#i think the show version of blood and cheese is INSANELY weaker from a character/narrative/thematic perspective

[navree]

i'm not a book purist, never have been, i've been fine with a lot of changes made from the f&b source material for the show (i'm a rhaenicent girlie, so like duh) but i can't really take the "how can you be mad that the show changed stuff, f&b is a history book so obviously some things just got muddied up" take is that westeros isn't real.

f&b is written as a history book in its format, with different viewpoint represented by different characters, but it's still, functionally, a novel. this is not an actual collection of historical texts where conflict reports are being generated and things have been lost to decay, this is a fictitious work written by author george raymond richard martin and published by bantam books/penguin random house. george created the entire thing out of whole cloth, he is not re-cataloguing existing historical information about any real time period. he wrote a story, and he made choices for that story about what would be most narratively compelling and what works better in a fictional setting. maegor is a monster because it was the most narratively compelling choice. rhaena the queen in the east had the life that she did because it was the most narratively compelling choice. blood and cheese went down as described because it was the most narratively compelling choice. george, as a writer, made a calculation of "what would be the most engaging story to tell here that also gets my thematic statements across for this particular section", and wrote accordingly.

and sometimes, when you deviate from those choices, you are creating a less engaging story and moving away from the themes that also helped make that story more interesting. and it is perfectly acceptable to critique those writing choices within an adaptation and say that changes have weakened the narrative, because this isn't real. none of this happened, none of this ever existed, f&b being formatted as a history book makes for a great analytical exercise as well as for some fun metas (you guys know i love the ambiguity of stuff when it comes to the conquerors) and makes for an interesting reading experience when you are presented with conflict evidence and have to parse out which version you think is more likely. but it's still fake. it's still one creative work, that in this case is being adapted into another creative work, and sometimes it is being adapted badly.