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

Sea battle was muddled and badly presented

If it had been the greatest ship-to-ship combat sequence since Master and Commander I still wouldn't have been especially concerned about the outcome for anyone involved

Tyrion is boring now

One last thought before bed: if Sam's idea works, then the Boltons, had they survived, could have turned their inclination for flaying to good ends. Such are dark ages, where generations of expertise go up in smoke at the drop of a crown.

i loled

Varys is James Comey is my new favorite game of thrones thing.

The Ironborn have no maesters, right? So no ravens.

pretty sure the Greyjoys use(d) ravens when they were back on the Iron Islands.

According the post-episode chat with the makers, the line Arya spoke to the wolf was a reference to a comment she made to Ned back in Season 1 about how being a lady wasn't her. That the point was Nymeria isn't going to go back to being a pet because she is independent like Arya.

This episode was almost as successful as the firebombing of the Sept of Baylor last season for getting rid of bunch of extraneous characters en masse.

Also very excited about the prospect of Medieval anti-aircraft missiles

100% sure Littlefinger knows Jon's real parentage and is going to tell Sansa while he's away.

That doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Bran & co. had to go to a great deal of trouble to learn that information, why would they bother with all that if a conniver like Baelish has just had it in his back pocket? Makes the entire three-eyed raven quest into an unnecessary shaggy dog story.

I have no idea why Baelish is still hanging around, no one likes you fam

an unnecessary shaggy dog story in got? say it ain't so.

I like the spectacle, but watching them all lay intricate plans without ever thinking about the fact that Euron Greyjoy has a fleet and is mad at them, then a while later seeing their plans destroyed by a mad Euron Greyjoy, it's just so stupid.

How do you know they never thought about it?

Like at a war council they're going to talk about resolving beef between Iron Island factions?

i mean, in their defense they stole the iron fleet so probably had no idea euron somehow magicked up the greatest armada westeros has ever seen. if you're going to take issue maybe it ought to be with that. the show is a colander at this point, i don't understand the motivation to poke yet more holes in minor plot points. if something like that actually bothers you, which is certainly fair, then you've kept watching for at least a season too long.

I think it's funny how poorly the pacing of the show was planned, like so much time in seasons 2 through 5 was spent crawling to one big event episode or another and now it's big ol' payoffs (and deck-clearing deaths) left right and center. the perils of respecting yr author god or w/ever

x-post: I did stop in season four, actually, but then picked it back up to see how it resolves since GRRM can't figure out how to finish it. And yeah, you're right, the problem is with Euron all of a sudden having the fleet. But that still makes it really stupid.

I'm still enjoying it or whatever, but things definitely feel a bit more boring, like we know most of the beats they're about to hit and everything feels a bit rushed and fan-service-y. And even though all these plot points have been predicted for years, the way they're being spelled out and moving so fast just feels kinda shallow. Jon saying "I just learned that guess what Dragonstone is on top of? Dragonglass!" Shocking.

I thought he did a decent job trying to make that line reading sound less dumb that it looks on paper.

Drag-Gon Stone is on top of a mountain of draggin-glass

I'm still enjoying it or whatever, but things definitely feel a bit more boring, like we know most of the beats they're about to hit and everything feels a bit rushed and fan-service-y. And even though all these plot points have been predicted for years, the way they're being spelled out and moving so fast just feels kinda shallow.

Yeah, it's basically been a different show since they unkilled Jon Snow.

also Euron is Lord Nelson and Yara is Villeneuve, he clearly approached perpendicular to their fleet's line and from a position of concealment, he doesn't necessarily have a bigger fleet than them although he did have some decent time to replenish his during the time it took the kids to sail all the way to Slaver's Bay, load up half the horses in Essos and then sail back.

It's just so rushed. How many minutes of the show passed between iron islands and dorne will be a huge force and whoops not quite. They just left like 5 minutes for bisexuals and castrati laffs.

Yeah, it's basically been a different show since they unkilled Jon Snow.

Resurrection is like the ur-jump the shark. Jon Snow=JS=J ...S ...=Jesus!

Anyway, this and Broad City, I have no idea how much of the last season I saw, or where I left off. Debated diving back in, but sounds like it's the same ol' erratic.

