arjumand

I suppose it works that way! I think I was just annoyed that it was chosen as a sign of HIS LOVE, lol. I sent you a link to what I think is the offending comment, lol.

Ugh, don't get me started with the Arrow writers and their idea of good characterization. My pet peeve is the PrettyWomaning of Felicity aka Ray Palmer, boyfriend from hell. Not that they do Oliver any favours. Recently I saw a gif on tumblr of Oliver taking the phone call from Slade telling him that he had Felicity, and everyone was squeeing about how horrified Oliver looked. All I'm doing is tearing my hear out, because it was HIS IDEA. He knew it was going to happen. There's no-one who needs to be tricked. Who is he acting for? The camera, of course, but JFC. I've heard of the term fridge logic (how plot points fall apart half an hour later, when you're staring into your fridge), but in this case we need another term, for when it falls apart as you're watching. Ugh, that episode.

Oh, ok - I'll look again, but tomorrow. Different time zones and all. I don't know if anyone answered you in PM, but Ward is a character in Marvel's Agents of Shield - he starts out as one of the good guys,

Yeah. I stopped reading FICoN in the early chapters, but there's another, really popular (and very good) writer who's doing something similar - a few days ago, started complaining on tumblr about some criticism she got in a recent fic. Try as I might, I could not find the offending comment, because author said she'd responded, and there weren't any answers to comments. And it might be meanspirited of me, but if you have over 800 comments composed entirely of ass-kissing, maybe you can deal with one/two which aren't? Ugh. I've said too much. Shame! Shame! (Must. Stop. Watching. GameofThrones.) That's such a bad sign, isn't it? Especially on AO3, where you can delete comments after they've come in, unlike on ffn, where you can only delete guest comments. It's worst when the moderation of comments comes with an author's note which says "This is my first fanfic and English is my second language! I welcome constructive criticism but don't be mean!" Girl. Seriously. A lot of people are ESL (one of them being me) and they don't bang on about it, because nothing is preventing them and you from actually reading books in English to see how things should be done - like simple punctuation conventions, etc.

I'm pretty sure I saw them in the boat with him and Tormund (besides Edd). Also, he tells one of the Night's Watch to take the boat and come back for him, and then he yells 'Night's Watch, to me!' A lot of them died, though, which caused even more problems, as the traitors put the spin of "He let Night's Watch men die for Wildlings!" I think that the only Night's Watch men who didn't believe in the White Walkers (or didn't care) were the ones stabbing Jon - I'm sure Alliser believed, he just didn't think it was enough reason to let the Wildlings through the Wall. And of course the Northern lords will find it hard to believe until they see everything with their own eyes. And I'm pretty sure that Petyr Baelish doesn't really believe in it, or doesn't think it will affect him, even if it's true. Ooh, I just want him to be killed by a White Walker so bad! Who can I bribe to make this happen? It's just - he's so slimily sure he has all the angles worked out, he knows everything that's going to happen, he's the puppeteer pulling the strings: I just want him to be faced with someone who can't be bought or bribed or manipulated.

Yeah, I don't either. And while she didn't hate Sandor anymore, as was shown when she was playing the game of faces, she showed much more emotion when she thought she'd caused ex-Jaqen's death than when she left Sandor there to die. I read a theory that during the war for the dawn, Arya will feature in a big way because she will find the long-lost sword, Dark Sister, which, being Valyrian steel, can kill White Walkers. It's interesting, though except for the fact that it's called Dark Sister, and it might be at Castle Black, I don't really see a connection. Different speculation: I was thinking about Petyr Baelish's words to Sansa in Winds of Winter: First of all, his "I see myself on the Iron Throne [pause] with you by my side" is both a truth and a lie, in my opinion. Sure, he wants the Iron Throne. Sansa by his side, he can take or leave. For someone who loves her, he sure is cavalier about her safety and whereabouts, and leaves immediately after delivering her to the Boltons, not even staying for that creepy, creepy dinner, where a blind man could have sensed that something was deeply wrong with Ramsey. Second, when he talks about Jon, calling him a "motherless bastard born in the south." I was kind of taken aback. It just seems strangely specific, especially with the reference to where he was born, like he's trying to suggest that Jon isn't Northern enough, which makes me laugh - Jon has spent his whole life in the North, except for the few weeks until he was taken out of Dorne. Seriously, Petyr? His last name is 'Snow'! Then I started thinking he was hinting at something else - that he knew about Jon. That he really thought about the timeline between Ned going away and coming back with a baby, and he worked it out. That's going to be a real problem, if he knows about Jon being Rhaegar's son, before Jon and Sansa find out.

