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

i think one of the that lent GoT a sense of scale was the time that was allowed to elapse between various threads of the plot before they were picked up again. you'd go five episodes, episodes, a whole season or two, before something would be picked up again and allowed to bloom. as we hurtle towards the finish i feel like more and more plot threads will only have one or two episodes worth of breathing at most before they're picked up/amplified/resolved etc. introducing chekhov's dragon cannon in ep. 2 and having it used in ep.4 and the cave paintings were p. bad examples of this

― 龜, Monday, August 7, 2017 4:03 PM (twenty minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i agree w/ this but its also a reality of the box the show painted itself into...its all supposed to resolve in a handful of episodes! So as far as I'm concerned I'm looking for them to do the best possible job they can w/in this constricted space, and considering that face, last night's episode was strong af solid five stars

painted yourself into a box is my fav mixed metaphor

which leaves only the premise "the paintings look really fucking stupid" -- and that's idk, what should they have looked like?

xps re what happened to the gold - yeah I was wondering that too? Thought they were deliberately showing blazing wagons o'bounty

this was awesome though. Kind of surprised Arya actually turned up at Winterfell. <3 'fewer'

i forgot to say i really enjoyed sam's asshole dad and his stoic hard-on for "flogging some stragglers" or whatever, then subsequent disappointment.

cave paintings were lol, walls and walls of spirals and circles then Jon hiding a pencil behind his back as he gets to the innermost cave and points out the detailed life drawings of white walkers

this show needs to start killing principal actors at the rate of three per episode just to get all the stories under control imo; shoulda just fried the kingslayer and be done with it

i was sure we were going to see a dead dragon.

so is Dickon gay? Got some homoerotic feelings from him looking at Jamie

shoulda just friedspeared the kingslayerdany and be done with it

also, re: cave paintings

https://i.imgur.com/nwe5isa.jpg

right before the attack someone is like "the gold is safely within the walls of kings landing blah blah this is all grain and shit"

bit annoying that they made a big deal out of "as soon as the gold gets here" etc etc if it was just going to get there.

which leaves only the premise "the paintings look really fucking stupid" -- and that's idk, what should they have looked like?

― sansa riff (sarahell), Monday, August 7, 2017 5:26 PM (ten minutes ago) Bookmark

idk, maybe somebody on the creative team should have GIS'd petroglyphs and gone from there. as it is, it looked like a snapchat filter

the children of the forest loved to carve those dumb-ass faces into weirwood trees ... why do you think their petroglyphs would look cooler?

so is Cersei going to end up doing what Tyrion and Jon advised Dany against doing -- bringing in foreign mercenaries and alienating the native population?

the weirwood faces are hilarious and a welcome addition xp

i was hoping after Dany said, "Bend the knee!" we'd have a smash cut to Jon walking out of the cave towards Davos saying, "I told you it wouldn't work!" and a frustrated Davos tossing away a box of chalk.

bad vibes from the look sansa gave arya while she was sparring and (minor spoiler) i think sophie turner said sansa was going to do something bad this season, and wouldn't that be just the perfect twist?

― 龜, Monday, 7 August 2017 15:03 (six hours ago) Permalink

think it more likely (if Sansa really is gonna do something bad this season) that it'll turn out that Jon's decision to bend the knee was just the latest in a now extensive line of boy-Stark political cock-ups and he really does alienate all the northmen who rally instead behind Sansa w. Littlefinger whispering poison in her ear. presumably pissing Arya off something rotten into the bargain. things going way too well for the Starks rn

*assuming he bends the knee next week, obvs

sansa puts a hit out on jon snow and arya turns on sansa eh?

it was mildly fucked up learning that the cave drawings are meant to resemble the geometric patterns that we've seen the white walkers arrange dismembered bodies in, i.e. the white walkers learned about those shapes from the people of the forest, who created them

― El Tomboto, Monday, August 7, 2017 9:52 PM (forty-five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this gives me bad flashbacks to the spiral painting shit from Battlestar Galactica which then turned Starbuck into an omniscient god pilot, so i hope it doesn't go too far with explaining the history. I just want the White Walkers to be ice lords who can animate the dead. I don't want the Simillarion I want Lord of the Rings.

Littlefinger was actually the one behind the attempted stabbing of Bran, wasn't he? ... I bet that detail gets discovered soon.

my sense w/Sansa's look was that it had something to do w/her realizing how much Arya had changed, maybe coupled with how much Bran had changed. the look Littlefinger gave Arya from upstairs wasn't one of his "I've got this under control" stares which immediately precedes him stepping backwards and disappearing into the shadows.

wagons were just filled with food and grain and shit. It's important because people need to eat. The gold made it to Kings Landing though, they made sure to mention that, although a lot of people seemed to have missed it.

