falcotron

To be fair to Hallam, the Nymeria scene, while cool, wasn't at all clear. I'm pretty sure the point is that she realized that Nymeria can't go back, but also realized that she's not like Nymeria, and that's what "Not you" meant, so she can, so she's going to carry on to Winterfell. (And once you get that, the fact that Nymeria has built a new pack, but Arya hasn't, is even more confirmation that she should go home.) But the scene itself didn't tell me that; I only read it that way because it seems from everything else (even without the preview or spoilers, but obviously they confirm it) that she's carrying on to Winterfell. Taken in isolation, I have no idea how I would have read it, but it may well have been the same way as Hallam did. Also: Well, that's rarely a good assumption to make with this show.

Not being a vassal or subject means Aegon wasn't a traitor, but it doesn't mean he wasn't a usurper. Usurpation, in both French/Norman terms and in the modern meaning, is just wrongful seizure by force. But of course "wrongful" isn't some well-defined legal term. Conquerors usually have some decent justification in advance (although Aegon, unlike William, really didn't), and usually justify themselves retroactively (William said he wasn't King because he won, but because he had the fealty of the earls and barons, the acclaim of the crowds of London, the approval of the Papal Legate, and a bunch of other stuff, and Aegon apparently made a similar proclamation, based on TPaTQ), but in practice, those justifications aren't what matters, except in meeting a minimum standard to get people to consider fighting for you. Basically, if you win, you're a conqueror, except to the people with a pretender to support, who call you a usurper. So Gospatric of Northumbria pledged fealty to The Conqueror in 1066, and announced rebellion against The Usurper in 1068. Not because he'd discovered some new facts about William's claim, just because he was feeling buyer's remorse about overpaying for his earldom and thought Edgar Aetheling would give him a better deal, and obviously if Edgar is the rightful king, William must be a wrongful usurper.

I think the whole point of the scene where Arya pauses and then decides to ride north from the inn instead of south was that she'd decided to put her family over her list, so we're probably not going to see her kill Cersei. But imagine the scene we could get: Cersei: But the prophecy! Arya: What prophecy? Cersei: A prophecy I was given as a child. Every other part of it has come true, and it ends by saying I will die choked by the hands of the valonqar. Arya: What's a valonqar? Cersei: It's Old High Valyrian for "little brother". And you're a girl. Arya: Could it matter that I was dressed as a boy when I escaped King's Landing during your coup? Cersei: That hardly seems like it would qualify you as a "little brother". Arya: Yeah, good point. Wait, when I was spying on some other people, I overheard Tyrion say that everyone forgets that some Valyrian words are grammatically neutral, like the one for Prince. Maybe that's true for valonqar also, so it really means little sibling, not little brother? Cersei: OK, that could work. But you're still not my little sibling, I mean, I don't see Cat and Tywin— Arya: Eww, no. That doesn't seem likely. But you said the prophecy says "the valonqar", not "your valonqar", right? I've got lots of older siblings. Cersei: Hmm. It's really a stretch both ways, but I guess technically maybe it works. But the real problem is that thematically, it's stupid. Why would anyone give a prophecy warning me against anyone who's the little brother or sister of anyone? 80% of the people in Westeros are someone's younger sibling. It might as well say "You will die at the hands of the person". Arya: Yeah, you're right. Maybe the "little" means "youngest", not "younger". Cersei: Yeah, but you're not the youngest. Not even the youngest left alive, if the rumors about Bran are true. Arya: Yeah, they're true. So. Um. I guess the only answer is: fuck the prophecy. Cersei: Fair enough. Arya: I mean, I wasn't planning to choke you anyway. Hence this knife. Cersei: Oh, yeah. Arya: (Stabbity-stab)

Sure, because having a rightful claim doesn't mean anything more than a foot in the door to convince people to fight for your claim. You still need to convince them, and they still need to win, or you just go down in history as another failed pretender. Dany has a claim, exactly the same as Stannis, Tommen, Cersei, Jon, Sansa, Euron, etc. She'll either succeed or fail in pressing that claim. It doesn't matter whether her claim is "the" rightful claim, or "more rightful" than someone else's; however it ends up, the Maesters can work out the trivia of justifying why it was right that she won or lost, as appropriate.

