The Bard of Banefort

That one guy on Reddit who’s always claiming he has secret intel (i.e. that Miguel sabotaged the S2 scripts and they had to be rewritten lol) is now saying that Winds is finished. I never wanted a fraud to be right so much in my life.

I think the reason why it’s considered a Green victory is because Aegon II is credited as the official king and not Rhaenyra (otherwise Aegon the Dragonbane would be remembered as Aegon the Second, not Aegon the Third). And unfortunately, the precedent was reinforced to bar women from the Iron Throne. Not just Daena, but Daenora too, would should have come before Maekar (I’m guessing that’s why she was wed to Aerion, to combine their claims).

Something the show set up and then dropped was Daenerys getting pregnant. But how can Jon die, get resurrected, and then still sire a child? Even if his soul goes into Ghost, that still feels like a cop-out.

I think it says a lot about the showrunners that they view being fat as a slander. It reminds me of when they thought that Laena dying in childbirth was weak and that she should commit suicide instead because that was more badass. The “feminist” reasoning is instead quite misogynistic. HOTD can boast about how diverse it is all they want, but at the end of the day they couldn’t contemplate hiring fat actresses, even though there are plenty out there and the source material calls for it. Plenty of people wanted Rhaenyra and Helaena to be chubby not so that they could hate them more easily but because it’s actually quite refreshing to see and reflects real life. No, they didn’t need to include the part about her resenting Alicent for being thin. But like it or not, most women gain weight from pregnancy. I see no point in pretending otherwise.

It’s also possible that Tyrion will be the treason for love, in that he won’t be able to turn on Jaime in the end. But I still think Jon is the most likely.

Even if he did go to Valyria, I doubt he found a suit of Valyrian steel armor just laying around in Valyria somewhere. He probably plundered it from a palace he raided.

Now that Spain is re-releasing the books with new covers, people are theorizing that Winds is on the horizon. If I remember correctly, this sort of thing has happened before though. The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that Jon won’t be resurrected until well into TWOW, possibly not until the end of the book. Melisandre has no reason to attempt a resurrection that she’s never done at this point, least of all on Jon. More has to happen before she reaches that point. And considering how slow-paced the last two books were. . . I also think there’s a fair chance that Stannis loses the battle at Winterfell and is forced to retreat, or if he does win, he’ll suffer heavy loses and then be met with the news that Aegon has taken King’s Landing. He and Shireen are nowhere near each other right now, and it’s going to take something big to push him to the point where he’ll sacrifice her. Maybe it’ll be like Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, where Selyse kills Stannis to avenge her daughter. The books seem to have dropped any plans for Brienne to kill him.

I think George underplayed religion more than he probably should have, at least in the first three books.

I can understand why people don’t like the ship, but I have a very different reading of this quote: Saying “I should have done this before leaving her for that dwarf” is like saying “I would jump off a bridge before going on a second date with that guy.” It’s not a confession; he’s saying that being raped and killed is better than being married to Tyrion, who he despises. It’s kind of like that line from the show, where the Hound says something like “if you die with a clean sword, I’ll rape your corpse.” Obviously he didn’t do that. Not to mention, GRRM wrote the Blackwater episode, which had the “you won’t hurt me” exchange instead. This is a long way of me saying that even though he was being aggressive, I don’t think the Hound had any intention of raping her.

No, no, I meant that Jon killed Dany for love of his sisters, who he thought Dany would kill. I’m guessing that Arya will somehow get on Dany’s bad side in the books, which will be what leads us here.

