Book vs Show question for Game of Thrones (Spoilers, duh)

[WolfThomas]

Tyrion's preparation in the book goes like this. He finds Cersei and Joffrey have ordered the smiths to make more weapons, armor and arrows for men they're training to help defend Kingslanding. They are also planning to build more trebuchets and fling wild fire by hand at the attackers. This is a pretty conventional plan. Anyone would do this.

It's conventional, but it's also a pretty poor plan of action. Hitting a moving target coming from an unknown direction with a Trebuchet would be absurdly difficult to do reliably; that's not such a worry if you're flinging rocks, but it matters if you're flinging valuable Wildfire, which you don't have an inexhaustible stock of.

Joffrey builds three trebutchets and we see at least one manage to destroy a ship. When there are 200 ships packed into a narrow river you don't need much aiming. Also they can be flung at the host of hundreds of men. But the Wildfire can also simply be dropped over the side of the wall onto the men, who are the real threat.

But I agree it's a poor plan. But it's the only real plan.

Did you read my post above. I'd understand if you didn't it's huge. But Tyrion's plan didn't really work out well in preventing Stannis from capturing Kingslanding. Rather the reinforcements did.

 

[Frankster]

Nothing to add I guess...oh wait, an unanswered question!

I never found him to be particularly horrible. My memory is fuzzy, what exactly makes him horrible and especially to women?

I remember him being nice to women, and fairly kind overall.

There's a couple but one of my "favorite" book Tyrion moments is when after having escaped Westeros and chilling at the fat spice merchants mansion, he gets on an insecure power trip with the servant girls there.

In particular, he torments (by our modern standards, compared to the Bolton treatment for example this is still light stuff) a serving girl from lys after she didn't care of being dismissed and hated that he wasn't getting even a fearful reaction even after deliberately leering at her in a grotesque way, sees it as an insult that not even some random girl is scared of him anymore, so changes his mind and besides asking for a fuck after all , gleefully points out how utterly replaceable and disposable she is, that he could kill her in gruesome ways and no one would give a damn because her life is utterly worthless and she would be replaced by another in record time, until he finally gets a fearful reaction from her he wanted and derives pleasure from it. Satisfied that she is now terrified of him and what he might to do to her, he carries on with his merry way.

Honestly Tyrion being nice to women and fairly kind overall...That's only in the show, and it ruins Tyrion's character as a result plus makes his actions after escaping King's Landing nonsensical.

Why do I say that? Because it makes him signing up to join Daenarys insane, TV Tyrion still loves his brother Jaime and still cares about Westeros, why would he be so eager to help in its downfall? In the books it made sense he would want to see Westeros burn, he doesn't even care too much about Podrick the way he does in the show, he is perfectly happy with Westeros being ravaged and him leading the invasion, so long as he gets to be the one to plant Jaime and Cersei's head on spikes... Does that sound like TV tyrion to anyone? Exactly.

 

[WolfThomas]

In particular, he torments (by our modern standards, compared to the Bolton treatment for example this is still light stuff) a serving girl from lys after she didn't care of being dismissed and hated that he wasn't getting even a fearful reaction even after deliberately leering at her in a grotesque way, sees it as an insult that not even some random girl is scared of him anymore, so changes his mind and besides asking for a fuck after all , gleefully points out how utterly replaceable and disposable she is, that he could kill her and no one would give a damn, until he finally gets a fearful reaction from her he wanted and derives pleasure from it. Satisfied that she is now terrified of him and what he might to do to her, he carries on with his merry way.

You are forgetting the scene later when he rapes someone.

To be specific he goes to a brothel in Volantis, where all the girls are slaves and therefore (even by Westerosi standards) can't consent. He picks on with red hair, who speaks no Westerosi, he notes she has dead eyes and scars from floggings on her back, but still has sex with her as she lies limp.

Much different to the TV scene where he is flirting with a spicey foreigner before he gets kidnapped.

(To be fair Jorah also is having sex with a slave girl who looks like Daenarys, so yeah he's pretty terrible too.).

 

[Terminal Blue]

I never found him to be particularly horrible. My memory is fuzzy, what exactly makes him horrible and especially to women?

I remember him being nice to women, and fairly kind overall.