My favourite (as in, eeek) was the one which claimed that what Oliver was doing wasn't sexual harassment because, and I'm quoting: "First, it is fanfiction and not real life." What? So, if someone writes fanfic in which there's a murder, it's not really a murder because it's not real life? What does that even mean? Her next argument is that "Second, if the harassment had only started at work it would be different," i.e., worse. Wow. It's ok because it didn't start at work, it started when she was in fucking high school, and he was a legal adult. Wow. I can't decide which is worse, the fic author or these clueless commenters.

Now, in Run to the Water, there are no full stops at the end of some sentences, the dialogue is punctuated atrociously, and there are some run-on sentences which have to be seen to be believed. The only place that's a conscious style is in poetry, and even there it helps if your name is e.e. cummings. Or James Joyce. And in those cases, the choices are consistent and have a purpose, rather than "I'm doing this for free! Stop hassling me about punctuation!" I have your same issues with reading that stuff. Can't do it, nossir. That's why I only read the first chapter of Under my skin and peaced out. I was going to write that it's weird that I'm becoming more nitpicky about this stuff as I get older, when I realised that it's not weird at all. Shit. As for saying something to the author . . . uhhh. No, I guess. It's very rare to find just one mistake of that kind - in this case it's throughout. Not only that, the formatting is terrible too. I mean, doing this kind of thing is part of my job, you know? I get paid for this shit, so in my free time, I'd rather not.

Yes. Before the explosion, the Tyrells were annoyed at her and reserved their hatred for the High Sparrow. The Martells hated her but didn't have the resources to make retaliation count. After the explosion, the remaining Tyrell, who now has to find a bastard / lowborn with money to adopt so that the Tyrell name won't vanish, and the Martells unite in hatred against her. Those weren't only Targaryen sails in the fleet - we had Sunspear and Highgarden sails. Also, dragons. Plus, how could she be sure that the Sept of Baelor explosion wouldn't cause a chain reaction and take out the entire city? Answer: she couldn't. And she didn't give a fuck. And let's not forget the common people who will starve pretty soon, and this time it's completely Cersei's fault. The riots we saw in Season 2 will be nothing in comparison. At least then the Sparrows were nice guys who distributed food to the poor. She turned them into the Spanish Inquisition, and then she wiped them out. And it's not like she didn't know this would happen - I still remember Olenna during the Purple Wedding, saying that she was off to taste the food she'd paid for. The first thing Olenna will have done will be cutting off the food supplies to King's Landing - maybe that's why she was in Dorne, to forge trade agreements, and she ended up getting a free dragon with every sale! I loved the episode and I hate to nitpick, I really do, but were we ever given any explanation why Drogon and co. are suddenly so chill? Maybe they're not teenagers anymore, lol.