I still don't get why Tyrion hasn't remembered that and figured out how to make it work. Declare Dany to be not Queen, but Empress. She could easily justify that—she holds overseas territories that were once part of Valyria, she beat Volantis in a war, she has all the dragons, etc. And an Empress can have Kings as vassals. They both get what they need, both practically and in terms of not looking weak to underlings or rivals. Dany even gets new bargaining chips to use in her future negotiations, and, best of all, even more titles to recite. Everybody wins. (We're talking about the show here. In the novels, playing Charlemagne would be a lot more complicated, because Valyria is a lot less like Rome. In particular, they were explicitly never an Empire, and that was in intentional contrast to the Ghiscari, so, declaring herself Empress would mean claiming successorship to Harpy Empire of Ghis, not the Dragon Empire of Valyria, and it's obvious why that wouldn't play as well in Westeros, or the Free Cities, or Slaver's Bay. But just play Henry III instead of Charlemagne—as Daeron II already did with the Martells. The Starks can remain a Royal House, so long as they bend the knee to the Targaryens, and all future heirs remain Prince instead of becoming King at accession. A bit more of a compromise, but it still ought to be pretty easy to play off as a victory for both sides of the deal.)

Because that's how it works. Of course you have to win your claim, but history is full of people with claims like that who won. For example, Henry II spent his childhood in exile in France after his mother failed to take the throne from Stephen. Henry VII wasn't Richard III's heir, he was (supposedly) the successor of Edward III's rightful heir who'd failed to take the throne almost a century ago and fled to Wales. And of course it's full of people who lost. The reason Charles Stuart didn't become King wasn't that he wasn't eligible because his grandfather had lost the throne, or because his family had been in exile in Europe for two generations, but because the Jacobites lost their wars. That's the only difference between him and Henry Plantagenet or Henry Tudor. Likewise them, Dany has a legitimate claim to the throne, but it's not the only one. That happens, and that's why there are wars of succession. People seem to think that there's some simple and unambiguous law of succession that covers every possible edge case, but there's nothing of the sort. As we saw in The Princess and the Queen, what Westeros has is nearly identical to what Norman England had, with exactly the same problems. And that's not surprising, because the same thing is true of every pre-constitutional monarchy ever. There's no point in searching for the real answer to who's the legitimate leader, because there are multiple equally-real answers that contradict each other, and the matter can only be settled by war or diplomacy.

He was disinherited by his father, he declared that he didn't not want to be Randyll's heir, he took the Black, and he trained to be a Maester. In-universe, that's about as many disqualifications as you can pile up. Sure, Dany could probably have her Maesters come up with some legal way around it, but it would presumably be a lot easier to attaint the Tarly line and then just grant the Reach to Sam in his own right. And thematically, it would be a lot more fitting. For one thing, his double-disqualification is a deliberate echo of Aemon, who intentionally became both Maester and Watchman to make absolutely sure he couldn't inherit the throne. For another, Sam's story is all about not trying to be his father's son and learning to succeed his own way. Or, even better: Legitimize Little Sam, maybe even have Sam and Gilly come up with a new dynastic name for him, and make him Lord of Oldtown and Warden of the Reach, with Sam as his regent. Because I'm pretty sure that after he's forged his own destiny and become a hero and all that, what Sam will really want is to retire from the limelight and dedicate himself to being a good father to Little Sam, as Randyll and Craster weren't. And as long as Jon keeps his mouth shut, everyone believes Little Sam is his bastard. (In the books, maybe not Oldtown—it depends on what the Hightowers do. But on TV, the Hightowers are a once-mentioned irrelevant family, and Oldtown is much more fitting for Sam's legacy than Horn Hill or Highgarden.)

The Reach: Randyll Tarly, obviously. Of course if Dany wins, she could attaint him as a traitor and replace him with his heir (Dickon), or attaint the whole line and put anyone that she wants in charge. But until then, it's Randyll. Dorne: Presumably Sarella Sand, probably with some cousin we've never heard of as regent, and we'll never hear what happens to Dorne because they're no longer relevant to the story. (I'm assuming the whole Alleras story from the novels isn't going to be in the show, and Sarella will stay an off-screen character whose name only appears on the DVD extras.) Edmure: Presumably still a Lannister prisoner. Walder Frey was ambiguous about exactly where he was being held and by whom, but we didn't see Arya freeing him at Riverrun, which they probably would have shown us if it had happened. Robin: Somewhere in the Vale; maybe still at Runestone, under protection of Royce's castellan. He is still Warden of the East, but who cares, when LF, Royce, and his entire army are all at Winterfell without him? He'll reappear when he's important to Sansa's story, probably after LF is killed.

