Elkins

If you're wondering why you're getting somewhat fuzzy responses here, NeelyO, it's because the show is very nearly caught up to the books when it comes to the King's Landing material. By the end of this season, I'm guessing we'll be caught up, and possibly even a tiny bit ahead. So, while your guess might not be quite as good as ours just yet, it's very nearly so. :-)

There may have been a sausage eating scene, although I don't remember one, but it couldn't have been very much like the scene on the show because the book doesn't have a castration scene at all. In the book, it's something that happened in the past and that Theon can barely even bring himself to acknowledge. It's revealed to the reader only through hints and allusions, and by the way that Theon's internal narration keeps returning to the issue only to circle around it, shuffling along its edges until he simply can't bear it anymore and starts deflecting. It was so subtle that I suspect many readers would never have caught it at all if it hadn't been for that awful wedding night scene with Jeyne, where it was alluded to far more directly and undeniably. Oh, wow, I can't believe I never noticed that! That's absolutely true, what they did with Pod was exactly the same delusional fantasy that Littlefinger was talking about in that scene. How do they keep managing to do stuff like that? Ooh, that's a great comparison! It does have just that sort of gothic feel to it, although with the twist (as the script itself pointed out) that the heroine is not the stranger new to the house, as she would usually be in a gothic tale, but is instead the native, or maybe even almost a personification of the house itself, invaded and surrounded by interlopers. The relationshop of the heroine to the house is flipped on its head: the genus loci of the setting in this story does not need to be won over by the heroine; it is already the heroine's ally, and so rather than finding herself confronted by hostile servants like Mrs. Danvers, Sansa instead encounters furtively supportive servants like that unfortunate 'the North Remembers' woman. Speaking of "The North Remembers," that's another sort of cool inversion, isn't it? It seems to me that usually the echoes of the past play an antagonistic role in a romantic gothic, but in this story memory and remembrance are not forces arrayed against the protagonist but instead the forces that strengthen and arm her. It's a kind of ghost story, but one in which the audience is firmly on the side of the ghost. The Ghost of Winterfell. Huh. I think maybe I'd...better stop now, before I start comparing Sansa to Rebecca and the Boltons to the second Mrs. de Winter or something. Oops. Too late!

Brought over from the Episode Thread-- You know, I was worried about that as well, but now I'm seriously beginning to wonder if we're being led down the garden path on this point. Who wanted Shireen to come north to the Wall with the rest of her family? Mel did. Who absolutely did not want her daughter to come north? Who even told her daughter that she didn't want her to come? That was Selyse. Selyse scolds Shireen for fraternizing with Gilly. When Shireen objects that Gilly wouldn't harm her, Selyse pauses a moment. This strange expression settles on her face. "You have no idea what people will do," she then tells her daughter, her face as grim as death. "All your books, and you still don't know." And in episode 4, there's that terribly foreboding interaction between Mel and Selyse. Selyse has yet again been beating herself up over having borne Stannis no sons, but "only deformity." "Those scars mean nothing to the Lord of Light," Mel tells her. "Her father's the Lord's chosen king." She pauses, then looks meaningfully at Selyse. "And her father's blood runs through her veins." And Selyse's response? She looks absolutely terrified, and then scurries off like a frightened rabbit. I'm starting to think that there may have been some deliberate misdirection going on here. If either of Shireen's parents is a danger to her right now, I'm beginning to suspect that it's not Selyse at all.

So, a week or two ago on the "Unpopular Opinions" thread, I wrote this: Yeah. So you can doubtless imagine my reaction to them doing with Gilly the exact same stupid thing that I was so pleased to believe they were indirectly denouncing through Shae. What the everliving fuck, writers? Yes, that's right. We women are just wired funny that way. Attempted rape makes us horny! Totally true! Blech. It looked to me like a small auger. Basically, a primitive hand drill. I'm hoping it will be used as a lockpick, or perhaps even for its intended purpose of drilling a hole, rather than as a weapon. We already have a whole boatload of female warriors in this story; I don't see any benefit in turning Sansa into one as well. I am absolutely riveted by the entire Winterfell plotline this season. I find it intense, atmospheric, claustrophobic, gripping and dark. The character work seems fantastic to me, and I also think that it is visually just gorgeous. Definitely one of those "Huh. I guess I'm just...watching a very different show than all of these other people are somehow?" situations for me. Some of the interpretations I'm seeing I can't even find a way to connect to the show I've been watching. But eh, whatcha gonna do? Things just shake out that way sometimes. My Unsullied housemates have only seen the first two episdoes so far. (They've decided they like this show much better binge-watched, so we've been storing up episodes to watch later.) I'm really curious to see what their reaction to the storyline is going to be. She and Cersei certainly have that in common! I have loved watching Cersei talk to the High Sparrow this season. She gets this great expression on her face that I remember from all the way back in Season 1, when she often looked like that when speaking to Ned Stark. It's this "Surely you must have an ulterior motive, so why can't I figure out what it is? This is most intriguing!" expression. It cracked me up to find that Olenna was exactly the same as Cersei in her inability to figure out how to deal with someone who simply doesn't want any of the things she has to offer. I desperately want Qyburn to give the next Small Council meeting a miss -- maybe he gets too caught up in dealing with FrankenGregor or something -- just so we can get a scene of Pycelle sitting all alone in the chamber, glancing around at all of the empty chairs and wondering how long he really needs to wait before he can leave. A Qyburn and Pycelle scene would be great fun too. Come on, writers! It's Julian Glover and Anton Lesser, for heaven's sake! Make them happy by writing them a nice juicy scene. Let them chew up the scenery a bit. C'mon, you know you want to... I thought it made perfect sense. He's been horribly broken. Brainwashed. The poor bastard is way beyond Stockholm Syndrome; he's been worn down all the way to the point of identity loss. His ego has been shattered to such an extent that he can barely even imagine rebelling. He thinks of Ramsay as a force so unassailably powerful that when his sister came to rescue him, he couldn't perceive it as anything other than one of his master's tests. He loves Big Brother. But that doesn't mean that he can't still empathize with Ramsay's other chew toys, or pity Sansa when he sees her being cruelly treated. In his own way, he actually did try to help her. When he earnestly warned her not to try to oppose Ramsay, that was him trying to help her. In his mind, he was giving her some really good advice there, because he knows all too well that "it can always get worse." He's just...not anywhere near ready yet to help Sansa in any way that she (or we) would consider very useful. But I think he'll get there. I think Sansa will help him to find himself again. I agree with Pete Martell that Ramsay is deliberately pitting them against each other, but unlike Pete, I believe that they will thwart him. I don't read this story as one that is heading for utter despair. I just don't see any signs of that being the story. The story I see taking shape here is one of these two people helping each other, and by doing so saving themselves. Oh dear. Right, so I know this probably seemed like really pointed commentary to you when you were writing it, but you've chosen the one and only sex scene in this entire series in which consent was actually actively sought. Which makes it, well, not very pointed, I'm afraid. Rather blunt, in fact. If you want to object to a woman raping a man on this show, Gilly isn't the rapist you're looking for. Ygritte is.