The thing is, in the books, Catelyn doesn't strike me as being very perceptive - single-minded, yes. Fiercely loyal to her children and Ned, sure. But she seems to take everything at face value. Her sister tells her that Jon Arryn was murdered by the Lannisters, and she believes her (and makes everyone else believe her too); she finds Tyrion's dagger on the hired killer, and doesn't think how insanely stupid and obvious it would be for a crafty person to give such an expensive and easily identifiable weapon to a hired killer. She sees what a mess Robb has gotten himself into with Jeyne Westerling (and in the books it wasn't love - it was simple 'I banged her, and then I made an honest woman of her') and she just looks at the child-bearing hips - rather than asking herself why exactly the high-born maiden (of a minor house, it's true, but still a lady) of the family would be tending to Robb's injuries and 'comforting' him. The whole 'tansy' business was when I just rolled my eyes at Catelyn - I don't live in a society which relies much on herbs in their raw form anymore, and even I immediately knew that Catelyn's dad wasn't talking about a woman called Tansy, but the plant. In one of the other books, I forget which Lady complains to the travelling bard that everytime he comes along with a new song, he makes all of the young women cry and drink tansy tea (i.e. they sleep with him and then have to bring on a miscarriage). So it is clearly common knowledge. But Catelyn didn't figure it out for a while. She accepts everything and everyone at face value - maybe she's been with Ned for too long! Also, we can't forget that while Ned was a good husband to her, and they eventually fell in love, there was only one time he really scared her - when she asked him if Jon's mother was Ashara Dayne. So she might have not permitted herself to wonder anymore, and in time she accepted it - why else would a man get so angry, if not for his own son? While Ned was just terrified that his carefully crafted (ha!) lies would unravel if they were picked at. Also, in the books, Jon Snow is the spitting image of Eddard Stark. He almost never has to say who he is, because people can see it in his face. That was what angered Catelyn and convinced her - because he looked more like Ned than any of her kids (except for Arya). The problem with us accepting this is that the show gave us visuals - which for Eddard and Jon are completely unlike the books. I have my own theory about why they did this, but let's look at what we're given. Once you've chosen Sean Bean as your Ned, technically you need to get a Jon Snow who looks like him as a young man. They can't have grey eyes, because Sean Bean's eyes are green, and as they didn't make Dany or Viserys wear purple contacts, they weren't even going to try with Sean Bean. But then they choose Kit Harington, who has dark brown eyes (and who looks nothing like Sean Bean - compare him with the actor they chose for the Tower of Joy scenes). Ok, fine. Eye colour doesn't matter, even though the books mention the Stark grey eyes all the time. But at least Harington has brown hair, of the approximate shade they made Sean Bean's wig in. Nope, he's going to be told to dye his hair black. No wonder they left out the bits in the books where people tell Jon he looks exactly like his dad! The only thing that bothers me about this is that it makes tv Catelyn look especially stupid in not guessing, while book Catelyn was just looking at the spitting image of her husband, and getting more and more frustrated.

Yeah. It's easy enough to put in an end note with the trigger warning, and link to it: "Go to end note for trigger warning; spoilers". Done.

Yeah - I read somewhere nitpicky that it's all wrong, that the smallfolk would be rioting in the streets, etc, after this attack on their religion, and so on, and so forth. First of all, Melisandre* and Stannis did exactly the same thing, religion-wise, at Storm's End and Dragonstone - set fire to the statues, burned the Sept. Any of the nobles who refused to take the Lord of Light into their hearts were shown that there was a place for religious debate and discussion: on top of the next bonfire. No-one rebelled or protested after that. Gee, I wonder why. And now we have an even greater show of power - if Cersei is admitting to what happened, everyone will be bowing down to her, because they'd like to not be blown up, thanks very much. Also, who was really taken out in the explosion? The A-list nobles and the Faith Militant. None of the smallfolk cared about the nobles, and the Faith Militant were the only ones 'on the smallfolk's side'. There were no soldiers in the sept, no Tyrell men, Lannister men, etc. Cersei still has the City Watch, the Queensguard, and the Mountain, who seems to sense it whenever anyone's talking trash about the regime. Also, clever Cersei- ha ha! Who am I kidding? Clever Qyburn can even put a further spin on it - the wildfire was brought by the Seven, angry at how the Faith Militant were perverting their message, and the nobles who were going along with it. Now, when food starts running out, that's when we'll have a problem, and not before. Seriously, if critics are expecting the smallfolk to riot because their temple has been destroyed, King's Landing is the wrong place to expect it. They were never full of religious fervour - they were just glad that someone seemed to care about them for a change, and that the bitch who would have let them starve was shamed and that they could yell and throw shit at her. *I just read a whole bit on how awesome book Mel is, and it pissed me off so much, I could spit fire at this point. At least with the Seven, the septons and septas (the High Sparrow and Unella were exceptions to the ones we've seen in other parts of the books) try to help people through education and guidance. Melisandre's answer to everything is SET IT ON FIRE! Sure, she sees the threat of the Night's King etc, but by that time she's done so much fire-related shit I just can't reconcile to her.

