[BOOK SPOILERS] Nitpick without repercussion?

[SilentSense]

-so many stories running in parallel now that there is very little progress in each, and what little progress there is feels kinda rushed, and we're almost half way through the season. :Z

-tyrell, tyrell. pissed me off more than it should

-sorcerer in the box, how unprompted both of varys scenes were, though I did like them a lot

-theon and ramsay scene, bran scene.

-not showing the hound-beric duel. was getting excited and then they're cutting to dany. which admittedly was quite a nice scene however

people keep saying Jaime wasnt misogynistic. This is the guy who called Brienne wench for several hundred pages.

almost like he wanted to really provoke her or something when in fact they are best mates. weird.

[teemo]

-so many stories running in parallel now that there is very little progress in each, and what little progress there is feels kinda rushed, and we're almost half way through the season. :Z

yeah, it's getting to the point where no writer or team can really flesh out so many characters with just 10 hours of screen time. Jaime and Brienne is definitely one of my favorite storylines at this point in the books (and Arya), and their journey is such a slow, brutal haul, emotionally draining haul, and it's quite amazing and definitely humanizes the characters, especially Jaime, who needs it. It has to be rushed in the show, however, and the characters and scenes are becoming more and more one-dimensional as time goes on because not enough screen time can be dedicated to everyone...

[Pinkie Baelish]

yeah, it's getting to the point where no writer or team can really flesh out so many characters with just 10 hours of screen time. Jaime and Brienne is definitely one of my favorite storylines at this point in the books (and Arya), and their journey is such a slow, brutal haul, emotionally draining haul, and it's quite amazing and definitely humanizes the characters, especially Jaime, who needs it. It has to be rushed in the show, however, and the characters and scenes are becoming more and more one-dimensional as time goes on because not enough screen time can be dedicated to everyone...

This is why part of me is dreading everything past season 4.

[Dove]

Somehow I never thought of it that way, ugh. You think it skips around too much now - just wait until we have 5+ prominent new Dornish and Ironborn PoVs doing their own thing, and literally every main character is seperated into their own plot threads besides a few people still remaining together in King's Landing.

It's going to be a huge mess if they try to be too faithful, but if they don't, they'll get reamed by a lot of book people.

[The Pain Yak]

1. Show!Littlefinger is several orders of magnitude less devious than his book counterpart. The man simply has had no opportunities past his betrayal of Ned Stark to show off that he's one of the best players of the game around, while getting plenty of new scenes that make him seem downright inept. If Ros had existed in the books, given his treatment of her last season, can anyone possibly imagine Book!Littlefinger possibly being so foolish as to let her see him making his plans with Sansa Stark and trust her (apparently implicitly) to hold her silence? Aren't 'never get your own hands dirty' and 'trust no one' basically two of his rules to live by?

And now he's getting outmaneuvered through mistakes so basic they would have done Ned Stark proud. He looks like an idiot, not a brilliant schemer.

Littlefinger is a character in need of rescuing. And soon, if viewers are to appreciate what a magnificent bastard he's supposed to be.

2. I really wish they would start emphasizing guest right. Said that on WiC.net, and now I say it here. I want them to do it subtly, and I want them to do it in a way that doesn't give away how important it will be for RW, but I want it there so that people understand that what the Freys do isn't just a run-of-the-mill kind of betrayal. Its one of the most horrific crimes imaginable in Westeros, for which they end up loathed even by their new allies. It should be neither neglected nor hammered home so hamfistedly that people can't mistake they're being set up for something; rather, it needs to be subtly slipped in and understood, and the betrayal at Craster's strikes me as a tragic missed opportunity for that.

[Tyrion_the_Oneironaut]

Hmm.

-didn't like how Varys caught his sorcerer. I always liked to wonder who it might be(Moqorro)...plus I think seeing the feeble old git begging for help in a crate kind of takes away from the imagery Varys just painted not moments before. The magic was was so creepy it haunts Varys to this day, well big deal because fat lot of good magic did the sorcerer in the end!

