slf

I disagree. Ned made several mistakes, including not delegating important tasks to his own household. As Hand of the King, he had the right to replace small council members, guards, etc., with people he actually trusted. He knew there was a conspiracy in KL, knew he didn't know who all the players were, but left pretty much everyone in their positions. Ned wasn't dumb but he wasn't able to survive in that kind of environment.

I fianlly get the love so many have for Timothy Olyphant. I recently started Santa Clarita Diet and he's great. (I'm enjoying most of that cast, actually.)

One of the main complaints about the finale that I've never gotten is that the Dothraki would have gotten revenge for Dany's death and fought to see her vision through. The Dothraki were always shown to have mixed feelings about her. The Dothraki didn't believe that khals should marry foreigners or that women could lead. And the Dothraki had as low an opinion of Westerosi in general (mocking their customs, weapons, armor, etc) as the Westerosi did of them. Dany herself was referred to as a "pink-skinned girl" and a "midget", among other things. But still, she had fire breathing dragons and was fireproof (and had killed all the khals) so they followed her, despite their well-documented misgivings about magic and crossing the sea. But, y'know, she went from surviving years in Essos with three dragons to losing one before the Battle for Winterfell and another not long after. She was the Mother of Dragons. Dracarys was the last word many Essosi heard before they died. Those dragons were fully 90% of her power, reputation, legacy. Without them she might've died in the red waste, and if she hadn't, she certainly never would have risen to the heights she did. So why people brush aside what their losses would've meant for her is beyond me. She lost two dragons in less than a year in Westeros. That is no small thing. And just when she's defeated her enemy and taken King's Landing and the iron chair the Dothraki thought nothing of, she went and got shanked. As one of the khals said in Vaes Dothrak about the Dothraki warrior Daario beat to death, "Aggo belonged to my khalasar. He served me well. He got his head smashed in by a rock. Fuck Aggo." Like, how embarrassing. He got his head smashed in with a rock. That's not even a dignified death, not that the Dothraki respect the defeated no matter how they fall (as others have pointed out). So why on earth would the Dothraki give a single solitary fuck about the pink-skinned girl who lost most of her dragons (the third having flown off to who knows where) and got herself stabbed by a man in a 'steel dress'? They wouldn't. They didn't benefit from her anymore. They only followed the strong and the dead are as weak as it gets. Most of the Essosi weren't allowed to be fully developed people. They were for the most part props in Dany's story. But they did have a culture, a way of life the show was always consistent about, and their final act (of not giving a fuck) was true to that. Dany had no personal loyalty from the Dothraki because they were just another people she brought to heel with fire and blood. So the idea that they should have fallen to their knees weeping over her death, for me, is skeevy.

Ned made a ton of mistakes because the show/book needed him to. GRRM and the writers couldn't figure out a more believable way to progress the King's Landing plot. For the books, I always considered it just early series roughness. I have no clue why they didn't smooth that over in the show.

Not surprised the show got so many noms; the Emmys sometimes do that for a big show's last season. There are a couple, I'm not saying which, I don't think should have been nominated because they barely did anything this season. At least one who I consider among the weakest of the cast but there's no chance of that person winning so it doesn't matter.

For me, it wasn't out of character. Badly done but not ooc. Dany was used to being hailed Breaker of Chains and Mhysa, the people lifting her up to crowd surf over them, getting to flex her muscle by violently overthrowing the opposition. She was denied all of that and more or less had been ever since arriving in Westeros. Almost everything about that invasion was, at best, a frustrating disappointment to her, at worst, a devastating loss and it all built up over the course of the season.

SyFy has the entire series on their app.

Of course people born and raised in the US are Americans, but Dany was not raised in Westeros. She was raised in Pentos, since she was a baby. My point was that she did not even have the excuse of wanting to go home, to be with her people. And I disagree that her being a conqueror means she wouldn't kill women and children. That is precisely what conquerors have always done; by definition, a conqueror takes a country by military force, subjugates its people. That is, as others spent the entire series pointing out to her, the price of the Iron Throne. And she decided early, back in season one, that it was acceptable for others to pay that price. That she cast herself as a liberator doesn't change that.

I mean, yeah, but so? Her family only ruled in Westeros because they invaded and conquered the Seven Kingdoms 'with fire and blood'. Then they were rightfully overthrown and a new monarchy was established. Dany's family having once been Westerosi didn't give her a 'right' to invade, or even really a good, much less noble, reason to do so. She wasn't going home because she was raised elsewhere. She had no knowledge of, or attachment to, Westerosi culture or religions. Really, in the first few season she had no opinion of Westeros other than "it has a nice big iron chair I want to sit in". She was just a foreign invader, conquering a kingdom and slaughtering its people because she felt entitled to.

I think Sansa withdrew after Ramsay's brutality and it took her a while to get to the point where she could trust in people again. But I think in the end it showed her beginning to open up a bit more. I believe that she will be reserved; like how Ned was left even more reserved after the events of Robert's Rebellion. I'll be honest, I don't see Sansa as manipulative at all. Manipulative people are rarely who they present themselves to be. They don't take responsibility for the things they've done, especially when there are disastrous consequences, and blame other people. Manipulative people generally disrespect boundaries, prey on someone's conscience/empathy, create plots and shit stir often just for the sake of drama, they generally target people more vulnerable than themselves, etc. That doesn't describe Sansa, in my opinion, that describes Cersei and Petyr. I think Sansa became more shrewd, which is different. People who are shrewd generally rely on being observant, being a good judge of character, out-thinking their opponents, etc. And I like that because Sansa's big weakness as a character in the earlier seasons was her flawed judgement in character; she survived by learning to consider people's motives, goals, likely responses given past behavior, etc. She didn't become a master assassin or great general or prophetic leader or Master of Coin with zero qualifications. She turned her weakness into one of her strengths.

