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

I'm glad The Hound didn't have to explain to Tormund why he went out of his way to save him, like Bronn does to Jaime every time

i thought the hound and tormund stuff was pretty good. heck just give the hound his own spinoff after this series ends

establishing a 'killing the master white walker kills all its wights too' dynamic means we'll probably see a final battle where the humans are gonna get owned pretty bad until a last ditch/suicidal attempt to take out the night king succeeds and all the wights spontaneously disintegrate

it suddenly doesn't feel like that big a deal. how difficult is it to just have a dragon v high in the air then fly down and torch him.

gotta say the time/distance isn't really bothering me - this show sank to walking dead status ages ago, huge desire to watch it asap every week while simultaneously thinking it gets worse and worse.

has a very 'the eagles should have dropped the ring in mt. doom' feel. fingers crossed there's a major curveball or two

fire destroys wights but does it kill white walkers? they stepped over some small flames without too much fuss in this episode.

I would assume fire has no substantial effect on the walkers, since it is much easier to come by than dragonglass

need to hook a huge dragonglass bolt into the mouth of a dragon

i mean we haven't seen much of the white walkers/night king i guess, but how nimble are they? the night king doesn't look particularly athletic.

he threw a gigantic spear insanely fast several hundred feet into the sky

harder than an oversized crossbow even

that's more strength than speed but yeah i'm willing to accept he's only been moving slowly because of his high status as king and the calm it brings.

i don't frequent this thread much but wouldn't the easy explanation of the time/distance stuff be that this is all a story being retold by someone? perhaps Sam?

this would explain why every single one of the characters were nude 100% of the time in the first season

and why sam is such an annoying idiot

There's really no good explanation for why this show spend whole seasons, months in the show, traveling from a to b in the first few seasons, and it now takes a couple of minutes/days. It's just because the showrunners can't be bothered now that they don't have the books to guide them and it's stupid and it undermines so much of what the books are about and who cares we still have the books.

I'm sorry, the travel time and distance shit is such an insipid thing to be so bothered by. Maybe I'm weird for not having my graph paper with when I watch TV?

Another thing I liked in this ep was that the wight that gets hit with a rock was really his own character. He keeps getting back up! And then he comes back out of the ice to pull on Tormund! Wonder what his name is in the script.

Think Lannisters and Stark/Targaryens will be forced to collaborate on using Qyburn's state of the art big crossbow to just fling unending piles of awkwardly shaped dragon glass at the Night King until a lucky glancing blow ends him

I'm sorry, the travel time and distance shit is such an insipid thing to be so bothered by. Maybe I'm weird for not having my graph paper with when I watch TV?

― As an ilxor, I am uncompromising (El Tomboto), 21. august 2017 18:20 (six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It's not just any tv-show, it's an adaptation of a book series. And yeah, the books are all about graph paper, or maps, and strategy, and travel routes. Which ties into this whole larger theme of complexity, of not being black and white, not just doing a heros journey, etc. Being annoyed that the show is fucking that aspect up, now, not from the start, but seven years into the story, is not 'insipid'.

The opening sequence every week show the creation of a miniature version of the world! The sense of world/space/geography is an obvious pleasure with this show. Or used to be.

re night king i'm p sure arya could sneak in there w/ a dragonglass dagger and finish this shit off

yeah, I just don't know the benefit--given the limited number of episodes left, of having extended travel scenes. They could make it seem like a realistic amount of time had passed between scenes through dialogue or whatever but they're obviously going for a feeling of momentum. Anyone truly bothered by this can start a "Games of Thrones Jetpack Complaints" thread.

if Arya can shape shift and size shift enough to approximate the build of Walder Frey, you'd think she wouldn't require actual masks. p sure the first time we saw Jaqen pull his trickery there was no mask involved.

mentioned this a few years ago, but since they already discovered these locations they can Fast Travel

When does everyone find time to use the toilet? Or are they all afraid they'll get murdered on the can?

p sure the first time we saw Jaqen pull his trickery there was no mask involved

Yeah it was just a bit of hand-waving, which I would have thought the makers of this show would be happy to go along with...

if Arya can shape shift and size shift enough to approximate the build of Walder Frey, you'd think she wouldn't require actual masks. p sure the first time we saw Jaqen pull his trickery there was no mask involved.

