ElizaD

This season, the Night's Watch plot has been so much better than anything else that's been going on. Now, finally, the White Walkers get to be an awesome enemy. I wish they got all the way to King's Landing, but I guess the southern half of the continent will only have to deal with winter instead of having to face the stupidity of their game. Loved the tension and then the action, loved Jon's big fight, loved the Night's King. And the giant! I'm also joining the praise of the wildling woman. Only one episode yet she seemed more like a believable, real person than the Sand Snakes, or Daario, who's had 2+ seasons as Dany's love interest. Cersei never learns, and aging up Tommen has made him seem unsuited to being king. He's a nice kid, but his inability to cope has gotten to the point where "lack of training" no longer feels like a good enough excuse. It's grating to watch Dany's smug speeches and Tyrion's flawless perfection in one scene.

One of the things that annoyed me about ADWD was the feeling that the book and the plots of the POVs were unfinished. At least Jon's final chapter was a proper cliffhanger, but not having either of the two battles felt like getting the Blackwater buildup x2 without any actual battle and resolution. I thought the show could fix that and have at least one battle this season, but the summaries of the last two episodes have made me feel that, unfortunately, we might get the dull book endings. Stannis gets Sansa/Theon but the Boltons still live. Dany runs into the Dothraki. Cersei walks. Jaime leaves with Myrcella. Jon is stabbed. Arya is still in Braavos. Maybe Tyrion gets to imprison Hizdahr and that's the end of the Sons of the Harpy on the show, with the battle cut so that everyone just waits for Dany to return to Meereen in season 6.

I hope that Dany's time with the Dothraki is a mercifully brief two-episode thing before she returns to Meereen and gets on a ship around 6x03 or 6x04. If Show Arya spends time with actors instead of returning with Mace, I have no idea how she gets back to Westeros. If Show Jaime returns to KL with Myrcella, it's going to be tough for him to leave the city without looking like an idiot who abandons his kids when they're in a dangerous, volatile situation. Maybe they'll merge the North/Vale/Riverlands storylines by having Littlefinger's army seek Walder's permission to move north to fight Stannis just when a "Bolton" army arrives south. Littlefinger and Walder discover it's actually Sansa's new army, but it's too late for them to save themselves.

There was speculation that Randyll would side with the more martial Aegon over sweet Tommen, especially since, IIRC, Garlan was awarded lands to which his wife had a claim. Right now the Baratheons are the only major house that looks to be in danger of extinction, IMO. The last time we saw Robin Arryn on the show he was left with Royce to get some proper training, which suggests that he survives. The Tullys have Edmure and the Blackfish, who might resurface in season 6 if Walder does, and their heirs are the Stark kids. It would be interesting if the show is including the Tarlys and Euron's attack on the Reach because the Tyrells fall in the books due to some combination.of Aegon, Margaery's trial and their failure to protect the Reach. I admit I'm hoping for it, because I think it makes sense based on what's been said about the Tyrell history and their current situation in the books.

It looks like someone tweeted Graham McTavish of The Hobbit and Outlander about Randyll.

We'll finally get to say RIP, Balon Greyjoy. Since they're casting a Greyjoy brother they could be doing the Kingsmoot, but the fact that Sam's trip to Oldtown will even be included and the casting of so many Tarlys immediately made me think of the speculation that Euron will strike a major blow at the Tyrells and the Reach. Bran must have a vision of young Ned; I'm guessing the boy who's big for his age and the older Northern boy are Robert and Brandon. Will that eventually lead to a Sean Bean flashback where he reveals Jon's parentage? Would they cast Septon Meribald just for a scene between him and the Hound? Since Brienne is in the North, I don't think she's likely to return to the Riverlands unless Sansa is with her. It would be strange to see a Sansan reunion when the speculation is that if he reappears it'll be to fight Ungregor, but then, the Walder Frey actor supposedly said he's returning in season 6 (don't know the original source of that information). Without Stoneheart and with Show Jaime likely going back to the KL plot with Myrcella, only Sansa seems like she could be headed for a confrontation with Walder. The leading actress might be part of Arya's next job. No idea which specific characters the priestess and the fierce warrior could be, but mixed/any ethnicity suggests Essos. Could they have decided to spend some of Dany's time on gaining a Dothraki army?