-Brienne & Arya's POVs are supposed to give a sense of destruction the war is taking on Westeros. All I'm really sensing are some disenfranchised common folk joining up with the BWB. Even Tyrion has a chapter where he has to deal with the carcases from Blackwater Bay.

-the Astapor slavers came off as cartoonishly stupid. All this time, someone like Ramsay Bolton could have just dropped a chest or two of gold, commanded the Unsullied to attack their former masters & taken their money back & taken over the slave business. Yes I know Astapor has other defenses but they're no match for 8,000 Unsullied.

-the Queen of Thorns hits you over the head with her biting, unsolicited cynicism. I was hoping for more Sophia Patrillo smartassery.

[Ser Desmond Wine's Bane]

On the Brienne and 'Woman' thing.

It did cause me to raise my eyebrows on first watch.

The second time I thought it might have worked better if there had been more 'Wench' from Jaime...

But I have since rewatched E3 to see the Theon/Boy scenes again and came across something. Its from when Brienne and Jaime are talking about the impending rape attempt

So if you were a woman' date=' you'd let them do it? Let them take what ever they want?

[/quote']

[mafalda]

Hmm.

-didn't like how Varys caught his sorcerer. I always liked to wonder who it might be(Moqorro)...plus I think seeing the feeble old git begging for help in a crate kind of takes away from the imagery Varys just painted not moments before. The magic was was so creepy it haunts Varys to this day, well big deal because fat lot of good magic did the sorcerer in the end!

-Brienne & Arya's POVs are supposed to give a sense of destruction the war is taking on Westeros. All I'm really sensing are some disenfranchised common folk joining up with the BWB. Even Tyrion has a chapter where he has to deal with the carcases from Blackwater Bay.

-the Astapor slavers came off as cartoonishly stupid. All this time, someone like Ramsay Bolton could have just dropped a chest or two of gold, commanded the Unsullied to attack their former masters & taken their money back & taken over the slave business. Yes I know Astapor has other defenses but they're no match for 8,000 Unsullied.

-the Queen of Thorns hits you over the head with her biting, unsolicited cynicism. I was hoping for more Sophia Patrillo smartassery.

Agreed with your first and fourth points. That Varys scene pissed me off because the convo was way too casual. And while reading the books I always thought there was gonna be something mysterious and amazing regarding Varys and the sorcerer, like something was gonna happen when he finally found him, or maybe he was someone we knew (like you said, moqorro). This just ruins it for me now.

Oh how perfect Sophia would have been. God rest her soul! I like Diana Rigg as QoT, but she does tend to ramble. Like the sigils and words speech... that's it, everything she says sounds like a speech! Like she's having a conversation with herself, she never gives anyone else a chance to say anything. I don't think those girls doing the embroidering got a word in!

For your third, a lot of people have been saying that. But I think that's the only way for it to work, is if the slavers were stupid. If they were smart the whole thing would have been an epic fail and Dany would also be in an Astapori knot! :)

[The Pain Yak]

The Astapori slavers falling for such a blindingly obvious ploy was a fault of the books, too. The show creators merely carried it over. Not one of GRRM's stronger plot twists, with a truckload of blatant foreshadowing, but the end result was just so satisfying to read that I didn't really mind.

This is how I personally rationalize it somewhat: Dany got away with it because the Good Masters approached her with a healthy mix of misogyny, contempt and complacency. A Ramsay Snow or some such wouldn't have been able to get away with it because Ramsay is a grown man. Dany, by contrast, is a 15 year old girl. They just didn't take her seriously and saw only a naive little girl to be swindled rather than a potential threat.

Was it still stupid? Obviously. Yet it was a byproduct of Astapor and its rotting, decadent culture. Safe for so long from danger, they saw only the profit and refused to see the risk.

