SeanF

Well, we got the horrid business with the thimble. If there was a Sam/Gilly sex scene, it’s probably been erased from my memory.

We never even got Fat Pink Mast.

Kim is basically living the life of Waynetta Slob, stuck with a moron. She could do something more constructive with her life than that.

Knowing that it all goes to shit at the end, for both Dany and Jon, just kills off any interest in rewatching any part of the show, for me. I couldn’t give a toss that Tyrion and Bronn got to josh about brothels, happy as a pair of pigs in shit; that Sam got to break all his vows and got a position he was never entitled to; that Sansa got her tinpot crown, and that the Bran 9000 had “the best story”.

In general, I found Dany more likeable in the books than the show - until the last season, where I found her vilification so abrupt and contrived that I found myself increasingly sympathetic to her.

Hopefully, not as evil as Tyrion or Sam Tarly (the two characters I hated the most in GOT).

Bowen will feed R’hllor’s fires.

Scarcely any POV character regards the smallfolk as human beings. No one present considers Mycah to be human, for example, other than Ned and Arya, and only Arya gets really indignant over his murder.

I imagine that the general view in this world is that “real” sex requires a man, and that sexual activity between women is not thought terribly important. A nobleman might get enraged at the thought of his wife sleeping with another man, while not caring very much what she does with handmaidens.

Forcing Alicent to work in a brothel seems like jumping the shark to me. Just unbelievable. There’s more than enough dark material in the tale, without having to go there.

Hatred within the story, especially between elves and humans.

It’s more shlocky. Yennefer got her clothes off pretty frequently in Season 1, and bewitched a bunch of people into having an orgy for her amusement. The main book story is basically an extended version of Arya’s experiences in the Riverlands, with extra racial hatred.

It looks to me like they’re reinforcing failure. Pushing soldiers into a city that’s almost cut off from supplies is the kind of folly Hitler insisted on, in the last two years of the War.

Break up the masters’ estates, and pay the soldiers and administrators salaries. Dany does the latter, but misses the former. But, I expect she’ll do exactly that, in TWOW. Chattel slavery is never actually *necessary* for economic development. If anything, it retards it, by delaying the introduction of new forms of technology. Had the Romans etc. never captured vast numbers of slaves, they’d have developed other forms of working, and their society would have been a lot more peaceful. In fact, contemporaries like the Gracchi were well aware of the problems that were being caused by the replacement of thousands of family farms with vast slave-worked latifundia. All that the profits of slavery brought the Romans, in the last 150 years of the Republic, were gross conspicuous consumption among the elite, rapidly escalating costs of pursuing a political career, and endemic civil war, as generals bribed their soldiers to fight on their behalf. None of Dany’s people wished to return to slavery. They joined her standing army and the Brazen Beasts. They didn’t defect to the invaders.

Ramsay had already done enough, prior to that point, to establish that he was a piece of scum. Admittedly, Benioff described him as a “badass”. What makes the corresponding parts of the book work so much better is that he’s a figure of complete and utter terror to Theon/Reek.

Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson is a fair comparison for the two D’s.

Haiti is an example of slavery being ended permanently, by exterminating the slave owners. The Ghiscari slave owners are parasites. They add nothing to the local economy . Their trade in slaves is of no benefit to most of the population. Their disappearance won’t damage the local economy.

It also seems very much that AI are blaming the victim. When people are on the receiving end of unprovoked, ruthless, aggression, they’ll fight back in any way they can.

The real elephant in the room was the way they made Tyrion their self-insert. Sansa got punished for rejecting him.

I think this fandom understands Benioff & Weiss pretty well.

It wasn’t against her will. LF had to persuade her to go to Winterfell. He didn’t force her. And, Martin himself said it was out of character for LF to have done this, because he’s obsessed with her.

Of course she could have refused. She’d just saved LF’s life at the end of Season 4, and could easily have shopped him to the Vale lords if she wanted.. D & D simply wanted to ditch the Vale plot for…reasons.

LF never compelled her to travel to Winterfell. He talked Sansa into doing something that made no sense for either of them. The point about Jeyne and Alys is their stories are given to another character in a way that makes no sense.

The whole idea that Sansa would ever willingly marry the man whose father massacred her family is stupid beyond belief. The idea that LF would ever press for such a marriage is stupid beyond belief. And it’s not even Sansa’s story. It’s Jeyne Poole’s and Alys Karstark’s stories, cut and pasted into Sansa’s. Finally, having her saying she’d have remained a little bird but for Ramsay’s rape and torture is gross.

IMHO Dany’s and Sansa’s rapes, the sexualised torture of Theon (with the Violet/Myranda faux seduction scene) and the death of Ros, were very much put in to titillate or shock.