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[Book Spoilers] EP506 Discussion v. 2


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Aryas arc confused me.

I didnt understand shit. Can anyone enlighten me?

When did she lose the game before?

Why all the beating even when she was saying the truth?

Why suddennly she is shown rubber mask gallery?

Why cant they drink from well themselves? Clearly Arya has no magic..

She briefly played the game with the Waif when she first arrived at THoBW. She tried to say she was No oNe

The aim of the exercise, as I understood it, was to seed lies into her story such that Jaqen wouldn't notice. And he hit her every time he caught a lie.

Jaqen thought she was ready after taking a life I guess.

The girl was particularly weak?

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The HOBW was amazing again. They are doing such a good job with the interior.


Tyrion telling Jorah about his father was something I have missed in the books. I always wondered about how Jorah would react. If he heard what his last words were it would be perfect, but yeah, they skipped those last words so that's a closed door.


I'm curious about what the f LF's plan is. I don't know yet if I like it. I wanna see how it plays out first, then I'll judge.


And Margaery being arrested for lying? That's just boring. QOT did not dissappoint though. Tommen needs to grow a pair and stand up for his wife.


Dorne was a bit.. cheesy. I liked Doran and Areo though.


Sansa's storyline is changed way too much. She is one of the most important characters of the show so I still don't understand why the WF storyline is so much more important that they have completely let go of Sansa's storyline. I get that sometimes things need to change a bit, but don't overdo it.


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She briefly played the game with the Waif when she first arrived at THoBW. She tried to say she was No oNe

The aim of the exercise, as I understood it, was to seed lies into her story such that Jaqen wouldn't notice. And he hit her every time he caught a lie.

Jaqen thought she was ready after taking a life I guess.

The girl was particularly weak?

But didnt she say the truth?

What are they training her for? To tell the truth always or to lie perfectly?

Why suddenly the face gallery?

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She tried to slip lies into the narrative but Jaqen picked them all up. She thought she meant it about the Hound though - she doesn't realise how fond of him she became. But Jaqen does. I liked that bit.

Every time Arya lied she clenched her fist and Jaqen noticed that, or did I just dream that up? I'm not sure, I'd have to watch the episode again.

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But didnt she say the truth?

What are they training her for? To tell the truth always or to lie perfectly?

Why suddenly the face gallery?

She was only hit when she told a lie. As I understood it, the aim was teaching her how to lie undetectably. The easiest way to start is by learning how to seed lies in with the truth.

And the face gallery - again, Jaqen seemed to think that taking the girl's life was some sort of rite of passage for Arya. Not sure the exact logic behind that.

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Wow, a lot to process from that episode. I'm personally very interested in what is going to happen with Sansa and WF. I don't mind the deviation from the book. I'd rather have the players get closer together, and never could keep track of who was who in the Vale anyway. Those scenes, while intentionally disturbing, were very well acted. As horrible as it was to have that happen to Sansa, I did feel like it was something she chose, at least to the extent someone in her position is able to actually make a true choice (which is to say, not much). She wants revenge, and that means being at WF. That is her home, and whatever happens to her there, I think it is anchoring for her. She can see an endpoint where things aren't terrible when she's there, whereas in KL, it was all just going to be horrible for her forever.



Dorne. Ugh. Gods. That was...awful? Like, really, really bad. Jamie's non-existent plan...them almost getting close to the princess and crown prince of Dorne by putting on some different clothes? The sand snakes...oh my. I don't know when I've seen worse acting. The fight was ridiculous. I don't even know what the point of all that is. We lost Aegon and Arianne for this?



Arya's scenes were wonderful, and talk about atmospheric. But...I just do not care about the FM plotline. I'm sure it eventually becomes relevant to the overall story, though I have no idea how it works into the White Walkers, which is the whole point of things. Mainly, just like in the books, I want Arya to get herself back home where she belongs and it is frustrating to watch her go through motions that seem largely pointless. That is a book failing, too, though, at least for me. I love the character when she is interacting with people that matter and a part of the rest of the story, but isolated like that, it just isn't something that interests me.



