loki567

Cogman's spin-off didn't get picked up and he's not involved with the other ones. The whole "10,000 years in the past," thing throws me. What's the technology-level like? If GoT was the fantasy equivalent of the "War of the Roses," pre-Tudor era, wouldn't that make this show 8,000 B.C.? Did they have, "scheming socialites," back then? Has Westeros never developed as a culture?

Looking at the cast and I'm finally excited. As much as we could complain about certain peoples' wins, this is a hardcore group of gameplayers. It's going to be a straight slaughter and I can't wait to watch.

I sincerely doubt that. HBO is still basing its future around Thrones' spinoffs, this could hurt the overall value of the franchise. I'm pretty sure they would have preferred universal acclaim. Ratings and publicity were guaranteed for the final season, now they're more concerned with what the impact could be on season 1 of Bloodmoon. And I'm wondering what's going through the minds of Disney executives right now. Season 8 backlash has a similar feel to the Rian Johnson/TLJ firestorm. And while it's very arguable if TLJ led to Solo bombing, it definitely spooked Disney enough to scuttle their stand-alone SW films and try to go for a trilogy approach. Which ironically lead them to D&D. And if now D&D come with their own major baggage...

That article is powerful. Their situation is sad and yet their lives and reaction to the disease is so admirable. Such a shame it hit Stacy just as her career was taking off. Jonathan sounds like he's still completely in love with her.

The thing that makes me really nervous is the fact that, "The two will be similarly surviving as the contestants, though will have better initial supplies and more time for constructing their shelter and feeding themselves." Why!? Why would you have them LIVING AS CONTESTANTS unless there's the possibility that they might be able to enter the game? Why not just have them go to Ponderosa or something? It is because you need some sort of bullshit excuse of why it's really okay if they suddenly enter the game at the merge or something? Big Brother had the same thing with coaches in S14 and they inevitably re-entered the game as players because spending a bunch of tv time on a group of people who can't do anything would be a boring, waste of time.

It's the finale, I assume they'll be willing to space out the scenes a bit. I doubt/hope that they wouldn't kill Dany in the first 15 minutes or something. Probably in the 40 to 50 minute range.

Oh my god at those leaks. What happened to D&D? I know they wanted to move on but there's a difference between deciding to end your show early and putting that garbage to the screen. They've committed 11 years of their life to this thing (counting the original pilot), you figure they have some sort of pride in finishing the show strong. It seems to me the last two seasons have been like a college student pulling an overnighter on a paper that's due tomorrow for a class he doesn't particularly care about. The entire thing screams rough draft, that none of the writers sat down to think about the logic in their characters' actions or the themes that have been represented in the series. Then again, "themes are for eighth-grade book reports," so... Goodbye, D&D. This is the last work of yours I will ever watch and yeah, that includes Star Wars. Hearing the "punishment," came from Tyrion makes me feel a little better. I assume it's with the implication that the Night's Watch is gone, so basically he's telling Jon he can spend his life up North with the people he cares about.

I hate Joe. I'm sure he's perfectly nice guy in real life but never before has a Survivor player been jerked off so much after accomplishing so little. He's not even really that good at comps. He has no real "Survivor moment," to his name. He's just... there. And he gets slobbered on.

I still don't buy the spoilers or that the editors would do their winner like this. For example, Michele got a good edit where it felt like the editors were throwing in any reasonable content they could, to emphasis to the audience that she was a strong player. The simplest explanation is usually the correct one. They have a big character who's an underdog, he wins the necessarily comps to get to the end, he wins and gets 80% of the screentime like Ben or Mike. Otherwise, it's a case that the editors willingly tanked the season by giving their winner less of an edit than Natalie White. They've had a loser like that before in Terry and they still made sure to show the tribal dynamics of the majority alliance.

I'm pretty sure the mod got it from the same FB group. And the only thing supporting the spoiler is the Aurora boot when that was a fairly easy thing to predict.

I remember a leak of a filmed scene between the two of them. It might have been a fake scene to throw off spoilers or some sort of a "Jon tries to convince her to surrender," scene that got deleted.

I don't buy it. These "spoilers," came from the SpoiledSurvivor reddit mod who's been absolutely obsessed with Victoria all season. He got a boot list before last week's episode saying that Aurora was next to go so he thinks that confirms the list. But Aurora's always been an obvious target in the event of a Rick immunity win. And Chris seemed a likely candidate to return since that picture of him with a red buff months ago. So I'm still comfortable in saying there are still no confirmed spoilers out there.

The unfortunate thing is the show's going to almost lose all of its replayability now that we know what happens. Almost anything Jon, Jaime, Bran, Stannis, etc. Giant chunks of the show will not matter in the slightest because in the end they didn't matter in the slightest to the story. I know there's an argument that you can't show everything, but I wish the show had more ruthless with some of the periphery characters in order to give its main characters more screentime for development.

No way in the world the Jaime/Cersei thing goes down the same in the books. He was already out of love with her BEFORE she burned down the sept. That was 100% completely an invention by the show due to their love for LH. My guess is that Myrcella actually makes it out of Dorne and gets crowned by Cersei. When it looks like they're about to lose King's Landing (either to Dany or f!Aegon), Cersei poisons Myrcella (similar to how she nearly poisoned Tommen during Blackwater) and Jaime strangles her in rage.