[Pompeius Magnus]

While I agree (in general) that Littlefinger's character has been weakened in the show, keep in mind that unless they make a massive departure from the books, his plan actually comes to fruition. What better way to demonstrate Varys' point that he's the most dangerous guy around than by magicking Sansa out of King's Landing even while everyone's trying to prevent it, and one-upping that by offing Joffrey in the process.

It does make me curious to see how they handle the Tyrell involvement in the Purple Wedding, though. Are they just playing along with Varys, and doing (to book readers) odd things like offering Loras to Sansa because they know it'll never actually happen? Or will Baelish pull of the whole wedding assassination himself, giving the (little)finger to everyone for thinking they were better than him? Either way, knowing what we know, we simply can't accept the whole discovery of Littlefinger's plans at face value.

[FattyPeon]

While I agree (in general) that Littlefinger's character has been weakened in the show, keep in mind that unless they make a massive departure from the books, his plan actually comes to fruition. What better way to demonstrate Varys' point that he's the most dangerous guy around than by magicking Sansa out of King's Landing even while everyone's trying to prevent it, and one-upping that by offing Joffrey in the process.

Right. Everyone knowing about Littlefingers plan is a departure from the books, but the involved characters seem to think he's taking her with him to the eyrie when he first leaves, which he doesnt.

So hes going to leave for the eyrie, without Sansa. Sansa will be like wtf, Varys will be like wtf, QoT will be like wtf, audience will be like wtf. Then before you know it Sansa is married, then when the PW comes around everyone's forgotten. Then boom, Joff is dead and Littlefinger is back to whisk Sansa away.

He still looks like an utter genius after all.

[protar]

Somehow I never thought of it that way, ugh. You think it skips around too much now - just wait until we have 5+ prominent new Dornish and Ironborn PoVs doing their own thing, and literally every main character is seperated into their own plot threads besides a few people still remaining together in King's Landing.

It's going to be a huge mess if they try to be too faithful, but if they don't, they'll get reamed by a lot of book people.

I don't think it will get any worse than this, and I think they're starting to really learn how to give each character arc the screen time they deserve (whether it's the material they deserve is an entirely different matter sadly.). S4 sees a couple of new plots, but also plots merging (Stannis/Sam/Jon, Jaime/KL) and falling away (Cat and Robb). I think it mostly balances out as having the same amount of plots as S3. If the Ironborn and Dorne are introduced in S4, then S5 does not introduce any major character sets (though a few characters like Tyrion are getting their own adventures of course.).

[The Roose is Loose]

No disrespect to the nitpickers, but Varys' story of being cut didn't seem out place to me, because, 1. We get the reveal of the sorcerer in the box, and thus the culmination of his "lesson" to Tyrion that he can get the revenge he wants on Tywin and Cersei if he plays the long game, and 2. Varys' story parallels Jamie's current story (an important part is cut off, and each character resolves to endure the hardship and remake himself).

My nitpick is the tywin's kingdom count (3 in open rebellion). It's thoroughly discussed by others, but the proper count is 2 (the North & Iron islands), since riverlands and Dragonstone aren't/weren't kingdoms when aegon landed and the storm lords bent the knee after tbotbw. In the show I think they simplified to 3 kingdoms, because there are still 3 other kings alive (Robb, balon, Stannis).

[Ser Desmond Wine's Bane]

since riverlands and Dragonstone aren't/weren't kingdoms when aegon landed and the storm lords bent the knee after tbotbw. In the show I think they simplified to 3 kingdoms, because there are still 3 other kings alive (Robb, balon, Stannis).

They weren't? What was King Harren the king of then?

I'd argue that Aegon did subdue 7 kingdoms, and Trident/Riverlands was one of those. The others being the North, Iron Isles, the Vale, the Stormlands, the Reach and what ever the Lannisters called their lands in the West at the time. Dorne was added generations later through marriage rather than subjugation.

[The Pain Yak]

They weren't? What was King Harren the king of then?

