The Bard of Banefort

According to photo leaks from Croatia, E5 is when Meleys’ head will be paraded through King’s Landing. So this confirms that Rhaenys will still die early on. Assuming that the Battle of the Gullet is pushed back to S3 though, what’s the climax for this season going to be?

Sounds like there’ll be a funeral for Jaehaerys next season. I still have a hard time envisioning how they’ll be able to build on Alicent and Rhaenyra’s relationship after Blood & Cheese. Assuming Alicent witnesses it, I can’t see how she’ll feel anything but loathing for Rhaenyra after that.

George is apparently a huge fan of Tad Williams and drew inspiration from The Dragonbone Chair, but did GRRM inadvertently prevent it from ever being adapted to screen (at least for another twenty years)? The plot sound so similar to AGOT and, thanks to HOTD, it would be the “other dragon show” if they kept the title.

I remember looking at the HOTD scores for the season finale and being surprised that despite having a high score, far fewer people reviewed it than the few before it. A lot of people got attached to young Rhaenyra and were upset when she was replaced in E6. Also I think viewers were getting tired of the childbirth scenes by that point.

For all the complaints show fans have about S8’s plot holes, bad dialogue, and overall bad writing, I realize that if Jon had slain the NK and Dany ended up on the Iron Throne as the beloved goddess-queen, most of them would have been thrilled and S8 really would be regarded as the Best Season Eva, with just us disgruntled book fans complaining about the rest of it. That’s probably why D&D got as lazy with the scripts as they did—most people overlooked the bad writing in the past, so they didn’t think they needed to spend more time on it. They probably could have written something better if they had tried.

Does the writers strike extend to all forms of communication, or just words written on paper? Because I’m trying to imagine how Ryan Condal will manage showrunning without running into writing complications. If is a scene isn’t working, can he make suggestions or does he have to keep his mouth shut?

We’re told in the world book/FnB that the Great Council of 101 set a precedent that the Iron Throne could not pass to either a woman or her male descendants. Then we’re told that the people who wanted Viserys to change the succession often cited the council decision in their argument. I think this is sufficient evidence that Aegon the Younger’s claim is through his father, Daemon.

The Greens won become Aegon outlived Rhaenyra, who was forced to flee King’s Landing. Little Aegon’s claim is through Daemon, not Rhaenyra. Since Aegon’s brothers were dead, and neither with legitimate children, it bounced back to Daemon (dead) and then his son (alive). When James II and his son fled England, he ceased being king. His daughter is remembered as the legitimate queen from that point forward. In a bit of irony, Daenerys ruled that one Meereenese noblewoman forfeited her home by temporarily abandoning it. By that same logic, she lost her claim by leaving Westeros. And just like Rhaenyra, they sold their mother’s crown in the process.

I think George was using Manderly as a self-insert in this instance. In the “North remembers” scene, Wyman talks about how people view him as being a lesser person because of his weight, and that’s a sentiment many heavyset people have encountered.

Quentyn would have been a good match for Dany, as Barristan pointed out. Quaithe wasn’t the only reason she turned him down—she also wasn’t ready to leave Meereen. But we know Quentyn didn’t go to meet Dany with the intention of betraying her. And it seems highly likely now that Quentyn’s death will result in Dorne turning against Dany.

It’s just some guy on Reddit who likes to claim he has super-secret inside info (according to Ran, he’s been doing it for a while). One of his “scoops” was that before being forced to leave HOTD, Miguel S. purposely provided a bad outline to the screenwriters to sabotage the show, which is why there were rewrites. As you can see, there’s an awful lot of holes in this story (like why a director would be doing screenwriting or how it somehow slipped Condal’s notice).

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.

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 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.

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.