SeanF

I thought it was due to the amethysts and wine.

The Abomination portrayed the Starks, by the end, as Season 1 Lannisters with different hair colour. But, Ding and Dong’s take on tge tale was a very strange one.

You’ve often said that feudalism is a protection racket. And those who pay the protection money are entitled to expect protection in return. Pay up, keep your nose clean, obey your lord, or king, and he should leave you alone and keep off other predators. You should expect to be ruled by Vito Corleone, rather than a complete monster. What took place at Bitterbridge was monstrous.

Nobody in-universe condemns Robb or Jon as oath-breakers. Everybody who has an opinion on the Freys despises them completely. Even their own allies despise them. So, why do you invent opinions that nobody in-universe actually holds?

Yeh, I found the practical "jokes" remarkably unfunny, and the behaviour of true arseholes. It started with making Sophie Turner and Maisie Williams cry by saying they were too young to come to the wrap party. Practical jokes are only good if the target can laugh at them.

The killing of Mycah was illegal (the law is that someone who strikes a member of the royal family loses the hand or foot in question), but no one present actually cared about a butcher's boy, other than Arya. Obviously, murdering a member of the royal family is going to incur a death sentence, and indeed, had Lady Caswell handed the murderers over, they wouldn't have got away with just a hanging. Likely they'd have been burned at the stake, or disembowelled. But the massacre of an entire town, whose people offered no resistance, and whose leader did all in her power to avenge the murder of Maelor? That is excessive.

Modhi likes to speak of “five hundred years of foreign occupation,” the implication being that Muslim Indians are foreigners. The Moghuls could be very brutal, but no one should pretend that contemporary Hindu rulers were any less ruthless. And of course, the Moghuls’ impact upon Indian culture was profound.

“Lawful neutral” is a ridiculous interpretation of Tywin’s character, and it goes to show just how badly wrong they got the Lannisters. And that mattered in the end. If the Lannisters are not villains, then you have to vilify other characters. A very big change between books and show is that Dany’s advisors are always urging her to be more ruthless and I expect that to be Tyrion’s approach, when they meet. Tyrion believes his father’s approach to war to be the right one. The show, by contrast, has Dany wanting to be more ruthless and her advisors urging restraint. Book Tyrion would be telling her “mercy is just another word for cowardice”, and “it is far better to be feared than to be loved.” Going back to Tywin, he is vile, petty, spiteful, snobbish, and misogynistic, and not at all the great statesman he believes himself to be.

Collective punishment is always a part of war. Had Daeron imposed a huge fine upon the town, this would probably have been thought fair. Had Lady Caswell protected the guilty, and/or offered resistance, then a brutal sack would have been deemed just. But, I think this falls into the same category as the Harrying of the North, an act that is unjust, even by the standards of medieval warfare. Lady Caswell did all she could to punish the guilty, and to make amends, and offered no resistance at all.

Well, Rhaenyra was the head of the family, at that point, and would certainly have wanted her great nephew's murderers to be punished.

Well, I don’t expect The Hague or Geneva Conventions to have any traction in this world. That said, burning hundreds of innocents alive, after trapping them in a sept, after Lady Caswell had already executed the criminals, is hard to defend. It would be somewhat different, had Lady Caswell protected the guilty, and refused to surrender the town.

The notion that there is any body of people who think that Robb was wrong to rebel against Joffrey (outside the ranks of Lannister loyalists, or those directly in the path of the Northern army), seems bizarre to me. No one outside the North has heard anything of Ramsay Bolton, or much of Roose, but nobody in the North is going to condemn Jon for opposing them.

Blackwater was a fine episode, really exciting. I guess the female nudity involved the prostitutes with the Hound, which I suppose was added to appeal to “the perverts in the audience.”

I agree with you. Now adapting AFFC/Dance in toto would have been difficult. But, they dumbed both books down horribly, (eg the Kingsmoot, Porne, most of the Northern storyline). Even Meereen, which drags in Dance, was actually made worse in the show, by having Dany bullying Hizdahr, and making Tyrion her chief advisor for no reason. Dany is also made a lot less heroic in Daznak's Pit, basically leaving her friends in the lurch, rather than risking her life to fly Drogon out.

