To state the obvious, the summer has been hot. It’s penetrated the surface of our skin and embedded itself in our bone marrow. At times it was inescapable. It seeped into every corner. It overpowered air conditioners. It was a monster. But now the cool air descends from the north, breathing wisps of autumn air onto our sun drenched skin. Winter is coming.
For “Game of Thrones” fans, the arrival of winter could not be a more joyous occasion. It reminds them that the wait until its return is dwindling, and the return of winter brings them that much closer to the return of Winter. As they look ahead to the new season, they simultaneously dwell on the past. Season 3 ended on a rather harrowing note as several Starks walked straight into a blood soaked sabotage, falling to the blades of those that betrayed them. As confused, livid, remorseful and heartbroken fans felt settled, executive producers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss talk “Game of Thrones” violence and its integral role in the show’s success.
“I think we’ve made mistakes on that front,” Benioff said during an interview with Entertainment Weekly. “There are moments that I think the violence, or not so much the violence, but the gore is pushed too far. It can start to become ridiculous, and something that might work in ‘Evil Dead 2’ isn’t going to work in a show with this tone. For instance, there’s a scene in the first season where a man is killed - a lance goes through his throat - and you see him gurgling and dying on the ground, and looking back on that, I think we have seven seconds of him with blood coming [out].”
“A second or two seconds can be the difference between horrible and funny,” Weiss added.
“Ned’s execution,” Benioff said while citing another scene from the first season. “Originally it was supposed to be - you would see the sword passing through his neck and you would see the stump of his neck and the blood pouring out - so then we ended up having a big argument about which frame to end the sword. So you see it just passing through the skin and then cut out.”
While this may discourage fans, it doesn’t mean there isn’t plenty more violence in store for Season 4, but the number of buckets of fake blooded may be depleted.