Yikes. Comparing Sansa to one of her abusers. How so? Cersei was sexually assaulting her brother by the time she was ten. She abused children, she abused other women, starved people, committed mass murder, etc. I think there's a long way to go between Sansa and Cersei. If anyone was like Cersei it was Daenerys.

Dany was the defender of the weak and freer of slaves when it benefited her, when it got her what she wanted. She needed to think of herself a certain way - a liberator - rather than acknowledge that she was just a foreign invader, conquering nations for the sole purpose of assembling her own kingdom.

Didn't care for Jack McCoy on Law and Order. The X Files was kind of boring.

I miss this show so much. I wish I could watch it for the first time again.

Loved the first one but this was boring as hell. Hemsworth and T. Thompson are attractive, charming actors but it felt too much like they were going for Ragnarok 2.0. I did enjoy seeing Emma Thompson, tho, as always.

Yeah, Pike specifically mentions Bellamy being his student in Earth Skills so it was a class everyone had to take.

Yeah, I never got a lot of the defenses of Ross saying Rachel's name (which he kept doing even after the wedding). He still had feelings for Rachel and Emily was justified in being angry and suspicious.

One of my favorite late-series episodes is Lassie Jerky. Just beginning to end, it's hilarious. Shawn luring Gus into the woods by convincing him there's a bbq joint built into the side of a cave called the Sassy Quatch that almost no one knows about. Shawn telling Gus he enrolled him in classes at the university to study hermeneutics- "I think it's the study of the Munsters, so we should be fine" "Shawn, hermeneutics is the study of theory" "Well, that feels redundant." Gus freaking out that he may have a test on Friday, "I need to find a syllabus!" Gus eating the meat left out to lure the sasquatch that has a tracker in it. Lassie stepping into the bear trap and Jules going into badass mode to save her partner by pushing a tree over. "You found my shoe!" Everyone's hilarious faces when yelling after Ed entered the cabin still wearing his camo outfit. Everyone constantly being annoyed by and cutting off I Grew Up On A Commune chick. Poor Ed's "you guys are using me as a chest of drawers, aren't you?" as Gus and Shawn try to prop him against the front door to block the Serbs from entering. Lassie saying Ed carried him like a baby fawn. Juliet once against going into beast mode when the Serbs attack and shooting them with a crossbow. Shawn, proud, excitedly yelling, "Lassie! Jules knows how to use a crossbow!" Gus eating the meat when they thought it was Lassie. I always stop to watch that ep whenever it's on.

The original terrified me. I saw it at a slumber party. My friend's mom had a large doll collection, mostly American Girl, and I was so scared to go to sleep I had to call my mom to come get me, lol.

I love American Duos. When the country singing brothers come out celebrating and say to Shawn, "Nigel called us a curious cocktail of inbreeding and Type 2 Diabetes" I die laughing.

Does anyone have experience with dealing with bad dog owners? Several of my neighbors have gotten dogs, all pitbull mixes with about the same coloring so I'm thinking they got their dogs from the same litter, that I see being walked by their teenaged kids in the afternoon. But these dogs aren't trained and the kids clearly don't know how to take care of them; they're very verbally aggressive with the dogs. And unfortunately, every single one of the dogs is wearing a choke chain. I realize there may not be much I can do. People can get really defensive if you approach them about how the treat their pets. But I'm hoping that if I say something helpful, gently, to the kids it might have a positive effect? Anyone dealt with soemthing like this?

I hate that so much of her story line was about Jaime. She deserved a much more interesting arc. And as much as I despise her being paired with the sister fucker who threw a little boy out of a window, that doesn't hold a candle to how much I hate that her biggest scene in the finale was about preserving Jaime's "honor." Thankfully, they at least had the good sense not to make her pregnant.

Kudos to your whole post but especially this part. Dany cared about two things in Winterfell: her ego and Jon. She did not especially care about the wellbeing of the North. She tried with Sansa because she wanted her boyfriend's family to like her. She had no idea how to respond to Sansa's lack of enthusiasm and her ego was offended by it. I've been rewatching a bunch of episodes and something I've noticed about Dany is that she generally does much better with people who are enslaved, or who spent most of their lives enslaved. Once she has to deal with free people it goes to shit. Almost all, or all, of her most contentious relationships are with free people. People who don't "owe" her their lives, people who have loyalty to their house, country, or religion which does not allow them to devote all of their loyalty to her and commit themselves solely to her goal of claiming the Iron Throne. She's just terrible at navigating those relationships. Though it's already been pointed out that Lyanna is not his niece, I just want to add that Jorah had at least one: Margaery Tyrell. Jorah's wife was the youngest sister of Alerie Hightower- wife of Mace Tyrell and mother of Margaery and Loras. As far as I know, Jorah and Margaery have never met.

Well, everyone could be undiagnosed. Referring to the crew members as "my crew" is something I've heard countless actors, singers, writers, etc., say. I don't think that, much less that one thing, points to having an inflated sense of self. Being afraid and angry at someone when their dog attacks someone else doesn't indicate someone has a need for attention; dog attacks often rattle people, especially when that dog is a pitbull/pitbull mix and the attack resulted in over a dozen stitches. Maybe Perrette's just a drama queen with a grudge. Not everything's a disorder.

No small part of why Jon was named King in the North was his being Ned Stark's son. I wonder if the lords would have chosen him had they known he was Rhaegar's son (since the North believed Lyanna was kidnapped and raped). But more importantly, I wonder how his true lineage affects his actions as King. Would he be considered illegitimate, as Joffrey and Tommen would have been?