I did like the bit where Tyrion pointed out that Jorah thinks Dany is going to be the awesome ruler when she hasn't even been to Westeros and has really no idea about how things work there. There is so much Dany doesn't know, not just about Westeros, but how to rule in general. I hope she is willing to listen and learn it.



ETA: I hope it is the Queen of Thorns who sets up Cersei's downfall (well, with an assist from Cersei herself, lol). I want to see a smug QoT watching Cersei get locked up. No way Grams is sitting idle while both her grandbabies are locked up.


Edited by sabrecmc
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She tried to slip lies into the narrative but Jaqen picked them all up. She thought she meant it about the Hound though - she doesn't realise how fond of him she became. But Jaqen does. I liked that bit.

Funny, I thought it was the opposite: his issue was with her use of past tense: "I hated him!" - slap! - "no, really, I hated him!" - slap! She didn't leave all that behind, she's still Arya Stark, with Arya Stark's issues and Arya Stark's scores to settle (bless her heart).

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She tried to slip lies into the narrative but Jaqen picked them all up. She thought she meant it about the Hound though - she doesn't realise how fond of him she became. But Jaqen does. I liked that bit.

That was my favorite bit too. Now I'm REALLY hoping to see Rory as a "guest star" in the opening credits of one of the next episodes... Or at least have him back next season.

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A few comments:

1. Yes, the wedding was rushed. Maybe Roose has an idea that Stannis will be marching on Winterfell soon, maybe he wants to consolidate his claim to WF before LF can return and try to foil his plans, maybe he wants a spare trueborn heir-grandchild in the picture because he knows Fat Walda and her baby won't be around much longer if Ramsay can help it.

2. About Sansa's wedding dress: not sure if intentional, but a white raven is a harbinger that "Winter is Coming," and that Sansa represents that Winter--harsh, cold, and unforgiving. Not to mention reinforcing white=virginity.

3. People are still misinterpreting and underestimating Sansa. That she would put up with such a disrespectful bedding shows just how much of a price she's willing to pay to come home. Now all she has to do to stay there is outfight/outmaneuver the Boltons, Stannis, LF, and the Lannisters--and get some revenge along the way, if she can. If D&D are smart, this is the path they'll take, rather than Sansa-as-perpetual-victim. Possibly even play up the "childhood's end/you can't go home again" angle. IF they're smart. Not betting on it, though.

This would also make Sansa "THE Stark in Winterfell," and give a window to explain Chekhov's Aphorism.

4. Once more Dinklage gets the best line: "Guess. Again." Liked the scene where Jorah finds out about the Old Bear's death. Liked QoT dealing with Cersei. Hated all the Dorne scenes. You mean the Water Gardens are so ill-guarded that not one but TWO sets of kidnappers (that don't even know about each other) can infiltrate them at the same time? Doran can't be that stupid. Please let this be a setup to trap the Sand Snakes with Jaime and Bronn as an unexpected bonus.

5. About Jorah's greyscale showing up so soon: I figure it isn't visible except to the viewers--maybe it tingles a bit or is starting to go numb at that point, so he's not sure if he's infected yet. He may be figuring that after he sees Dany he can have the arm amputated, you know, with what passes for proper medical attention in a feudal setting.

6. On an unrelated note, to provide a bit of humor, I'll be quite disappointed if we TV viewers don't get a decapitated-dwarf-head montage this season. C'mon, D&D, you need some humor to break the dramatic tension a bit.

7. This is an unpopular position, but I actually like the Missandei/Grey Worm romance so far. Humanizes them both a bit.

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The show confirms for me my theory that Sansa will reign as the ultimate ruler, maybe even elected. (personally i feel the endgame is a transition to democracy) I think the show runners use her suffering as a way of catering to the lowest common denominator. The show was starting to lose me at the end of last season and so far the show is leaving a lot wanting. The sand snakes are corny. Kings landing has the most text to pull from so it at least has direction and arya's journey is going along as expected.



