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

There were so many narrative inconsistencies and logical nonsense but the weirdest and most dissonant thing about last night's episode, for me, was that since S1 there's been a decidedly unique feature of this show, and that was simply that both the characters and the showrunners themselves valued the lives of their characters less than I did as a viewer. This episode upended that. The camera was lingering on Edd's face and (endlessly) on Jorah's face, a new plot point hinged around a hostage situation involving.. Dany's translator? I was looking at the screen, like, "you do realize that it wasn't that long ago that this show unceremoniously exploded four of its main characters without hesitation or eulogy"

was I the only one who was very confused as to where the Cersei showdown was meant to be taking place

near the Sarlacc pit

Maybe the Starbucks cup was a nod to all the hard work and long hours they have been putting in.

I remember reading that the final space battle in Return of the Jedi features amidst the chaos a sneaker and an actual kitchen sink. Maybe it's like that, but scaled way down.

how did Dany et al get to King's Landing so fast and where the fuck is Jon Snow (and Jamie) who presumably left a day earlier? Did they take a long route or something?

Starbucks cup is a hint that this is all going to end in a time-bending style reminiscenct of Monty Python and the Holy Grail

xpost boats and dragons faster than a walking army I think

Okay-- so if Dany can make Gendry the legitimate son of Robert Baratheon, then what stops him from having a claim to the throne?

nothing AFAIK. that did not strike me as particularly "clever" tbh

xp being Gendry

i liked that little confrontation at the end of the ep in the desert it felt v. pulpy + conanesque

We were denied a scene of Euron seeing the dragon-killing ballista and doing his googly-eyed bit while exclaiming, "Have you checked to see what this would do to a SHIP?"

obviously if I were writing the show, he'd have a lot more dialog but it'd all be focused on islands, ships, sailing, etc.

also references to iron

I love that Qyburn of all people is the only person to have thought, "What if a crossbow but bigger?"

this is a world with 12,000 years of recorded history and no one has discovered electricity, so yeah maybe making a crossbow bigger is a genius idea there

Cersei used the rest of the mad king's explosives cache blowing up the Westeros vatican, right?

My biggest gripe is entirely my own I guess, but I was having a really hard time believing they cleaned up the million wight corpses that would have been surrounding the entire castle from the night or 2 before. Not even with a fleet of snow plows would they have been able to clean it up that fast. And from a show perspective (not just a Simpsons magic xylophone pickiness one), it would have been really effective visually to have all the characters restricted to these shoveled out paths as the only way to navigate around the overwhelming piles of bodies extending all the way out to the Dothraki slaughter. Would have been a perfect way to underline how horrifying and hopeless everything actually was now that the sun was out and you could see the entire threat and aftermath clearly. Oh well!

Pretty sure the final episode is titled "Oh Well!"

At one point Varys turns and shrugs at the camera

This fantasy show is too fantastical! Harrumph!

I'm going to guess this plays out along these lines: Dany decides to go supernova on KL, Varys tries to assassinate her but fails, Dany believes Sansa is behind a conspiracy, orders her execution, Jon mopes but ultimately decides to free Sansa, final battle leads to deaths of Cersei, Jon and Dany, leaving Tyrion and Sansa to work out new govt. Ends with Arya and Gendry's son getting on a bus with Sam and Gilly's daughter.

...to follow the Dead

i feel like last night's episode got off to a good start, too, so it was disappointing to see it kind of slowly run out of gas over the course of 78 minutes. the banquet was both fun - brienne/jaime drinking game, grumpy hound solo drinking game - and intriguing, with the clear tension between dany and jon and the kind of respect that they both command.

but then the rest of the episode happened.

i don't quite understand, on any level, why jaime made the choice that he did. just baffling, even on a meta level. wouldn't it be way better and interesting if jaime was conflicted with how/whether to oppose cersei? instead he's just like "i hate anti-hate. i hate. i am against not hating. fuck you b!" and just rode off to join the bad guys

Would like an episode about all the poor peasants who had to work like all fucking day to round up all those corpses from all over the place.