Even simpler: Sansa: I thought you were the three-eyed raven... Bran: The previous one. I mean, you really shouldn't need to explain the concept of succession even to Hodor, much less to the educated daughter of a lord (and the current Stark in Winterfell).

I think we needed to see Bloodraven as the character from the books—the creepiest man in Westeros even before he switched off his emotions to do his dishonorable but necessary duty, rather than just some old Targaryen and Watch Commander. Without that, it isn't clear why being trained by Bloodraven would turn Bran into an inhuman freak who doesn't understand why talking emotionlessly about your sister's rape might be a bit tactless. Also, it would have worked a lot better if everyone weren't so aged up, so Bloodraven was training a pubescent boy rather than a 16-year-old. (Plus, creepy teens never work as well as creepy kids on the screen.)

Presumably Arya made it look like Walder planned to kill off a bunch of rival heirs to straighten out his succession, but accidentally killed them all, then committed suicide, or something like that. Sometimes barely believable and totally suspicious. But I think it's just not too important to anyone to worry about. I'm pretty sure that, from what we've heard, Walder not only couldn't be counted on to supply Cersei with any significant troops, he wasn't even supplying food, or doing anything significant to keep order in the Riverlands. And, now that he's dead, I don't think there are any named characters left to raise an army there against Cersei. So, either way, the Riverlands is just where the smugglers get the food they smuggle into KL, and it has no other strategic value from now until the end of the war. That may not seem plausible, but if that's the facts we've been told, that's that. And, if so, Walder's death isn't even worth mentioning when there's 70000-man armies switching sides back and forth on a daily basis, plus a half dozen people you need to get personal revenjustice against. (Of course I wouldn't be at all surprised if next week, Sansa has teleported to Riverrun, summoned all of the River Lords, given them a rousing speech in the name of her Tully mother, and raised an army overnight that can be used for a dramatic reversal to Cersei or a threat/offer to compel Dany to take Jon more seriously. But that's not based on any facts we've been told, just on me expecting the show to give us another huge diplomatic/logistic/strategic surprise out of nowhere.)

Of course it matters. You can't force someone to be King, or Warden, against their will. Just ask Maester Aemon. Even if their society somehow has no precedent for abdication (which is implausible—and at least in the books, we know it's not true), what do you think would happen if a King announced he was abdicating? Put their fingers in their ears and say "La la, we can't hear you, you're still King" and then just have nobody making judgments on anything for the rest of his life? Of course not. Whether they accept the abdication, come up with some complicated legal fiction to deal with it, or even kill him in anger, they still have to give the reins of power to the next person in line.

Iä! Iä! Martin fhtagn! Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Martin Santa Fe wgah'nagl fhtagn!

That's only 9. But then the Bible, the Quran, and the Little Red Book have to push the bottom 3 off anyway, so we don't really need 10? (Plus, without looking, I'd bet #10 is either Narnia 1 or Harry Potter 2...) Anyway, ignoring Red Chamber (because most Westerners haven't read it), of the 3 "academic classics", The Little Prince is openly fantasy, and Quixote is borderline, and of the 5 "non-classics", the only non-fantasy is a mystery novel, and it comes pretty low on the list. Which is, of course, completely irrelevant to the point under discussion here, but it's interesting nonetheless.

Why is Daemon Targaryen on the list? Even if the romantic songs are right and he survived the Battle of Gods Eye and lived out the rest of his days with Nettles, he still lived out the rest of those days decades ago and has long since died. Otherwise, he'd be, what, in his 170s? Of course you can come up with theories that make him a tree-monster southern counterpart to Bloodraven on the Isle of Faces, but even if that were true, it seems very doubtful that anyone in Westeros believes him missing or would ever think to look for him alive.

