HBO's adaptation of Game of Thrones - Thread 2. There are a lot of nerds.

I'd like it if Cersei said heck with it and just blew up Kings Landing

I think this is going to happen next episode. Maybe not all of Kings Landing will be burned, but she is definitely going to go for 9/11 style targets

I love how people get SO ANNOYED with how this show just TELEGRAPHS EVERYTHING and then if it does some shit offscreen or fails to spell it out in the Previously On bits then people get SO ANNOYED with how this show is so THINLY PLOTTED and INEXPLICABLE

right on.

Sansa is doing her own thing. So is Dany, Yara and if the above comes tru, Cersei.

All the sisters will win in the end.

And then all the GRRM neckbeards will cry.

(PS prob not really but that'd be fun)

I'd figure the nerds will end up doing ok too. I'll be surprised if there is not some scene with Littlefinger, Varys and Tyrion around a table at some point.

The odds Littlefinger ends up being the total creep that somehow survives this whole thing is probably pretty good. One of them has to survive, the world can't kill all the roaches.

Tombot o.t.m.

xp Sam Tarly is gonna save their asses in a big way, so nerds and neckbeards will do just fine

I like Littlefinger, I seem to be alone in this.

I wonder what Jaime's up to next week though. The preview showed him enjoying a feast with the Freys. I feel like something insane might happen up there and tbh I wonder if it might be related to the hound and his new posse, if you catch my drift.

are you suggesting it might be a BANNER day for Jaime and the Freys?

"2. the lesbian angle for theon's sister - another terribly shoe-horned line this ep"

lesbians fucking rule what is wrong with you. how many lesbians do you know?

I'm not going to count how many lesbians I know for the purposes of this thread - I just think this is badly written and introduced hastily in the space of about 15 seconds of dialogue over two scenes.

I love how people seem to relish in their self-appointed role as explainers of this crappily written show. I mean, there are five books it's based on, it's not hard to find more material to fill in the blanks. Except at this point, there's just blanks, and dumb explanations that doesn't make sense anyway.

Guys. This show is badly written. The characters don't make sense anymore. It's okay. You don't have to defend everything.

wake up sheeple

Sansa didn't tell Jon Snow about Littlefingers army because if he'd known about it, he'd prepared for it, and then the climactic rescue wouldn't have been so dramatic.

Ramsay shot Wun Wun instead of Jon Snow because Jon Snow won't die again until the endgame, and the showrunners still wanted him to shoot something.

Rickon ran in a straight line because otherwise he wouldn't have been hit by the arrow, and what were they going to do, write more scenes for him?

Daenerys waited until morning to save Mereen because it would look more filmic in daylight.

Etc.

Not running in a straight line probably wouldn't have worked either
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW01WuknX8s

Why do you watch such shit TV, Fred?

Rickon ran in a straight line because otherwise he wouldn't have been hit by the arrow, and what were they going to do, write more scenes for him?

Rickon ran in a straight line, even after being shot at the first time, because a) he was told to run as fast as he could to his brother and I hope to fuck I don't have to explain to a grown-ass Dane what the shortest route between two points is, and b) he could see John riding for him on his motherfucking horse and presumably didn't want to present him with an erratically moving target so they could join up more quickly.

I swear to God. You don't have to rationalize or look to the books for this stuff, you just have to think for more than four seconds. I mean, it would have been great if Rickon's YEARS OF TACTICAL TRAINING had kicked in I suppose.

"Why didn't Rickon just serpentine?" = "I woulda took down them terrorists."

He's a goddamned kid who's been living on the run for, what, two years in the show's time?

I think Fred's point by point explanation is correct, and I also think there are or ought to be story explanations for those details as well. The secret about the Vale one is likely going to be addressed next episode.

Hopefully someone will the MPH stats for a dragon and a Dothraki army and we'll finally know why Dany waited until morning

http://data.whicdn.com/images/68942419/large.jpg

re daenerys i assumed it wasn't that the dothraki army were hiding around the corner but that they only just got there - dragon probably a faster travel option than horseback (xps, alright glad that's cleared up). that makes for three very conveniently times cavalry arrivals in one episode, but eh who cares

'Lol, why do you take it so seriously, it's just a shitty tv-show'

'I agree, it's shitty'

'Oh yeah?!?! THEN WHY DO YOU WATCH IT?!?!?!?'

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I would rather speculate about why Sansa didn't tell Jon about LF--like it's more interesting to me if she's playing the game now and wants to be Queen of the North, and also knows that saving Jon's ass after his generalship fail puts her in a better position than him--and even if that turns out to be wrong I will at least know that I wasn't a poster who got off on proving to a bunch of Americans that he was smarter than their childish TV show.

Gabbneb of Thrones

The xenophobia in these last few comments is really really strange...

i'm not on board with the dissecting every little thing but the rickon thing is stupid.