To be fair, most of his more overtly unpleasant moments come after he is shipped off to Essos and has become a self-loathing alcoholic, which seldom does wonders for anyone's personality, but it is kind of a logical extension of traits which were already manifest in the character before. Probably the most overtly WTF moment is when he taunts a random bedslave in Illyrio's mansion (whom its also implied that he later has sex with, despite knowing it's unwilling on her part).

And in another example of the show getting Tyrion completely wrong, that cute little scene where he cheers up a dejected prostitute in Volantis and is rewarded with an offer of free sex (which he turns down because he's still so in love with Shae), in the books he goes off and pays for sex with a woman who is clearly so broken and severely abused that she's basically catatonic. Yup, our hero..

As WolfThomas pointed out, a lot of Tyrion's story is written from his own POV, and Tyrion has a tendency to emphasise his own victimhood, as well as the horribleness of his own enemies, to the point where we come to see him as justified, but if we actually try to imagine him from the perspective of another character he is actually kind of obnoxious. He flaunts and takes advantage of his power over people in some pretty vicious and sadistic ways, often purely out of malice or vindictiveness. Even when he's not outright exploiting and hurting women for his own amusement, he's still largely incapable of seeing them as anything other than either pretty baubles he can buy or nasty cockteases who reject and hurt him and make him feel disgusted with himself. It's pretty obvious where a lot of this comes from once we know his backstory, but it doesn't make him a good person, it makes him an incredibly flawed person, and from the outside an incredibly flawed person just looks like a horrible person.

 

[WolfThomas]

To be fair, kings landing was falling apart as it was with famine and discontent and Tyrion had to even get to the position he can sort of do anything without Cersei screwing him, he made the most of a bad situation. Also I'm not sure, but the city might would have been able to hold a siege for a while.

Though it's weird that some people blackwash (if that's a real term) him, as he has his moments of unselfish good deeds.

I agree Kingslanding was in a shitty situation. And Tyrion's plan paid off in denying Stannis an opportunity to retreat. But he had lost the battle by that point. The King was hiding in his quarters, Tyrion lying wounded, the Goldcloaks fleeing, the Hound gone. It was pretty clear Stannis would have most of the city by morning and possibly the Red Keep.

I agree about the Blackwashing. He does good things. While politically getting rid of Slynt was a poor move, it was the morally right one, because you know baby-killing. He manages to give the Night'd Watch as much aid as he can as well when Alister Thorne arrives. He tries to stop Joffrey's abuse of Sansa.

And for that I'll let following quote suffice.

A good act does not wash out the bad, nor a bad act the good. Each should have its own reward. - King Stannis Baratheon

 

[Breakdown]

Tyrion's preparation in the book goes like this. He finds Cersei and Joffrey have ordered the smiths to make more weapons, armor and arrows for men they're training to help defend Kingslanding. They are also planning to build more trebuchets and fling wild fire by hand at the attackers. This is a pretty conventional plan. Anyone would do this.

It's conventional, but it's also a pretty poor plan of action. Hitting a moving target coming from an unknown direction with a Trebuchet would be absurdly difficult to do reliably; that's not such a worry if you're flinging rocks, but it matters if you're flinging valuable Wildfire, which you don't have an inexhaustible stock of.

Joffrey builds three trebutchets and we see at least one manage to destroy a ship. When there are 200 ships packed into a narrow river you don't need much aiming. Also they can be flung at the host of hundreds of men. But the Wildfire can also simply be dropped over the side of the wall onto the men, who are the real threat.

But I agree it's a poor plan. But it's the only real plan.

Did you read my post above. I'd understand if you didn't it's huge. But Tyrion's plan didn't really work out well in preventing Stannis from capturing Kingslanding. Rather the reinforcements did.

Tyrion's reasoning was that Wildfire is dangerous stuff at the best of times and giving in out to the goldcloaks to use in a battle would probably result in the city burning down.

 

[Terminal Blue]

Also the whole misogynistic angle doesn't work well as he's shown to treat the dwarf girl and Sansa as humans (and generally creeps me out that this is now how people define characters as bad this days).

You're correct in a sense. Penny is interesting in that I get the feeling she's meant to be a turning point in Tyrion's arc. She's literally the first female character other than Cersei whom he manages to treat with any genuine empathy, and even then he sees her as sad and contemptible most of the time. In fact he seems to come close to outright hating her internally even as he can't bring himself to actually hurt her.

