All Hail Jaqen H’ghar

No spoilers as long as you don’t click on links

I’m a fan of Jaqen H’ghar. The very minor character who was featured primarily in season 2 of Game of Thrones, I feel had a disproportionate impact on Arya Stark and I’m delighted to see that at the end of of Season 5 there could be further exploration of this complex and compelling character.

During my recent vacation, I realized that I wanted to re-watch all scenes involving Jaqen and Arya and the process wasn’t incredibly hard. Fire up the Game of Thrones wiki, find his page, and then map references to episodes. Using that as a script, I fire up iTunes and scrub episodes to watch these selected scenes. Voilà.

This experience revealed something interesting about the show to me. While there are certainly dependencies which tie the different plots together, the different narratives, I believe, can stand on their own. Imagine just a cut of Games of Thrones that contain scenes involving Theon Greyjoy – would that be good TV?

The point: I would pay good money for a recut Game of Thrones where I could choose the character that I wanted to follow – and that’s it – that’s the only scenes I’d see. I doubt this would be viable without first seeing the show proper, but I think it’d be a great way to explore a specific character.

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