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

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!"

i bet it's something like, the minions have a head minion, and that person co-ordinates the signals to the other minions, and only that person has to deal with Cersei ... y'know, kinda like a translator. R.I.P. Missandei, I cried when u died.

i'm enjoying this season (i continue to get a lot of mileage out of the fantasy scope) but the story is a predictable one. lots of the acting continues to make it better; in this past episode i thought Tyrion and esp Varys were quite strong and Sansa, Arya, and the Hound were vv good in their bits. and tbh I find Daenerys pretty convincing as someone who is on the path to maybe totally losing her shit. her character (and what will happen w/her vis-à-vis Jon and Sansa) is virtually the only bit of genuine palace intrigue left, since it could go in any number of directions. my own take is she will come to the brink of losing it but step back before the end, and she'll realize the place where she is needed and beloved is back across the sea. she should melt down the Iron Bank w/her dragon maybe.

the show will never be what it was, this murderous, exceptionally vicious, medieval bloodbath with intricate plotting and genuinely startling moments. it's just at the point of narratively pairing off characters (cf. the hound and the mountain) and setting them on paths aimed at an obvious future showdown, or throwing armies at one another, and one reason is this show's present storyline has been created by people who don't have much ability to craft any story that isn't following trad "golden era" TV show beats. the reason the show was actually special at one point was it was following the Martin novels closely and executing them to perfection.

but as an alternate timeline of whatever the remaining books will end up being, it's fun!!

I think it's very vague what Jamie intends to do and that was intentional.

"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"

I assumed they disintegrated. I don't know why I assumed that but isn't that what happens to them?

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlzEjXu6QGQ

huh pic.twitter.com/au0EQcTy5Y

— Ahmed/#Starkset is all i rep (@big_business_) May 6, 2019

xp Lots of the other stuff just seemed to disintegrate when the Night King died.
THought some things were just being held together by magic, though they may have been more corpses animated by magic than held together by so yeah you might expect some mess to be left.
Did wonder if they actually needed to burn all the corpses if the Night King could no longer reanimate them. Or if several different cultures' dealing with death rituals had been simplified to the same thing for the occasion.

the iron fleet, the spanish inquisition of Game of Thrones

"I can't believe Jaime changed his mind" OK then don't! This seems like one of the more low effort misdirections in the show. On the spectrum of enticing misleading cliffhangers I rate it slightly above "we'll be right back after this commercial break". Is it because they were attempting to reinforce it during the inside look? I wasn't buying it for a second!

^ Not a direct quote from anyone here, just arguing with that consensus.

"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"

I assumed they disintegrated. I don't know why I assumed that but isn't that what happens to them?

― akm, Monday, May 6, 2019 1:49 PM (sixteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

They sort of disintegrated to mere bones but not to dust. Citing the giant wight collapsing after it got stabbed by the Mormont girl.

Lots of the other stuff just seemed to disintegrate when the Night King died.

like the plot

xp - still would entail a bunch of cleaning, ya, i think they missed an opportunity there ...

why does jon hate his giant magic dog?

How metal would it have looked

xp

with all the money this show has I'm baffled that they still can't make the dragons look even remotely convincing when close up.

xxp heavy-handed symbolism of him recognizing that he's a dragon man (Targaryen) and not a magic dog man (Stark)

sad that he had to explain to his not-stepsisters that he's a dragon man

he didn't even pet him though!

:(

maybe there's extended heavy symbolism in Dany not being able to protect his dragon when he's not there

why does jon hate his giant magic dog?

The entire show is an anti CGI metaphor that's been casting away or casting out all its magical computer generated prime movers (dragons, wolves, giants, ice zombies, and so on) post-haste until all that is left will be a bunch of people standing in a room, talking. It will be downright Brechtian. And then at the end they'll turn to the camera, sip a Starbucks latte, and reveal who shot JR. And then the camera will pan to the throne, and sitting on it will be a giant dragon egg with a face drawn on it.

I've been kind of an apologist but damn this one was bad.

all this coming down to basically "Dany is a dumbass" is deflating

glad we had one more Varys/Tyrion conversation for the road, gonna miss those two

Tyrion also seems to be a massive idiot now, Varys only slightly less so for not seeing this mess coming