As washerwomen! It's always washerwomen for some reason, either disguised as the washerwomen themselves, or hiding in the laundry that the washerwomen are carting about. Since there are two of them, maybe they can do both! But first, they'll have to have a catfight over which of them has to dress up as -- ugh! -- someone who works for a living. Nah. That would be a happy ending, and we all know how this show feels about happy endings. That, and I think she also wanted him to start feeling the symptoms so that he would be willing to drink the antidote. Otherwise, from Bronn's point of view, it would be the daughter of this notorious poisoner trying to convince you to drink an unknown substance, one which she's been carrying around on her person like a spy with a cyanide tablet, because she claims that she poisoned you. Even though you're feeling perfectly fine. Yeah. I don't think Bronn would ever have agreed to drink it under those circumstances, so once she decided she didn't want him to die, she had to find a way to get that poison working faster. Nonetheless, I agree that it was totally gratuitous. That the writers were able to come up with a reason for Tyene to be flashing her boobs doesn't change the fact that the scene in question looked as if it had been filmed for the express purpose of illustrating the concept of the "male gaze." Right up until this episode, I cherished my twisted little head canon that Gilly's baby had actually died ages ago, but that no one had been able to bring themselves to explain to her what it means when a baby turns cold and stiff and stops suckling or crying. But then this week they had to go and show us a clearly-living baby, smiling and gurgling. Dammit! Yes! Exactly! Every time he comes on screen, I murmur: "Oh, look, it's that guy. He lives in Brooklyn and works as a barista. And he's in a band." I liked the old Daario better. He was hilariously OTT, and I found him weirdly believable as just the sort of preening douchebag that someone like Dany might well find appealing as a boy toy. It was just a far more fun take on the character. But I guess they decided it was too camp. Because, you know, heaven forbid we not be able to take the plotline with the magically fire-proof exiled princess and her three dragons seriously enough. I thought the slave owner looked decidedly put out when Dany and Hizdahr showed up, and that's exactly what I assumed was his reason: because he knew that he was now going to lose a lot of his slaves in fights to the death. I imagine that if he hadn't had VIPs in the audience, he would have been ordering them to fight just to first blood or surrender, since the main objective was to determine which of them were good enough to compete in the big event. But I guess when the VIPs drop by, you have to put on a good show for them. A pity no one told him in advance that Dany only likes violence when she's the one to initiate it. Oh no! How awful that must have been sounding, yikes! It's a carry-over from the book fandom. There are a lot of Waldas in the Frey family, so they all have nicknames like Fair Walda, Dark Walda, Fat Walda, Little Walda, Tall Walda, etc. I'm sure that no one using it here had the slightest intention of fat-shaming either the character (who has a bit of a cult following among book readers) or her actress. Well, the High Sparrow did say something about the boy only piece by piece divesting himself of sin. Maybe Lancel confessed to something like fornication with a married woman when he first joined the Sparrows, but never actually named the woman in question until Littlefinger told Olenna who told the High Sparrow who then confronted Lancel about it. I don't know if I think that the High Sparrow knows about the regicide. Unlike adultery, that seems a pretty enormous crime to just be brushed off with a "well, you're obviously contrite, so all is forgiven." If he did spill about the regicide, I don't see how either he or Cersei would survive the fallout, and while Lancel is clearly pretty caught up in his fanaticism, I don't know if I think he's quite that suicidal.

I'm wondering if they're going to have news of Balon's death somehow reach Stannis's encampment just in time for Mel to use that piece of info to put even more pressure on him. I'm finding that plotline so anxiety-provoking. Or hey, maybe they'll add some B-movie femme fatales and a few rapes to the Oldtown plotline! The show still hasn't managed to match Martin for fanservicey quasi-lesbianism, so how's about a scene where Sarella and her best friends, two other students who are also playing Sweet Polly Oliver at the Citadel (it's a little-known fact that there are, in fact, no male students at the Citadel at all), exposit about dragons and obsidian candles while fingering each other? Then the Ironborn can burst in and show us just how 'gritty' the world is by raping and slaughtering them all. It can help to motivate both Sam and the Dornish! Call me, HBO! Oh, I am absolutely dreading that scene. Not only because it was such an upsetting sequence in the books already, but also because there are just so many ways they could screw up filming it. It's like a minefield with only one safe route to the other side. And I'm convinced that even if they do get it perfectly right, there'll still be a massive shitstorm. At this point I think they're in a no-win situation when it comes to anything that even so much as points towards the misogyny of the setting, but a scene in which a woman is being stripped and subjected to the voyeuristic gaze as a way of literally slut-shaming her? Oh, yeah, and also it's a kind of "hoist by her own petard" situation, so you can be sure there will be plenty of people using and then defending phrases like "she was totally asking for it?" Oh, yes. This is going to be fun. Ugh. I'm already cringing just thinking about it. And that's what makes him far more interesting, IMO, than either a simple Good Guy Champion of the People or an outright Bad Guy Intolerant Bigot could ever be. The High Sparrow is the leader of a populist religious movement, and to my mind he's a perfectly fair example of the type. Far too many populist leaders really have been associated with fanning the flames of already-extant bigotries. It saddens me, as my own politics lean left, but there's a long and very nasty history of demagogues going precisely that route. The High Sparrow can both speak against the injustices visited upon the downtrodden masses and encourage them in homophobia, misogyny and intolerance; and if viewers are feeling torn about him because of that? Well, good! They absolutely should be! I don't think it's at all a bad thing for the show to present political forces in ways that encourage audience ambivalence.