The entire use of sound / music / lack of music in this episode is out of this world. It's so well done, you really have to watch the episode more than once, and really listen. The first minute has no dialogue or music - all you hear is the sound of the bell of the Sept of Baelor, calling everyone to the trial (such beautiful irony, too - the High Sparrow was making a power play by insisting the trial should be there, and ended up playing directly into Cersei's hands) and the sounds of everyone getting dressed, preparing for the trial. The piano only starts when you see the congregation filing in, and it's kind of jarring, at first, but then you're lulled into complacency when it continues, and nothing seems to be happening. The next part which really stands out to me is the Tower of Joy, when the woman gives Ned baby Jon to hold, and as you focus on the baby, the violins swell to some kind of crescendo: and boom: adult Jon Snow. I love it. Finally, the last sequence, and I've watched it so many times, and really for that amazing bit of music, called the Winds of Winter: (start watching at about 7:20) https://youtu.be/cDh_2Ks7Iyg I can't say I'm Dany's biggest fan, but Ramin Djawadi is trying to make me one. I looked up the music for season 6, and the track is described as: It so does. ETA - it gets even better after the cut to black - there was a better version on youtube, complete with end credits, but I think it got taken down. The whole track is 3:29 minutes, and it's amazing.

But in that society, in Westeros, in the North, her value is zero now - I mean, yes, it's awful for us, but that's how the values of that society have been presented to us. Look, Sansa's been handed around like a game of pass the parcel as long as she was a virgin. Her entire value lay in her virginity. And yes, yes - her son would inherit Winterfell. But now, when she and Jon were going around asking for help, all the others were seeing a wife who doesn't like her marriage anymore - a marriage she entered into of her own free will. Yes, we know that Ramsey is a monster, etc, but apparently, no one else does. Even in the books, at the most there are rumours of what happened to Lady Hornwood, but no-one knows for sure, and Roose is always quick to deny all of them. The virginity business is really, really important, and perhaps the tv show has downplayed it too much, so that now we tend to want to sweep it aside. But in the books, there are so many examples of women only being valued for it - just some off the top of my head: Jaime asks Brienne is she's still a virgin after her first encounter with the Bloody Mummers, when Qyburn tells Jaime that Brienne isn't going home, Jaime assumes that her father won't pay the ransom because he thinks she isn't a virgin anymore, Jeyne Poole has been in a brothel being 'trained' (Petyr Baelish also needs to be dog food before the end of the story), but Ramsey is assured she's still a virgin - I'm sure there's more, but I'm starting to feel queasy. In the books there's Northmen prepared to march for miles to save 'Ned's girl', but in the show, Sansa isn't Ned's girl anymore - she's Lady Whoever she married this week, to them.* The other point is the Red Wedding, and how it completely destabilized Northern society. There's a reason it's being mentioned a lot in season 6, and I don't believe it's simply 'let's remind the audience that this is a thing'. Yes, it's going to be harder to get Northerners together, even for the Starks, because apparently, you can totally betray and destroy the family, and nothing will happen to you. Walder Frey broke guest right, and how did the gods punish him? He got everything he wanted for quite a long time. In fact, I'm curious to see what kind of spin will be put on his death. Arya should really have painted a direwolf sigil on the wall. *I'm not saying that she's stuck with the Lady Bolton title, now. She and Jon won - they can put any kind of narrative about they want. and if she wants to call herself Sansa Stark again, it'll be fine. Even Catelyn stayed a Tully till the end of her life. All the Boltons are gone, and anyone who wants to say otherwise is welcome to a tour of the kennels.

That's not what I had in mind at all. The one thing Jon asked him, at least in the tv show, was about his mother. All his life, Ned left him with this hope that his mother was out there somewhere - when Ned could easily have spun something like what happened to Robb and Talisa / Jeyne, except that Ned was already married at the time and couldn't do the honourable thing. Then add the detail that his mother died in childbirth, and Jon stops wishing for the impossible. And yes, if he wanted to tell him the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, Ned could have been the one to tell him that no, Rhaegar wasn't a rapist. And maybe Jon would have gone to the Wall anyway, because as I have asserted many times on this board, our John Snuh is not interested in playing the game (of thrones). It's about giving him a choice, not creating a fait accompli. So now he's away from the Wall, and has finally achieved something that he feels maybe his father would have been proud of. Except Ned wasn't his father, others will say that with his Dragon bloodline and history of family insanity he can't be trusted, and he could have known that all along and prepared for it. I don't know, that would make me pretty angry. ETA Thing is, I read somewhere (I really can't remember where) that Aerys was right in being suspicious of the Northern lords, among them Rickard Stark, who'd set up a series of dynastic marriages for his kids, along with other lords: you had Lyanna Stark with Robert Baratheon, Brandon Stark with Catelyn Tully, and I'm sure there was something planned for Lysa Tully, except she went and boned Petry Baelish. So there was no way Ned could have talked his dad out of that one. Also, I think they were starting to get together because after the failed meeting at Harenhal, they had enough of waiting for Rhaegar to pull his finger out and move against his dad, while Rhaegar, while interested in moving against his dad, also wanted his three heads of the dragon. I don't think it was true love on his part, either, but I like Lyanna so much I don't want to think of her as a victim, lol!