WOTW has the first casting descriptions: The Tarlys and Meribald are pretty obvious, and I think Euron rather than Victarion is the infamous pirate. One boy has green eyes like Sean Bean, as WOTW points out, and is being introduced, which implies future appearances. Could this mean a series of Ned visions?

And season 6 casting has begun! They don't use names but some roles are easy to guess. Damn, it looks like they really are committed to

In general, I think the show right now is more grim than the books. It's stuck in The Empire Strikes Back without those hints of The Return of the Jedi that made ADWD's Northern storyline so good - horrible things were happening, but it was also clear that people were getting mad as hell and ready for a big move against the Boltons/Freys. I'll always regret that Dany didn't sail to Dorne after ACOK. Then she could have been proving her queenship on the continent she actually wants to rule. The conflict could have come from winning the trust of the Martells (Rhaegar abandoned Elia, after all, and Aerys kept her and her children as hostages) and from the effort to get the Dornish, who excel at guerrilla warfare in their own land, to commit an army to her cause. The KL characters would have had to react to news of her doings and she wouldn't have been as isolated.

Season 1: you should have known Tysha was a whore, women don't want sex right after being rescued from attempted rape. Season 5: let's have the Sam/Gilly sex scene right after he rescues her from attempted rape. Show Sansa really is Book Jeyne, an isolated sex slave, with the only difference being that she's trying to escape. They could have made her more of a Jeyne/Manderly merge and emphasized the politics, but no, let's just have her stuck in a room and taken out for a repeat of her season 1 finale. There's only three episodes left and since Sansa is a captive with no opportunity to mess with the heads of Roose/Walda/Myranda, her only achievement will likely be getting Theon to confess that her brothers live and somehow signaling her rescuers. Dany and Tyrion meeting, which should have been a major moment, fell flat and the big moment was the one everyone already knew about, Cersei's arrest (it's my personal impression that the most talked about storylines, for good or bad, are still Winterfell and King's Landing even though people have been waiting for Dany/Tyrion for ages). I've praised the overall quality of the cast, but watching Jonathan Pryce, I couldn't help but feel that he makes the rest look like TV actors in the old, less than complimentary sense of the term. The High Sparrow is perfectly believable as a man capable of knocking down Olenna and trapping Cersei. I think he's more intimidating than Tywin, who was predictable in his hardness. The new Myrcella doesn't seem like a significantly better actress than the extra who used to play her, but at least this week Obara/Nymeria shared what has been Bronn's best contribution to this plot: eyerolling at the ridiculousness going on. That little response to Tyene's game did more character-building and implied past history better than anything else in previous Dornish scenes. Dorne is B-movie, but compared to the dreary misery of other plots, it's starting to be so bad it's good. Tyene's scene was straight out of pulp fantasy - exotic hottie demonstrates her power by showing her boobs to the hero (who is far less attractive yet somehow still sexy to her, dear reader).

The show wants us to view things from a 21st century perspective. It applauds Arya and Brienne as plucky warrior women, presents the bigotry Tyrion faces as an injustice, and tackles religious extremism in a way that echoes modern movements. It's not a matter of medieval realities but the choice of the modern showrunners that Tyrion's slavery becomes an easy little adventure and Sansa's marriage means captivity and rape. The treatment of women dependent on their class, as did that of men. What could be done to a peasant differed from what could be done to a noble. And noble women in particular did have rights - they could appeal to their relatives and to religious authorities to have their marriages annulled or a divorce granted on the grounds of abuse by the husband. People weren't idiots and could see that early consummation led to cases like Henry Tudor's 13-year-old mother nearly dying in childbirth and never again getting pregnant: the death of a young mother, especially when infant mortality meant you were never safe with just one heir, would defeat the whole purpose of marrying to secure power and wealth. So early consummation was frowned on, and there are plenty of examples of royal marriages that were not consummated when the bride was young; the peasants, in general, married at a later age. Rape was a crime that, if accepted as such and proven (and let's not pretend we're perfect today when it comes to that), led to serious punishment: neither the law nor the people formed a hivemind of universal, practical or emotional indifference to rape. GOT is not a realistic portrayal of medieval customs and attitudes: it's a very selective modern interpretation of a wartime situation in a fantasy setting where Tyrion and Jorah get to be slaves without needing to worry about male rape, no matter how realistic that would be. Ramsay's abuse of Sansa is idiotic from the long-term perspective that Roose should be capable of. By being violent with her, he risks causing injury that endangers her ability to have useful Stark/Bolton children or might even cause the miscarriage of a child that has already been conceived.

