patrickstormborn asked: yeah, i think this daario looks far better. his appearance is still flamboyant - long hair, face paint, elaborate and over the top clothes, etc. apart from the blue hair and gold tooth (both of which are ridiculous), he looks about right to me
Just so. I mean, Daario…isn’t fandom’s thing about him that he’s a joke? Almost singularly unappealing? A big reason large segments of the readership turned on Dany during Dance? Making him a regular old dashing swordsman of the sort familiar to viewers of fantasy filmmaking, as opposed to a character described even within the books as being kind of ridiculous looking, ought to go a long way to rectify that.
Now, I understand the complaint that the show loses a lot of the books’ more flamboyant or colorful aspects, and that’s certainly true. And some of that is indeed, for lack of a better term, a philosophical difference between Benioff & Weiss on the one hand and Martin left to his own devices on the other. But much of it really, truly is a a practical matter, or a matter of things looking a certain way in the mind’s eye but looking different, and often worse, on the screen, in ways that would adversely affect the viewer’s experience. The most famous example, I suppose, is the white armor of the Kingsguard, which sounds awesome and would have BEEN awesome to see but which apparently looked chintzy when they tried it out. The losses of color I most keenly feel — no godsway at Vaes Dothrak, and Bolton bannermen instead of the Brave Companions — are likely a result of entirely properly budgeting the show’s time, money, and resources: They simply can’t do the the work necessary to develop all the cultures represented on that road or in that mercenary unit for what would be, at most, minutes of screentime. Turning the Hand’s Tournament from the Super Bowl into a Pop Warner game was a budgetary thing too.
And then you have cases where, having asked the audience to think of this world in resolutely realistic terms, you’d then need them to swallow a sudden eruption of…whimsy, almost. Like, if we showed up on Dragonstone and all the buildings looked like dragons and were covered in gargoyles…in the books that works fine, because Martin’s had thousands of pages to worldbuild his way to that point, but in the show it’d almost look like someone used the wrong set by mistake. And while I think they could probably get away with slightly more outlandish costuming and hair than they’ve tried for people like Jaqen and Daario and Illyrio, I think the same basic principle applies. (Actually, I think the Qarth storyline worked to the extent that it did, i.e. as a pleasant and fun thing to look at and listen to if not as a particularly good use of Daenerys, because it was the one place where D&D did go for the full Neverending Story/Legend/Labyrinth vibe, in contrast to everything else.)
