User blog comment:Knakveey/Expert Showcase: Series Director Andrew Grant/@comment-5014364-20150501201112

I need to spend a day or two reviewing the first episode, so I can search out any questions I may have in full.

Basic questions would be "How and Why were the Forresters picked as a family to focus on?" -- I thought it was a great decision; you can't make up a new War of the Five Kings scale conflict because the backstory is known, but what you can do is "zoom-in" and show a microcosm of how the conflict is playing out on the level of the minor Houses; also a great idea to not invent Houses from scratch, but to pick a minor House at least mentioned in the novels, to give a blank slate to fill in (the Forresters are briefly mentioned as Glover vassals in A Dance of Dragons).

...I'll have more questions later...

Oh here's one: people keep coming on here and assuming that one of Margaery's handmaidens in the TV show must be Mira Forrester - just picking one that has brown hair and assuming it's her. I think one could be her, but it's not "official".

...so do you think you'll ever get the TV show to make a throwaway line referring to events from the game? Like a one-off thing in which Stannis is saying, "ack, we don't have a lot of men, but some minor Houses in the North sent men like the Mullens and the Forresters", or truly a throwaway reference that TV-Margaery calls one of her handmaidens "Mira" at one point?

...general question: how are you handling character diversity in the game? This comes up now and again, with the TV show too. As with the TV series the focus is mostly on the North or Westeros, but you do have characters going to Essos where there are more non-white characters (or I don't know, making a few Dornishmen sent to the Wall?)

The decision to make that extra step and get the core TV cast members voicing their own characters was great; how was this coordinated? I imagine it was difficult but it put you head and shoulders above previous unsuccessful attempts at games based on the series.

Did you ever work out with the TV show writers how "canon" the game is? I asked George R.R. Martin via his blog and he briefly responded that he doesn't really handle "TV show canon" anyway, Benioff and Weiss do; so far we've been treating it as "near-canon" - it interweaves with the TV story but never contradicts anything in it, so it's plausibly what could happen, "off screen".

Question: have the initial episodes been well-received enough that you are hoping to make new episodes/series beyond the initially planned six episodes?...for that matter, might you work on other spinoffs which are set in other prequel eras, giving you a lot more free rein to fill in the blanks? I.e. focusing on minor Houses in the Reach when the Dance of the Dragons divided the realm? We only know about such events in broad brushstrokes but they are very tantalizing.

....Question: Do you ever use the wiki to make quick fact-checks? (We do our best to help).

Question: Do you ever have issues regarding content and subject matter? The books and TV series have a mature level of sex and nudity in them, and you have generally steered clear of anything explicit without sacrificing the story; violence of course is fine (they'll let you show a man's brains be smashed in by an axe in explicit detail, but they won't let you show to loving married people engaging in sex, because it's "obscene"?)....but seriously: in the graphic novel adaptation of the novels, the artist said that he faced similar problems that the TV producers did with regard to underaged characters having sex; underaged by modern standards, though in Westeros the age of adulthood is 16 in the novels. It isn't unusual in Westeros for girls to marry as soon as they have Flowered and are thus "a woman". The graphic novel adaptation said that they also had to age-up Daenerys because she has sex at 13 years old in the novels, and they'd have run into similar censorship issues. Now obviously the game is based on the TV show so TV-Daenerys and game-Daenerys are the same, both by Emilia Clarke, but even so, when you have characters invented for the game, do you have to worry about "this is the kind of younger character who would need to be aged up in the TV series?" -- or do you just avoid the entire issue, and have a rule about "we're only going to depict people in sexual relationships who are 18 or older, not 16 like in the medieval society of the novels"

Obviously the game is set mostly in Westeros, but do you ever want to show characters making side trips to other regions in the Free Cities? We see a bit of that with Asher Forrester. The urge to show locations that exist in the storyverse but that the TV show hasn't depicted yet - or even the Summer Islands, they're interesting and not that far from Westeros.

Question: ...It's quite shocking that the game is giving more and more hints about Ice dragons, particularly because they're barely hinted at in the novels and implied to be part of the upcoming war against the White Walkers. Was it your decision to add this? Or was it a very measured, weighted decision...i.e. you'd only imply stuff about future TV seasons or books if the writers gave you an outline?

more questions to follow....