The Thing About Book!kanej Is That So Much Of Their Relationship Is Told Through Their Thoughts, And

the thing about book!kanej is that so much of their relationship is told through their thoughts, and that just doesn’t translate well to the screen.

kaz calling inej an investment, for example, is so much less meaningful when you can’t see his thoughts in that moment. unless you have something to replace it with–but there’s only so much you can do with intense eye-fucking and body language. so kaz puts the crow club up as collateral against inej’s freedom.

a smart move? no. something kaz would’ve done in the books, especially without a solid plan in place first? absolutely not. but it does convey what the books do with internal monologuing–shows that kaz feels something for inej, far beyond considering her an investment, from the very first page.

(nothing can convince me that kaz wasn’t in love with inej from the beginning of SoC, if not earlier. the way he reacted to inej’s near-death? what he did to oomen for stabbing her? yeah.)

kaz in the show is a lot more vulnerable, a lot less devious, a lot less brutal, and i think a lot of that is because it wouldn’t fit tonally and thematically with the main storyline (i said in another post that SoC and TGT are fundamentally different genres, and TGT is meant to be the primary focus), but a big part is also because of the fact that the only reason kaz is as likeable as he is in spite of what he does on the page is that we can see, every step of the way, how his brain works and what brought him to that point. we know what he’s thinking when he brutally kills oomen (we know that inej is 99% of his impulse control and he goes absolutely feral over her), we know what he’s thinking when he tries to drive inej away, we know what he’s thinking when he does a whole lot of really awful shit on the page–and, often, even when it’s another characters point of view, we get their insight, but we also know enough from kaz’ other chapters to speculate what’s going on in his head even when we aren’t seeing his thoughts directly.

none of that is really possible in a tv show. books and television are such different mediums, and they have very different strengths–but sometimes, in order to play to those strengths, changes need to be made.

i think it’s also worth pointing out that the show isn’t just for fans of the books. they have to try to get people invested in characters and relationships they’d never even heard of before, and it’d be so much harder to do if they had kaz acting just like his book counterpart, without the benefit of being able to see his thoughts along the way and understand why he acts the way he does and what, exactly, made him.

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"My mother will die soon. She said she wanted to return to her hometown. I brought her here."

God, Askeladd is such a well written bastard 😤

Crying cause it really be this way 😭

s s k challenge: top ten protagonists [03/10]

Thorfinn Karlsefni » Vinland Saga

— How do you plan on living your life? Haven’t you given a single thought to what you are going to live for after I’m dead, Thorfinn? You haven’t, have you? Move on already. Don’t hang on to this petty bullshit your entire life. You have got to move on, go further. You are the son on Thors, so venture beyond the world he saw. That is your true battle. Become a true warrior, son of Thors.

Thorfinn

anyway