Yeah. That's what I was dreading with this plotline, actually. I was worried that Ramsay would play nice with her for a while, winning her over until she was off-guard and starting to relax, and then turn on her later For Teh Dramaz! The thing is, while I know that it may sound like I do sometimes, I really don't trust these writers, and I was stomach-churning over the idea that they might revert her all the way back to "Ha, ha! Sansa's still a stupid little girl who can be tricked into thinking evil men good!" :nods: Part of the problem in evaluating the adaptation from here on out is that none of us knows the shape of the endgame. Does the fact that they've folded Sansa's plotline into the Winterfell story mean that she will be somehow reclaiming or attempting to reclaim Winterfell in the books? I'm guessing that's the case, but obviously I don't know for sure, and neither does anyone else here. That is perfectly fair. I have my own reasons (which I've probably gone into at far too great a length already) for approving of this particular adaptation choice, but there have been plenty of others that I've considered poor. So I can hardly object to your lack of faith in them. They have justly, and through their own efforts, earned that lack of faith. Ugh, yeah, sorry about that. I woke up early this morning with it still stuck in my head and have been cursing myself furiously for it ever since. Even that Bumblebee Tuna commercial that I've had stuck in my brain for forty years has not sufficed to drive it out of there, and usually that one can override anything. Tenser, said the Tensor. Tenser, said the Tensor. Tension, apprehension and dissension have begun. That, indeed, is the thing that's made me run the most hot and furious this week (as if it weren't obvious). To be fair, though, I don't think that's an argument any of the people still engaging with this thread have been making. Sean, Pete, and Boundary have different objections to the direction the writers have taken Sansa's story. I agree, and actually, I think a lot of the disagreement over the scene comes down to this very question, which is far more subjective on film than it is in prose. I saw the scene as told primarily from Sansa's POV, and only secondarily from Theon's, so I didn't read it as a fridging situation where the victim's perspective was erased in favor of a male protagonist's ManPain. Instead, I saw it as a much-needed corrective to some of the more problematic aspects of the source material. Unfortunately, though, I'm not educated in film analysis, so I don't have the grounding or the vocabulary to explain what it was about the way the scene was filmed that makes me reject that reading. (Maybe I should take some classes or something, actually, because I'm finding being in this situation both immensely frustrating and surprisingly distressing.) But anyway, yeah, I imagine that if I had read the scene the way that some of those who are angry about it have described themselves reading it, I'd probably be frothing right alongside them. ElizaD: You make some really good points there. I can't argue with the fact that they have removed a lot of rapiness from Tyrion's story. In general, I think they've significantly lightened up all of the characters. Personally, I think that's improved the antagonists tremendously (I really dislike the lack of nuance in Martin's villains), but it's also taken a lot of the bite out of the work as a whole. And I would agree with you that Tyrion is the character who has been the most dramatically bleached, although Cersei would run a close second. What I'm not sure about is whether a show hewing closer to the original in that respect could really have succeeded. As it stands, I hear people complain all the time about the villains being too one-dimensionally villainous and the story lacking sympathetic characters (and each time I do I think, 'oh, boy, you'd just love the books then'). Combine that with the fact that many people find things far more visceral in a visual medium... I just don't know. Maybe it still would have worked, but I think chances are good that it would have put people right off. I'm not sure I'm willing to call that tonal shift a cowardly decision, rather than a prudent one. But then, I had a severe case of Eight Deadly Words with the books, so maybe I'm a poor judge of such things. Here we get into an issue that has so far gone unraised, I think, which is that Ramsay...well, he kind of sucks as a character. He's a stock type (over-the-top sadistic serial killer with a penchant for mind fucks) that had already become played out by the end of the '90s, after Thomas Harris had made everyone want to do their own version, and is now well and truly tired. The only twist on the type is that he's wandering around a quasi-medieval setting, rather than thwarting the FBI. I really wish Martin had not gone to that well in the first place, but he did, and I guess the show has to deal with that somehow. But I do wish they'd changed it up somehow, not only because of the sexual violence issue, but also because the immediate response just about every show-only watcher I know has to Ramsay is a big "Oh. He's one of those" eyeroll. True dat. And a very good point. It's best not to lose sight of the fact that the choice between Benioff & Weiss's oblivious dudebroness and GRRM's sleaze-revelling nerdrage is a false dilemma of the first degree. Something we can all agree on! Er...I hope.

Correct. And in this case, the writers chose to frame the narrative in a way that removes our ability to comfortably other Ramsay's wife, which is why some people are so distressed. Jeyne Poole was fine with readers, as many readers have explained over the past week or so, because she wasn't an important character. She was a faceless cipher whose designated role was to service Theon's story, a means to another person's ends, a diposable object. A special class of Unperson known as "victim," an underclass whose distinguishing characteristic is the inability ever to have "agency" (a word whose meaning seems to have drifted off towards an infinitely vague horizon). Someone with no story of her own. In short, as Zalyn wrote, no "different from any other woman." Not someone we need to identify with at all. A typical Othered victim. Gender: feminine. But main characters are different, right? POV characters are different. They have, as many people have also pointed out over the past week, their own stories. You can't just substitute Sansa for Jeyne, because Sansa has her own story to tell. She is not a means to someone else's end, but is "different from any other woman." We need to be able to identify with her. We insist that she must have agency; she is not Othered. Not object but subject. Gender: masculine. POV characters don't get raped. George R.R. Martin said so himself. (Except when it's Dany, because...because why? Because we all like to pretend that never happened? I don't know if Martin believes that the fact that Dany later fell in twoo wuv somehow retroactively turned Rape into NotRape or what, but honestly, my blood pressure and I would probably really prefer not even to know how he'd defend that statement.) George R.R. Martin considers rape off-limits for POV characters? Oh, of course he fucking would. Because being a POV character is a job for a subject, not an object, and as such, regardless of sex, the POV characters are all granted an honorary masculine gender. They live their lives in the active voice, and in the active voice, as we all know, Mr. Morton is the subject of the sentence, and what the predicate says, he does. But rape is such an extraordinarily feminizing event that people who are raped, men and women alike, must be fixed forever into gender mode feminine, irrevocably transformed from grammatical subject to grammatical object. How could it be otherwise? They failed to eschew the passive voice -- something was done to them -- and now what the predicate says is no longer what they're the ones doing. And that's just not on for a POV character with whom we're supposed to identify, amirite, Mr. Morton? Er, I mean Mr. Martin? Whatever. Martin's gender issues would probably make for a doorstopper of their own, but I'm not sure why the television show should feel the need to ape all of those same screwed-up ideas, nor do I see why any of its viewers should. Rape is a fundamental part of the human experience for a huge number of people in this world, men and women and children, and each and every one of those people considers themselves--rightly!--the protagonist of their own story. They are not incapable of action, and they have plenty of agency. None of the things they have learned over the years has been erased. Their psychological development has not been revoked. And they remain the POV characters narrating their own lives, no matter how many people insist that their life experiences somehow magically render them inappropiate for that role. They are still the subject of their sentence -- and what the predicate says, they do.