Once again Cersei mentions burning cities for her children. The writers are either aware of the theory and deliberately trolling readers or it's totally going to happen. The show cuts the Riverlands and the Vale for B-movie femme fatales and rape but apparently keeps Oldtown. Huh. Maybe they'll introduce a Greyjoy uncle after all, or maybe it'll be a relatively cheap set where Sam finds some kind of information about how to fight the undead. I could see Arya finding some way to return to Westeros on Mace's ship. It would make her training quite short, but if they still want 7 seasons (or even a split season of 7 and a half), neither Arya nor Dany will have time to do much in Westeros if they don't leave in the first half of season 6.

I actually think the slave rape stood out because it wasn't like the shocks and extreme edginess that we tend to get in tales about Gregor or Ramsay. It was like a scene from those low-budget dramas that portray everyday life as realistically and depressingly as possible, with no cinematic tricks to spice up what's going on: there was no pleasure in the act, no energy to be found in either the self-loathing rapist or the victim who'd become resigned to her life, and the whole situation was full of this mundane, weary ugliness. In a way, it felt like the perfect scene for the inclusion of a rape that couldn't delight the creeps in the audience: there was nothing shocking about it, nothing titillating, it simply showed Tyrion at his lowest point in a way that didn't have the grandeur or wish-fulfillment of the kind of villain moments people are drawn to because even though those characters are evil, they are in charge and do what they like without having to care about what others say. The explanations about Jaime/Cersei were a mess, with the director saying one thing and the showrunners another. Whatever the original idea was, I feel that the execution must have been made worse by miscommunication. Alfie's season 2 is still one of my favorite GOT performances (perhaps the favorite for the way it made me love a story I never cared about) and I've been posting for years about how I much I looked forward to his seeing ADWD plot onscreen. Such an opportunity, yet now it will be remembered for Sansa's rape. IMO, the show probably wouldn't be as successful if it wasn't so black and white and easy to digest once the viewer gets used to the massive cast, but I do think it would be possible to push the boundaries more than is done. To me GOT is above all, and even more so than ASOIAF, an epic soap with its emphasis on twists, secrets and character interaction. When it does that well it's great soapy fun, but it's such a shame that it's including rape as drama, one of the dodgiest soap cliches, when it won't devote time to exploring it with the kind of thoroughness and honesty that soaps at least try to make their goal when tackling rape storylines these days. I agree that Ramsay is tiresome. It's like GRRM wanted a gruesome villain who would top the fan favorite twist of Gregor confessing to Elia's rape before killing her seemingly victorious brother. I may despise the great leader and misunderstood woobie interpretations of Tywin and Tyrion but I can see how they came about because those are complex characters who have things they are very good at and moments of vulnerability that explain their actions. But Ramsay is a non-character. There's nothing there except dwelling on atrocities. He seems to exist for the hype of "what line will he cross next?!" and I find that tedious, predictable and off-putting in a way that Tywin never was. I cheered Tywin's death, but before that he had countless good and varied scenes with the rest of the cast. Ramsay inspires nothing expect the hope that this murder clown will get off the screen.