I did enjoy that this was a good old fashioned ass-whoopin'. It played better than Bolton decimating Stannis' army.

http://www.vulture.com/2017/07/game-of-thrones-season-7-stormborn-questions.html

Who is the most powerful person in Westeros?
Duh — Samwell Tarly with a library card.

They leaned hard on the "Samwell is GRRM" thing last night

I saw it pointed out on twitter that Euron's magic fleet is even more annoying since the show spent five seasons of Daenerys trying to find a fleet to get back...

They gave up on any kind of rules guiding Westeros, all sense of geography is out of the window, and nobody knows anything about military strength anymore. Which is ok, but the exhausting things is that they still have all these scenes of planning and strategizing which clearly don't mean a thing anymore, and is just a complete waste of time.

jesus

trouble is, what made this show great at its best was that the big moments and reversals were rooted in well-drawn characters behaving in character in a specific context
- jaime lannister resignedly pushing a kid out a window
- joffrey baratheon choosing cruelty over honor and reputation
- tyrion lannister using cleverness and charm to extricate himself from certain doom
- robb stark neddily trusting in custom while walder frey did what was best for walder frey
- oberyn martell overplaying his hand for style points at the crucial moment
- etc etc

i know i said this last season but it still feels true: without GRRM's words to work off of, this feels like just a TV show, and the more fan service we get the less interesting it becomes

i think the first four seasons are almost completely outstanding (the fourth less so), but the last two were this mix of source material and original ideas that didn't always work even remotely. i think the last two episodes of last season were very good though and this season is as well. nothing as knife-twisting and intelligent as the best of seasons 1-3 but i think it will finish strongly. albeit very predictably. i don't think this is a GoT problem, so many of these prestige shows, even the better ones, have moments that are easy to telegraph far in advance.

Euron seems like a good antagonist. better to have a cackling glam pirate than a dinner table sadist like ramsay.

I do like the idea of a guy who basically hijacks the kingship of a shithole land just to strip it of its trees and build a fleet he can use to sail around and swing his dick at everything

the books and early seasons felt as if they had some substance you could dig into, and while grrm is tying himself in knots trying to maintain that in the books, the show has gleefully jettisoned the conceit and we just have surface now, theater, spectacle and set pieces, often very entertaining and i believe worthwhile in its own right but not the same thing as it was.

and the thing with euron's armada is not just building the ships, which is logistically improbably enough on its own, but the crewing of them. their whole fleet has just fucked off, exactly how many sailors are still around? and hell, they're a rape and pillage based economy, how much of the adult population just left?

it doesn't matter anymore. there were big ships and fire. it was good.

Theon and sis only took the best ships (about 50?) from the fleet. Doesn't seem like it would drain the entire population to man that many boats.

I have been enjoying Jim Broadbent, he's way overqualified for that role

But yeah they're running full on with the "only nerds care about some of these details" mindset now

Nah. I wish they would run full on with that. Instead of wasting time arguing whether or not it's 'right' for Jon to go to Dragonstone.

It was just a way to show more tension with Sansa, and so we could see Littlefinger sneer.

just wait till they hold off for like four more episodes till Jon and Dany even bang xp

god, Sophie Turner is so awful

I laughed out loud when Dani said, "Bend the knee." (see Chapo thread)

yeah same lol

especially the way she said it after a dramatic beat, and that it was spoken by the character most frequently mocked by dirtbags

and the thing with euron's armada is not just building the ships, which is logistically improbably enough on its own, but the crewing of them. their whole fleet has just fucked off, exactly how many sailors are still around? and hell, they're a rape and pillage based economy, how much of the adult population just left?

― Roberto Spiralli, Monday, July 24, 2017 6:39 PM (thirty-six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

and that his dope new fleet is equipped with machine gun cannons firing explosive ordinance

lol. contrasted with qyburn's super secret anti-dragon tech being a bog standard piece of iron age artillery.

Just picturing the GoT writers' room puzzling over how to give Cersei's army a chance against the dragons and someone saying, "Wait, have any of you ever read this book, 'The Hobbit?'"

Yara could take only the crew loyal to her over Euron and was outnumbered by the latter's followers and fleet. He also knew they'd attempt to ally with Danaerys as that was his own plan he revealed upon his return. It all made relative sense (handwaving timespan required for one or two things as you have to do every episode now).