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Ran

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Everything posted by Ran

  1. She was paralyzed from the neck down, hence no reaction when he stepped on her arm, and not a jot of movement from her.
  2. It actually is. George introduced the idea in The World of Ice and Fire, specifically in "The Sons of the Dragon" material where it's stated that the Hightower's flame burned a "baleful green" as Lord Hightower gathered his banners. Yeah he did. His ominous silence the entire time makes it plain enough. I'm guessing he was planning to pull her off the horse to kill her, be a shame if anything happened to a fine horse like that.
  3. I wouldn't have killed Joffrey off the way the show did. And it's not that I wanted another tourney, I just wanted something... I don't know, less obviously improbable for Cole to escape reprisal for. The attempts to reason it through as if it's no big deal to brutally murder someone who arrived in the Velaryon wedding party as their guest _and_ also throw the groom around... Self-defense? Crushing his face in his self defense? He broke his arm almost immediately when he pulled the knife, he could have left him for the king then if he was an assassin. They could have done it in a better way, if less spectacular: have Cole, disgusted and upset, leave his post to get some fresh air on the walls... and Joffrey follows, says the same stuff, and oops, he falls to his death. Also it happens to fit nicely with a later event, kind of a foreshadowing. Hell, they could even make it more of an accident if they wanted -- he loses his temper, grabs him to tell him off, there's a struggle, Joffrey falls. Simple. With no immediate witnesses, at best there's suspicion about the fact that Joffrey followed after him, but Cole has to just stick to his guns that he didn't see him or whatever, or maybe they talked briefly, Joffrey seemed despondent, and they parted ways, tragic accident or whatever. There's a scream outside, people come out to see, Laenor is heartbroken again, etc. I like a lot of what Condal and his team are doing, but the apparent overwhelming desire to introduce gory violence to the point that it strains credulity is not among the things I enjoy about it. Rhea Royce I'm much less bothered by. There's always the possibility that the accident involved an assassin cutting her saddle girth or whatever so that she fell at an inopportune time, and that Daemon was behind it. Making him literally the direct cause of it is new, but I think they've made the point about this that their Daemon, like Jaime, generally does his own killing.
  4. Hell, need to see the scene and Hepburn's delivery. The Lion in Winter is so good:
  5. Yes. Rhaenyra deliberately misled her, there's no question of that. And with a knight of the Kingsguard no less, breaking his vows. Alicent already feels guilt about having her father lose his position because of the choice she made to support the princess, and now she sees that that support was based on a lie. And it is a lie to Alicent because of her concern was about the danger of the princess not being a maiden and the rumors and such, but Rhaenyra lawyered her way around it. Moreover, Alicent went to Rhaenyra as a friend, promised to help her and may have been perfectly honest that she would have helped Rhaenyra even if she had told her the truth. But Rhaenyra did not confide in her, misled her, and then took advantage of her support to then force her father out. You can see why this changes Alicent's feelings about Rhaenyra.
  6. Book spoilers and episode discussion here.
  7. Given what they seem to be doing with her from what we saw in episode 6, I suspect people actually will care. She's very distinctive.
  8. There were very few think pieces for GoT in its first season compared to GoT in its later seasons, whereas this first season of HotD is definitely getting more of that than the comparable GoT season (since there now exists a GoT-centric media ecosystem), and to my cursory look it seems HotD has so far engendered more mainstream commentary than RotP has, another show tied to a pre-existing property. To some degree it takes time for these things to develop when you're new, even if you are part of a franchise. Do I expect HotD to reach the heights of popularity of GoT? No, that was lightning in a bottle, and this story is no more than 4 seasons long, which means it has less time to build (as it should).
  9. There's a lot of ways to square the circle without actually stating anything. The problem is while there are plausible ways to resolve it, it's left a mystery (at least through the episodes we've seen).
  10. Not so far as we've seen. You just have to come up with your own view of it. Maybe Inside the Episode after the jump they'll talk about it and provide some filling in? Don't know.