Fanfic writers love Sansa because fanfic writers love fiction. They love stories and they love free artistic expression; they love to imagine and to fantasize, and then to use those things to better tailor creative works to their own needs. That is why they are writing fanfic in the first place. And the only character in the series who shows a really strong interest in stories and in imagination and in creating art is Sansa. Furthermore, once you get away from the books and into the show-only material, this connection is made even stronger. Show!Sansa is all about the art of fiction. That's one of my favorite scenes in the show so far for a number of reasons, one of which is that I tend to view it as the writers tipping their hand as to how they were going to be framing Sansa's story (which is rather different, IMO, than how Martin approaches Sansa's character in the books). Show!Sansa seems to me to be all about the tension between truth and lies, and ultimately about the synthesis of these two seeming-opposites: fiction. Fiction is the synthesis that resolves the truth/lie opposition. Stories are how we tell the truth by telling lies. All the way back in the second episode, when asked what really happened with Arya and Myca and Joffrey and Nymeria, Sansa tried to thread the needle by abstaining from either telling the truth or telling the Queen's desired lie; instead, she simply claimed ignorance. Lots of viewers hated her for that, and some people seemed to think that Sansa's story would therefore be about learning to become truthful or honest, or something like that. I don't see it that way at all. As I see it, Sansa's story is all about learning to become a more productive liar, learning how to leverage her powerful imagination and her affinity for songs and stories and tales -- for fiction -- into creative power that she can master, control and direct towards her own ends. In effect, it's all about her evolution from passive Reader (Sansa loves songs and stories, but she is a passive consumer of them: she believes in them without ever either examining their construction or questioning their underlying agenda) to active Author (Sansa learns to create useful fictions of her own, and to manipulate the stuff of fantasy in ways that advance her own agenda). The problem with Sansa's "I don't remember" wasn't really that it was a lie. It was that it was a poor lie, not so much because it was unconvincing, but because it advanced nobody's agenda and did no one any good. The woman that I believe Sansa is learning how to become probably wouldn't have told the truth there either, but she would have constructed a better story, a useful fiction that might have prevented anyone from being punished for the incident while still allowing all involved parties -- most importantly the Lannisters -- to save face. "The truth," said Sansa, "is always either terrible or boring." But that was a while ago. Now, when she sees a snowy courtyard, she transforms it into a fantasy Winterfell drawn from her imagination. She brings the stuff of her fantasies to life in the material world, and that is how we know that she is entering a new stage in her development. Even Sansa herself seems to realize that this is the pivot on which her story swivels. "I'm a terrible liar," she keeps repeating, earnestly, to anyone who will listen. "Everybody says so."

Would it be a good thing for the text to tell us that Sansa is "different from any other woman" when it comes to her ability to avoid being raped by a psychopath? Do you think that would be a useful or beneficial or truthful thing for a work of fiction to tell its audience? I don't. And that is part of the reason why I don't. Othering the victims of sexual violence is a thing that happens a lot, in part I think because it helps people reassure themselves that it will never happen to them. It only happens to women (thinks a man), or to weak women (thinks a woman), or to women who dress a certain way, or who lack common sense, or who fall for the wrong men, or who are gullible or naive or untalented or spoiled, or who "have their head up their ass," or who are "like the chick in a scary movie that goes down into the dark basement." Or who are too proud, or too humble, or much too passive. or far too aggressive, or too smart for their own good or just plain stupid. Or who fit some other elusive set of conditions that we've decided today shall be the identifying characteristics of a "victim." It only happens to minor characters, people Not Like Us, people with whom we aren't really expected to identify anyway. But it will never happen to a protagonist. It will never happen to a POV character. It will never happen to a character we are meant to identify with. It will never happen to us. I really loved this other post from Hecate7 that was posted on the 'Television vs Books' thread. I 'liked' it when I first read it last week, and I wish I could have done so a hundred more times, because it articulates my feelings about this issue so much better than I seem to be able to do myself. And since it also sums up my reaction to some of the furor over Sunday night's episode, I thought it would make sense (and I hope Hecate7 doesn't mind my doing this) to repost part of it here. I find this post doubly relevant to this particular episode, because -- appropriately enough for one so strongly focused on Sansa --this episode was all about truth and lies. It wasn't in the least bit subtle about it, either; the motif got pounded home in every last one of the plotlines, even when the writers really had to work to shoehorn it in (Myrcella to Trystane: "Are you lying to me?"). Truth and lies, truth and lies, over and over and over again. In this episode of all episodes, do we really want the story to lie to us? Because Sansa being able to charm or flirt or manipulate Ramsay into delaying the wedding or delaying the bedding or treating her gently or respecting her person, or Sansa stabbing Ramsay in the face, or Sansa being such a stoic that she doesn't cry out in pain and misery even while being violently deflowered by a psychopath whose previous victim has been given a front row seat... None of those outcomes could win the Game of Faces. They fail the smell test; they ring hollow and empty and false. And they don't even have the excuse of benevolent intent to fall back on, because those voices that continually whisper 'don't be a victim' in our ears? Those voices do not serve our interests. Their lies can never make us strong.

