Black of Hair and Heart

Totally agree. Actress Rebecca Hall has a Black grandfather and no one who looks at her would ever think she was anything other than white. People are way too literal about the whole issue.

Clearly, that's not the case in the show. No Velaryon blood from Corlys's generation onwards makes it into the bloodline that continues the Targaryen dynasty. And Valaena Velaryon and Alyssa Velaryon don't need to be addressed since they've been dead for decades/centuries by the time HotD starts.

Must be really stuck in his craw if he wants them to change a detail that won't even be relevant to the upcoming spinoff. That said, there's really no reason you couldn't just make Aerys the fourth son of Aegon V and swap out Shaera for Rhaella. The generations are so compressed at that point, it wouldn't really make a difference.

I'd love to read an article/book/dissertation someday about why this fanbase is so uniquely unhinged, especially with regards to Benioff and Weiss. I find it alternatively fascinating and infuriating. We're probably gonna get scolded again for being off topic.

Re: Hobart Hightower, my guess is they'll just take the Hobart Hightower that exists in F&B and make him the Lord of Oldtown. The Hightower family tree circa the Dance is very complicated/unclear, so combining some characters would make sense.

It's hard for me to say. Virtually everyone I interact with regarding the series, both IRL and online, have read the books, so I don't consider myself well versed in show-only fans or their feelings. But the hatred I see for Benioff and Weiss among book fans (especially on this site) is borderline psychotic and completely unjustified.

Ha, I don't know. I type a lot for work? Yeah, that seems to be the general sense I'm getting here from everyone.

LOL, we'll have to agree to disagree there.

I mean, you generally don't have to persuade someone to do something if they're initially willing to do it. It was probably out of character for Book Littlefinger to do it, but Show Littlefinger always struck me as more obsessed with his own advancement than with Sansa/Catelyn, so it didn't feel out of character to me.

Considering what a mess season 5 was in terms of pacing, that was probably the smart move. They should have done it earlier and cut Dorne entirely, the show would have been better for it. Calling it a "gleeful" excision really speaks to the irrational hatred this fandom has for Benioff and Weiss. Like they're sitting in a hotel room cackling and jerking each other off while crossing out plot lines on a white board with a big red marker and watching this forum melt down in real time.

I don't think there's a fixed number. But you'd be surprised how many people have the same lesson shoved in their face again and again and never learn it. Although it's different for Sansa since all of this is happening against her will.

I'd suspect that the primary reason was "it didn't exist because Martin hadn't written it yet" whereas the Northern plot with the Boltons did.

I mean, she probably shouldn't have trusted him by that point, but he was her benefactor and her only line to actual power at that time. It's not a great decision, but hey, sometimes fictional characters make bad choices!

Because she trusted Littlefinger and was in no position to refuse? Like, what was she going to do otherwise?

I love that moment. Alfie Allen crushes it and it's the emotional bedrock of the later scenes between Theon and Sansa.

I don't know what show you were watching where you think Sansa willingly marries Ramsay. She went through with it yes, but it was clearly under duress. The Jeyne Poole/Alys Karstark point isn't really relevant, they're both nonexistent in the show. I mean, they both appear in the show, but they're functionally different characters.

Littlefinger married Sansa to Ramsay because she has a claim to the North and the Boltons are the ones currently controlling the North. I feel like it was pretty clear that Littlefinger intended to use her to ingratiate himself with the Boltons and then betray them because that's how Littlefinger works. The fact that Sansa "earned" her "Dark Sansa" skin at the end of season 4 only to discover that it doesn't shield you from the machinations of men like Littlefinger and Ramsay is a tough pill to swallow. Almost like she was learning a lesson of some kind. Huh. I won't defend the pacing of season 5. At that point, they had really hit a wall of too many plot lines and not enough time to go around.