I don't know, I hate the idea that Ned could have been so calculating; I thought he liked and knew the kid better than that. "Hey, guess what! You're not my son, you're not even a bastard, probably! But none of that matters anyway, 'cos if you try and leave the Night's Watch, you'll be beheaded! Laters, nephew! Enjoy your stay at Prison Castle Black!" Yeah. I hope whoever tells him also explains that history is written by the winners (see Richard III being turned into an evil hunchback by Tudor historians and a certain W. Shakespeare), and that the 'Rhaegar the rapist' narrative was Robert Baratheon refusing to believe that any woman would ever refuse him. This will probably never happen, but I really want one of the dragons to make the reveal, in a 'Don't look now, but an enormous dragon just landed behind you' sort of way. 'Sooo . . . that isn't Ghost nudging my back?'

I'm so curious about this! I mean, Sansa was clearly listening when these stories were told, and, at least up to that scene in the crypts with Littlefinger, swallowed the party line - Lyanna was kidnapped, raped and murdered, the end. But was Jon listening when Nan or Maester Luwin told these stories? Have we ever read / heard Jon thinking about the history of his own family (the Starks, I mean - he doesn't know about the other one!)? I remember he had that conversation with Aemon when he revealed his identity, but I think that never went into Lyanna's fate. Or I might be remembering wrong. It just occurred to me - the kidnap and rape is the narrative tvLittlefinger sold Robin Arryn to excuse how Sansa ended up with the Boltons; he tells Robin and Yohn Royce that they were "set upon" on the road to wherever, and the Boltons carried Sansa off. Going back to the point, I'd hate for Jon to think that he was a child of rape, just like Ramsey. Though if he thought about it a little, it would make no sense for Ned to take care of the son of the man who raped his sister - maybe he'd make sure that the baby had a home, but it wouldn't be his home. This, so much. I was reading a blog which is analysing the books chapter by chapter, and this is a big fuck-up by Ned - the author suggests it's simply a sign to Ned's major character trait, which is really avoidance, rather than excessive honour. And it shows in his treatment of his children too - he seems to have made no marriage plans for Robb, he seems to be surprised when Benjen tells him Jon wants to take the black, etc. Jon realises that in the show - he tells Tyrion "no-one told me the truth about this place, only you . . " While Benjen could be excused, because he didn't know Jon wasn't Ned's bastard, Ned couldn't. Even Ned's last words to Jon, that when they met again, Ned would tell him the truth - what would have been the point? Jon would have already sworn oaths to the Night's Watch. The thing is, he's worked through fighting the Wildlings (battle causes PTSD, even in hardened soldiers), fell in love and watched her die, fought a losing battle with the undead and ice monsters. He spent the entire season working through his issues from being murdered, being brought back, and wishing to be dead again. I do think it's going to be a mind fuck, but I doubt it'll break him. He's going to have massive anger towards Ned, though, mixed with love for the man. I wonder who's going to dare to tell him that, essentially, he had to go to the Wall at precisely that time, as he seems like one of the few people in the entire country who is capable of seeing the bigger picture or even basic mathematics: if the Army of the Dead is now at 10,000 undead fuckers, and we kill 100,000 wildlings, who then rise up to join the Army of the Dead, how fucked are we?

Yeah. I was very 'what the fuck is this' in the season opener, and I hate it even more the second time around. I think I'm done with Killjoys, tbh. I watched till midway this episode, and then stopped. Did we always have the cheery, isn't this hilarious, hyuk hyuk music while people were committing suicide? And then the music gets even funnier during the exposition of "I pushed the red button, and 7 people died horribly!" And it got so loud I could barely focus on the dialogue. The hell happened to this show? I mean, I enjoyed the Dark Matter episode more! WTF? Ugh. Disappointing.

