Spidey

*double post*

I was so convinced he was up to no good.

As was I. I was all like "Oh, of course you did, you treacherous piece of shit!"

Then I had to eat my boots...

In case it got missed in the Stannis hate:

Oooh Hizzy is up to something!

Dany:"where have you been"

Hizzy:"just making sure everything is in order"

Best red herring ever, though.

My only gripe about Hardhome was the fact that the whites have turned into Resident Evil zombies.

They haven't. They aren't moving at a snails pace and they are immune to head trauma. They're fast and really fucking hard to deal with. They're the exact opposite of RE/TWD Zombies.

Sansa obviously expected the bedding. But the part that makes it horrific and turns it into rape is Reek being ordered to watch.

Having eye witnesses present at the consumation of political marriages was quite common in medieval times.

Remember the show Rome and how there were slaves around the bed whenever their owners had sex?

It doesn't? The issue here is that producers wanted Arianne but they are ridiculously not casting her, for whatever reason they had. And now, we have some strange fusion of the character that makes no sense.

Why? Revenge for a loved one is one of the most simple motivations in storytelling. Everyone understands it, nothing to explain there.

Complicated intrigues and politics? Not so much.

Does it go against what Oberyn would have wanted? Sure, but Ellaria is not an extension of Oberyn. She's her own character, one who never struck me as peaceful in season 4. She can have her own opinions.

And passive Ellaria as you call her, was perhaps the wisest character in entire series.

Maybe. But the Dorne plot doesn't need a dove. It needs a hawk to work.

Why do you think GRRM dropped the character when he got to Dorne?

Because that was always who Catelyn was. Here we have the complete change of character and even more, complete transformation that makes zero sense.

Catelyn was Catelyn, through and through. Ellaria, though, she has to be Ellaria and Arianne, obviously her passive mindset from the books would not serve the plot at all. Kinda hard to get a vengeance plot going if the main instigator doesn't care about vengeance.

So Ellaria takes on the hotheadedness and lust for vengeance from Arianne. Obviously, she won't be the Queenmaker but she gets into conflict with Doran which will eventually lead into the reveal of his game plan to her.

None of that would be possible with a passive Ellaria.

Show Ellaria wasn't this way last season...

Show Ellaria hadn't had to watch the greatest wonder in Westeros get his head squished last season. Stuff like that changes you.

Show Ellaria also doesn't even have a book counterpart left past the duel, so any accusations of character assassination are completely ridiculious. There is nothing to assassinate in the first place.

And you think that with your pathetic and shite comment is doing any one any favours?

Truth stings, don't it?

Geeze...all this Stannis outrage is so incredibly stupid.

He doesn't arrive at the first night in the books either. Did you throw hissy fits then??

His arrival has been in the descriptions for episode 10 for weeks. Learn to friggin read, guys!!

Also calm the hell down, you're not doing yourselves any favours with misplaced nerdrage.

"Your sister."

Oh, c'mon. They couldn't have given us "Only Cat"?!

Why does it even matter? The meaning's the same. It's still getting the point across and it's still a great punchline.

Agreed. We need Conan back.

GRRM wrote this episode? I find that so surprising.

Why? because not much happened? Have you read AFFC?

This episode seems to have the misfortune of having been written by the AFFC-GRRM instead of the ASOS-GRRM.

I think it's because Loras so readily just jumped into bed with the first squire he looked his way. Book Loras vowed to never love again after Renly died.

Love != Sex

She saw the Hound at Winterfell, when the King visited and they traveled together back to KL, that place was one of the places they stopped.

It's even the same set, both inside and outside.

‘If truth be told, even our claim to Highgarden is a bit dodgy, just as those dreadful Florents are always whining. "What does it matter," you ask, and of course it doesn't, except to oafs like my son. The thought that one day he might see his grandson with his arse on the Iron Thronemakes Mace puff up like ... now, what do you call it? Margaery, you're clever, be a dear and tell your poor old half-daft grandmother the name of that queer fish from the Summer Isles that puffs up to ten times its own size when you poke it.'

'They call them puff fish, Grandmother.'