But there are definitely plenty of exceptions to that. Mark Twain was enormously popular in his day. And, while I can't think of any 19th century examples that were popular but ridiculed or ignored by critics and scholars of the time, there are plenty in the early 20th century--my copy of The Maltese Falcon says it's #56 in the Random House Greatest Novels collection, for example. So I don't know that being popular is the opposite of being enduring, I think it's more that it's almost irrelevant to being enduring. (Except that obviously something has to be at least popular enough to get noticed in the first place; there aren't that many great novels/plays/songs/whatever that were discovered in someone unknown guy's basement in a pile of rejected submissions.)

Only very small handful of writers (like Atwood) manage to straddle the razor's edge and get classified as fantasy and literary at the same time, but it's not because that very small handful are the only ones in the same league stylistically, or even the best. Many of the best just don't get counted as genre writers even though they clearly are--Paul Auster, Jonathan Lethem, Kurt Vonnegut, Jorge Luis Borges, Franz Kafka, and Mark Twain are all found in the literary fiction aisle, not the SF/fantasy/horror aisle. Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Salman Rushdie are so hard to consider non-genre that critics had to invent a new non-genre genre for them so they didn't have to tar them with the "fantasy" brush. And many of the best do get counted as genre writers, and never escape the genre ghetto. I'd put Philip Purser-Hallard, or even Bruce Sterling at his best (Zeitgeist), up against Hemingway or Faulkner, but nobody's likely to write a thesis about them. Anyway, this used to bother me, until something Neil Gaiman said. He was asked what he thought about some university offering a course focusing on Sandman, and he said something like, "If Sandman gets placed between Gatsby and Catch-22 in the Great Canon, that won't make me any more of a success than I am today. If Neverwhere affects more people than Sandman did, that will."

Yes, Roose. I was replying to a post that said that going to Winterfell at all made no sense when he could have just lied to Cersei. If he did that, Roose would have no reason to back him up. Sure, he could use a different plan, going to Winterfell without Sansa, to bring Roose into the plot with him. (In fact, as I suggested earlier, if he had access to a Jeyne Poole, that might even be a better plan.) In that case, of course, Roose would lie to Cersei for him. But that's not what we're discussing here.

If she finally turns on LF after he "rescues" her from Ramsay, unexpectedly to him because of his blind spot, she will be a character who failed to learn from her first mistake, and only learned from her second mistake right before making a third. That's an interesting character arc, and it would make for dramatic television. And she'd hardly be the first character in fiction who needs more than one mistake to learn her lesson (that goes back at least to Odysseus). Of course we have no way of knowing that's what D&D are planning, or that they'll be able to pull it off if it is their plan. But to say that she can't possibly be on any kind of interesting story arc right now, without having seen the end of that arc, when there's at least one possibility and probably plenty of others, is silly. And if you're just going to assume that it's impossible that show will ever do anything interesting, even when it has an obvious opportunity to do so, there's literally no reason to watch the show, because it cannot possibly be interesting.

Female body parts of women as opposed to female body parts of men, or male body parts of women? :)

He definitely does. At least sometimes, he sees her as like teenage Cat, but even better, because this time he's in control instead of stupid Hoster Tully or Brandon Stark, and he can finish raising her into his perfect wife. Sure, but the point above, together with the fact that LF clearly thinks he's an even better manipulator than he is, and that he doesn't seem to understand people who do things against their own self-interest for any reason other than bad game-playing or being manipulated, and he may be a lot less worried about this than he should be. (By the last part, it's a bit hard to explain what I mean, but: LF understands that Cersei will cut off her nose to spite her Margy, and he has to take that into account when dealing with her. But he doesn't expect that Ned will make a choice that isn't good for himself. If he had, he could have tailored his plan to appeal to Ned's honor, his anger at Cersei, and/or his concern for his daughters, but he didn't do any of that. LF's plan was the best thing Ned could hope for, Ned wasn't trying to play any game of his own, nobody else was using Ned as a pawn, so it was almost inconceivable that Ned would say no. In the same way, if LF sets up a situation where it's in Sansa best interest to play along, he may not take into account the fact that she's hurt, or thinks he needs to be stopped, or whatever, and therefore she may be willing to use the only weapon he's left her even if it leaves her personally in a worse position. Anyway, I hope if this is what they're planning for LF's downfall, they do more work to set it up over a few episodes next season. Sansa has to believably sacrifice something to take LF down for a reason he believably wouldn't anticipate; otherwise, it would be a pointless storyline.)