Actually - I've been thinking about that, and a recent line of dialogue, and Jon's mistakes in Season 5 sort of put a few things together for me. In Bran's first Winterfell flashback he sees his father training Benjen, and after establishing their identities, we zoom in on the two boys, and Ned tells Benjen: "Put your shield up, or I'll ring your head like a bell." Now that line sounded incredibly familiar to me, but I only realised where it was from when I was doing a rewatch of Jon's scenes from season 5. Jon is training Olly with a sword and shield, and, after beating him down, helping him up, and putting an affectionate hand on his cheek, says: "Keep your shield up, or I'll ring your head like a bell." Now, I only really got into GoT this season and I've been going back and watching mainly Jon scenes (but some other good ones too), but this is when I realised why Jon trusted Olly so much, even though he had absolutely no reason to - it's because he looked at Olly and saw Bran. He saw a younger brother, when Olly just was a stranger. If you go back and watch the scenes once Olly is Jon's steward, it makes me cringe how Jon lets him sit in on top-secret meetings with Stannis - he trusts Olly implicitly, and this is after he sees how Olly can never reconcile with the wildlings. Getting back to your point - we know how this ends. Olly betrays the Night's Watch and Jon has to execute him. And yes, Jon did have to execute him - Olly was in on the plan from the start (his dialogue with Sam in episode 8 suggests that he was wavering on the need to kill Jon, and that's when he accepted it). But if we see it symbolically - Olly was his little brother surrogate, and Jon killed him. Jon even equates this himself, in case the audience didn't get it, when speaking with Sansa: "I hanged a boy . . . younger than Bran." Notice that he specifies how he killed Olly - hanging is deliberate, and can't be excused as a heat of the moment, heat of battle incident. And is he responsible for Olly's death? He kind of is, in my opinion. Jon, in his eagerness to have a little brother again, didn't see that Olly should never have joined the Night's Watch (and if he hasn't, why is he wearing their livery?). Olly was a traumatised child, who'd never be able to see the bigger picture, who refused to believe or didn't care about the White Walkers etc. Once Stannis left, he should have been with that army. I mean, if Jon was considered too young, at the beginning of the series, to make that level of commitment, Olly was even younger. ETA: Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying Jon is a horrible person - he's just not a saint, or a Gary Stu (in spite of the mystical special animal companion, special sword, and DESTINY, he just seems the most down-to-earth of all of them sometimes). He's still my favourite character, and I hope that when he says "We have to trust each other" to Sansa, he also means "We have to stop talking at cross purposes".

I've been curious about this since Episode 10 - in light of the explosion, and the presumed death of every septon and septa in the city (except Unella - yikes), is the Faith of the Seven in trouble? In the books, Melisandre has been leading a huge crusade against it - I don't think there's been anything similar in the show (though I haven't watched all the episodes - burning people alive is one of my 'can't watch, nosireee' - I cringed through that Mance Rayder scene and have never watched Shireen's), but one of the Davos chapters mentions them dragging out all the statues from the sept at Dragonstone or Storm's End and burning them. Afterwards, Davos often feels he's being punished, especially when his sons die. Also, we keep reading snippets of septs being looted, septons and septas horrifically murdered. The Faith of the Seven has always been presented as a sort of Christianity analogue, with no visible answers to prayers etc, unlike the Lord of Light (I'm tired of looking up his bloody name to spell it right) and the old gods (the fact that people like Bran get visions and warg, etc, shows that there is some power there). So how long until people start doubting the Seven, and going back to the old gods or their fiery new god? And now the Sept of Baelor is gone, and a lot of religious are dead - was the Sept like the Vatican for Catholics? Is there going to be some reaction to it in Westeros, or will it just be Sansa filled with glee? I'm kind of torn - on the one hand, the new churchly homophobia put me off the Faith of the Seven. OTOH, crazy fire-mad let's burn EVERYONE because we're afraid of the dark isn't much better. I'd thought Melisandre was an exception until we met the lady in Mereen.

