Westeros

Via James Hibberd over at EW, the first major casting of season 4 of Game of Thrones has been revealed: Prince Oberyn Martell will be played by Chilean actor Pedro Pascal. From the article, here’s Benioff and Weiss on the casting:

This has been up for a week and change now, but we wanted to give your Youtube subscribers the first look at it: our review of season 3, just over 2 hours of discussion between Linda and I as we share our thoughts on the season. You can find the review over at our feature page, and of course as part of our Season 3 playlist.

Enjoy!

New York City’s Slattery’s Midtown Pub will be playing host to an official A Song of Ice and Fire trivia contest! On June 25th, five rounds of trivia questions based on the novels (not the TV show)—questions which we here over at Westeros.org have had a look over and some input on— will see the best teams winning some cool rewards, such as signed copies of the novels and more!

Sponsored by series publisher Random House and arranged by Trivia A.D., the full details of the trivia competition and registration for tickets to participate can be found at the event page.

Usually these posts are titled “Reviewing…” but in this case, for now our episode guide for “Mhysa” contains our complete, blow-by-blow recap as well as our book-to-screen material. The review itself will be forthcoming some time tomorrow. Why the delay? It’s turning a bit into a season overview piece, with a lot of references to past episodes of the series, and I’d like to mull it over a bit more before settling on how to go with it. The season finale is always a tricky thing to review, at least when it comes to Game of Thrones, and it deserves some extra thought.

But until then, check out the episode guide, and feel free to visit the A Song of Ice and Fire forum where there’s some lively, in-depth discussion of the episode going on right now.

We’ve gotten our winner for our 7” Iron Throne contest... but for the final episode of the season, we have an ever grander prize, once more courtesy of the amazing folks at :

This depiction of Tyrion Lannister at the Blackwater was a moment that David Benioff and Dan Weiss specifically suggested to Dark Horse as a possible subject for a statue, and is the first full-figure statue that they have produced for Game of Thrones. Standing 10” tall, the statue is actually part of a limited edition series of just 3,000 figures. Future statues will include Jon Snow with Ghost and a White Walker.

How do you win? This one is easy: follow us on Westeros.org and spread the word about this contest by including the #GoTTyrion hash-tag and linking to this post! We’re thinking that if we cross the 30,000 follower mark, we’ll be offering up an additional prize that some might find pretty interesting in its own right…

And yes, the Tyrion statue prize contest can be entered from any country in the world—it is not US only! (The second prize may or may not be available overseas, so we can’t promise that one will be available to an international entry.) We’ll decide the winner—or winners—come Monday after the final episode, “Mhysa”.

As we reported yesterday, George R.R. Martin appeared on the Conan O’Brien show last night. In the course of his appearance, he discussed writing the novels and keeping facts straight, and (to our delight) mentioned us over here at Westeros.org:

There are other clips of his appearance on the site, and the full episode should be available for streaming some time tonight.

Tonight’s episode of Conan O’Brien will—quite amazingly!—feature none other than George R.R. Martin, according to the full schedule at the Team Coco site. O’Brien included a reference to Sunday’s episode, “The Rains of Castamere”, in his monologue on Monday; suffice it to says, there are spoilers:

  The digital release of the season 3 soundtrack is now available on iTunes and Amazon MP3, with the CD release due next month! See below for the details, straight from WaterTower Music:

As we suspected, the Red Wedding has sort of drowned out everything else about, “The Rains of Castamere”, dominating coverage of the episode. Linda and I have been invited to share our thoughts on the episode in a couple of venues. First off, I was asked to provide some comments to the New York Post, while Linda joined some other “megafans” to discuss the episode’s main event over at the Vulture.

And if you’ve missed it, we made our penultimate appearance on Thronecast for the season, as well as our usual bonus video, which I’m placing below the cut:

Just spreading the news for those who might be interested: North One TV, a media company, is working on a program related to Game of Thrones, and they would love to meet some Game of Thrones cosplayers to appear in their studio for the program.

If you’re interested, drop us a note at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) and we’ll share the email contact for the producer!

After having a great lack of time these last weeks, the down time due to the delay of episode 9 of Game of Thrones by a week finally gave us a bit of time to record a new installment in our A Song of Ice and Fire videos. In this installment, we discuss the sample chapter from The Winds of Winter that is available at George’s official website. Naturally, there are spoilers! See the video below:

And as an added bonus, we would be remiss not to mention our appearance on Talkback Radio, where Linda and I spoke for an over an hour with host Justin Mireku about the Game of Thrones series in relation to the novels. There’s spoilers here, too:

Usually, we work for several hours on the recap, analysis, and book-to-screen breakdown for our episode guides and release them all together more or less in time with the west coast airing. But tonight, we’re deviating to share my analysis—a briefer-than-normal one, but also a more-focused-than-normal one—of “The Rains of Castamere”, which can be found here.

Naturally, there are spoilers, so read at your own risk. The rest of our content will, we hope, follow in a few hours.