Sansa's wedding dress included the little fish pins that Catelyn used to wear and in the previous episode she had her collar-thing, so she's going Northern again. This was the first Northern costume that stood out in quality/expensiveness and looked like it was meant to be the equivalent of the kind of power-dressing Cersei, Margaery and Dany do in their more glamorous environments. Margaery's second wedding dress looked as awesomely campy as the first, it's a shame we saw so little of it. Minus points: the Sand Snakes' Power Rangers look. Myrcella got the sweet, airy ingenue dresses compared to the more form-fitting Ellaria/Snake costumes - I'm not yet sure whether that works or is way too obvious.

Whatever happens to Sansa in the books, and I don't think it'll all be smooth sailing, I doubt she will repeat Jeyne's storyline of being raped by Ramsay, a character who exists to outdo all the sadistic sickos GRRM had previously written about. I don't believe that Book Sansa will undergo a similarly horrible marital rape: the more likely possibility is that the showrunners wanted to include the Ramsay/Theon/Jeyne storyline they liked and just changed the victim without caring about anything in Sansa's story/character other than that, I would now predict, she eventually returns North when her Vale plot has played out? Marriage to Ramsay is a complete failure that gets her nothing: she abandoned the safety and untouched army of the Vale, its malleable child-lord, and the virginity that was an asset on the marriage alliance market for the taint of association with the hated, doomed Boltons and the mere chance that maybe Stannis will attack Winterfell when she and random peasant servants can stab the guards at the gate or something. She won't gain any power by being in Winterfell as an isolated wife getting raped by her husband and having to hope for help from servants. Whatever GRRM has said about not writing POV rapes, in addition to the scenes from Dany's early marriage and Cersei's memories of Robert's visits to her, he has also written a rape scene from the POV of the rapist: Tyrion's rape of the sex slave in ADWD. Which, surprise surprise, didn't end up on GOT. The show isn't more intelligent or realistic than ASOIAF for adding random rape scenes with no fallout for female characters while feverishly trying to rewrite Tyrion's consistently dodgy treatment of women to make him a modern gentleman since it can't tolerate gritty realism that's applied universally. Nothing about the statements from people involved with the show or its past treatment of rape/nudity has convinced me that this is about anything but getting sexy controversy while shying away from realistic treatment of rape: realism would mean devoting screentime to a variety of emotional responses and admitting that living in a shitty society doesn't just mean adding rape for women but recognizing that your male fave has taken advantage of ways in which that shittiness enables him to get sex from unwilling women. At least GRRM admits that people who are capable of decency can be caught up in this system and become abusers. GOT, on the other hand, doesn't see it as in any way relevant to the characters of Tywin and Tyrion that they were involved in rapes, turns its unfavorite Jaime into a rapist (for one episode, then it returns to wooby oathkeeper Jaime) because his book objections to rape say nothing about him, and adds rape scenes for women without that changing their character development. In short, rapists aren't held accountable for what they've done and rape victims get over it quickly, because ultimately it doesn't matter. That's a more callous, dismissive attitude than GRRM's. Instead of improving GRRM, as I argue they did by cutting plots like Aegon and probably getting Dany and Tyrion to meet sooner, in this matter they've chosen to out-sleaze him by selectively adding more casual rape into major characters' plots while cutting the rape that was too realistic in its illustration of the miseries of slavery and Tyrion's lowest point. There were no consequences to the Jaime/Cersei rape. The showrunners could have gotten a story out of that if they wanted to, with the rape driving Jaime and Cersei further apart, especially if she connects it to Robert's treatment of her, so that Jaime's quest to save Myrcella and prove himself would have more weight. But the rape existed solely for the purpose of that one scene. Acting like rape has zero effect (Cersei) or leads to one episode of crying (Dany and, I'm predicting, Sansa) before it's forgotten is not a tribute to the survivors' agency. It's just a way to have your cake and eat it too: "It's realistic! But they're strong women!" The show gets the hype, the acclaim from the "pervert side" of the audience, and can act like it never happened after a couple of comments defending the scene with talk about realism and choices. I wish the total fail of the Sand Snakes had been the big thing about this episode, because at least it seems to have united the fandom and wouldn't have involved social media being flooded with endless victim-blaming and mockery of rape's emotional consequences. The fight choreography is starting to look so bad it's good.