Side note, I also think we are being set up for a shireen sacrifice to save jon


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But didnt she say the truth?

What are they training her for? To tell the truth always or to lie perfectly?

Why suddenly the face gallery?

They were training her to be able to lie perfectly. Jaqen realized she was ready when she lied so perfectly to the dying girl. She is now ready to be a Faceless Man. She will give up her face and acquire one of those in the face gallery as a disguise like Jaqen does, At least this is how I interpreted the scene. Edited by TheFirstofHerName
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The show confirms for me my theory that Sansa will reign as the ultimate ruler, maybe even elected. (personally i feel the endgame is a transition to democracy) I think the show runners use her suffering as a way of catering to the lowest common denominator. The show was starting to lose me at the end of last season and so far the show is leaving a lot wanting. The sand snakes are corny. Kings landing has the most text to pull from so it at least has direction and arya's journey is going along as expected.

Side note, I also think we are being set up for a shireen sacrifice to save jon

It seems we are getting closer and closer to The Others invading and maybe the show will take a major sci-if/fantasy type turn with more of a focus on the magic ruling properties of The Others, Dragons, Bran, The Children of the Forest, etc. There is a greater threat to humanity than all these political and power grabbing games. it really shows the corruptness and how in the quest for things and power we forget about the greater threat to the planet. My husband thinks The Others should win and wipe all their sorry asses off Planteos,

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Here's my attempt to be grown up about Sansa's arc.

I don't get why people think that Sansa getting in a bad situation means that her last scene of season 4 doesn't make sense. Character arcs don't go need to learn something, learn it , win. They usually have characters trying many multiple tactics to get to their goal or even repeating the same mistakes over and over until they succeed. A 2 hour movie will usually 4 or 5 different screw ups by the main character before they finally get on the right track so an 8 season epic fantasy season should have quite a few more than that. In real life most people do continually make the same mistakes, get in the same holes and continue the same habits while somebody completely changing the way they react to situations or changing their world view is usually very difficult once or twice in a decade event and fiction reflects this.

I think the trouble is that people have gotten to respect LF too much. This means that Sansa turning into LF 2.0 is not seen as an obviously bad thing in the way that, say, Arya become no one is. Really all the characters on apprenticeship type arcs are being set up to fail and it is just that some are more obvious than others. We know all the time that no matter how well Dany does with organising Meereen she will be leaving but with Jon we don't realise that being leader of the NW is not his ultimate role until his final chapter. Similarly with Sansa we think she is safe because we have not seen the end of her arc but it may well be that what happens in the show with Ramsey is not dissimilar to what happens with Harry. Being smart at politics doesn't stop someone being sexually naive. Wearing a black dress did not turn a teenage girl into a seductress.

I think the rape is not meant to empower her like in some daft Hollywood film but it will change her. It will stop her trusting LF and make her more self-reliant. Hopefully it will drive a wedge between her and LF that no amount of his smarming on his part will be able to heal (and without any "LF killed your father and tried to kill your brother" info dump). I think the show is revealing that the point of Sansa's character was never to become a player (which sounds pretty disgusting and stupid now we have seen the effects of such game playing on a well loved character rather than just a stand in) but to be someone who decides they don't want to play LF and Varys's game and goes their own way. This ties in with Sophie's comments about Sansa wanting to start a new house, she wants to succeed on her merits and forge her own destiny rather than play the Stark card. There's a good chance that Sansa will become more like Stannis, living by his own moral code and not even trying to play the game, rather than LF. It didn't work for Ned because he was ultra-honourable and politically inept but Sansa is neither of those things.