BOOM. Hecate7 drops the mic. In other words, you're so right. I'd like to have seen Sansa's face at any suggestion that they were giving her the seat of the Stark family which has been in the Stark family for thousands of years, only to be "thence wrenched with an unlineal hand", i.e., taken by treachery. Re. what I bolded - oh, yeah. I wonder if Littlefinger will go to King's Landing to complain and after spending five minutes in that throne room (a room with huge windows which manages to look gloomier than an old style hall only lit by candlelight) tiptoes out again. Something completely different - I've been doing a rewatch of the whole season, and I've found the exact spot where Cersei decided that not only Kevan Lannister was fucking dead, but that if Tommen bought it, she wasn't going to be too sad: Episode 6.08. Announcement in the throne room, 'what about me, Uncle Kevan? I'm the Queen mother!', banished to the balcony, preteen son tells her, in code, that she's corrupt and should face her punishment, Qyburn uses lots of oblique language to say "It's WILDFIRE, ok? Fucking wildfire. I've found an assload. Let's fuck shit up." Anyone who saw that look on Cersei's face and didn't immediately start packing their bags for Braavos or something was too stupid to live.

Thanks! Now that you're describing it, it does sound familiar - I must have seen it and forgotten. I see it as wanting to go for the triangle of doom next season, with Littlefinger and Jon fighting over Sansa's soul or something. But I'm glad it's been made clear that yes, she is the Lady of Winterfell.

I'll answer that! The thing is, it's really easy when you're writing an AU and you decide that in your version of season 1, Oliver realised long ago that there's no chance with Laurel anymore, so she doesn't have great importance in the story, or she's moved to Central City or something. But the moment you kill her off, the story becomes about her, and not about Oliver and Felicity. In my Season 4 AU which is kinda stalled but not really (my ideas are in place, but I just have to get off my ass and stop watching Jon Snow fanvids) the main impetus is about Darhk attacking Felicity, and Felicity only. I don't want anyone to be distracted by oh no, Laurel's dead, whatever shall we doooo? You know, that old saying of not speaking ill of the dead was taken to huge extremes after Laurel, and in between sniggering about all the wonderful things she's supposed to have done and said, we missed that all of a sudden, it was all about Laurel. It got so bad that I actually read an article about FRIDGING in relation to Laurel (it was the last article I read on themarysue, I can tell you that). Seriously? Laurel wasn't fridged! But that's how badly her death warped the narrative, and, just speaking for myself here, I don't want that to happen in my story. I want my characters to stay fixed on target, not be distracted by Laurel is dead! Funeral for Laurel! Eulogy and being outed (and all her cases are overturned, thanks Oliver) for Laurel! Grieving for Laurel! At least the horrible Samantha and her useless brat left, never to be seen again (am praying to the old gods and the new, here). Laurel died. And it might have been (or almost certainly was) a great impetus for celebration around these parts, but on the show the characters were devastated. And I really do not want to spend thousands of words on their grief and desire for vengeance.

Also, it's the only thing which is a callback to that coronation, which I'm glad to hear, after reading all the smug "It's exactly like Robb's! That means Jon is gonna die the same way!" proclamations. So, it's as a lot of us thought - proud and slightly worried, because now even more people are gunning for them (coughLittlefingercough) than before. I disagree that she wanted recognition at the proclamation - if she did, the whole 'Ramsey, I sentence you to die by dog' thing would have taken place in the open air. Or maybe she would have borrowed Longclaw, and inexpertly hacked him to death. No, right now she's happy being the eminence grise - she knows that as long as Jon is in charge, she will never have to do anything she doesn't want to. I love that little conversation between them after their reunion, going something like: Sansa: Say you forgive me for being such a bitch to you. Jon: There's nothing to forg- Sansa: Forgive me! Jon: I forgive you. Does Sansa know that? There's bits of the series I haven't seen. You know, I'd love for Arya to have written a big WINTER IS COMING on the wall, using Walder's blood (maybe with a P.S. the pies are people), like the 'Kill the masters' in Mereen.

This is such an amazing video -it's just a masterpiece of editing, music, everything. It tells us all we need to know about Jon Snow. Re. what I think will become of him - I don't actually think he's going to die, at least not in the tv show (and if GRRM takes any longer, the books are going to be moot). See, he's already died. If he died again, we'd just shrug and say: "Priest / Priestess of R'hllor on Aisle 5, please!" It doesn't make any narrative sense to kill him, even if it's a wondrous scene of self-sacrifice, because we've been there, done that.