Jeyne's plot was GRRM's most brutal, but at least he also managed to use it to make a thematic point: Theon was responsible for the death of innocent peasant children in ACOK, now he risks himself to save a girl who is not of high birth. He doesn't save Jeyne because she's a Stark and he owes it to her, but because allowing anyone to be abused that way is not right. His own sufferings have made him capable of empathy even if the girl is no one (so the show will also be lessening Theon: Show Theon will rescue a Stark, a specific rather than a general expression of remorse and recognition of human value - even if he's forgiven after he tells fellow victim Sansa that he didn't kill Bran and Rickon, the peasant boys are still dead). The show managed to make that plot worse by treating rape as something that can be casually added to a female character's storyline. In ADWD, Jeyne is a minor character who only had brief previous appearances: minor characters support the stories of POVs. But the show reduced Sansa, a POV character, to playing Jeyne's role: she is repeating her season 2 storyline, now with rape since the actress turned 18, for the sake of Theon's character development. To me, perhaps the most infuriating thing about the rape scene (because more than anything else, it was utterly unnecessary) is that Book Tyrion's story includes more than one rape, yet Show Tyrion is such a knight in shining armor that we can't be allowed to forget how great he was to Show Sansa. At least Jeyne's rape was about only one male character; on the show, in addition to showing Theon's pain, rape was turned into yet another occasion to remind the viewers that Tyrion was the bestest, most considerate partner in Westeros. So Show Sansa gets Jeyne's rape and she has to prop up a character who, in the books, agreed to rape her, changed his mind, and after enduring a couple of months of sexless marriage was thinking about how she'd cry no more than she had to if he changed his mind again and went through with the rape after all. Show Tyrion gets to live in a rape-free fantasy version of Westeros (and now Essos) where prostitutes are happy to have sex with him and his slavery is set to be a merry escapade, while Show Sansa, who has been endlessly criticized by the fandom for not wanting to have sex with him and not placing his feelings first, gets raped after a reminder of how great her husband #1 was. In addition, Jeyne's rape was only one element of the Winterfell plot in ADWD. On the show, they've made big cuts and focused on the rape, which will lead to Theon rescuing the victim. Sansa, after being raped, will merely be doing what the show chose not to have her do in her own King's Landing storyline: she will be an active participant in her escape from her abuser #2, which will only be character development because the show had her dragged from the Purple Wedding a clueless puppet. Finally, Jeyne might vanish from the story after her rescue (my own guess is that she'll live but I don't know if we'll hear more about her than where she was sent), but whatever Show Sansa does after this will be a question mark - is she doing something Book Sansa would have done, or is she killing Freys and Boltons because her rape sent her on a badass path of revenge (nevermind that for male characters the murders of their families are reason enough, no personal experience of empowering rape required)? I'll praise the show when I believe it deserves it; who knows what will happen to Stannis now that he's coming into conflict with the showrunners' love of the Boltons' thrilling atrocities, but his time on the Wall was far better than I would have expected and the highlight of the first half of season 5 after two poor seasons for Team Dragonstone. Winterfell, however, is a mess where the #1 priority seems to have been making Jeyne's rape a bigger opportunity for articles about the latest GOT controversy by having Sansa raped instead. And for me, it becomes even worse when compared to the way the show sanitized Tyrion's rape of the slave in ADWD: Sansa is interchangeable with ASOIAF's most badly abused female rape victim, but Tyrion can't be given the rape scene he did have in the book (which showed the abuses enabled by the system of slavery that Dany is trying to eradicate, how broken the victims can be and how easy it is to forget what is right when society permits you to do wrong, but eh, let's have dragonfire and quips in Essos instead). GOT has shown no interest in being realistic about the trauma or complexity of different forms of rape: having the 100% evil sadist rape the pretty virgin girl is just about the laziest, least challenging option available, and it's disappointing to see it in 2015 when it feels like it belongs in those old pulp novels that were all "fate worse than death! but ooh, enjoy this scene even as you look forward to the hero's gruesome slaying of the rapist." GRRM can be hard to read, but at least he doesn't pretend Tyrion will always meet a hooker with a heart of gold and gives us things like Cersei's memories of drunken Robert for an examination of marital rape when it's called claiming his rights. I'll wish the very best for Sophie and Alfie in their careers, though. The story is a mess, but none of that is due to their acting: while the Sand Snakes are showing what happens when casting fails to elevate poor material, Sophie and Alfie are making the most of what they're given to do.

