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George R.R. Martin Nervous About Game Of Thrones Season 2, Not A Fan Of Tebow?

You know nothing Jon Snow

A Song of Ice and Fire scribe, George R.R. Martin, has been pretty content with HBO’s adaptation of Game of Thrones but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t still get nervous from time to time. There’s one scene in particular coming up in Season 2 that’s causing him concern. And have you ever stopped and wondered what the writer thinks of football? No? Well look no further, we’ve got Martin’s thoughts on a famous NFL star right here. 

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So it turns out Martin is a big fan of the NFL, particularly the Jets (which makes sense because he was born and raised in New Jersey). But there’s one player in the NFL Martin is not a big fan of and that’s Tim Tebow. We felt compelled to share this quote about the player’s recent move to the Jets that Martin wrote on his LiveJournal.

“I was drinking my morning coffee when the headline flashed across the bottom of the screen. That sound you heard was me choking and sputtering,” he wrote. “My Jets have given up two perfectly good draft picks for Tim Tebow, the worst quarterback in the National Football League. Gak.”

It’s the gak that makes it great.

Moving on to Game of Thrones, Martin is truly wondering how a particular scene will turn out on film. He told the Vancouver Sun, it’s the battle of Blackwater Bay he’s nervous about, especially considering he wrote the episode in which most of the fight will take place.

“I’m on tenterhooks to see what sort of (production) values (were used) and how much . . . they were able to capture on screen. The Battle of the Blackwater is a gigantic set piece in the book; it occupies 12 chapters, or something like that,” he told them. “It fills up the entire episode, and we had to cut certain elements of it, or it would have demanded a Lord of the Rings-style budget. Of course, we [have] a high budget for a TV show, but we are low-budget for a feature film.”

Fans of the book series know Tyrion Lannister, played by actor Peter Dinklage, has a large role in the Battle of Blackwater which is extremely large in scale. “While most hour-long TV dramas are filmed in less than 10 days, [that] episode took about a month of wet, muddy night shoots,” writer/producer Dan Weiss told Entertainment Weekly. “Peter didn’t have to act tired, because, by 5 a.m., [he’d] had . . . rain pouring on him for eight hours straight.”

Martin also laments the fact, both for himself and readers of his novels, that many characters will be left out of the HBO series.

“I knew they’d have to cut some characters. I literally do have a cast of thousands, and it gets bigger with each successive book, so there is no way they can get all of that in,” he said. “We’ll see how they continue to deal with that challenge.”

Martin said the elimination of one character or introduction of one not in the books is likely to cause distress on fans but that tv viewers,  “want a story they can understand and they want to know who all these characters are. They can’t refer to a genealogy in the back of a book, because they don’t have the books. You can’t confuse them too much with a multiplicity of characters.”

Hopefully the changes won’t make that much difference this season and we’ll be left with only the best the books have to offer.

(via Blastr, Pajiba)

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Author
Jill Pantozzi
Jill Pantozzi is a pop-culture journalist and host who writes about all things nerdy and beyond! She’s Editor in Chief of the geek girl culture site The Mary Sue (Abrams Media Network), and hosts her own blog “Has Boobs, Reads Comics” (TheNerdyBird.com). She co-hosts the Crazy Sexy Geeks podcast along with superhero historian Alan Kistler, contributed to a book of essays titled “Chicks Read Comics,” (Mad Norwegian Press) and had her first comic book story in the IDW anthology, “Womanthology.” In 2012, she was featured on National Geographic’s "Comic Store Heroes," a documentary on the lives of comic book fans and the following year she was one of many Batman fans profiled in the documentary, "Legends of the Knight."

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