The dead person in the cage was a somewhat more morbid version of the incident in the books, indeed... which also happens only two books later, but guess they have to accelerate the timeline - I read something about meeting Aviendha as early as season two, so yeah. If the theory about them dropping the Seanchan entirely is right, they could skip huge parts of tGH and essentially combine books two and three in the second season. If it's not... then not sure how that's supposed to work.

Anyway, ok, I'll buy this version of Thom as being more 'GoTish' than 'LotRish', I suppose. I mostly liked the whole barmaid plotline, as I mentioned to Joe (that's what I was referring to with the thing that would've involved nudity in GoT, in case it wasn't clear).

It is, yes. The Whitecloaks, when you think about them in the books, do get an inordinate amount of time and attention for ultimately being as useless as they are - more an illustration of hypocrisy than anything else. It makes sense that an adaptation would either cut them or make them a more scary adversary. I won't say it doesn't bug me, but it does make sense...

The books are violent enough themselves... perhaps less so the first one, but there's plenty of nasty stuff when you start keeping track. If they want to be as gratuitous as GoT and include explicit torture scenes, random senseless killings aplenty, and so on - they can. As far as I'm concerned, so far I haven't seen them going out of their way to do that.

Fair enough.

Well, that's not the only thing in the popular taste that changed in the meantime. Another big one, for instance, would be more interest in moral ambiguity - having heroes who aren't as unfailingly noble as the LotR ones largely are, some exceptions notwithstanding. And bad guys who have more of a motivation than just being evil - like the aforementioned barmaid. The Tolkien lore that Amazon picked for their other big fantasy show is also some that has the most space for moral ambiguity, with Numenor's slow moral downfall.

Yeah, I know. We don't really disagree much about the quality of the show, it's not like I find it that great so far, either. Mostly the disagreement is about to what extent they are imitating GoT - in my view, not that much.

It's just plain stupid more than it's really going against character - they do depict her as stubborn, hotheaded, brave to the point of recklessness, protective of her charges, very into healing, all the major elements are there. So I'm not too worried that they're screwing up her character, just offended by how dumb all that stuff of her capture by a Trolloc, her miraculous escape and then that whole interaction with Lan was.