HBO's adaptation of Game of Thrones - Thread 2. There are a lot of nerds.

xp faceless interns

the thought had occurred to me that arya lives and becomes "no one" because her list includes people who a lot of other characters would want to see dead, as well as the iron bank, and the huge payoff on the contract(s) mean the faceless men stand to score big if they train up the person who made that list

― pratt truss it (dan m), Monday, June 13, 2016 12:21 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

that's an interesting take --- he seems so casual about her leaving at the end that i couldn't help but think this outcome (waif dead, arya back to being arya) was exactly what he wanted

not just casual, he actually smiled...a little bit.

It kinda made no sense.

I like the idea that they're happy to have her go kill Cersei

latest episode itself was kinda whatevs, but it's a table-setter, so that's fine

i understand forks' complaints about this season being way more fan-service-oriented and soap-operaish than previous seasons, but i don't think it's genuinely breaking any of its established rules and after the relentlessly bleak season that preceded it, it's an understandable move, it may be less weighty but it's also incredibly entertaining. at some point the show was gonna have to lean more into the entertainment camp

xp it made sense if you read that exchange as arya doing a mike drop and jaquen thinking "now... now the student... has become... THE MASTER"

look, i'll cop to getting too hung up on the death fakeouts. but those are good examples of the writing crew trying to unhinge all the unfinished GRRM directions and put their trains on different tracks. my sense is that the whole season is a table setter, bound to be capped by a few major deaths/alliance shifts. they're calling a do-over. it may not have been preventable given the utterly unique circumstances surrounding the source material but it's showing. A lot of the plot twists and character developments feel unearned and it's rubbing me the wrong way.

was also thinking that tyrion might have expected the slavers to show up because he figured dany would return with dragons, make a show of power, and then hey presto she's got the fleet she's always wanted

why does everyone keep saying "the faceless men" when afaict there's only one faceless dude

Budget, man. Do you know how hard it is to costume and feed a few more folks dressed in rags on location? They've got to save their money! Plus, did you know Peter Dinklage is a totally CGI creation? Shit's expensive.

latest episode itself was kinda whatevs, but it's a table-setter, so that's fine

I think it's a legit criticism to complain about table-settling 6 seasons in, let alone one (two?) episode before the finale. There have been several seasons of table-setting, it's time to eat, dammit!

...it was table-setting for events that will occur in the next two eps is what i meant (mostly in the finale, if ep. 9 is gonna be all bastard battle all the time as the preview seems to indicate)

So many of these complaints about this or that world-building storyline "not going anywhere" make me feel like I'm watching hundreds of fan sheep dogs trying to herd GRRM and the showrunners toward a predictable boring dragons vs. zombies conclusion.

dragons vs. zombies is pretty inevitable is it not?

The what's west of westeros line gave me hope that everyone would unite to go commit genocide on some undiscovered continent

Otherwise known as the conclusion GRRM was inevitably heading towards

Xp

camera pulls back to reveal the night king sitting with his eyes closed on a hilltop, his teeth bared in a wide grin
cue sound: "I'd like to teach the world to sing, in perfect harmonyyyyyy"

part of me suspects that GRRM had the ending first ("wouldn't it be rad if there was a big war between zombies and dragons?") and worked backwards from there.

And just kept going back, and back, and back, thousands of years ...

what're the odds on cersei blowing up king's landing in the final ep

The what's west of westeros line gave me hope that everyone would unite to go commit genocide on some undiscovered continent

― Blowout Coombes (President Keyes), Monday, June 13, 2016 2:28 PM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark

varya and the iron born finally ascend the shores of a new continent, slow pan out to reveal buried hand of statue of liberty just a few dozen feet in

camera pulls back to reveal the night king sitting with his eyes closed on a hilltop, his teeth bared in a wide grin
cue sound: "I'd like to teach the world to sing, in perfect harmonyyyyyy"

― De La Soul is no Major Lazer (ulysses), Monday, June 13, 2016 2:32 PM (14 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the night king is v misunderstood he broke all his vows and scandalized his child but he's an artist at heart

i had what i thought was an original plot guess, which i found was already doing the rounds, that cersei would break and try to wildfire it all down and jamie would kill her to stop it, echoing the last time someone tried to burn them all. with the way the books have handled their relationship that seems a plausible development. however, having a scene like in this episode where jamie talks about how he would do anything for her, only for him to kill her a couple episodes later, is pretty reasonable for the show's MO. whatever his failings, grrm insists on causality in a way the show hasn't always.

i know grrm doesn't really ~do~ chekhov, but the wildfire seems like a pretty big gun sitting on the mantelpiece

I like that theory Roberto.

It may be more likely that Cersei uses the wildfire to kill the Sparrows, inadvertently kills Tommen, and then Jamie turns against her.

i can buy that if only bc i find it hard to believe that we've seen the last of jaime and brienne together and cersei would have to cersei her way out of that for them to have a path.

also if davos gets killed in the big battle next week i'll be pissed, he's a top 3 likable character for me.

That's why he'll probably die.

i'm not entirely unconvinced LSH won't make an appearance, the jaime and edmure conversation felt like some kind of setup beyond the scenes immediately following. also dang i never knew edmure had it in him, ballsy to go at the kingslayer like that.

also yeah davos is probably toast :/

If Davos dies I hope they have time for an autopsy, otherwise everyone will assume he's coming back

LSH would be a little much in a season that already has one major resurrection and another major reemergence. It would be both of those things at once and a bit excessive right now.

LSH should be abandoned entirely imo as it thus far has been

if davos dies i fuckin riot

LSH has either been hiding around quietly for a long time now or she is a pile of bones at this point.

Wouldn't be shocked if she makes an appearance in the season finale, at the very end, and then we have to wait until the next season for anything to happen. Jon Snow redux. After all, this is still television, where the easiest and most obvious thing to do is often the choice that is made.

There has been a shitload of character deaths though and only two (?) have come back from the dead. (We never knew the fate of The Hound).

What was the rumour that Cersei & Qyburn were talking about? Or do we not know yet?

p sure that about hiden caches of wildfyre. presumably there is some being kept underneath the sept

why does everyone keep saying we didn't know the fate of the hound? didn't preacher dude say pretty explicitly that he found him in really bad shape and nursed him to health? or am i making that up?

Because we only found that out a week ago?

For a season and a half whether he was deD or nt was up in the air

Didn't know Hound was alive or dead, didn't know if Benjen was alive or dead, didn't know if Bronn was ever coming back, Jon Snow back from the dead, Mountain back from the dead, Beric is back from the dead. Probably forgetting a couple.

The Hound was left for dead, and didn't appear for several seasons. I mean, no, we never saw the body, but it's not out of the ordinary to say that he's come back from the dead. Benjen returned from the dead as well, btw. That's four characters in eight episodes whos deaths were 'fakeouts'. Is that a better way of saying it? Also, I fear/hope the Blackfish might soon join them.

Benjen was never dead, was he? Pretty sure he was just missing North of the Wall.

I never thought that Benjen was dead (or rather, that his story was over). If it wasn't expected that he would come back at some point, he would have never been in the show to begin with.

Wait Hound, Snow and Benjen

Who is the 4th? Arya?

You can't be serious about Bronn

Arya's almost dying but then somehow killing the Waifinator bothered me way more than the Hound or Jon coming back

as far as implausibilities go

Mountain, Snow, Benjen, Hound.

For what it's worth I always assumed The Mountain wasn't ever necessarily dead, just as close as possible before being engineered into Frankenstein's monster.

ned stark