Tragically, Bart the Bear died in 2000. That was Little Bart.
Well, Dany didn’t know about European history. * She* just remembered her creepy brother selling her to a barbarian…
That’s why I like when HBO does their entire season marathons. The show plays much better as a ten hour movie with intermissions.
He’s not the President. He’s a hereditary king. If conflicting orders come from Tywin and Jeofrey, who do you think the men will follow? Their beloved, unstable tyrant or the man who pays them?
Westeros isn’t really a society based on “laws” written down on paper. It’s a society based on power. Ned Stark had a piece of paper. How did that work out for him?
Heck, even their most heinous crime of “king slaying” is mostly frowned upon.
Yeah…unfortunately we might actually see that in the upcoming Star Wars sequels. Ford can pull of Han as an old grizzled general (sort of like the one he’s playing in Endors Game or played in Cowboy’s & Aliens). But I think Leia’s a long way from her golden bikini days. Although I think a bloated wine-swilling bitter, old Leia might be fun.
“How many lives have you saved, Kingslayer?”
“Half a million…the entire population of King’s Landing.”
I was refrring to the hot naked chicks. When they went to cut off Theon’s Greyjoy, the hot naked chicks started giggling. I doubt they are professional (or even hobbyist) torturers so it seemed weird to me.
My point was merely that this sort of thing went on in the real world.
Hmmm. Not on my setup. (System 7, Chrome.)
p.s. that clip is NSFW - naughty language.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3POYx6IeeI is a better place to go.
Yeah, that’s what I thought.
It goes on in Westeros too. How much cognizance of his children’s feelings did Tywin take when he told Dany to marry Loras and Tywin to marry Sansa … or of their prospective spouses’ feelings? My point is that this sort of thing is normal and natural for aristocracy in Westoros. Now Dany may have felt her brother had treated her badly and used her, but there’s nothing to make her identify with slaves because of it … it’s normal noble behavior.
It doesn’t seem especially surprising that the women were amused by Theon’s plight. Their society, by and large, doesn’t protect or acknowledge the rights of people outside of one’s own group. Even within a group, things are iffy; the pecking order is held together by the threat of personal violence (not the state-monopolized kind). Bear baiting and public executions are popular family diversions.
Theon’s an out-group prisoner who’s obviously not even worth ransoming. He’s only good for entertainment purposes. The fact that he’s a prince and semi-well known only makes his ignominious treatment more entertaining for his tormentors.
How well would those women have fared if Theon’s men had occupied their village/castle/whatever? Or anybody’s men, for that matter?
Bummer. The kid is good, though. He had me convinced that someone was going to be bear chow.
Nitpick: Maesters are more of a science/scholarly advisor, they are unrelated to the church.
Bears are so adorable. Tis pity they’re godless mindless engines of carnage.
Incidentally, do we know much at all about the religion of the average Westerosian? Melissandre, the Brotherhood and Jaqen(? I’m not sure about that one) are all, to varying degrees, religious fanatics about this Lord of Light thing. (I rather like someone’s suggestion last thead that the LoL doesn’t exist–the reason we see “his” power manifesting in such radically different ways among his followers is that they’re manifesting their own natural abilities, then pointing a finger at the sky like an NBA or NFL player. :D)
The Starks, we learned way back in the day, follow the “Old Gods”. We saw evidence of this about once, in a two minute scene that involved a tree with a face on or something. We have since heard absolutely zip about the Old Gods.
The Dothraki seem to have some sort of kinda religious thing going on. At least, they have prophecies(?) about a stallion humping the world or some shit. (One wonders how they decided that Kings Landing was the vulva of the world, but I digress.)
I can’t really remember what the wildlings have going on, but I think not much. And I think we’ve seen exactly no evidence of religious faith or ceremony in the lives of the other characters.
Have I got this pretty much right?
There is also “the seven” that the rest of westeros worship: the mother, the father, the warrior, the stranger, the maid, the crone and the smith i think. Sam sung a song about them a couple episode ago and Stannis burnt their statues to his sword back at the start of season 2.
I wonder if we’re going to see the sorcerer who came C.O.D. to Varys again. It could be a nice “dueling banjoes” torture exchange twixt him and Theon.
The seven worship is reflected in lots of subtle ways. Notice that the stars in the palace at King’s Landing and elsewhere are seven pointed, the priest (including the one ripped apart in the riot) is called a Septon and one of the whores servicing Theon mentioned her training to be a septa (something like a nun devoted to The Seven). It’s a cool way of working it into lots of scenes.
This is the area where the no-book-spoilers rule is trickiest… there’s some general background knowledge about things like this which is clearly not at all intended to be a secret or surprising or anything, but which is spelled out much more clearly in the books than in the series. (There was a similar situation way back at the beginning of the series when book readers very clearly knew who Rob, Jon Snow and Theon were, and TV viewers didn’t, but it wasn’t supposed to be a surprise or anything… should book readers have held back from clarifying things?)
Someone ran a non-spoiler background thread during season 2 for these sorts of questions, it might make it easier to start something like that (easier in the sense of avoiding disputes over what’s spoiler, what’s background, etc)
Everything i mentioned is strictly from the show.
Ah yes, that does sound sort of vaguely familiar. I get the impression that its importance for the vast majority of Westerosi is roughly equivalent to the role of religion in modern western life, rather than the all-dominating force that it was in the actual Middle Ages.