Unfortunately, GOT’s misogyny forced them to overcorrect in HOTD where, at least in the first season, the women are all frightened lambs constantly being used and abused by the men. And because of GOT’s reputation, the way women are portrayed in any of its properties are never going to sit well with many fans, no matter what direction they go in. Even I’m guilty of this. One problem with being THE BIGGEST SHOW IN THE WORLD for a decade (even though it wasn’t, it was just the show that the most amount of clickbait journalists decided was worth their time) is that it leaves a mark, for better and for worse. I disagree with a lot of Lindsay Ellis’ takes, but her comment that GOT was “hot fantasy that fucks” was definitely true. I think the reason why there were/are so many overly defensive bros in the show fandom who were adamant that this was a very serious T&D show was because that meant they didn’t have to be embarrassed for liking a fantasy show. Then when the ending fell flat on its face, a lot of those people indeed felt embarrassed for caring so much. The funny thing is, despite the female-centered marketing, I’ve read that HOTD is even more male-skewed than GOT was (it makes sense if you look at HBO’s merch website, which has a lot more women’s attire for GOT than HOTD). I’ve also heard that very few “adult women” (as in 30s or older) watch HOTD, and I can totally see that. The only people I remember seeing criticize Aemma’s torturous childbirth scene were women, and most of them have reached the point in their lives where they don’t find a manchild like Daemon all that attractive either. Tying those two together, it’s actually a little ironic that men consume more fantasy and sci-fi than women, since women aren’t generally embarrassed to be fans of stuff like that the way some men are.

I think that originally the wildfire was supposed to do most of the damage. That said, Dany still went on blowing up the city for the rest of the episode, so it’s not like she thought to stop when she saw what was happening, even in the original script. My theory is that Jon will be the “treason for love” in the books, and that this was D&D’s way of incorporating that. A lot of the stuff George told them was just kind of slapped on without any cohesion (i.e. King Bran). I think a major mistake the show made was trying to make every battle bigger and greater than the last. It’s clear that many people went into S8 expecting it to be an entire season of epic battles on scale with Battle of the Bastards, which just isn’t feasible. It would have taken an additional year to film and judging by all I’ve read about The Long Night now, I don’t think the cast would have agreed to an intensive schedule that would have lasted that long. What the show should have done, in my opinion, was forgo the giant battle and do a string of episodes with smaller fights and a psychological thriller-esque escape from the Walkers (the closest we got to this was Arya in the library). It could have been interspersed with regrouping, assisting the commoners, deserting Winterfell, etc. But that wasn’t the type of approach GOT was interested in.

One reason why I resisted the RamSan leaks for S5 for so long was because it would take way too long for Sansa and Littlefinger to get to Winterfell for that plot to happen and, up until then, the show had been very meticulous with travel times.

It is inconceivable that Ryan Condal, book nerd that he is, did not include the gold dragons joke. He must be kicking himself for that now. Otto may see Alicent as a pawn, but he also shows a certain deference to her as queen. One of the more interesting things about his character is how he always seems vaguely impressed whenever Alicent asserts herself—a huge difference from Tywin, who always shuts Cersei down when she tries to do the same. He also shows some understanding in E3 that convincing Viserys to change the succession won’t be easy. A progress between the second and third episode would have given Rhaenyra and Criston more time to bond, which I would have appreciated, since they didn’t really do much of that prior to having sex. I think that, realistically, Rhaenyra would have felt compelled to come to Alicent’s side during the birth upon seeing how frightened she was. It would have reminded Rhaenyra of her mother. (Another weird decision: why wasn’t Rhaenyra attending her mother during the birth?) It was quite disturbing seeing teenage Alicent hugely pregnant with this old man’s child. That’s definitely one of those things that hits differently in a visual medium than in a book. At first, it looked like Larys was going to fall in love with Alicent, in his own creepy way. But then they took a turn and went straight off the cliff into him just being a psychopath who gets off on having power over her. I preferred the twisted love story angle.

They could probably just recast him. Like you said, he wasn’t really an iconic character.

Rhaena wasn’t craven. Aegon forbid her from riding with him into battle.

He’s also talked in interviews about how much he likes houses Dayne and Blackwood, which I think we can also infer from the text. There’s a rumor floating around that Graham McTavish isn’t returning next season. I guess he wasn’t listed in whatever press release HBO did for S2.

I meant that they weren’t interested in tourneys, melees, etc.