Why exactly do you think he is off to join the bad guys?

xp

Why exactly do you think he is off to join the bad guys?

maybe i'm baffled because i'm totally wrong! that seems in character for me :) i may have pre-partied a little bit too much and misunderstood what was happening. but he seemed to be making a choice between staying in winterfell with brienne v riding off to kings landing. i assumed that meant he was going back to cersei, since that's the side he was on just before the fight at winterfell? i suppose his intentions are meant to be ambiguous?

i think he have a fraught + intense relationship w/ cercei his twin + lover and whatever happens to her at king's landing (whether he's there to prevent it, or help it, or... ??) he wants to be there when it happens and not on the periphery and considering their history that makes perfect sense to me

has*

seems brienne killing him is likely enough now, though this will probably be stupid.

I read his speech as "I don't get to be chill and hang with my new girlfriend while everyone goes off to fight Cersei because I'm one of the major reasons she is where she is, and I have to try to kill her myself."

i don't quite understand, on any level, why jaime made the choice that he did. just baffling, even on a meta level.

have you never gotten out of a dysfunctional long-term relationship, and then you start to get into something with another person, and you kinda freak out and tell yourself, "this isn't me! this isn't what I want, what I deserve" and then break it off and want to get back together with your ex?

kingslayer, more like selfloathingenabler

his entry in the Famous People of Westeros book is about to get very Knausgaardian

It seemed really obvious to me that the writers were trying to sort of trick the audience by keeping his motivation ambiguous but that he is ultimately going down there to kill her or stop her.

and expecting to die in the attempt

a new plot point hinged around a hostage situation involving.. Dany's translator?

uh i actually got kinda weepy tbh ... like she's a fucking civilian ... also, as ppl elsewhere pointed out, she and grey worm were the only remaining people of color on the show, and wouldn't it be nice for once to not sacrifice PoC for the greater good of white people? ... also, fuck, she had been a slave, she was freed by Dany, and how does she die? In chains? Like, that is super fucked up...

thought it was a little dumb that the whole northern gang was already headed to KL in order to fight cersei, and he had deliberately opted out. but when cersei does some cersei stuff he's like 'how could she' and changes his mind?? or did he think that a) cersei was somehow getting out of this alive and/or b) would never do the wild shit she's literally always done

Jaime has proven for the past 7 1/2 seasons that he's really not that bright

"for once to not sacrifice PoC for the greater good of white people"

In the context of the events this really has nothing to do with how she died, or are you saying the writers should have went an entirely different route? It seems intended to be the tragedy in regards to their romantic story as well as a breaking point for Dany and her actions going forward.

oh it makes sense from a show/writer perspective. I was just arguing why it was painful and deserved the time spent on it

Right. Also I agree the chains thing is super brutal as well!

and I think Tyrion's speech wasn't primarily for the purpose of "changing Cersei's mind" but a gesture showing Dany (and he) were reasonable and humane -- like he did it primarily for the soldiers and other KL people who were present.

kingslayer, more like selfloathingenabler

― mh, Monday, May 6, 2019 8:41 AM (thirty-three minutes ago)

pretty much, yeah. Maybe when he gets there, he ends up "doing the right thing" and turning against her, but I don't think what he said to Brienne was some devious speech trying to hide his secret plans ... he's not that clever

I hope the next two episodes are just repeated scenes of Cersei/Lucy pulling the football away from Tyrion/Charlie Brown by continuing to string him along that she might surrender then killing another character.

also like, before he makes his choice, we see him just hanging out in the Winterfell courtyard while Brienne has an important meeting w/Sansa, and he, Jaime, has to fucking ask, what's going on? He's being totally sidelined. Like, dude also has too much of an ego to be like the semi-retired house husband? Even when he was w/Cersei and she was queen, he had his Kingsguard gig and he was off sacking rebellious provinces ... he had control of something and was in charge of something important.

plus he loves the incest

I like how Cersei and the other leaders issue commands to their minions using silent signals, but I wish we could see some scenes of the laborious memorization of, like, if I touch my nose with my right hand, that means behead the captive

"No, no, left hand means behead, right hand means undo the shackles!"