Right. Because this is Westeros, so simply saying "grow up" wouldn't do, nor even "man up." Oh, no. No no no. You have to frame it as child murder to get anyone to take you seriously in Westeros. And then many, many people confessed to having had the same thought. I am unspeakably relieved to know that I'm far -- very far -- from the only one whose mind immediately went there! (And yes, LadyS., I think they're doing a fine job of implying off-screen sexual abuse through the performances alone.) Alfie Allen killed that scene, though. I have no idea why he isn't getting more attention for what he's doing in this role. He has what is probably the toughest acting job on the show, and he delivers each and every time. Has he ever even been nominated for an Emmy? Or a fingernail, or maybe some skin. Yep. You know, I hated the Theon torture scenes in season 3. Hated them. I thought they were clumsy and inelegant--and also actually less disturbing than they would have been if left mainly implied and off-screen. But I have to admit that I did finally see them starting to pay off here, because I was cringing in anticipation right along with poor old Reek during that scene. The fact that they'd shown us hand torture in the past made it seem far more likely that they might be about to do it to us again. So...yeah. Okay, Benioff & Weiss. Okay. I begin to see at least some purpose to them now. (But you still should have had fewer of them. And abandoned that whole "let's make Ramsay's identity a big mystery!" idea. And you should have completely rethought your weirdly adolescent kinky little fantasy concept for the gelding scene, because...yeah, no. Sorry dudes, but that one was just plain embarrassing.) ::gasp:: You think Hizdahr was wearing a wire?!? If I were Tyrion in that situation, I would have no faith that Jorah wouldn't simply cut my head off if I admitted to any possibility of being infected. I'd lie my ass off about it, were I in his position. "Nope, none of them touched me, I was conscious the whole time, and I'm absolutely sure of it. 100% positive. Yep." I was thinking along the same lines. This gets gross, sorry, but I was thinking that maybe only the completely stoned-over people are likely to infect you with a touch because they have it all over their bodies, and that hard, cracked, scaly skin winds up weeping pus and fluid out of the cracks. Ever had or seen a really nasty case of foot fungus that hasn't had much chance to dry out or heal? Appalachian Trail thru-hikers can wind up with truly horrifying-looking feet if they pick up a fungus and the weather stays wet. Soldiers, too.

benteen, thank you for linking that article. I doubt I ever would have noticed all those stone men on my own. I also only saw the one on the ledge. That is just fabulously creepy! You and Tyrion both! That shot of Tyrion with the stone man sloooowly standing up in the unfocused far upper left background of the screen was one of the scariest things I have ever seen on television. It was really beautifully done. Hee! I love Stannis "getting a good edit." Indeed, I'm sure that if they'd chosen to show us different parts of the hundreds of hours of footage they've shot of Stannis this season, we'd be getting a much different view of him! I definitely agree with your analysis, though: given the hero edit Stannis has been getting ever since the merge, he's almost certainly either going to the Final Four or being set up as our next tragic blindside. Either way, I can't wait to read his post-game interviews so we can finally find out exactly why he really chose to ally with that awful Selyse, and what was up with him throwing Cressen under the bus like that right at the start of the game? Heh. No, sorry. I'm so sorry, Hanahope; I did understand exactly what you meant. I just associate "getting a good edit" so very strongly with reality television that I couldn't resist. Stannis: The iron throne is mine by right. I didn't come here to make friends. She really does seem like a decent sort, if not the sharpest tool in the shed. Trying to commiserate with Sansa over being alone in a strange place was rather idiotic, yes, but it was kindly meant, and that counts for a lot with me. There are so few kind people in this crapsack fictional world that I find myself feeling fiercely protective of them whenever they do appear. And it looks like poor Walda's going to need some protecting, too. Oh no! Look out, Walda! I'm also finding it sort of hilarious how little she seems to notice that she's trapped in a claustophobic gothic. I guess after the Twins, even this must seem like a step up. "Thank heavens I finally get to live some place nice," Walda thinks to herself, as she wanders past the flayed bodies in the courtyard and gives a friendly wave to the filthy cowering ruin of a man who seems to be her new son-in-law's best friend, and who likes to sleep in the kennels for some silly reason. "And with such lovely people!" She beams as she fondly thinks of her new husband, whose voice alone suffices to make grown men weep with terror. Oh, me too! I want at least one Dinner with the Boltons scene in every episode for the rest of the season. Make it happen, D&D! That combination of characters and actors make comedy gold. Well, black comedy gold, anyway. Comedy OIL! It's just like if Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Saw made a baby together! Oh, that was totally a Mad King move, I agree. I can't imagine that's not intentional, right? Given that we're only two episodes out from the one in which Barristan told her all about how crazy her father actually was, and how he used to do things just like that? Right? Right? Ugh, I hate it when I can't quite tell if I'm reading against the creator's intent or not. (I'm fine with reading contrary to intent, mind you! I'm all about subversive readings. I just prefer to know when I'm doing it.) I certainly hope it's intentional, because their willingness to show Dany as tottering on the brink of full-fledged Targaryen looneytunesville is something that I really like about the show, and I'd hate to think that they were doing it by accident. “I don’t want to marry you,” Hizdahr wailed. “You had my father crucified!” He's Sansa Stark through the looking glass really, isn't he? His father was unjustly executed by a cruel and illegitimate tyrant who is now forcing him to marry her. I know I'm supposed to be sympathizing with Dany here, but as is so often the case with me and Dany, I'm just...really, really not. I sort of want Hizdahr to shove her off a battlement, frankly. It would be a much kinder death than the ones she keeps doling out to people every time she gets upset or frustrated about something. Ah well, at least she's not having children tortured in front of their parents. Yet. But hey. Give her time. Give her time. I'm loving what they're doing with Hizdahr too. He was such a non-entity in the books, whereas in the show, he's quickly becoming my favorite character in Dany's plotline. Joel Fry is doing such an incredible job with the role. His performance hits a perfect balance of sympathetic, suspect, funny and yet still rather annoying that works really well for Hizdahr. You feel for the guy, yet he's still sort of punchable in exactly the way that extremely privileged people who insist on remaining stubbornly oblivious to the full extent of their privilege always are. There's just a hint of that aggrieved undergraduate "but I'm a liberal, and besides, wealthy white Western men have suffered TOO!" whine in his tone that is absolutely pitch-perfect. Love him.