These gifs are the perfect summary of Dorne. I would never have expected Areo to be my #2 favorite after Doran, but at least he hasn't yet had a chance to look like an idiot.

I'm starting to feel that the Sand Snakes are the show's first major casting screwup. There was speculation that they were kept over Arianne because they have stuff to do in KL, but right now it's ridiculous to think of these characters confronting Cersei, Olenna or the High Sparrow and looking even remotely formidable. At least the absolute mess of Sansa's show storyline has Sophie and Alfie's acting. Dorne wasn't special in the books, but I'm still surprised by how badly it's flopping. It hasn't even had the campy fun moments of season 2 Dany's legendary Where Are My Dragons and Qarth. By cutting Manderly and the other pro-Stark lords and potentially setting up a situation where Sansa is raped and Stannis killed by the Boltons, the show has managed to make the Northern plot even more miserable than in ADWD where Roose's control over the events was starting to slip. I'd rather see a Bolton dead this season than spend one more year unspoiled in the futile wait for TWOW.

Show Sansa chose to marry Ramsay the way Book Sansa chose to marry Tyrion: she wasn't told about the marriage until it was too late to escape. The only choice was between being dragged to the altar or walking with her head held high. It's been a month since the spoilers/interviews made it clear this was happening, and it's still infuriating that the thing the showrunners loved most about the North in ADWD was Jeyne's rape. They were prepared to trash logic and character development just to have that rape and turn Sansa into a joke to viewers who see her repeating the same storyline, with the difference that the sexual violence escalates as the actress ages out of childhood. And this change becomes even worse when it's compared to their treatment of Tyrion. All the excuses about why rape is realistic and logical become irrelevant when it involves a character the showrunners actually care about: then it's removed. Tyrion is scrubbed clean of all unfortunate implications and instead held up as a shining standard of chivalry, because him raping an abused sex slave when he's depressed would be too realistic and we can't have a rape scene that's faithful to the book when it would make Tyrion look bad. Sansa, on the other hand, is given the role of a minor character who only existed to give Theon an opportunity to rescue the damsel and to provide the brand new information that Ramsay is a sadist who enjoys sexual torture, which we could never have guessed from his previous deeds. The showrunners removed rape from a male character's storyline and added it to a female character. Based on the total irrelevance of the Jaime/Cersei scene, I have zero reason to expect the rape to have any reason for existing beyond the courting of controversy by means of a disposable female character whose own storyline matters less than the question of which male character's storyline she can now be used to prop up (chivalrous Tyrion/poor Theon/wicked Ramsay). Show Sansa will be Jeyne Poole, with the awesome exception that she'll talk to/signal her rescuers. It's just an absolute mess. In the books Tyrion is a rapist and Sansa is not raped, yet the showrunners decided to create a situation where Tyrion becomes a saintly gentleman who would never abuse a woman and Sansa is raped to enable the "see how lucky she was with Tyrion!" comparisons. So Sansa's first marriage becomes about what a gentleman Tyrion is and her second becomes about how horrible her rape is for Theon, who must now overcome his fear to rescue her. How awful it is that Tyrion's child bride doesn't want him and he has to endure her unhappiness over her family's murders! How awful it is that Theon must watch Sansa's rape! And whether a female character is raped or not is just a minor detail that can be changed on a whim. When the showrunners said in an interview that they didn't think Tywin was a villain or a sadist, I thought that was a dodgy interpretation of a character who ordered a girl gang-raped. Now it's looking sadly indicative of their general use of rape as a source of cheap shocks that don't really matter in the long term. I have to take back my criticism of Downton Abbey's rape storyline and whether it focused too much on the husband's reaction. Compared to this, it's a high point of realism and characterization. Downton had Anna dealing with her trauma, it didn't try to pretend that her being raped in what had been a safe, happy workplace could be shrugged off, she received emotional and practical support from Mrs. Hughes, the show didn't follow the rapist on his visits to other houses for extra shocks, and Mr. Bates didn't blame Anna for causing what had happened through her choices. On GOT, Anna's decision to hide the rape would have been presented as bullshit "empowered woman makes a choice" stuff, the way they're trying to spin Sansa's rape, and GOT Anna would have actually succeeded at keeping Mr. Bates from finding out because rape changes nothing significant about a female character's development or behavior. Another mess: Dorne. It's utterly B-movie. Seeing the Sand Snakes makes me love Pedro Pascal's performance all the more: he had better source material, but he also made it work onscreen. The Sand Snakes just feel like non-actor extras and even Indira Varma has fallen victim to Dorne's suckiness. At least previous episodes had the improvement of the Wall storyline to feel upbeat about.