'Of course they do, Summer Islanders have no imagination. My son ought to take the puff fish for his sigil, if truth be told. He could put a crown on it, the way the Baratheon do their stag, perhaps that would make him happy. We should have stayed well out of all this bloody foolishness if you ask me, but once the cow's been milked there's no squirting the cream back up her udder. After Lord Puff Fish put that crown on Renly's head, we were into the pudding up to our knees, so here we are to see things through. And what do you say to that, Sansa?'

Sansa's mouth opened and closed. She felt rather like a puff fish herself.^[1]

Why was this not in there ):

Because it's too long. You can't have big monolithic monologues like that on a tv-show where a scene rarely takes up more than four minutes.

9.5! Too bad George didn't write all the episodes.

I'd rather have him write TWoW.

The SanSan scene from the book just wouldn't work on TV. The tension builds from not knowing what the Hound is doing because Sansa has her eyes closed.

Obviously, on TV we would be able to see that she's not in danger.

Jaime killing Alton is NO problem with me. Don't you guys remember all the times Jaime talked about killing Brienne in his mind to escape? So why wouldn't he kill Alton to escape.

Yes, the whole cousin who looked up to him made it more brutal than usual, but don't act like its a HUGE deviation from his character.

Yeah. Even in the books, he doesn't care much about more distant relatives, es evidenced by his reaction to the death of Stefford Lannister.

How do you love it? It is beyond uncharacteristic for Lord Tywin.

No it's not. Arya encorporates everything that made House Lannister one of the great houses of Westeros. It is absolutely believable that Tywin would respect her and enjoy conversations with her.

And yet he still has no qualms about her dying, which is why he let her taste his food.

And then he goes burning villages down because one of his men was assassinated.

This IS Tywin Lannister in his truest form.

I loved this ep. Especially all that background info. Harrenhal, Aegon's sisters, "Dark Sister", the nature of Targaeryan madness, Jaime's days as a squire, Valyria being a death zone.

It felt soo much like actually reading the books.

They also went and made the Qarth plot awesome. It wasn't in the books.

Ygritte is a fucking riot.

There's literally nothing in this episode that i didn't like.

As for Bran and Rickon's wherabouts, I think they're already in the crypts. In their scene, Osha made it quite clear, that continuing to run would be pointless.

So, I guess that's when they decided to go back and hide.

Well... after this last episode, I guess next week we'll see lord Tywin burn down Harrenhall and everyone in it.

I love the actors. Their performances are amazing.

But I feel the producers are destroying characters, cutting away at their essence.

I can get past the fact that BLACK Lorren is blonde. But why do they have to mess with lord Tywin?

He's a masterpiece of a character. George R. R. Martin constructed him perfectly, a hard, family man, always wanting to win, not wanting to make any compromises. From the books I only know lord Tywin to lose his cool once - "They have my son!".

And now I see him looking like a combination between a spolied brat and an old woman, always shouting and humiliating people.

Lord Tywin does not humiliate you.

How do you know? We never witnessed his war councils in ACoK. We never read about him continuously receiving humiliating news from the war. We don't know how he reacted to that.

He already had the friggin' Mountain out there terrorizing the small folk, "Setting the Riverlands on fire, from the God's Eye to the Red Fork"

What more could he have done? Burning Harrenhal down? What for? No one cares about that pile of rocks. Least of all the people living there.

You're missing the point that they are trying to depict Tywin as someone who values intelligence above other things.

And why wouldn't he? Wits and smarts are what led to the rise of House Lannister.

Every Lannister should value this above all else.

I really like this idea, but wasn't Dagmer with Theon before he left Pyke? Why would Ramsey be on the Iron Isles?

In order to steer Theon towards taking Winterfell. Watch their conversation from last weeks episode again. It's Dagmer who nudges him into that direction.

Hats off to whoever came up with Dagmer=Ramsay.

That's brilliant. It makes perfect sense. Dagmer already seems to take over Reeks function at Theon's side. And it would explain why they didn't cast Ramsay. They actually did, right under our noses. Sneaky bastards.