Well, I think its inspiration is probably not so much actual leprosy as it is leprosy as it was viewed historically. It seems to be quite contagious, for example, which leprosy really isn't, but people used to believe that it was. And I would guess that before antibiotics, gangrene or sepsis was very likely what killed most people with leprosy. I don't know if people without a modern understanding of medicine would have considered those infections a separate condition from the disease itself. Certainly the idea of leprosy I remember having as a kid was "it makes your fingers and nose fall off!" (Also, lepra means 'scaly' in Latin, which was probably what led me to the idea -- quite possibly erroneous! -- that it was Martin's real life inspiration for the Greyscale)

Making it, in fact, exactly like leprosy, which is surely its real world inspiration.

Gilly's story was show-only, but it is book canon that the wildlings are familiar with (and very afraid of) the disease. Although in the 7K Greyscale is associated with damp climates, it definitely does exist north of the wall. It also seems far more common on Essos than in Westeros. The ambiguities and uncertainty surrounding the precise details of how its transmission works are definitely in keeping with the book series, IMO.

Nope! Which is precisely why I specified that my problem had less to do with the facts of the characters' actions and failings and more to do with the tone that I read in the authorial voice. To me, Jon's failings at Castle Black and Tyrion's failings at King's Landing both seemed to be accorded a kind of dignity in their treatment that I felt was lacking elsewhere. (For whatever it's worth, Theon's absolute failure at life, the universe and everything in the second book would be an example of a male character whose story I felt was similarly handled, so it's not solely a gender division.) But "authorial tone" is obviously an extremely hazy and subjective thing, and one that only a fool would expect all readers to agree upon.

Same here. In fact, I can even see why the show-runners might have thought it necessary to include that scene. It seems to me that the show audience is a lot less forgiving of the GrimOldTimes aesthetic than book readers are. I was surprised, for example, by how many show-only watchers never quite forgave Ned for executing the Night's Watch deserter in the first episode, even going so far as to call it "karma" when he himself eventually suffered the same fate. Reading the books, it just never would have occurred to me to be horrified by Ned's sentencing a military deserter to death. That's just...sort of expected in a quasi-historical setting, you know? Perhaps it's because a visual medium makes everything feel far more immediate and visceral, but for whatever reason, it seems to me that the show needs to go a lot further than the books did to justify its protagonists taking violent action without losing audience sympathy. Jon Snow is one of our "good guys," yet he's totally down with showing up at Craster's and killing every last man he finds there. In order to make that seem okay to the TV audience, maybe the audience really did need to first be convinced that these men were Seriously Bad Dudes Who Need Killin' . Does Ghost Grass get more attention in the recent world book, or am I forgetting it getting more mentions in ADWD? I only remember it being mentioned once, and...I don't know, maybe this is stupid, but I always assumed that it was an orally handed-down memory of snow, or maybe of hoarfrost, of frost on grass. I thought that the legend of the Ghost Grass spreading and ending the world was basically the Dothraki equivalent of the prophecied Super Bad Winter -- a winter so severe that even the Dothraki Sea will be frozen, which would be a pretty major catastrophe for nomadic horse people who have never had to deal with freezing temperatures before. But maybe I was totally off on my own flight of fancy there. The constant focus on greyscale this season really is intriguing, though, isn't it? I can't wait to see where that's going. I'm utterly terrified for her as well. I'm also a little creeped out by something I saw hypothesized elsewhere: that possibly the reason the wildlings don't believe that grayscale ever goes dormant is that unlike most of the 7K folks, they burn their dead -- and the specific way in which dormant grayscale can reawaken to infect people is through inhalation after being incinerated. In other words, the northern vector for the speculated future grayscale epidemic might be Shireen...but only if she is burnt for her kingsblood. Huh. You know what? Actually, now that I've typed all that out, it sounds so remarkably improbable to me that I'm feeling far more cheerful about it. Sure, I know, magic, whatever, but that's so far removed from any real world means of virus transmission that I somehow can't see Martin writing it. (ETA: also, I think that Avaleigh is probably right in thinking they'd balk at actually burning Shireen to death, although they very likely willl threaten it.) It looks as if grayscale really is going to be important to the endgame, though, as otherwise it's hard for me to imagine that the showrunners wouldn't have excised it. I'm insanely eager to find out what its role might be.

I agree, it was a horribly written scene. For that matter, it barely seemed written at all -- it came across more like the bare bones outline of a scene, or perhaps like an improv exercise in which none of the participants had any prior experience improvising. There was no drama and no conflict, and it didn't even serve to introduce the characters properly (Quick: give me a one-word personality descriptor for each of the three girls! Yeah, I can't do it either). Would it have been too much to ask for one or two of the Snakes to be undecided on the issue, so that we could hear a bit of debate or see one of them being persuaded to join with the others? The episode was only 50 minutes long, surely they could have spent a few more minutes to add some actual drama to that scene. Also, Obara's monologue made no damned sense. Choosing the hard power of the spear over the soft power of manipulative tears isn't at all the same thing as choosing war over peace, and anyone who thinks it is, frankly, ought never be entrusted with any sort of power at all. Yeah, that's problematic as well. Then, I wasn't crazy about the "look how incompetent every single female character who tries to play politics is!" feel to the books either. Arianne? Shoulda trusted in Papa Doran, silly girl. Cersei? Shoulda let Uncie Kevan handle things, silly girl. Daenerys? Lol, why are you trying to rule, you silly little girl? Shoulda stuck with blowing things up!" I am sure that it was not intentional, but it truly grated after a while. Tyrion ultimately failed too, when he tried to exercise power in King's Landing, but I felt the narrative offered him a degree of dignity that it repeatedly denied to any female character who tried and failed to play the game. It's a shame, isn't it? So much of this story -- hell, so much of human history, for that matter -- seems to boil down to "oh, look! Another catastrophe that might have been averted, if only people had stopped acting like assholes and worked together instead." Huh. Well, that's incredibly disturbing, I agree. They just came across as pure antagonists to me, especially with the scorpion torture and the murdering of useful informants and all that. I don't see anything sympathetic about people conspiring to hurt an innocent girl either, and conspiring to instigate a war is straight-up moustache-twirling arch-villainy in my book. Then, I was totally freaked out when people started objecting to the lack of Lady Stoneheart by saying things like: "But it's depriving the audience of the feel-good ending!" I...what? VengeanceZombieCat was supposed to feel good? The hell? A similar thing also happened for me with Manderly and his creepy House of Atreus schtick. I...was supposed to be fist-pumping for cannibalism and Thyestian feasts? Really? So hell, I don't know, maybe we are supposed to be cheering on the Sand Snakes for their plot to mutilate an innocent girl and condemn thousands more to death by plunging their principate into war. It would make about as much sense as viewing a main character coming back from the dead as a horrific twisted mockery of what she was in life and then wandering around joylessly committing vengeance killings as a "feel-good ending." Hmmm, yeah. Well, at the risk of starting up an irresolvable debate, that's a problem I had with the books as a whole. I always felt that the more classically 'feminine' female characters were being written with a certain degree of authorial contempt, and it really bothered me. It's the main reason I gave up on the series after ASOS, in fact. But I am well aware that others read Martin very differently. In the books, I seem to remember her hypocrisy coming across as far more bothersome, because the famine that her "charitable efforts" were acting to relieve was largely caused by her family's blockade in the first place. I don't think that was ever pointed out in the show, was it? On the show I felt her charity work was portrayed more positively. Sure her motives aren't pure, but if I'm one of the people trying to feed and clothe a gaggle of war orphans in Flea Bottom, I can't imagine caring all that much about the purity of her motives or the state of her soul. Is there now food where there wasn't food before? Yes? Alrighty then! Keep up that PR campaign, Queen Marge! In fact, could we have a bit more phoniness next month? The kids could use some new smallclothes. But the HS has his own agenda and his own concerns, I'm sure. Personally, I'm hoping that in the show, the writers will find some way to allow Jaime to become disenchanted with Cersei without harping on the whole "she slept with other guys, whatta slut" thing. I mean, really, of all of the truly horrible things about Cersei, that's the one that Jaime must fixate on? (And fixate on, and fixate on, and fixate on, and Moonboy for all I know Moonboy for all I know Moonboy for oh my god shut up shut up shut up!) It annoyed me in the books; I like to think it's something the show could improve upon. I'm totally in agreement with everything else you wrote about Jaime's Riverlands story, though. I did like seeing him start to really think about his actions, take responsibility for himself, and show that in fact, he did have the chaps to be a halfway decent ruler of men. I hope that the show doesn't take a pass on that aspect of his development, which honestly, I consider a lot more important than his growing estrangement from Cersei. Yes, the two are interrelated, but I'd much rather see the emphasis on the former than on the latter. Yes. :D