The dragons are so overpowered (to the point of being virtually indestructible) that the only thing that prevented Aegon and Jaehaerys from being tyrants was a conscience and idealism. Neither cared for violence for the hell of it, and both wanted to create a thriving society, complete with happy smallfolk. Maegor shows just how powerless anyone is against a dragon rider. Either you need to assassinate them during a moment of vulnerability (which is also what happened to Aegon II) or you need to find a different dragon rider who can defeat him. Rogar wouldn’t have openly declared rebellion against Maegor if he didn’t have Jaehaerys and Alysanne (and eventually Rhaena) on his side.

Exactly. So why would they support the people with the flying WMDs who are setting their land on fire? It makes sense that they eventually came to support Aegon because he was a competent ruler, but during the Conquest I have a hard time believing they saw him as any kind of savior.

I finally watched the deleted scenes from S8: Very little of value was cut. It’s mostly just scenes of people calling Davos old, Alys Karstark dying off-screen, a scene showing that the northerners don’t really see Dany as their queen (and her not liking it), a few cut lines from Tormund and Tyrion, and a scene of Dany teasing Missandei with some less-than-great acting from Emilia. The big scene they cut was Tyrion and Sansa killing some wights, but after watching the scene, I’m wondering if they cut it because of some uncommonly bad acting from Gilly. Her reaction to zombies trying to kill her and her son is a blank stare (granted, you would think the director would have told her to look more frightened). It’s also shot in a way that makes it look like Tyrion killed all the wights on his own, which I’m pretty sure he didn’t.

This is what I don’t understand about ASOIAF fans when they talk about unreliable narrators. We get a vague reference to how the smallfolk welcomed the Targaryens with open arms, yet these were the same people who were being burned alive in battle. They approved of Aegon after the Conquest because he was a competent ruler, but there’s no reason to believe the smallfolk saw him as their savior. Would Torrhen Stark really be remembered as “the king who knelt” if that was true? Maegor died by assassination, and the only reason anyone was willing to openly declare against him was because they had three dragon riders versus his one. Aegon held the realm together through a mix of competence and fear. As soon as Aenys took over, rebellions sprang up everywhere.

I think Maegor’s reign made it pretty clear that when the guy with the dragon says he’s your king, there’s no denying him. That’s part of the problem with the dragons being so OP. Most of Westeros didn’t want Aegon as their king, they just wanted to avoid being burned alive even more.

It occurred to me: did the Baratheons own a dragon egg prior to the Rebellion? Rhaelle would have had one in her cradle, and she presumably brought it with her to Storm’s End. So was the egg passed down to her son and grandsons?

I like Corlys’ actor, but he’s definitely more theatrical than the other characters. I feel like he’s onstage while everyone else is on set. Viserys not having a dragon in the books is more understandable since Daemon is a bit more restrained. In the books, when Viserys tells him to give the egg back and send Mysaria away, he does it. I always thought Rhaenys seemed really petty in that scene with Rhaenyra. She does, however, seem to acknowledge that she doesn’t like the idea of her young daughter marrying Viserys—which just shows how subservient she is to Corlys. Viserys’ big reveal that he’s marrying Alicent is so goofy. He doesn’t tell either Rhaenyra or Corlys about it ahead of time, humiliating both of them, and no one seems to wonder why Alicent is randomly present at the council meeting. I hate how they make it look like Alicent and Laena are the only two options for a wife. There were plenty of women over the age of fifteen that Viserys could have chosen. They filmed a confrontation between Rhaenyra and Alicent right after this, along with Rhaenyra helping Alicent dress for her wedding. I’m not sure why they cut those scenes. Apparently Rhaenyra called Alicent a whore, and Alicent broke down crying and said that no one ever bothered to ask her what she wanted. Milly’s Rhaenyra is a huge brat, so I don’t think they’d cut it because of how it would make her look (it also would have created a parallel to when Rhaenyra is called a whore by Vaemond later on).