Murdering children (leaving aside its immorality) does ensure that they need never trouble you in the future. Of course, it does ensure that your own children will be murdered if fortune turns against you. I think that the (likely) capture of Kings Landing will see Tommen, Myrcella, and Margaery all meet very cruel ends.

Creating a much bigger role for Margaery was one thing I welcomed in the show. I find her an enigma in the books. Is she just her family’s pawn, or is she sly and ruthless in her own right? In general, the Tyrells are just as brutal as the Lannisters, but they make better use of PR.

If nothing else, I’d like to see all the big cliffhangers from Dance resolved.

Sansa is stuck up and stupid, through most of Book 1, which must be a remnant of her originally being intended as a villain. After Ned’s death, she learns empathy and compassion. The two D’s followed that quite closely (and I love pretty much all her scenes in season 2). But, her tale goes wrong in Season 5. She would never have willingly wed Ramsay. The two D’s then “put it right”, subsequently, by turning her into Cersei 2.0.

We've got Maelor being pulled apart, as well.

This is the response from the Mormonts: Bear Island knows no king but the King in the North, whose name is STARK. This is the exchange between Ser Davos and Wylla Manderly: What does Stannis offer you? Vengeance. Vengeance for my sons and yours, for your husbands and your fathers and your brothers. Vengeance for your murdered lord, your murdered king, your butchered princes. Vengeance! Yes. They killed Lord Eddard and Lady Catelyn and King Robb. He was our king! He was brave and good and the Freys murdered him. If Lord Stannis will avenge him, we should join Lord Stannis. Lord Manderly to Ser Davos Wylla. Did you see how brave she was? Even when I threatened to have her tongue out, she reminded me of the debt White Harbor owes to the Starks of Winterfell, a debt that can never be repaid. Wylla spoke from the heart ... not every woman can be as brave as my Wylla. Hugo Wull: I would sooner my men die fighting for the Ned's little girl than alone and hungry in the snow, weeping tears that freeze upon their cheeks. No one sings songs of men who die like that. As for me, I am old. This will be my last winter. Let me bathe in Bolton blood before I die. I want to feel it spatter across my face when my axe bites deep into a Bolton skull. I want to lick it off my lips and die with the taste of it on my tongue. Insofar as anyone thinks of Sansa, they would assume she was a prisoner, or by now, dead, after the death of Joffrey. But, I think the quotes above show what the North thinks of the Starks in general.

Plainly the people in the North think very highly of the Starks - as witness the Manderlys, the Mormonts, the Mountain Clans, and Stannis' desire to associate his cause with avenging House Stark. Places that suffered at the hands of Northern soldiers, such as Duskendale, or the Westerlands will think poorly of them. Feelings are probably somewhat mixed in the Riverlands. The Red Wedding is considered a heinous crime (as it is everywhere), but there is probably some resentment at the fact that Robb's marriage to Jeyne Westerling had such disastrous consequences.

The problem with show Cersei/Tyrion/Tywin being given a coat of whitewash, compared to the books, is that it upended the tale.

The Greatjon’s argument for independence is that their oaths of fealty were to the Targaryens, who are now gone.

If the books were to end with a showdown between Daenerys and the Starks, I could understand fans picking one side or the other (and if it were to end like that, I suspect that the author would wish to make both sides sympathetic). Picking the Lannisters or Freys, or Boltons, over the Starks makes no sense at any level, since the Lannisters are Dany's enemies, and she would be disgusted by both Freys and Boltons.

That the show runners had a very cavalier attitude towards towards the actors’ safety seems quite clear to me. WRT Rory McCann, disregarding great lines from the book (eg “only Cat”, “Ed, fetch me a block), was a constant. Drogo/Dany in the books is pretty disturbing. But, it was intended as a romance. I think that having Dany explicitly raped was there for shock value. It was a great character arc; molested by her brother, raped by her husband, and finally stabbed through the boob by her nephew/lover.