This episode not only showed what a sham and risk arranged marriages are through Sansa's arc but also in Marg's story. Power through marriage is a great dynastic tool just so long as you are not the one in the marriage pact. Even if she had been married to someone who seemed like Mr Nice Guy she would still have been at risk of the same treatment on her wedding night. I think LF and Lysa and Dany and Drogo are relevant here as to how show Sansa might react. LF was disgusted by Lysa, she demanded sex, and threatened his life if he did not give her what she wanted lets not forget, but he put up with it as he had a plan from the start and was just waiting for an opportunity it push her out the moon door. Dany had no idea what she was doing, she had months of living hell until she learned to please Drogo and had to internalise her need to please him to survive as love. From Sophie's comment about Sansa needing to try and understand Ramsay and how to please him we can see she will probably go down the Dany path at first but we also know (as we have been blatantly told) she has a plan and I expect that part of her to win out by the end of the season even if it is just jumping over the wall with Theon to find Stannis. Whatever happens I bet that show Sansa will never see political marriage as an acceptable tool again.

That Vanity Fair article is disgusting. It is either saying that women who have power and agency don't get raped or that women who are raped no longer have power or agency. Seriously some of the anti-show comments are far more messed up about rape than those trying to work out what it means in the show. Does it mean Sansa is stupid because she should have seen it coming? No because, as I have said above, anyone in that situation, no matter how nice the other party seems, is vulnerable to the same thing happening to them. People worrying about Sansa's arc not working now she has lost her virginity or that she might be pregnant. No one was worried about whether Jeyne might be carrying Ramsay's child as she was being beaten or getting frostbite. Neither Cersei, Dany or Lysa had their marriage prospects dented by being a mother. People might also want to remember that in the original story GRRM planned for Sansa to have Joffery's child so it's not completely against her character.

I also want to point out that it is clear from the leaked story outline that GRRM split a lot of his original characters main into three or four different characters as he expanded the story. It may well have been that the original character to have taken Jeyne Poole's role was Sansa but GRRM in the end decided that he wanted her to spend more time around LF. The original story may well have had a young mother Sansa being raped by evil Jaime and we just read the fractured shards of that story. GRRM is repeating is "the same story told differently" thing on his blog again. I would believe him rather than trying to put words in his mouth.

What a reasonable post, thank you

I as well am annoyed by the Idea that a woman who suffered sexual violence has no story anymore, as if she were worthless now, not only after patriarchial ideology but also as character in literature: now she has no agency anymore, is not empowered enough.

Millions of women have been brutalized in wartime and yet they were the ones to put their shattered world together again. They brought up the children from rape and unwanted marriage and cared for them, they built whole new cities. No, women are so much more than their "lost virginity" (like what? lost wallet?? Their value in the eyes of male ownership?)

Edited by Woman of War
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Here's my attempt to be grown up about Sansa's arc.

I don't get why people think that Sansa getting in a bad situation means that her last scene of season 4 doesn't make sense. Character arcs don't go need to learn something, learn it , win. They usually have characters trying many multiple tactics to get to their goal or even repeating the same mistakes over and over until they succeed. A 2 hour movie will usually 4 or 5 different screw ups by the main character before they finally get on the right track so an 8 season epic fantasy season should have quite a few more than that. In real life most people do continually make the same mistakes, get in the same holes and continue the same habits while somebody completely changing the way they react to situations or changing their world view is usually very difficult once or twice in a decade event and fiction reflects this.

I think the trouble is that people have gotten to respect LF too much. This means that Sansa turning into LF 2.0 is not seen as an obviously bad thing in the way that, say, Arya become no one is. Really all the characters on apprenticeship type arcs are being set up to fail and it is just that some are more obvious than others. We know all the time that no matter how well Dany does with organising Meereen she will be leaving but with Jon we don't realise that being leader of the NW is not his ultimate role until his final chapter. Similarly with Sansa we think she is safe because we have not seen the end of her arc but it may well be that what happens in the show with Ramsey is not dissimilar to what happens with Harry. Being smart at politics doesn't stop someone being sexually naive. Wearing a black dress did not turn a teenage girl into a seductress.

