Fishslap

In a sense you could say that Rollo died I suppose. At least the one who was Ragnar's brother. Well this is the wrong show for them then. Just the fact that Lindisfarne was attacked in 793 and the siege of Paris took place in 845 should have driven purists away a long time ago. Unless of course we pretend that Ragnar and Rollo were in their late 60s while attacking Paris. Well there is also of course the historical fact that Rollo, or Gange-Rolf as he became known, was effectively the first Duke of Normandy and that his great great great grandson was William the Conqueror. Rollo had to win the battle so he could reproduce at least.

No obviously Jon is weak. But that's the point I was trying to make: It's fine for male characters to be weak you see. It's fine for them to be anything, which is perhaps why 99,99% of all rapists, serial killers, murderers and child abusers in TV entertainment are men. Whatever you want to write as an author you can always trust a male character to be depraved enough to do it, and no one will think it weird or inappropriate. I almost wish Martin had written Ramsay as a female character just to challenge this stale stuff. The problem comes when it is forbidden to make a female character weak, or really to have negative qualities at all, because it upsets people. I'm speaking generally of course, and this isn't the case on GoT or I wouldn't be watching it. But this is really what bothers me with a lot of TV these days, which is why I watch very little TV. If you write a female child abuser it becomes sensitive almost automatically so writers apparently shy away from it. What I want, as someone who is genuinely interested in story telling rather than people's genitals, is for female characters to have a much wider range of behaviors and qualities than either strong or unacceptable and male chauvinist, gender stereotype-reinforcing yada yada, which seems to be the only two available categories presently. Insisting that they must be strong is therefore the opposite of facilitating good female characters to me. I think what needs to happen is that people have to take the good with the bad. If feminists want strong, invincible female characters then they must also accept female child abusers, female sadists, female cowards and female idiots. You can't have one without the other without it becoming very boring very quickly. But you said it better than I have above anyway. Any character needs to be more complex for a story to be gripping: weak at times, strong at times etc, while having a core personality, or at least appearance/function, to give it a sense of direction..And that needs to apply regardless of gender is all I'm saying. So to me both the Mountain and Brienne could be off the show and I would be very happy about it. I consider them the two most one dimensional characters on GoT by quite a margin.

Well quite, and no I don't find strong women boring, although what makes someone strong, regardless of genitals, can be debated. What I find boring is to misguidedly force strong female characters into stories just cuz feminism, because it makes all the female characters one dimensional. I feel I was very clear about this above so please stop projecting things on me. As I said, it's like demanding that all male characters in a story be sly, sadistic, effeminate, stupid, weak etc. And no one would read such a story because it would have one dimensional characters. If it's a natural part of the story for a woman to be strong then it's fine. It is with Cercei but it's certainly not with Brienne, who has been turned into a caricature.

It's not a big deal historically and anecdotes tend to be skipped by serious historians these days, which is of course why they are so insufferably dull and boring. But on Wikipedia's page for the Battle of Falkirk it says "the knights were ordered to retreat and the longbowmen brought forward". This is allegedly when Ol' Ed simply had them fire into everyone indiscriminately. I must confess that my non-Gibson source for that is from a contemporary historian who wrote about the battle afterwards, and I can't find it right now, or indeed remember his name. Regardless, some people hated him and some people loved him so that needs to be taken into account with things like this. You never really know what is true and not in history when it comes to details like this because people lie and propagandize and they always have. All we really know is that he won the battle and that some people died fighting over a field. If he had lost I wouldn't be surprised if the stories about him had been even worse than they are now. But if you press me I will give you the point. Like I said though, it might not be a huge deal whether he actually said it or did it. Far worse has been done than shooting down a few of your own men in a battle. In general though, militarily it is what is known as a gambit and is very common. It works in chess too. Some forces are sacrificed to draw the enemy out of a favorable position, to confuse him or make him chase. One might argue than Ramsay did all three, and would have succeeded if not for LF and Sansa. In all such cases the losses are deemed acceptable as long as the enemy is hurt more by it than you are. This is basically what Churchill's various early continental landings were in WWII. For example, by throwing thousands of Canadians into the fire at Dieppe the Germans were successfully misled regarding the planned actual landing site for the allied invasion in Normandy. Like I said, it looks bad on TV but it's very common. There might be a reason why Hollywood has shied away from Dieppe as it makes for a very uninspiring tale. And it is so common that it might be the reason why historians usually skip even mentioning it. So it seems safest to blame Hollywood, as it usually does in my experience. You almost never see friendly fire in Hollywood movies, but it is a major source of casualties in any war, whether it is intentional or not. Regarding Gibson though he mangles the source material deliberately in order to make people realize that he is being allegorical, which is a point his many, and loud, critics, seem to have missed entirely. He's not really, or at least not primarily, talking about Wallace, Christ and the Mayans but about political power and oligarchy vs freedom and truth. To inform us of this he blends Aztec and Mayan culture and places it in the wrong time period, focuses more on the truth telling of Christ than his divinity and turns Wallace into a cartoon character. He's trying to be helpful with this but apparently he's still too subtle for some people. I mention this just in case this is another Gibson bashing intro. I'm not his greatest fan but the dude knows how to tell a story as more than a simple narrative. And I respect that.

They made it pretty clear early on that he is obsessed only with power. And whether she likes it or not, he has now saved Sansa with the forces he controls, not she. People who are backing Sansa in a confrontation with LF are in for a rude awakening I believe. Wiser she may be but she has little to no real power as long as LF controls the Vale, which he does. Maybe she can change that but it doesn't seem very probable to me based on everything that has happened. He's supposed to be a master schemer. it would be awful writing to have a master schemer outschemed by a girl.