To me Dany looked like the Mad King, arranging a random execution and giving every survivor a reason to become a Harpy now that she might make them dragonfood on a whim, but since the showrunners didn't think Tywin was a bad guy who destabilized the realm for petty revenge I'm afraid the scene was meant to show Dany as a badass. Dany going to an imprisoned Hizdahr and saying he'll marry her, no reply required, is creepily similar to Sansa's forced marriages: I'm not sure if that's intentional and Dany is meant to be going downhill like in ADWD when she ordered a man's daughters tortured for information, or if it'll be justified later by Show Hizdahr turning out to be a Harpy so that it was alright to mistreat him, or if it's just plain not thinking about the implications. The lone Targaryen/Jon arrives thing was obvious and hilarious. Though Kit isn't the kind of actor to elevate his material, at least this season he finally has good material and his story has become much more watchable. The fandom's love for Roose's line about raping Ramsay's mother as something awesome has always creeped me out, so I'm not thrilled that the backstory was included on the show, though it's exactly the kind of thing I expect the showrunners to love. I predict a Talisa parallel for Walda: pregnant woman brutally killed. What wouldn't I give for Missandei/Grey Worm scenes to be cut in favor of screentime explaining that the Starks weren't the only ones murdered at the Red Wedding and that Ned's way of ruling actually earned him loyalty that's not just about the Stark name having a long history. But it would show that respecting the law and showing compassion can have positive consequences, too, and we can't have that on Game of Thrones. At least Shireen will keep on being the cutest thing ever and cheering me up until she gets killed. Show Stannis treating war with the Boltons like Take Your Kid to Work Day screams doom. I think this is the first episode that didn't feature King's Landing, not counting the Wall battle which wasn't an ordinary episode. Good. The show should have done that sooner, preferably during season 3 when KL was mostly filler.

Harry the Heir isn't Ramsay and arranged marriage isn't interchangeable with rape. Plenty of girls today are fine with the idea of their parents choosing a nice boy from a nice family for them. If Sansa's future storyline involves marrying Harry, that doesn't mean it's a minor adjustment to have her raped in her childhood home instead by the son of her brother's murderer, who happens to be Westeros' worst sadist. Having Sansa take the place of a minor character for extra tension and viewer titillation is treating her and her character development as completely secondary to the shock factor: the rape of a girl by Ramsay and for Theon's development is so important to the showrunners that Sansa can be reduced to a tragic prop despite being a POV character with severals books/seasons worth of history and, presumably, a future that's bigger than just being shipped to obscurity after she's rescued by Theon. But since Jaime raped Cersei with zero plot or emotional consequences, the showrunners are just standing by their earlier view that rape is easy to shrug off and can be freely added to a female character's story for a bit of extra hype. It's going to be sad to see the show spin this as empowerment: a victim who knows that she'll just be more violently raped if she says no is not some great manipulator making a choice when she does as her captor tells her. I'm damn sure the showrunners wouldn't add a non-book scene of a male character losing his virginity to rape by the enemy, no matter how logical and realistic it would be to show that men are raped during wartime, because that wouldn't be the kind of safe, sexy controversy that the rape of a pretty girl is. This is one of the reasons why the story feels so awful to me. I've been in the fandom for over ten years and seen the constant hate Sansa gets for being pretty and therefore shallow for not wanting to have sex with Tyrion, the arguments that it would have been perfectly alright for him to claim his rights and she should have submitted to it, and the outright wishes that her story will lead to rape, supposedly because it's logical and realistic but really because people want her punished. This forum is moderated and more grown-up than some places on the net so I haven't seen it here. But when I used to be active on the Westeros.org forum and before they started being tougher on posters wishing sexual violence on characters, it happened over and over again. Especially in earlier days people felt freer to say what should happen to Sansa and how marital sex can't be rape in Westeros without fearing bans. During the post-release ADWD discussion, "I hope Cersei marries Ramsay" became the way to wish rape on her without using the word that would invite a ban more obviously. And now that's happening to Sansa on the show. When I checked out Westeros and other forums before the show premiered but after she'd been confirmed to go to Winterfell, the possibility of Sansa's rape was already treated as an opportunity for jokes about what Ramsay will make her do. So, unlike the rapes on shows based on original material, this one will come with a history. I know there's a substantial part of the fanbase that won't be horrified but satisfied and gleeful, whether they're free to say so as on Reddit or whether they have to be more subtle about it as on Westeros. People are already posting about how unfair and cowardly the showrunners are for not including actual nudity in the rape scene.