Which is strange as the whole thing was planned as one season.

That's very, very possible. It would be horrible but the show's been capable of that kind of horrible. It also brings to mind the theory I've seen before that all past legends in Westeros' history might have been prophecies about our current characters past down through the history. For example, Tyrion's Lann the Clever, etc. So by the same token, Jon might have been the one to actually start the Azor Ahai legend about killing his wife and forging Lightbringer by stabbing Dany and restarting the Night's Watch.

I agree so much with that. There are complaints of either Dany and Jon ending up on the throne but these characters, in the books anyway, have spent the entire series learning and dealing with the weight of leadership. At a certain point, the story has to become predictable to make sense to the audience. And I still say Dany/Jon rule could be quite bittersweet in the sense that suddenly wouldn't magically heal all of Westeros' problems. They would have to deal with the reality of governing a broken nation.

A couple things I wonder about Bran, God Emperor of Westeros: 1. Does GRRM have plans for a post-ASOIAF Westeros story? I'm wondering if he might go full Dune with it and try some sort of far-flung story about a rebellion against 3ER a couple hundred years in Westero's future. 2. Did GRRM tell D&D that Bran would lose his personality when he took the persona of 3ER? How would he plan to write Bran's PoV if he'll know everything? I've heard it speculated that we might lose Jon's PoV due to his murder and the reason why we got Melisandre's is because GRRM wanted a PoV at the wall. It would be extremely messed up if something similar happens with Bran and we keep losing our connections with the Starks.

It depends on what kind of ending you want. Me personally? I just want something narratively consistent with the world the books set up. GRRM's always spoke against the idea of The Good King with his, "what was Aragon's financial policy after LOTR?" The idea that Bran would be a good choice because he has super powers seems to be a little too close to that. I would like Gendy as king, not because he would necessarily be a good one (although he'd probably do alright with Tyrion as his hand) but because it would be consistent with the realpolitik nature of ASOIAF. The lords of Westeros need somebody as a face of their power structure and they elevate Robert's heir who will do what he's told. Life (and politics) goes on same as it ever was.

You could make Hot Pie the king. That would be a surprise. Doesn't mean it's plausible. Bran doesn't have a claim, a desire to be king, or any connection to the Southern side of the story since book two. I mean hell, how are they even going to get Bran down there in the last two episodes? If the rumor is true and GRRM/D&D were looking for a slightly outside-the-box king, I wish they would have just gone Gendry.

That's similar to Arya's "You will close many eyes," thing. Sure, it's foreshadowing. Doesn't make it narratively coherent or satisfying.

A lot of these endings do make sense if you think about them and could be appropriately bittersweetly satisfying in the right writer's (read GRRM, not D&D) hands. And a lot of stuff has already been guessed: Tyrion - Hand of the King. Sansa - rules the North alone. Arya - wanders alone because she's unwilling to conform to Westeros' power structure. Jon - My hope is that him returning North isn't about restarting the Night's Watch, it's just about reuniting with Sam, Tormund, Gilly, and the remaining the Night's Watch/Wildlings. Those are the people he's closest with and Jon finding some peace would be a decent ending. Dany - she's always been a much more morally ambiguous character in the books and the fact she'll potentially start sliding down the great to insane Targaryen scale is plausible. Of course, the show shot itself in the foot there by not foreshadowing that at all and just turning her into a vehicle to deliver "awesome," moments. My only real WTF, that sounds terrible, is Bran being king. I just cannot imagine satisfyingly getting him from where he is in ADWD to king at the end of the series. If that's really GRRM's plan, he might be playing it a little too clever for his own good. I think I'd prefer f!Aegon as king over that scenario.

That's the Jon in GoT we've always gotten though. They've always made him exactly that stupid and gullible. It's bad writing, no question. But to suddenly make him into a political genius would be completely different that how they've presented Jon for eight years now.

I've had one simple rule when following GoT the last four seasons. NEVER ASSUME THAT THESE WRITERS ARE DOING THE INTERESTING OR COMPLEX THING. Everything, every character beat and story detail, is laid out in the most simple, starkest (no pun intended) terms. The internet graveyard is littered with instances of people trying to give complex meanings to GoT's shit writing and it never ever amounts to anything. I've seen a bunch of "Political Jon," stuff this year and absolutely not going to go down like that. Dany will go crazy because of Missandei's death, Jon will kill her because of her craziness, the end. D&D are such strange writers and in how they really seem to think it's not a writer's job to give their characters or story inner meaning. Their response of , "Themes are for eighth-grade book reports," is the most unusual thing I can ever remember seeing from two professional writers in an interview about their work. And even their cast members often seem completely befuddled by D&D's refusal to give them any real direction in why their characters to do the things they do.

I got to assume those are fake. Crushed by a building? Come on even D&D wouldn't do that. Their main flaw is trying to make everything "epic," would they suddenly go small during Cersei's death?