While on the surface Penny and Tyrion are totally different (she's naive, he's cynical, she's idealistic, he's pragmatic, she's grieving, he's vengeful) but deep down they're actually quite similar. Specifically, Penny is a lot like the parts of Tyrion which naively believed Shae loved him, which lead him to marry Tysha, which wanted to earn his father's approval, and these are things Tyrion sees as weaknesses. The fact that she's a dwarf makes the comparison doubly obvious. So yes, Tyrions empathy for Penny stems from he fact that she reminds him of himself. Unfortunately, Tyrion kind of hates himself.

Sansa is a lot less ambiguous than you're remembering, and you may be getting confused with the show. In the show, Tyrion's decision not to have sex with Sansa (which would be non-consensual) stems from loyalty towards Shae. In the books, he seriously contemplates it on several occasions, but is put off it not because he respects Sansa but because she makes him sad. Her disgust for him makes him feel bad.

So yeah, all of Tyrion's feelings of apparent empathy towards women stem, ultimately, from his own self-loathing.

As for "bad characters".. umm.. no.. I could not write any of the above about a "bad character". I think what creeps me out, if anything, is the assumption that a "good character" means a likeable character, a character we the audience can morally identify with, when in fact many of the best characters in literature, and especially in fantasy literature, are horrible people by any reasonable standard.

You can have a character who is a horrible person but a good character, it comes down to whether the horrible parts of their personality are explained and given proper narrative reasoning, which in Tyrion's case I think is true. He even remains sympathetic, in an antiheroic sense, despite his horribleness (Littlefinger, I think, is a more explicit example of this because he has no POV chapters and is therefore more recognizable in his horribleness, but his internal justifications are probably very similar). Moral complexity is good, and is a hallmark of ASOIAF as a series, I don't really see why it's so shocking here to point it out.

I don't know, there are certain characters (particularly Tyrion, Stannis and Arya) whom fans seem to have attached to to the point of overlooking that they're actually kind of a bag of dicks.

 

[Silvanus]

Joffrey builds three trebutchets and we see at least one manage to destroy a ship. When there are 200 ships packed into a narrow river you don't need much aiming. Also they can be flung at the host of hundreds of men. But the Wildfire can also simply be dropped over the side of the wall onto the men, who are the real threat.

But I agree it's a poor plan. But it's the only real plan.

Did you read my post above. I'd understand if you didn't it's huge. But Tyrion's plan didn't really work out well in preventing Stannis from capturing Kingslanding. Rather the reinforcements did.

I did give it a proper read, but I think you're not being terribly fair, and relying on hindsight the characters did not have. Tyrion and the others did not know when or if Tywin was coming, or that the deal with the Tyrells had been struck. For all they knew, they were fighting a losing battle. Tyrion's plan did the most damage possible with the Wildfire, which is what counts in that situation.

 

[Politrukk]

Ok so, someone who has actually read the novels more recently than myself (namely less than a decade ago), please clarify something for me.

Tyrion and Shae. I vaguely recall their relationship in the book, but it's pretty fuzzy. In the show, it seems to come across that she was always actually on the pay to basically appease Tyrion, but that she was more than willing to switch sides because she never had affection for him. Even though they took effort at other parts to show she did seem to have some affection for him. But during the episode of his trial, and the following murder bit of her, she seemed to be very mercenary with her behavior. She didn't try and talk to Tyrion, she didn't seem at all happy to learn that he wasn't executed, and instead went straight to trying to fight him, but ultimately losing the fight.

How did it play out in the book? I don't remember at all. Did they elaborate at all? Was it like that? Or was it more nebulous? I just really can't remember, it's been so long since I read those, and I'll be fracked sideways if I'm going to read through those damn things again.

Thanks.

Edit:

Got my answer, thanks.

As I remember it the books pretty much point out that Shae was Tywin's whore all along(in more ways than one) and that is part why Tyrion murders Tywin like that.

I felt it was played out badly in the show as compared to what was written (it had much more force and drama in the books).

edit: quoted by accident.

 

[Fireaxe]

Regardless of if there's any genuine affection there, all Shae's actions at Tyrion's trial and after indicated to me that she was trying to survive -- Tyrion looks to basically be a dead dwarf walking while Tywin seems to be about ready to take over Westeros.