  11. Oh, the "I don't want to be a mother/don't want to get married" thing is 100% show canon. Book canon, while we don't really know Rhaenyra's mind, there's no great reason to think she had any particular hangups, and no great reason to think she didn't welcome motherhood. But since we don't 100% know, the writers (rightfully) decided to make a choice for their story... with the odd consequence of having the realization that, oh, she's happy to be a mother just something that happens off screen after spending half the season telling us she didn't want to be.
  12. I've got this entertaiment media analysis guy (per his About, he's worked in the business at production companies, major streamers, studios, etc. at various business development and marketing levels in the past) dropping his newsletter in my inbox, and he has a subscriber's-only post on his Substack about how House of the Dragon performed. From the short preview he has available:
  13. I can understand her having Jace -- having an heir of her own, a male heir no less, is important. Luke too -- the spare heir. I can kind of even understand Aegon and Viserys, who just happen to have really strategic names to go along with their unimpeachable Valyrian lineage, to flaunt her status and perhaps to appeal to dear old Dad by giving him a namesake and so on. But Joffrey is a mystery to me, and I guess Visenya will be too, unless it's not just "don't miss out on the good things in life", aka the pleasures of sex, but that after her first child she actually realizes she enjoys being a mother as well. I agree it would be nice to see that realization/development on the show, but as I've said before, the challenge of covering so much time in a season means we're going to have to miss key developments in favor of other key developments.
  14. Having seen episode 6, not a chance. They make everything very plain. You’d have to have the attention span of a fruit fly to not understand it.
  15. The miniatures look fine to my eye, but the paint work on them for the advertising/marketing were a bit too flat on the faces, IMO. Unless the characters are supposed to be that uniformly skin toned, if they're not-quite-humans or something?
  16. Nielsen and HBO has come out with data for episode 4, and the numbers are looking rock solid:
  17. Err, I meant Maegor! His campaign against the Faith paused for a bit with his return to KL where he displayed ~2,000 skulls that he said belonged to Swords and Stars.
  18. And Maegor with piles of skulls and Aerys the Mad King and Joffrey Baratheon and... GRRM is not a black-and-white sort of writer.
  19. You are so absurdly in your own head about this show and the story it's telling. Her remark has to be contextualized with what she says after -- she wants a night where she doesn't have to think about the burden and trouble of being heir. This includes fobbing off a remark about the smallfolk's views because she doesn't care in that moment. You can pretend it's some grand statement of Rhaenyra's perspective on the smallfolk, or you can recognize it's a young woman in the middle of a new experience not being terribly serious. Like, she steals some sweets on a lark right after.
  20. I'm not sure I'd call it inconsistent, given his treatment of Lord Jason and Lyonel Strong, and his shrugging off his brother's actions in Flea Bottom. Like I said, a sloppy drunk.
  21. Yeah, I found Rhaenyra and Alicent both likable here. Rhaenyra's little effort to get the crowd to boo was funny, her delight at being called a boy, and so on. Alicent's struggle with her various loyalties was also well played and you can totally understand her dilemma. Viserys, OTOH, did come off as worse, particular in the garden party scene where he's clearly a bit tipsy and makes fun of his wife and randomly farting as he laughs, then being rude to Rhaenyra when she tries to salvage the situation. He's clearly a sloppy drunk who let his joy at his brother's return take all of his focus and courtesy. Re: Alyssa, I think people are reading too much into a throw away line. "You were always the warrior" probably means Daemon was a ferocious little toddler, maybe grabbing at swords and knives Rickon-style, and Alyssa laughed and cooed over it and called him her "little warrior" or whatever.
  22. I don't think if people really noticed last episode, but in front of the fire with Alicent Viserys outright says that he called his daughter the Realm's Delight to "protect" her from Daemon's ambition. To me, he basically meant that he deliberately set singers and the like to spread the word about how charming and beautiful she was to try and win her the love and support of the realm. So, yeah, propaganda is a thing on the show, and I think they've done a good job with that aspect of things.
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