There's always a way. If everyone else is dead, who will stop him? The Lannisters are down to Mr and Mrs Incest and their soon to be dead son, the Baratheons are already extinct, excepting Robert's bastards, and the Starks are down to two girls, a cripple and an undead bastard, neither of whom seems very likely to rule anything for long. Anyway, I never said he'd sit there long. It's just that you need a villain on the throne when Daenerys arrives in KL. Otherwise you'll have her killing Tommen, who is after all an innocent in all this and fairly likable compared to most of the rest of the cast. Clearly it can not be Dany vs Tommen. That's like Stalin vs Dan Quayle.

It's what's known as a historical anecdote I believe, and is based on accounts from that battle. Obviously though there weren't any microphones present to record him saying it, so it's not like there's iron clad evidence. But as far as I know Braveheart lifted that quote from real life. And it's beyond question that he did in fact order his archers to fire into a melee at least once,. It was one of the things he became so infamous for in Britain even while he was still alive.

Well, it depends on what he wanted, which I'm pretty sure is the throne. The question now is who will sit on that when Daenerys finally manages to find a boat, and my money is on LF. Unless the show has a complete change of character I rather suspect that Sansa will be dead before that happens. Then you'll have Mr Doofus in the north and the Mother of Titles in the south against the loyalists in the middle perhaps. And since he's probably her nephew anyway they can then marry in violation of the laws of nature and fight the walkers together. The end! Needless to say I'm approaching the moment when I will start cheering for the walkers. I can smell the perverse happy ending coming here.

I keep telling you you're underestimating LF. This has been his war from the start; the Lannisters, Starks and Baratheons just puppets on his strings since season one.

This is based on Edward Longshanks in his war against Scotland. He ordered his archers to fire volleys into the melee then and when someone pointed out that they would hit their own men he supposedly said "Yes, but we'll hit theirs as well." It looks bad on TV obviously but it wasn't unheard of in Medieval warfare.

But season one wasn't an adaptation. It was almost word for word like the book it was based on. If you have seen the TV show season 1, reading book 1 would be the most boring activity ever, because nearly everything is the same. GoT only became an adaptation later when they decided to make some warped feminist statement with Brienne, and even that didn't derail until after she got Jaime to KL. But the rest of the show quickly deteriorated after that decision: dead Stannis killed by someone who should be dead, Sansa marrying Bolton to make another feminist statement, no Stoneheart and Berric still alive instead, Dorne a very embarrassing sideshow, Blackfish killed off when we know he's alive and so on.. Once you've taken a dump on the story you're telling it gets easier to do it again, and in worse ways. I'm not going to apologize for not liking it. And it started with Brienne. I mean back to the Incredible Feminist Hulk: Jaime is most definitely not in love with her in the books. He simply pities her and probably admires her honor while at the same time finding it utterly contemptible. The whole waving at each other thing was like the last scene in ET here.

Corrupt people like Pycelle, Cercei and Tywin Lannister have been saying that, which was the point Tommen made. It's bad enough that we have to suffer with Zombie Greg now if people can't counter Cercei's cheating by banning trial by combat.

Personally I have stopped expecting adherence to the books the show claims to be based on. And of all the warped caricatures available on this decomposing TV show you can't get worse than Super-Brienne; the magical woman who has no weaknesses of any kind, quite unlike Brienne in the books. I'm still waiting for her to have half her face bitten off before she and Pod are hanged, so naturally I wasn't expecting much when it came to offing Blackfish. Why not have him run over by a lorry while we're at it? Never mind that they have no cars, who cares about plot !?! Oh well, I'm sure that was just an accident when the author wrote all those things in the books. Let's just up and make Brienne like the Invincible Hulk why not! I DEMAND GREEN PAINT FOR BRIENNE! sigh...

Right. Well some of these fateful episodes are painfully obvious, and if we are confused it's simply because we haven't figured out the purpose of a character. Personally I was stunned when Sean Bean was offed in season 1, not having ready the books at that point and believing him to be the main character of the show. But I realize now that he died simply because he was done as a literary character. Through his oafish stupidity and honesty he helped cause the war and nearly destroy his own family and country. There was really nothing more he could do at this point, short of telling Jon about his heritage. But if he had done that Jon Snow would not have gone to the wall and might even have claimed the Iron Throne, making him what Robb became and then some; and probably just as dead. Jon's ignorance was essential to the entire story at the Wall, so Ned really was done even though he took that secret with him to the grave. And Stannis is basically the same, as unhappy as I was about his final scene. He had burned his followers, lost a major battle due to his own pride and finally burned his own daughter so his army deserted him and his wife hanged herself. It is not possible to be more done as a literary character than Stannis was, so you kill him off. As for the obvious things, as soon as Mel was moved along with Stannis to the wall I knew that someone would die and be resurrected by her. What else was the Beric Dondarrion episode in season 2 about, if not to foreshadow this? First I though it might be Stannis who was brought back, but as season 5 unfolded I became more and more convinced it would be Jon, which it was. And this was completely predictable right away with Mel at the Wall. And the Hound now is the same thing. The only two obvious things about him are that he will kill the Mountain, now as a champion of the Sparrows and the Seven, and that he will be burned to death, probably by the fire people or even dragons. There is too much buildup of both things, not just on the show but in the books, for this to not take place in some way. The only question is how they take place.

This is literature, not reality, just in case there's any confusion. The reason Oberyn failed is that the Hound is the one who kills the Mountain in this work of fiction. I repeat that point just so it's nice and clear.