― dan selzer, Monday, August 7, 2017 9:56 PM (forty-seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I had thought I'd heard tehy were collecting sizable amounts of food fro the area. Just rewatched the battle scene and there seems to be a lotofit. Whole harvest or large part thereof for the area?
Occurred to me that it would be something better captured than destroyed.
Not sure if situation anything like what is happening in the North where they have been talking about collecting food together so that people will actually be able to eat in months to come.
But would surprise if it was easily replaceable.

With the Bran/Littlefinger interaction of this episode, dude's now very aware he's on borrowed time. Think Sansa's abandonment issues kicked in seeing Brianne with Arya, like hey, my personal knight is now my sister's, who is taking care of me?

it was mildly fucked up learning that the cave drawings are meant to resemble the geometric patterns that we've seen the white walkers arrange dismembered bodies in, i.e. the white walkers learned about those shapes from the people of the forest, who created them

― El Tomboto, Monday, August 7, 2017 9:52 PM (forty-five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

https://media.giphy.com/media/3o6vXQQsHzEDslap9K/giphy.gif

Destroying the food was weird since she had just complained they were taking all of it so she couldn't feed her troops. Why not destroy all the soldiers then capture the food wagons?

because dragon fire isn't exactly a precision weapon?

I totally didn't get the 'chaos is a ladder' thing but apparently that's a Littlefinger saying? When did he say that? I tend to switch off when he goes all smug tbf

She had to turn specifically to make a strafing run on the wagons, so they weren't just collateral damage to the phalanxes.

Basically, between the unnecessary charge and burning the food she could use, dragon lady appears to be a poor military strategist.

xp - it was a speech he gave. The gist of the interaction though, is that Bran can see things that Littlefinger has done, that he's gotten away with so far. Caught on camera shit.

i don't think it's poor military strategy to starve her enemies?

How would she have known what was in the wagons?

It's either gold or supplies, one of which everyone can use and one she had just complained about being taken from her?

could be corpses

detecting a subtle parallel to Brexit/Trump in Dany's rejection of the "expert" advice of Tyrion and co. and just deciding to just torch the shit out of everything with her dragon

wanna hear my cool theory about the cave paintings thing? jon snow totally painted them about 10 minutes before Daenerys walked in so that he could use them as part of his plea for her help. they looked brand new and if my tv had smellovision i bet it would smell like paint in there. jon snow is low-key the smartest guy on the show

But she didn't reject their expert advice. Their advice was to not torch the city. So she found a smart compromise and killed a ton of soldiers out in the country.

It seems to me that Jaime's men left the Roseroad and were heading in the direction of the Gold Road. Tarly remarks that he doesn't want to split the troops on either side of Blackwater Rush, which would be irrelevant on the King's Road in that it crosses the Blackwater at King's Landing. So it's more likely that they're heading up the Mander on the way to the Gold Road.

The Dothraki ships must have landed somewhere between King's Landing and Shipbreaker Bay, and it would be hard to imagine that they landed anywhere near the Red Keep, so let's say they landed near the Straits of Tarth. The Dothraki are on horseback and not especially slowed by the rough terrain, so they can cut through the southern Kingswood or over the Red Mountains, away from the major roads. But if they try to bring the gold and other wagons back to their ships over the mountains and forests they'd risk Fitzcarraldo-ing themselves.

i think in milo's strategic plan, they would have taken the wagons to Casterly Rock, as opposed to the ships.

Dragon-napalm soldiers and Lannister knights/cavalry
Dothraki slice and dice the wagon guards and drivers and mop up the rest of the above
Now that your enemies in the local area are dead or running away, sit down for a minute and figure out the next step. In the event that you can't take the wagons in their entirety with you, let everyone feast then load up what they can on the Dothraki horses and bail.

Find out the detailed logistics on next week's Game of Wheat

Presumably she had some plan for the desired goods when she was complaining about being deprived of them in the previous scene.

Counter-insurgency side quest: redistribute the stolen goods that you can't take with you to the local peasantry and build up goodwill for when you'll be ruling over them.

Bran totally knows Littlefinger was the one who owns that dagger, right? For whatever reason he's holding that to his chest but maybe with the "chaos is a ladder" comment that was enough to make Petyr shit his pants anyway (lol that was awesome).

For some reason I thought Tarly Sr was Uncle Kevan as well!? All these old white men are confusing me.

tbf, handing out sacks of grain to the farmers who were stripped of it is a much less exciting shot than dragons blowing up a wagon train

One theory goes that the dagger belonged to King Robert, was stolen by Joffrey, and the little blond bastard hired the assassin.

The lack of grain redistribution will be one of the main complaints of the maoist uprising against Daenerys in the second half of season 8.