Of course you are. But my point is: Littlefinger clearly has the Vale Knights behind him. Whether you think the way it happened makes sense or not, it happened. So, if you argue (as someone did earlier in this thread) that Littlefinger can't attack Bolton because he doesn't have any army to do it with, you're just wasting your own time and everyone else's. He does have an army, and therefore, he can do it, and therefore, any plans that he makes that rely on his being able to do it are not stupid plans. If you're not willing to grant that he has the Vale Lords on his side, you're not judging the show on what actually happens in the show, so you should have stopped watching. (Or, looked at another way: It's already committed a sin that you cannot get past; why pretend you've gotten past it?) Let me try to give a more neutral analogy that people won't have any reason to react to emotionally. Do you watch Flash? It was ridiculous that the Flash recruited Captain Cold's to keep a bunch of supervillains on ice while transporting them, because Captain Cold's only power is that he has a cold gun, which the good guys built in the first place, and have already told us they could easily reproduce. And yet, he did it. So, later, when Captain Cold shot and killed Deathbolt, there's nothing wrong with that scene. Given that he was there, it makes perfect sense that he could and would do what he did. If I want to argue that he couldn't have been there in the first place, I should have stopped watching after they recruited Captain Cold. I can still complain that it was stupid (and out of character) for the Flash to recruit Captain Cold, but I can't complain that it was impossible for Captain Cold to kill Deathbolt, or that his plan once recruited was stupid because it relies on him being recruited which is impossible.

While flat-out lying about Sansa marrying Ramsay is not even close to an option, disguising a Jeyne Poole as Sansa for Ramsay still seems like his best option. In fact, it's a better option than the book plot of disguising her as Arya, because (a) she's not the wrong age, and ( B) it's even more believable that show-LF has Sansa under his control (given that it's actually true...) than book-Arya (who hasn't been seen by that many people, but that's still more than the zero who have seen Sansa). As long as LF keeps the real Sansa hidden from the Vale Lords, there's no one to contradict his story. Of course this would require having Roose and Ramsay in on the plot before betraying them, but, as we saw on screen, bringing Roose and Ramsay in on a plot before betraying them is exactly what he intended. The show doesn't really have Jeyne Poole. (Benioff did claim that the unnamed extra who sat next to Sansa in one scene was Jeyne Poole, but she was never mentioned by anyone in-universe, and never appeared in any scenes in KL.) However, show-Veyon Poole says he has five daughters, and he probably isn't the only one of Ned's men in Winterfell with a daughter reasonably close to Sansa's age and reasonably familiar with Winterfell. And it's not like the writers would have had to set this up in advance; the books didn't set it up at all, and nobody found it implausible. So, while there's nothing really wrong with LF's plot on the show, there seems to be an obvious even better plot he could have used instead. Also, even ignoring the in-story benefits of this plan, D&D were looking to introduce a hot new actress this season, and a fake Sansa would have been a way to introduce a hot new actress and show her topless (by having the character/actor both just a tiny bit older than Sansa/Sophie), all while making their writing easier by allowing them to borrow a little more Theon stuff from the books. So, I'm curious why they didn't think of it.

She doesn't ask for evidence because it would be stupid of him to lie when she can and will find out the truth. You think KL isn't in communication with the Lords Paramount? Unless LF somehow knows that she'll soon be arrested by the Faith and no longer a problem (which seems unlikely), he'd be a fool to make such a transparent lie.

This seems to me to be the one actual flaw in LF's plan (as opposed to all of the non-actual flaws people keep finding by trying to read the details of the book situation into the show). One of the first things anyone said about Stannis was when LF told Ned that he could not expect any gratitude for sitting Stannis on the throne. And LF seems to be in the same situation Ned was in then. With the added problem that, as a turncloak, he still has to be punished as well as rewarded, a la Davos (but with a much worse crime). The North, for all their Remembering, will accept as a hero anyone who defeats the Boltons, avenges Robb, and saves Sansa, no matter what they'd done in the past, but Stannis is not the type to forgive and forget (TV-Stannis even less than book-Stannis). Also, we don't know what's going on with the show-Tullys, but assuming even one of them is alive, it will be Stannis, not LF, that re-seats them at Riverrun and gives them back control over the Riverlands. Sure, Sansa is their (granddaughter/great-niece/whatever), but LF will still have a hard time manipulating them against Stannis if he's their savior.