Ugh, I know, it's awful, isn't it? He was so horrified by the idea of shedding blood "right on the steps of the Sept," too. Probably the first -- hell, probably the only -- genuinely pious sentiment we've seen from this royal family, and he's the one getting all the "abomination!" hurled at him. Such a decent kid, it seems so terribly unfair. Huh. See, I got just the opposite feeling from that scene. It showed Olyvar fleeing from the brothel and in doing so, abandoning his clients to their fates. It seemed to me as if that scene might be there partly to establish Olyvar as a profoundly self-interested person. In other words, as someone who would be more than willing to throw Loras or anyone else to the wolves if he thought it would save his own skin. It left me with a very uneasy feeling about what Olyvar's role in this season's plot might be. Okay, I feel I must be missing something here. Why would you assume that you're supposed to be rooting for them at all? They're certainly not sympathetic characters in the books; why would they be on the show? That's my suspicion as well. I'm expecting a three-way struggle over Myrcella this season, with the Sand Snakes trying to harm or perhaps capture her, Trystane trying to crown her, and Jaime trying to bring her back to King's Landing. And Doran trying to prevent all of the above -- which I suppose would make it a four-way struggle.

I love the way they keep using Winterfell's status in the opening credits to gutpunch Stark fans. Season 3: Winterfell is smoking. Audience: "Oh. Right. Ow." Season 5: Winterfell is repaired! And proudly stamped with the creepy-ass flayed man Bolton insignia! Audience: "Oh. Oh. Oh, ow!" I'm now fully expecting Season 7's opening credits to include...oh, I dunno, maybe a miniature clockwork horde of white walkers jumping up and down on the Winterfell model. Something like that, at any rate. Maybe it will just be a giant crater on the map where the model used to be. -- Did...did Stannis Baratheon just bring me to the brink of tears? Really? Stannis? God, they're going to burn that precious little girl, aren't they? As soon as her father's no longer there to protect her. If that's where this is going, I honestly don't know if I'll be able to handle it. I adore Shireen. Can't we just put her on the throne? She could spearhead a massive literacy campaign, get some real social change happening on that crapsack continent. If so, then we can be wrong together! I will miss Mace Tyrell on the Small Council, making his jovial little dad-in-law jokes while seemingly never once realizing that he is not among friends there. On the positive side, though, his being shipped off to talk to the Iron Bank means that Meryn Fucking Trant is headed for Samarra. Er...Braavos, I mean. Braavos. You know, I have to give the fellow playing Meryn Fucking Trant some kudos here. Every time we see his face, he makes me hate him all over again. He's doing a great job playing a role that can basically be summed up as: "You're a hateful thug. That's your motivation. Now GO!" No, a bunch of them had it. All the men who came to drag Loras off also had the seven-pointed star carved into their foreheads. I think its significance was to show that Lancel has now been inducted into the scary violent branch of the Sparrows. The branch that Cersei is going to arm. Because arming violent religious fanatics always works out so well for everyone. Yeah. Hee! I assumed it was that Bear and the Maiden Fair song. "There was a bear, a bear, a bear..." The Meow Mix jingle works too, though. If that. I thought there were more like ten to fifteen of them caught in that ambush. I'm not sure why others seem so convinced that she's "lost the Unsullied." She only lost a small group of them! The real loss there was either one or both of her most trusted and impartial advisors. Which is, to be sure, a very serious loss for her, but it's not quite the same thing as losing her entire army. Wellllll, Robert killed Elia's husband himself, and she and her kids were killed for his benefit, as part of the coup that put him on the throne. Were the Martells offered any restitution or even apology for those deaths by the new regime? I rather doubt it. Also, I'm pretty sure that the Martells were loyalists and that their people therefore fought against the rebel forces led by the Baratheons in the war. It usually takes considerably more than 18 years for that sort of historical relationship to mellow into a friendlier one. BTW, Tandaemonium, did you post under a different name at TWOP, by any chance? Your writing style seems really familiar to me somehow. (I posted under the name "Avia" there.) Given that they utterly failed in tracking the kids down, it's now really in their best interest to maintain the fiction that both boys were killed by the ironborn. That way even if Bran and/or Rickon do show up later, the Boltons can maintain that they're obviously pretenders. But yes, Littlefinger is missing some rather vital information there. Mmm. I think I like it when Littlefinger is missing vital information. Yes, they do. There was an entire subplot involving their man Locke searching for the boys last season. Theon told Ramsay the boys were alive back in Season 3, when Ramsay was playing mind-games with Theon by staging that entire fake rescue scenario. Ramsay then told Roose about it at the beginning of Season 4. Roose therefore sent his best tracker Locke out to find them. Locke managed to track them as far as the Wall, where he went undercover masquerading as a new recruit of the Night's Watch. While there, he overheard Sam talking to Jon about his meeting with Bran. In this way, he learned that Bran had gone north beyond the wall, which was the reason that he volunteered to go with Jon on the mission to Craster's Keep: he was hoping to pick up Bran's trail there. And indeed, Locke found not only Bran's trail, but also Bran himself at Craster's Keep...right before getting himself killed. AFAIK Locke had no way of reporting back to Roose, though, so the Boltons have no more idea where Bran and/or Rickon might be now then they did before. I don't think the Ironborn know anything, though. Theon never told Yara that the boys he killed weren't really the Starks, did he? And I'm pretty sure that all of the Iron Islanders who were with Theon were killed by Ramsay's men after they surrendered and handed Theon over to him. So I don't think there are any loose Ironborn lips the Boltons have to worry about, but I could have forgotten someone. It keeps reminding me of that creepy barred circle pattern that the white walkers make of their victim's bodies in the snow. I saw someone else, though, mention that they read it as the "No Entry" sign. This keeps making me giggle, because I am twelve.