I'd argue that Aegon did subdue 7 kingdoms, and Trident/Riverlands was one of those. The others being the North, Iron Isles, the Vale, the Stormlands, the Reach and what ever the Lannisters called their lands in the West at the time. Dorne was added generations later through marriage rather than subjugation.

King Harren was an Iron Islander and the Riverlands were conquered territory for the Iron Islands.

Remember the dialogue in Season 1 where a drunken King Robert talks about 'making the eighth'? One for each of the seven kingdoms plus the Riverlands?

[Ser Desmond Wine's Bane]

King Harren was an Iron Islander and the Riverlands were conquered territory for the Iron Islands.

Remember the dialogue in Season 1 where a drunken King Robert talks about 'making the eighth'? One for each of the seven kingdoms plus the Riverlands?

Ok thanks. I had actually completely missed him being Ironborn. I wonder what they called the 7 Kingdoms for the hundred-odd years before the Principality of Dorne joined it.

[aFeastForDragons]

This is why part of me is dreading everything past season 4.

The show is going to really drag then. 10 episodes of:

Jon and Stannis wandering around Castle Black documenting wildling refugees, castle repairs and food supplies.

Brienne going up and down the Riverlands.

Dany sitting in Mereen with a host of new unpronounceable cast members trying to marry her while the dragons and her Unsullied do nothing.

Littlefinger biding his time in the Eyrie while Varys has disappeared.

The Tyrion, Ironborn, Arya, Samwell, Davos, Reek plots will be really good though.

[zaphodbrx]

King Harren was an Iron Islander and the Riverlands were conquered territory for the Iron Islands.

Remember the dialogue in Season 1 where a drunken King Robert talks about 'making the eighth'? One for each of the seven kingdoms plus the Riverlands?

One of the incongrous things about the seven kingdoms is that no one is ever really clear on what the seven kingdoms are.

If you leave out the riverlands as 'making the eight', then we have the following that certainly are kingdoms ( they were when Aegon landed )

North

Vale

Stormlands

Westerlands

Reach

Dorne

The candidates for the seventh kingdom could be:

Iron Islands

Crownlands ( areas near King's landing )

Dragonstone and other areas in the narrow sea

Riverlands if you consider it a kingdom ( not sure if 'making the eight' is in the books )

[Tyrion_the_Oneironaut]

The Astapori slavers falling for such a blindingly obvious ploy was a fault of the books, too. The show creators merely carried it over. Not one of GRRM's stronger plot twists, with a truckload of blatant foreshadowing, but the end result was just so satisfying to read that I didn't really mind.

This is how I personally rationalize it somewhat: Dany got away with it because the Good Masters approached her with a healthy mix of misogyny, contempt and complacency. A Ramsay Snow or some such wouldn't have been able to get away with it because Ramsay is a grown man. Dany, by contrast, is a 15 year old girl. They just didn't take her seriously and saw only a naive little girl to be swindled rather than a potential threat.

Was it still stupid? Obviously. Yet it was a byproduct of Astapor and its rotting, decadent culture. Safe for so long from danger, they saw only the profit and refused to see the risk.

I just wish they addressed this with a line or two. "We never sell more than 1/3 of them to any one person...but this bitch doesn't have the money any how. Wait, did you say dragons?! Sold!

Good thing too, because we haven't had a sale in a long time, and these guys are expensive to feed.."

As for the Varys scene, I can live with it. I just thought in the books it was a nice creepy window into the wonderful world of Rhollor, about which we find out more the very next episode. Someone as disturbing as Varys showing fear of fire magic would have been a nice note to end the scene on.

[Grand Moff Mithrandir]

Ok maybe i'm slow..but where exactly is Theon being kept prisoner? the Dreadfort or Moat Cailin? and if that really is The dreadfort and not Moat Cailin wouldn't he(Theon) be able to tell the difference?

And we still haven't had a single hint of Jon's warging abilities. I was expecting Orell to point it out(Its said in Varamyr's prologue that skinchangers can recognise one another).