Rickon ran in a straight line, even after being shot at the first time, because a) he was told to run as fast as he could to his brother and I hope to fuck I don't have to explain to a grown-ass Dane what the shortest route between two points is, and b) he could see John riding for him on his motherfucking horse and presumably didn't want to present him with an erratically moving target so they could join up more quickly.

so it wouldn't occur to him to try and see when the arrow was coming and weave or jump about a bit. "i better not run in a certain way because the man who wants to kill me that i'm escaping told me not to"

He's a goddamned kid who's been living on the run for, what, two years in the show's time?

it's dodging a fucking arrow, it's not an act of putting yourself at risk, eg taking down a terrorist, it's taking yourself out of risk. the same impulse to run as fast as you can would prob have a person dancing like lord of the dance, looking over their shoulders etc. if he ran sideways or in any other direction for five seconds it's almost impossible the arrow would hit him.

i mean i don't care but in the spirit of defending the show let's not get completely stupid. dodging an arrow must be incredibly easy, it took about 6/7 seconds to land, if he just stopped running for one second the chances of it hitting him would be miniscule.

pretty sure we need a Youtube of a guy shooting arrows at some weaving teens to see if it works

Given the cost to Sansa if the battle was lost I don't think it makes sense to say she gambled to get an advantage.

pretty sure we need a Youtube of a guy shooting arrows at some weaving teens to see if it works

i'll check my personal collection though it prob is a nsfw

You ever watch a rabbit run? They don't run in a straight line.

I'm still 4 eps behind but not bothered about spoilers - has Jon even hinted to Sansa about what he saw at Hardhome (ie let's try not to get too re-attached to Winterfell sis...)?

thing about the arrow dodging is not so much what someone would or wouldn't do but that it was a dumb set-piece moment included because they thought it would be cool. there's a million other more plausible (and far less risky) ways to draw jon out that aren't so needlessly silly and distracting to the suspension of the disbelief. as i said above stuff like this just sucks the drama out of the show.

xp rabbits have thousands of years of naturally evolved instincts for dodging fast-moving predators. Rickon is a fictional tween who has been living in mud huts for two years. This seems to be a not-insignificant distinction.

I for one think dropping the scary music after the second-to-last arrow missed, then having the last arrow appear out of nowhere was quite well done. Good horror technique. Ditto the claustrophobic near-trampling.
Morning-after rationalizing misses out on a lot of the little things that made this ep a blast to watch.

i can't believe rickon had never seen snatch

What I didn't get about the arrow shooting was why Ramsay was just shooting arrows by himself. If all of the archers shoot at once they probably kill Rickon, Jon and Jon's horse right at the beginning of the battle.

Well, for all we know Osha might have no I'm not making that joke.

Because that wouldn't have been fun?

Ramsey wanted to give Jon a sense that he could save Rickon

if I were Ramsey I'd probably just let loose a dog at the appropriate moment

I think as far as any of this stuff goes, the show apparently burned through the books faster than a lot of fans (and certainly GRRM) expected/planned. Now they don't necessarily have a lot of time for the details the books are famed for, which I guess can be bundled into bad writing, or maybe just bad planning, as they now have to almost prematurely wrap it up, or at least set it toward its endpoint, which is why the show these past couple of seasons has felt like a film with lots of useful scenes cut for time, or why the timeline of the show has been unclear enough that a lot of fans apparently think Sansa is pregnant with Ramsay's child. On the plus side, they did get rid of a lot of the much-mocked sexposition, even if they lingered a bit too much on omg Ramsay is torturing someone!, or subplots that didn't really get the setup they deserved/needed (Dorne RIP, man in tree, Iron Islands stuff).

forcing Ramsay to take the black would have been a lot more interesting imo

So this blog suggests that everything is likely to go very dark again in the next episode. Seems... not improbable:

http://www.refinery29.com/2016/06/114629/forgotten-game-of-thrones-scene

Ramsay as lord commander of the night's watch taking on the white walkers would have been an interesting final season plotline. Maybe the books will go that way.

xp

It's likely Sansa will have the choice of marrying LF or dying

It's think it's prob. more accurate to say that GRRM knew how quickly the show would go, but thought he'd get the last two books out by now, since he is phenomenally terrible at gauging how quickly he writes them.

Why would Sansa have any idea that Littlefinger was on his way? Isn't the simplest explanation just that Littlefinger and his knights showed up (unnanounced) at the Starks' base camp where Sansa was waiting (not for Littlefinger, just for the battle to be over, regardless of its outcome), whereupon she was like "The battle is going down right now, let's go!". Littlefinger, Sansa, and the knights of the Eyrie all charge to the battlefield and that's it. Why does any any pre-existing conspiracy/communication between Sansan and Littlefinger have to enter into it?

(I resisted engaging in all this pedantry as long as I could)