The confusion around that scene is, well, confusing but frankly the lines between consent and non-consent can be blurry, especially between two people with as fucked up a relationship as Jaime and Cersei. I thought the scene communicated that very well. Benioff and Weiss being "two men" isn't irrelevant but I think that's a reductive statement considering the dozens of people that worked on that episode and scene, including a woman (Lena Heady). The Drogo/Dany thing is tough to navigate anyway you slice it, but I think the show improved on the book. In the book, 13 year old Dany immediately gets into it once Drogo is nice to her. It's certainly possible to write/depict a sex scene between a 13 year old girl and an adult man that honestly presents consent on both sides/is empathetic to both characters, but the Dany/Drogo sex scene in the first book feels like a copout. It's really, really hard to believe that a naive 13 year old girl who's just been sold into slavery to a barbarian is going to have a good first sexual experience with him because he's not "raping" her in the conventional sense. Honestly, I don't think Martin has the stomach to depict any of his POV characters getting raped. Which is a totally valid decision on his part, but it does make scenes like that one ring false. The development of Dany and Drogo's relationship in the show is much more believable thanks to the fact that it starts in a really dark place and grows from there in a way that feels true to both characters. It also doesn't hurt that Jason Momoa brings a lot to Drogo, who's really a pretty one-dimensional character in the books. I'm not really sure what "including a rape scene for the sake of including it" means. Things are included or they're not included and we take from that what we will. Rape scenes don't need to check a list of boxes to merit inclusion in a work of art. Some works will be smarter or more thoughtful about it than others, but including them or not including them is a neutral factor. I don't think Sansa's arc was ridiculous and I don't think her rape was "the visual depiction of killing her character". Honestly, that's kind of a fucked up thing to say about rape survivors. Those scenes influence everything Sansa does going forward and I think the show has real empathy for her and continues to present her as a complicated, consistent character who has to find a way to integrate a nightmarish experience into the reality of who she is as a person, in the same way that all rape and abuse survivors must. Theon's torture scenes inform everything about his character going forward and the sexualization of the scenes feels to me like a pointed reversal of Theon's former persona as a ladies man. Also does a great job of upping the ante with Ramsey, in presenting him as a worse version of the monster we've already seen in Joffrey. Ros's death scene is horrifying, all the more so because it's sexualized. The discomfort you're feeling due to it being "titilating or shocking" is intentional.

I can't really think of any incident of sexual violence on GoT that wasn't done empathetically. And I don't personally have any problem with any of the scenes you listed. Dany's wedding night was an improvement on the books to be honest, and the only reason people really have a problem with the Sansa stuff is because they don't want to see Sansa get raped, which is kind of the entire point. But yeah, the sexual assault comments from the producers strike me as them just trying to get out ahead of all the bad faith criticism the original series got. I think they could have a bit more of a backbone about it, but they've got a bottom line to protect.

While I'm sure there are people who want to see more sexual assault on the show for purely erotic purposes, I think the crux of the good faith complaints being made is the way in which the media narrative around the subject automatically equates "depiction of sexual violence" with "endorsement/exploitation of sexual violence". And the unspoken conclusion one would extrapolate from that, specifically "sexual violence as a a concept is forbidden and cannot be explored. Which is bad.

Another one I just thought of: the Dragonkeepers. Kind of surprised they didn't play a bigger role in the Storming of the Dragonpit. Also curious to know what their structure/responsibilities were like. I'm assuming their duties didn't also extend to like, feeding the dragons and mucking out their stables, etc. Were they purely guards? Did they have to be knights? Did they continue to exist after the Dance for the 20 odd years that there were still dragons?

I guess we just disagree on the responsibility that an adaptation has toward its source material. If the people making an adaptation want to be super faithful, that's a valid artistic choice. If they don't, that's equally valid. Faithfulness to source material is a neutral artistic choice, the same as whether a film is going to be in black and white or color, or is going to be 90 minutes or 150 minutes.

Actors aren't obligated to read source material. That's what scripts are for.

Ran revealed it in this thread from March of 2020:

Two part post: First, just wondering why @Ran randomly gave us that info when he did and what other minor tidbits he's sitting on that he could similarly talk about. Second part: assuming the book is closed on the 2BC - 136AC time period covered in F&B I (barring any tidbits of discussion the characters might have about it in Winds or Dream), what would have liked to have seen expanded upon from that time period? A few of mine: - As an enormous Kingsguard nerd, I would have loved some more exploits about the founding seven members and the ways in which the order developed in the early decades. As a sidebar to that, I'm really curious as to who the Lord Commander of Maegor's final seven was. It's super weird to me that their names and fates are all detailed, but we don't get that. - Martin specifically mentions the Tourney of the Field of Roses in the World Book, a tourney at Highgarden that was the most splendid tourney of its generation during the reign of Jaehaerys, but it's not mentioned at all in F&B. Especially weird given how much Martin loves expounding on tourneys. - I really would have liked more about the broad unrest in the North following the Conquest, presumably spearheaded by Brandon Snow and leading to the formation of the Company of the Rose. I would also liked to know why they were named that. - More about the Night's Watch. Considering how much time we spend with the Night's Watch in the main series, it's weird that they're generally absent from the histories with a few exceptions. - Even though the kingdom was in a bit of upheaval at the time with Baelon's death, Ryam Redwyne's Handship and J+A's declining health, I feel like there would have been some big celebration to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Aegon's Conquest. Maybe Martin can do something similar for the 200th anniversary during Daeron II's reign. Speaking of Ryam Redwyne, I was borderline flabbergasted by how Martin glosses over him in F&B. The present day novels consider him one of the greatest knights in history and he was in the Kingsguard for 45 years, but the only thing we hear about him was that he won some tourneys. I've wondered if Martin originally intended to give him Gyles Morrigen's backstory but realized that would make him too old to still be around during the latter part of Jaehaerys' reign. So yeah, I'll probably think of some more, but fire away.