Despite how disillusioned Book Jaime has become with Cersei, I don't think he can or will want to survive after he kills her, which is what things are pointing at IMO. The Jaime/Bronn talk seemed like heavy foreshadowing: Jaime will die in the arms of the woman he loves (at least metaphorically if not literally because he'll die as a result of/after killing her), but Cersei won't want the same thing because she'll be fighting him to stay alive. Dany's show vision of the ruined throne room and now Cersei saying she'll burn cities if Dorne harms Myrcella could support the theory that she'll succeed where Aerys failed and burn King's Landing, which will cause Jaime to kill her. On the show, Jaime hasn't started rejecting Cersei and it feels like at most he could reject her plan for Myrcella after seeing that she's happy with Trystane, but I still expect that he'll get Doran's permission to take Myrcella back to KL. Because of the likely timing, it's possible that Show Cersei won't have an opportunity to send for him before the walk of shame, in which case he wouldn't have that chance to reject her either. Show Jaime's disillusionment will probably be due to whatever bad things are likely to happen to Tommen/Myrcella in season 6 and Cersei's reaction to them.

New regulars:

I didn't pay much attention to grayscale in the books, but it getting mentioned on the show when so much has been cut has really made me wonder. It doesn't seem like the kind of thing the showrunners would love to include. If Tyrion dies of grayscale, maybe they felt they had to be faithful to the books even if it's not the most upbeat or glorious ending for their favorite. But dying of disease seems so low-key for someone as major as Tyrion. Maybe it becomes a widespread plague instead, but even then, it feels a little pointless - shouldn't winter and the epic return of the Others be enough to wreck Westeros? If that is done by a plague instead, the Others keep on being irrelevant.

I thought Pryce was great casting when I heard the news and I'm loving him in the role. The High Sparrow is so kindly, yet at the same time there's this feeling that he knows exactly what he's doing and he's playing a game that Cersei can't see. I'm really interested in how the show will handle him arresting Cersei: I hope he'll continue to have the same general tone of kindness even as he has people tortured and shamed instead of starting to make obvious lunatic faces. That would make him more formidable than the robotic bad guy-ness of Lancel and the other brothers. If the showrunners have tried to make Shireen extra lovable to make her possible death extra painful, in that, at least, they've succeeded brilliantly. What a wonderful scene. Stannis gets to be human while still being Stannis and Shireen gets yet another scene where she's just darling. Even though this Tommen is playing by an older actor than season 2 Bran, he seems so much less lordly and competent. Rolling my eyes at Dorne. It's such a B-movie with Jaime and Bronn's incredible bro adventures and a collection of hot dangerous women ("lemme kill the guy who sold me information to show how badass I am and to... ensure no one wants to sell me information again?"). But the place certainly looks great.