I honestly am not sure how it will come across if they keep it. On the other hand, even in the "good" seasons, I did not like Game of Thrones' approach to the profanity, especially the way they went overboard with it. Characters in the books swear like normal people do (for certain definitions of normal; George Martin & I both being NJ natives, our standards might be somewhat different from others' ), but on the show they swear like little kids being allowed to use bad words for the first time. Hearing Cersei tell Joffrey he can "fuck painted whores" was pretty immersion-shattering. Hearing Rand call Narg a cocksucker will probably send my brain to a quiet place while I recover.

I think they'd probably compensate by having Mat be more licentious in his topics of conversation (which, again, I found distracting and immersion-breaking when Jon's class of Watchmen were doing it on Game of Thrones. In fact, that was basically the first step in the complete destruction and reversal of Sam's whole character arc. He went from a man who was shy and gentle to a fault, to sleazy, leering dirtbag, who couldn't talk about anything but his friends' sex lives, and looked ready to stick his hand down his pants at any given moment. From sincere empathy for Gilly in the books to creepy perving on her on the show. ), and maybe flirting with girls in the background. I could also see them turning Min's affectation of sophistication into that sort of thing as well, having her overtly hit on Rand in Baerlon, and use overt innuendo to discomfit him in their conversation. That sort of thing.

I am thinking of the Shannara show, which is based on the second Shannara book, "Elfstones of Shannara" which was no more sexual than WoT, IIRC, but they still managed to spice up a little, with Wil Ohmsford having sex with both Amberle & Eretria, and making the latter bisexual and show interest in the former. None of which I remembered from reading the books in high school.

Obviously the former, since it would be purely gratuitous. In aSoI&F, the sex isn't really sexy. The sex in book 1, for instance, is a married couple in their 30s with no details on the act (and which the show dialed back to fully-clothed cuddling), an explicit act of incest seen from the view of an observing child, an extended sequence of what might be euphemistically termed foreplay more intended to evoke a sense of comforting and reassuring than stimulating, ending before the sex act, and then some scenes with hookers in the background and Tyrion & Shae. The show introduced Tyrion rolling around in a brothel, made its first real original character a prostitute, changed a sex ed lesson in which Dany & Doreah are simply described as talking late into the night to some sort of practice run, and of course, we have the infamous Littlefinger villain monologue as he trains two prostitutes to be fake lesbians. They had the excuse that there was a lot of sex in the book, which was sort of true, except Martin didn't have the sex front & center, he had it mentioned, described or implied from the characters. The difference being, the two ways of showing sex in the books both come across as pretty much the same. Look at the battles of book 1. There were three, one of which was experienced by a PoV character, and the other two were described to the PoV character after the fact. The show cut the first but kept the second of the described battles fairly close to the book dialogue. However, on the page, our reading of Tyrion's fight in Martin's words, and hearing the description of the Battle of the Camps, from a messenger, were pretty much the same, whereas on the show they would have required a radically different type of scene, not to mention budget, to depict. When it comes to sex on the show, the producers chose to film the battles, so to speak.

And what did it add to the show? How did it improve the story? How did it better showcase the characters? I would argue that as distasteful as the changes were to Daenerys' wedding night, they did a better job of making clear what her situation actually is and how her adjusting to Dothraki life consisted of adapting to a certain degree of brutality, and how she had to work to take control of it to the extent that she did. Other than that, we didn't really get much gain from Roz or Shae or all the breasts on screen, unless you count Issac Hempstead-Wright's and Maisie Williams' audible awkwardness on the DVD commentary track during the scene of "their" parents in a brothel...

So, no. What do we get out of splattering the screen with smut in the early seasons? How does it improve the story to actually watch the sex scenes, when they show up? Is it going to make us like Min more or empathize more with Rand if she embarrasses him in that particular way? Or if Rand has to actually wrestle Else Grinwell out of his bed at their farm? The book got the message across just fine, without anything of the kind. Maybe we'll get the Tinkers trying to entice Perrin & Egwene with a free love aspect of the Way of the Leaf. Does Egwene sleep with Aram or not? If she does, how does that affect the perception of the character when her & Perrin's conversation is about her having sex, rather than hanging out and dancing? If she doesn't, but it's on the menu, is it going to be perceived as some grand romantic loyalty to Rand or simply demonstrating that the Way of the Leaf is just not for her, no matter how she might like to pretend while she's in the moment? Maybe the Shadar Logoth dagger makes Mat super horny so he's practically raping women and maybe Rand has to pull him off a girl once or twice. There are just no good ways I can think to organically incorporate sex into the story.

Hell, just going with lots of overtly sexual content will destroy a large part of the themes of WoT, which are all about the interactions of men and women. Given how much WoT is about that, and how little sex there actually is in the books, the implication is that Jordan was trying to make the point that there is a whole lot more to people and relationships than just sex, and women and men have other purposes in a fantasy world than to be each other's sexual partners. Rand doesn't have three different lovers because he's the biggest damn hero and deserves three times the sex, it's so RJ can illustrate three different types of relationship and how they might work for such a hero (not least the short-shrift the two with more important roles in the story end up getting). Yet, there are still readers who miss the point and talk about how little there is to Rand's & Elayne's relationship: one meeting, three days of "dating" and making out and one night of sex. Yeah, no. Their relationship led Elayne to making acquaintances she might otherwise never have, which involved her in events in which she might otherwise never played a part, got her to leave the Tower twice, placed her in opposition to her Aes Sedai superiors whom she might otherwise have never thought to question or defy and changed her path to her mother's throne to a whole different game, with completely different objectives and agendas than she might otherwise have held. The fact of her pregnancy drastically changed her priorities and agenda in politics, not to mention her personal convenience. Because of his relationship with Elayne, Rand invaded a country, attacked a Forsaken, nearly lost people he loved and changed his strategic and political agenda. He ended up with people and assets he might not otherwise have had if he had not gone to Caemlyn and it even forced him to come more to the eye of the public earlier, which in turn reshaped the way the world reacted to him and how he planned his future campaigns. This stuff happened because of how they felt about one another. And that's with almost no sexual interaction, as the people who claim their relationship didn't matter love to point out.

I remember a sports columnist I used to read claiming that people didn't really watch "The Sopranos" because it was a well-written prestige drama, they watched it for the mob whackings and the scenes set in a titty bar, and maybe here and there accidentally appreciated some quality television and the sort of thing for which critics gushed over the show. I would not be surprised if that's how Game of Thrones got such good word of mouth. The most common single phrase I heard to describe it in that first year was "The Sopranos set in Middle-Earth" which honestly, could not be further from the truth about aSoI&F, but I think there was a lot of that prurient interest. There was buzz, the first episode started with a creepy horror scene, ended with siblings getting caught in flagrante and then pushing a child out of a window, with plenty of boobs between. And people watched for more dirty stuff and to see what else they'd come up with, and then they killed Ned, WHOA, and then there were dragons and people got hooked.

I don't know if TV is up to the challenge of selling a story on its own merits, and I don't see how WoT is going to have the kind of mainstream appeal that makes Game of Thrones such a phenomenon, and which some people are plainly hoping they'll get from a series that is so similar to aSoI&F (in every way that does not translate into shock TV).