Dreams on "Game of Thrones" · 4:14pm Jul 20th, 2017
Hey all. Guess I'm still alive. Haven't been feeling much inclination to doing much on the site, but I'm still reading almost nothing but pony fanfics (re-reading, mostly). I am actually working on the next entry of Grammar for Real People, and a while ago I made a lot of progress sprucing up my plans for Minoan Crisis, as well as preparing for a large project I may or may not have hinted at in the past. Here's hoping any of those actually bear fruit anytime soon.
Anyway, my pastime the last couple weeks has been bingeing Game of Thrones, which I've never watched through before, so for those of you who've read Crisis, you can rest assured that the gryphons' High Eyrie has nothing at all to do with Westeros's Eyrie. (Though it is also a massive stone tower; but mine is on a seaside cliff and completely hollow, and has no Moon Door. That would be kind of silly for a race with wings.) My reaction upon seeing the GoT Eyrie went something like: "Dang it, Martin! You stole my location!" I was legitimately angry at the guy.
Anyway again, I'm writing this blog now because I just woke up from a very cinematic dream with heavy GoT overtones, but set entirely in Middle Earth, and I want to write down what I remember while it's still fresh in my mind. My guess is that I can blame my very late night staying up stripping and repainting a wooden scabbard. (Part of a slight HEMA problem I've developed. More on that later, maybe.) So here's how the second half or so of the dream (the bit I can still remember) went:
I do remember there being a prologue, if you can believe it.
It opened on a rising portrait shot of a human, some character "we" knew from "previous episodes" as a good guy who found himself betraying his people and forced to work as a commander in Mordor, but not much trusted there. He's in furs and ragged armor, and painted to hide his white skin, and carries a lanky crossbow across his chest. He stands before some large wooden contraption, looking ahead, before turning and giving the order to move out. The camera (yes, I dreamed in actual cinematic camerawork and editing. Apparently I have a talent for film directing that I never knew about) panned across the procession he was leading: some great woolly mammoth-looking beast, ridden by a large, grinning orc, pulled the wooden construction, which was a sled the size of a parade float, built of stripped and pitched logs, in the center of which was strung up a human prisoner, hanging by his wrists, with little iron shackles around his toes. Chains led from these shackles in front up to the beast, and in back, each toe's chain led back to a wooden log, carried on the shoulders of a couple walking orcs. This setup meant the prisoner's toes were the only thing pulling the sled along with the movement of the beast and the chains. I will admit that the toes in question were what I might wakingly call comically large, to facilitate large chains.
After an unremembered amount of plot crap later, in which one encounter between the actual main characters (which I presume here to be Frodo and Sam and whoever else my unconscious mind's unexpected fan fiction of LotR had traveling with them through Gorgoroth) and some characterized orcs revealed a skull on the ground marking a secret hiding place of something very important (which the orcs didn't survive to report), the traitor human guy was once again on the good-guys' side, on the run in Mordor from the orcs. He had met up with the good guys, and was telling them what was going on, via flashback.
The first Mr. Traitor Man knew of the matter, an escaped Ithilien guard (my dream probably meant "ranger", although he was dressed as a Skryim guard in this scene) ran into his orc company's camp, balanced on an overturned barrel, and shot six arrows seemingly at nothing some distance outside camp. The arrows planted themselves in a tight circle, marking the same spot where the skull later was.
The guard was quickly captured, but wouldn't explain why it was so important to mark the spot. They took him to the local governor, another human traitor (a very princely sort of guy, blond and completely evil), for questioning, since they didn't know the location or the arrows were important. Somehow, they completely lost track of where that had been when the governor yelled at them for not knowing what was so obviously there.
For some reason, they needed the guard to guide them back to the spot, hence the tortuous procession from the prologue. This flashback expanded on the scene, showing one of the logs being dropped and the prisoner screaming as his foot was pulled back, and a couple small examples of the tension between the traitor commander and the orcs under him, and his fear. One scene I may never forget involved the beast-rider orc, who the rest gave a very wide berth, called for a piss stop for his mount. The commander yelled at him that he had already had one that day, but the orc hopped down and partially unhitched the beast anyway. He pulled the creature's leg aside as a sort of signal to begin his (disgustingly detailed) cgi business. (The camera was looking up from a disturbing 3/4 angle, btw, right next to the splash zone. And the stuff was dark orange. Sorry if I ruined your breakfast.)
Looking from a slightly different angle at the orc grinning quite creepily up at his pet and counting the time, the guy actually began splashing a hand in the stream before thankfully the camera cut away to show the commander's (and the rest of the orcs') disgust. "That's some good urine, my lovely," we hear the driver say in the next shot, when the job is finally done.
The camera then hung on another upward shot, looking from another orc standing alongside the sled up to the commander, who had taken up a position riding on top of it, to show their slack-jawed stares at the scene. The orc looked up at the commander and spoke: "If I have to smack 'im some and I get in trouble for it..."
---Cut to his evilly-grinning face--- "I'm using yore name." Reverse-shot to the commander's fearful expression as he turns away.
The final scene before my alarm went off was as the procession made camp, and the commander hurried through the kitchen setup to his tent, past some (I kid you not) orc women preparing food. By orc standards, they were beautiful. By our standards, they were at least unblemished, though orc-colored and featured and all of them very fat. They actually looked concerned for the commander. Right before I woke up (which was actually a pretty okay ending for this whole "episode"), we heard them conspiring to help him escape.
So yeah. I just dreamed an entire episode of a GoT-style, long-form, dark fantasy television re-imagining of the Lord of the Rings, complete with visual direction, believable scripted dialogue, and a complete episode story arc following multiple POVs, all during my five late hours of sleep, and then woke up very tired.
Anyone's welcome to trade lives with me, if you want to try it.
Good to hear about the grammar series not being dead!
And your dream was weirdly coherent.
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You're telling me. The one I just woke up from today was pretty cool, too, but it was Discord-related, so I'm saving it for a fic idea.
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A lucky man, to have such a relentless muse.
Or unlucky, if you value your sleep.