I think the rape is not meant to empower her like in some daft Hollywood film but it will change her. It will stop her trusting LF and make her more self-reliant. Hopefully it will drive a wedge between her and LF that no amount of his smarming on his part will be able to heal (and without any "LF killed your father and tried to kill your brother" info dump). I think the show is revealing that the point of Sansa's character was never to become a player (which sounds pretty disgusting and stupid now we have seen the effects of such game playing on a well loved character rather than just a stand in) but to be someone who decides they don't want to play LF and Varys's game and goes their own way. This ties in with Sophie's comments about Sansa wanting to start a new house, she wants to succeed on her merits and forge her own destiny rather than play the Stark card. There's a good chance that Sansa will become more like Stannis, living by his own moral code and not even trying to play the game, rather than LF. It didn't work for Ned because he was ultra-honourable and politically inept but Sansa is neither of those things.

This episode not only showed what a sham and risk arranged marriages are through Sansa's arc but also in Marg's story. Power through marriage is a great dynastic tool just so long as you are not the one in the marriage pact. Even if she had been married to someone who seemed like Mr Nice Guy she would still have been at risk of the same treatment on her wedding night. I think LF and Lysa and Dany and Drogo are relevant here as to how show Sansa might react. LF was disgusted by Lysa, she demanded sex, and threatened his life if he did not give her what she wanted lets not forget, but he put up with it as he had a plan from the start and was just waiting for an opportunity it push her out the moon door. Dany had no idea what she was doing, she had months of living hell until she learned to please Drogo and had to internalise her need to please him to survive as love. From Sophie's comment about Sansa needing to try and understand Ramsay and how to please him we can see she will probably go down the Dany path at first but we also know (as we have been blatantly told) she has a plan and I expect that part of her to win out by the end of the season even if it is just jumping over the wall with Theon to find Stannis. Whatever happens I bet that show Sansa will never see political marriage as an acceptable tool again.

That Vanity Fair article is disgusting. It is either saying that women who have power and agency don't get raped or that women who are raped no longer have power or agency. Seriously some of the anti-show comments are far more messed up about rape than those trying to work out what it means in the show. Does it mean Sansa is stupid because she should have seen it coming? No because, as I have said above, anyone in that situation, no matter how nice the other party seems, is vulnerable to the same thing happening to them. People worrying about Sansa's arc not working now she has lost her virginity or that she might be pregnant. No one was worried about whether Jeyne might be carrying Ramsay's child as she was being beaten or getting frostbite. Neither Cersei, Dany or Lysa had their marriage prospects dented by being a mother. People might also want to remember that in the original story GRRM planned for Sansa to have Joffery's child so it's not completely against her character.

I also want to point out that it is clear from the leaked story outline that GRRM split a lot of his original characters main into three or four different characters as he expanded the story. It may well have been that the original character to have taken Jeyne Poole's role was Sansa but GRRM in the end decided that he wanted her to spend more time around LF. The original story may well have had a young mother Sansa being raped by evil Jaime and we just read the fractured shards of that story. GRRM is repeating is "the same story told differently" thing on his blog again. I would believe him rather than trying to put words in his mouth.

It seems like the people who are upset about Sansa, at least some of them, expected her transformation to happen immediately - while saying that the writing is terrible. Which to me is laughable. THAT would be terrible writing. You don't just go from being what she was to a power player in one or two episodes , much like real life the transformation is a rocky and eventual one.

The only thing I've had a problem with so far this year is Dorne. The sand snakes feel gimmicky but I'm willing to see where it goes since we have literally only seen them for about 4 minutes.

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Yeah, I'm getting the feeling that Littlefinger will be the one to get Cersei arrested, by feeding information to Olenna about Lancel. Though it doesn't make any sense, as Littlefinger already reminded Cersei he knew about Lancel, which would place him in crosshairs immediately, and Cersei is going to make him Warden of the North. Then again, little about Littlefinger makes any sense, so anything can happen I guess...

Maybe. Have LF and Olenna colluded on anything in the past?😃

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