Colonel Green

Rhaenyra and Alicent are the main characters of the show. You don’t begin with multiple episodes that your main characters aren’t in (or we barely in).

That's a severe over-generalization. Most people in history who have traveled the world have not gained great understanding of the nature of homosexuality by doing so. For that matter, Corlys is hardly intolerant by Westerosi standards, given that the cultural baseline is to consider it a serious sin.

I don't think so, that just makes him completely progressive to modern eyes, whereas in this version he's given a believable flaw.

With Rhaenyra married to Laenor, her claim has 3 of the world's 4 dragonriders behind it, and the fourth is no friend of Otto's. This is absolutely not the time to be wanting the king to die. If Mellos is willing to poison the king, he'd be willing to keep doing so with Otto gone.

That's not "childish", it is a completely believable attitude for the character to have based on the period, and adds dimensionality to the character. There is nothing indicating that. Not only is it not in Otto's interest for the king to die right now, but we know that he lives quite a while after this. That's not an "excuse", they expressly say that the planned wedding feast will be even bigger.

Laena, Laenor and Harwin aren't actually important characters, though. They're the parents (or non-parent, in one case) of important characters.

There have been a fair number of funny lines, though?

Corlys was the only Velaryon involved in the Stepstones campaign in the book.

For whatever reason, GRRM left her out of all the conflicts pre-Dance entirely.

Could we, though? There's not actually much story there.

I don't think you are. But I think this problem is kind of inherent in the source material, because it's really hard to write convincing battles (especially with a naval element) where one side has dragons and have it not be anything but a complete rout for that side.

Mushroom’s only relevance in F&B is that he eventually writes a memoir of the stuff he saw. There’s no reason a court fool would be included in the series, he has no importance to the story. Can viewers not make up their own minds about the characters?

No, to his child. Should be rather obvious why he's proposing that.

I was initially unsure about how Carey and Cooke would connect, but Carey's Alicent is clearly full of nervous tics so I'm guessing that's just going to get worse as she gets older.

Dunk and Egg is one of the easiest ASOIAF properties to invent new material for. It can easily be the GOT equivalent of The Mandalorian, they are in no sense bound only to things implicit in the published material.

A lot. It's extremely difficult. Sansa's whole arc is about feminine forms of power, so having her personally executed people with a sword would be a miss on a thematic level, in my view.

I don’t know, but GRRM said as much in one of the SSMs.

There’s no basis for that. The source of the idea was Sansa’s relationship with Robert and his reaction to the stories she reads him. Sansa is never going to develop skills if you just assume without any evidence that any idea she has was planted by Baelish.

I'm not clear what you're asserting here. Sansa has been reading Robert those stories for a while. There's no indication he said anything to give her the idea. Her clearly developed it further to suit his own plans, but that's different. Er, what you're describing is the influence everybody knows him to have. And that has pronounced limits, as Baelish himself said. It's incorrect that the Vale as a whole was chomping at the bit to fight. As GRRM said, some did (particularly the ones, ironically, that aren't on Littlefinger's side), others were neutral, others wanted to back the Lannisters.

As far as the Targaryens are concerned, Ned was a rebel and traitor. Sansa wouldn’t have any reason to think he’d be favourable toward her. Moreover, Littlefinger’s position is not strong enough to commit the Vale to external wars. Indeed, that’s the reason he’s doing the Harry the Heir scheme in the First place.

This is one of those theories you periodically see, but I don’t think it makes any sense. The clans weren’t even in KL when she married Tyrion, so they’d have no reason to believe anything she said there. Moreover, the clans worked for Tyrion on a purely transactional basis, and that ended on bad terms; they wouldn’t give a crap about his wife. Sansa’s skill set is court politics. Also, if interacting with the clans was going to be important to Sansa’s future story, one imagines that GRRM would have had her interact with them in some way in KL in A Clash of Kings, when they were in the same place.

My instinctive answer would be that the marriage doesn't happen, particularly as it's not even supposed to be happening soon, from what Littlefinger himself has said (and the issue of Sansa's marriage remains unresolved, unless Littlefinger has some secret angle to deal with that, which I guess is possible). However, a lot of that depends, I think, on where the main Sansa vs. Littlefinger drama is destined to play out. If it's going to be conducted mainly on the deliberately isolated stage of the Vale (and thus probably in the course of TWOW), then I'd say it's extremely unlikely. If, however, GRRM plans to take this show on the road (whether to Winterfell, as Littlefinger says he plans to do, or elsewhere, as many fan theorists posit), then the odds rise considerably.

I agree that logistically it's a huge stretch. I tend to refrain from regarding that as conclusive simply because, as has been the case with many other plot points in this book, if GRRM wants the million-to-one success, it will happen (e.g., Theon capturing Winterfell). The strongest argument, to my mind, is that Sansa being taken back to KL to be a hostage again is a complete storytelling deadend. Rather literally, in that it ends with her dead in short order.

She fled KL on the Westerosi equivalent of January 1, 300. Say it took a few weeks to get to the Fingers, and from there she's probably been in the Vale several months. She doesn't appear to have turned 14 yet, so not approaching a year.

No, because the High Road is closed by snow (and the clans). This comes up in both ASOS and AFFC. No, they don't, because the Alayne preview chapter from TWOW was originally supposed to be in ADWD. The final third of ADWD takes place after AFFC; that's why a bunch of straggler POVs from AFFC starting showing up around that point (Cersei, Jaime, Arya, Areo, Asha; had they not been cut, Sansa and Aeron would have too).