacial writing pace.
bran > dany
Yes Carl it does indeed amuse me to describe Bran’s inevitable march towards some fulfillment of a magical destiny as “super gay” I hadn’t realized I might offend the high minded readers of the comments section on a dick joke blog.
I just find Dany’s story frustrating. I find the character Bran himself to be thoroughly uninteresting. I want to fly.. Blah blah blah. We get it.
Bran will use his greensight to possess one of Dany’s dragons.
Hell, add Cersei to that list too.
I’m the worst; I miss-clicked.
If you’re replying to the previous conversation, I do have to ask if you’ve finished the most recent book.
No, I’m currently wading through A Dance with Dragons. It’s been like months, to be honest. After blowing through the first three, the last book really killed most of my momentum for the story. That said, I’ve read two and a half books worth of Cersei chapters that have done little but to ruin the mystique created in A Game of Thrones. The best chapters in the series can’t erase that.
Yeah, ADWD is a bitch and it doesn’t get any better as time goes on. The last Dany chapter is absolutely brutal.
I think I made a comment about the aging of the child actors being a problem somewhere on the network a little while back based upon the pacing of the series vs. the timeline of the books. I didn’t expect it to begin to be an issue this season though. Bran is gonna end up taller than Hodor by the time he meets BR.
To be fair, I suppose, these would potentially be the same issues that Bran would have — getting too big to be carried around, needing some kind of alternate method of transport other than a dude’s back…
True, but in the books they only age a few years whereas the actors are going to age like 10 years over the course of the show.
They can — and probably will — change the timeline. The books are never that clear about how much time has passed anyway.
SPOILER
Maybe they’ll shift Bran’s story from ADwD into S4 (and maybe Arya’s too). Seems that he will not move much afterwards anyway.
The books are pretty explicit about the timeline, as all deaths are recorded in AL time.
HBO is just trolling us with the Joffrey pictures …each new one makes me want to punch him right in his smug mug more than the last one …
did he do something to his face? he looks fatter in his face to me.
It’s probably all the pie he eats.
Joffrey is basically his world’s equivalent of Justin Bieber — spoiled kid, given too much power too young, responding by wearing spiky headgear and acting like an epic-level douche.
I think this is good for the show. GRRM originally wanted to do a 5 year gap in the story between books 3-4 (he only ended up doing it IRL unfortunately). I always picture the kids a little older (approximately their age in the show) anyway. I don’t think that just letting the age thing play out will really hurt the show at all.
This is slightly off topic but about a year ago I came across a very humorous summary of Dance and Dragon online and now for the life of me can’t find it again. I was curios if anyone had seen it as well and knew where to find it.
Why couldn’t they just recast the role?
I was thinking the same thing. It wouldn’t bother me at all if they just shifted in a new mincey British kid.
Because Isaac Hempstead-Wright has performed the character quite well, even if he isn’t as jaw-droppingly awesome as Maisie Williams or some of the others? And also because recasting characters mid-story is generally stupid and awful? The constant recasting for the Draper boy is only acceptable because they never do anything with the character anyway. That’s the only example off the top of my head of recasting that works.
So the ball is dropped this season?
Good to see that the young king kid still looks like a 10 year old twat