― nomar, Monday, August 21, 2017 12:55 PM (five minutes ago) Bookmark

maybe magical properties associated with having a mask instead of being pure mission impossible style silicon masks?

If they could freeze water at will then Hardhome would have ended differently wouldn't it?

― As an ilxor, I am uncompromising (El Tomboto), Monday, August 21, 2017 9:24 AM (three hours ago) Bookmark

That was saltwater which has a much lower freezing temperature iirc

blindness can come and go at the wave of a man's hand, but a girl has to carry around faces in her bag?

FWIW, it's not as if GRRM ever figured out what to do with the world he built once he built it. He's no doubt overthinking all the stuff the show is just handwaving away.

"Hmm, the wingspan of this dragon is such and such, figure a modest headwind, given the cold season, but also that it is a dragon and therefore pretty strong, traveling x and y distance, so it should take this magical creature ... hmm, no, the math does not add up. Ok, back to people. Jon is about 5'8", so his stride is about such and such feet, therefore it should take him this long to walk ... no, but he's tired, his stride won't nearly be as robust! Man, this is killing me! The fans will absolutely HATE it if I don't get these details right."

part of the pleasure of some of these plot twists is imagining how these guys will explain it. i predicted that Benioff would say something about how "it's a whole new ball game" or "the night king just evened the score" now that he has an ice dragon, but he went with "The Night King now has his own weapon of mass destruction."

President Keyes pretty much otm. I think what really annoys me is the sense that none of this will happen in the books, because it clearly can't be fit into two volumes. They could have sped up a lot of stuff earlier, though, it's kinda remarkable how little did really happen in seasons 5 and 6. I dislike how much they fucked up the storyline of Jaime going to the Riverlands, but it's doubly annoying because they didn't have the time, because they sent him to Dorne instead.

And yeah, GRRM is clearly overthinking it. He has talked about how difficult it was to figure out when all the different characters who travelled to Meereen would arrive, and pretty much nobody liked all the chapters of different characters traveling to Meereen. And, I mean, the show did kinda fuck that up as well, but it was pretty understandable.

part of the pleasure of some of these plot twists is imagining how these guys will explain it.

would you like to go on a walk or something? we could get outside for a while

When ilxors can predict what's going to happen next, I think that's a sign that show is kind of stupid now.

*that your show

Or that we've been watching it for seven years

I am also on ilx but better than people on ilx! Small world!

The eighth and ninth guy in that seven-man crew really fought hard against those wights.

if I were the night king and his dudes I woulda just chucked javelins at them while they were sleeping

Things the NK realizes later while in the shower...

he was waiting for dragons duh

surely he has more than one javelin

He just had a toothpick until he got the scientists and engineers involved

Well he literally had 2

quibbling with the details of this show is honestly great because every scene has something stupid about it. what else can you do?

hope qyburn never finds out about the javelin - "a big crossbow bolt but you throw it!" - it would crush him.

I think this gets at what's wrong w the show now

https://www.gq.com/story/game-of-thrones-season-7-episode-5-recap

And this sums up my feelings about why I keep watching

Game of Thrones was always the thing that was better than you'd think it would be and now it's about as good as you'd think it would be

— Emily Yoshida (@emilyyoshida) August 21, 2017

xp or the javelina - "a small hog but you don't eat it!" - it would blow his mind

But the granular details that might sounds boring on paper—geography, travel, diplomacy, and training—are actually a big part of what made Game of Thrones interesting in the first place, and I've begun to miss them. There’s a reason that every episode opens with a sweeping pan over a map that includes key locations like King’s Landing and Dragonstone.

i didn't realize frederik b wrote for GQ

i think GRRM made a pact with benioff and weiss that the TV show would get the big stupid hollywood happy ending and he would get to do the smart thoughtful "makes u go hmm" ending for the books. if he ever gets to publishing another page that is