Me too. I find it particularly interesting how the show is twisting around some of the thematic material of the later books. Instead of all of the Stark children being encouraged to abandon their identities as Starks (Sansa becoming Alayne, Arya becoming No One, and Bran becoming, um, a tree), they're setting up a contrast between Sansa and Arya, with Arya following her book trajectory while Sansa is instead being encouraged to embrace her role as a Stark. I'm really excited to see how they intend to play with that over the course of this season. I'm especially curious to see how Sansa in Winterfell, interacting with Reek, might ring the changes on that identity motif from the books. Are they going to parallel Sansa embracing her Starkness with Theon reclaiming his identity? I can imagine that working really well, actually -- although like everyone else, I'm a bit anxious about their ability to pull this off without making any disastrous missteps. It's much like my anxiety over the Walk of Shame, actually. In both cases, they could pull it off really well...or things could go so horribly, horribly wrong. I'm finding it rather anxiety-provoking. Yeah, that wasn't a suspicious denial at all. Littlefinger: Well, congratulations on your upcoming nuptials, young man. Ramsay (a bit too quickly): I promise I'll never force her to fuck my dogs! (beat) Littlefinger: O-kaaaaaay... I've always found the dragons pretty meh as well...or did right up until this month, anyway, when I've finally started to find them interesting. I like the way they're being used in this season as a kind of metaphor for Dany's troubled relationship to her own power. It's hardly subtle, but I'm finding it unexpectedly strong and moving anyway. I agree with you, though, that it's annoying how little effort she's put toward learning with them. (Or even toward bonding with them, for that matter! I actually think that the show sells Dany as the "Mother of Dragons" a bit better than the books ever did, because at least we get a scene or two each season in which Clarke helps to sell her affection for the CGI beasties, whereas in the books, Dany's internal narration hardly ever touches upon them at all. Seriously, she hardly ever even seems even to think about them. They aren't even differentiated in personality, other than Drogon being the most aggressive of the three. It's quite weird. My beloved pet cat, who died two and a half years ago, still occupies my thoughts far more frequently than Daenerys's three living dragons -- whom she refers to as her "children" -- seem to do her own. And I didn't nurse my cat on my own breast milk.)

That's quite likely. They do move scenes around quite a bit even up to the editing stage. Scenes often seem to wind up in different episodes than originally intended. I've found that even when binge-watched, episode breaks do a much better job of implying time passing than scene changes do.

Jonathan Pryce's roles. I don't know which of these you've seen, but that's where you know him from. :D I always think of him as Sam Lowry from Brazil, myself. And then I weep, because comparing Pryce-then to Pryce-now reminds me that I really am growing old. Heh. "I've wanted X for so long, but not like this. NOT LIKE THIS" could be the slogan of the entire series, really, couldn't it? It applies to both the characters and the audience! Hey, Sansa, want to travel to the big sophisticated southern city, betrothed to the heir to the throne? Hey, Arya, want to go on exciting outdoor adventures in boy's clothes and with your very own sword? Hey, audience! Want to see Robb marry for love, instead of getting stuck with some Frey girl? Want to see Theon pay for his treachery? Want to see Daenerys become a ruler over men? Suuuuure you do! I thought this was a little confusing too. It could have been made much more clear, IMO. The castle in the swamp that they were looking down upon from up on that bluff is called Moat Cailin. It's the castle that the Boltons used Theon to take back from the Iron Islanders last season. It appeared in the opening credits, if that helps you to place it. It's in a strategic position as the gateway to the North, which is why Sansa would have passed through it before on her way south to King's Landing and why the Boltons needed to reclaim it before they could get their army back home. Later on in the episode, they entered Winterfell. There was a shot of them passing through the gates and into the courtyard that I think was supposed to call back to King Robert and his retinue arriving there all the way back in the first season. That's where the old woman welcomed Sansa home and told her that the "north remembers." The show skipped over the journey from the one castle to the other, presumably because nothing of interest happened during it. I think they really missed a trick there, personally. Not only was it confusing as all hell (I had to rewatch the episode to convince myself that they really had traveled from one castle to the other between scenes), but it also seemed pretty severely downplayed dramatically. Sansa's been yearning to go home for ages, show! We haven't seen Winterfell since it was sacked in Season 2! Wouldn't it make sense to give the moment a bit more dramatic weight? Ah well. Mmm. Well, I understand that old Walder Frey is in the market for a new wife. Maybe that can be Sansa's plotline for Season 6.

Gotta say, I would stand up and cheer so loud if Season 6 were to open with a chyron reading "5 Years Later..."