The In-Laws is one of my favorite movies. Besides that one, I particularly like the scene where the Latin American General shows them his “art collection” and it turns out they are all black-velvet paintings.
Was he reasonable? I though he was known as the Mad King well before the “burn them all” incident. Didn’t they establish earlier on that due to incest, the Targaryans are pretty much 50/50 if they’re going to be crazy?
Here’s the Serpentine, Serpentine move that came to mind.
Starts around 3 minutes.
Every bit as reasonable as a king who burns a high-ranking nobleman to death in front of his son and causes a civil war can be, I suppose.
He was described as a charming, generous and pretty laid back young prince but also easily angered and prideful. Things started to go downhill when he had been king for a couple of years and Tywin, as his Hand, was considered by more and more people to be the true leader of the Kingdoms.
But he didn’t show clear signs of madness prior to the Defiance of Duskendale. Something happened during his imprisonment that turned him into a vengeful man who started to use fire against his enemies and become more and more fascinated with it.
It was years later that the fateful Tourney at Harrenhall happened, so I’d say that his descent into madness took quite a while.
I agree about the ray-guns in Season 8. But as to the nature of the planet…I do often wonder if it’ll be significant as to what’s going on. From the very beginning, we know something is really weird about how their seasons work. They seem to have an earth-like day/night cycle, but erratic and unpredictable seasons. Whether that means anything by itself or is just the way things are, or more likely, if it’s tied into the White Walkers/“magic cycle” that seems to be happening…though we don’t know if the WW cause Winter or just take advantage of it.
Anyway, I’ve always thought about and wondered if there’s anything we can suspect about, say, the size of the planet based on what we know. How big is it? What’s on the rest of the planet? What if it’s an ice giant, and their thawed-out little corner of it is actually a precarious exception? I thought it was interesting that Arya mentioned this season about wanting to see what’s west of Westeros. What is west of Westeros? Was that just a throwaway line, or an indication that we’re going to find out more about the planet? If we do find out more about the planet, what’s the likelihood at this point in the story that it’ll just be additional useless background information rather than a significant end-game revelation?
Mine too. “Look at the stripes - you can almost reach out and touch them!”
Also: “A Zee?!”
As for the show, I really hope everyone calms down on the Internet about these theories, (Bran is Bran the Builder and built the Wall, Bran is going to warg into a dragon and mind-rape the Mad King, Tyrion and Jon Snow will ride the other dragons), because I fear that the writers will just oblige us and this will be pure fan service from here on out.
No way. Jaime would burn down all of Westoros before he killed Cersei. But Jaime is way out in the Riverlands. Could be that Cersei lights the fire while Jaime is still gone and unable to stop her.
I agree with Colibri that Cersei is most likely to use it specifically to eliminate The Sparrows. She’s already shown her willingness to use a nuke to kill a snake, so this fits her sledgehammer approach to politics. Cersei will need to be desperate, but not necessarily suicidal to execute the wildfire plan. So it could happen sooner than we might think. Probably before her trial, since she knows how screwed she is.
She’d just be following her ancestor Aegon the Conqueror’s playbook that way.
That’s Hedley!
Nice. I would’ve liked - even preferred - that.
Well said.
As noted upthread, the Vale is very mountainous, fortified at its few (single?) access points, and not easily attacked from outside.
This is something I definitely don’t like about this season. Over the last two seasons it seems like with his growing wisdom he’s come to realize that Cersei manipulates him in the same way that she does everyone else and doesn’t really have his best interest at heart, and it seemed like their relationship had changed. He still wanted to be near her, but not in a “I’ll burn down the world for you” sort of way. But it seems like we’re back to square one with that.
Wildfire has parallels with Greek Fire, and Valyrian steel seems to owe its properties more to magic than technology. But yeah, they don’t appear to be inappropriate to the level of technology we see.
Right. A medieval setting is extremely common in fantasy and science fiction, and there are an infinite variety of them: past or future Earths, other planets, other universes, dreams, whatever. I personally think of the GoT world as just being a different universe with certain similarities to our own.
It doesn’t really matter what elements you allow when you’re setting your world up. You can have knights in armor along with elements of high technology, or magic, or mythical beasts, or alien monsters. But once you set up your premise of what kind of a world it is, you should stick with it. (Of course, sometimes it becomes a plot twist that what appears to the past is actually a post-apocalyptic future, but at this point that’s pretty trite.)
Just because a world is imaginary doesn’t mean that anything goes. The GoT world, through many seasons, has been shown to be mainly consistent with medieval Europe (and medieval or ancient cultures in other continents), together with pretty standard fantasy elements like magic, witches, dragons, and the living dead thrown in.
It would be fine if when you started you had everyone riding on kangaroos instead of horses. But if you introduce some hill tribe that rides around on kangaroos after five seasons of seeing nothing but horses, its going to be jarring. (I’m sure someone here will come up with some plausible explanation for it though.;)) A world can have anomalies or inconsistencies even if it’s fictional.
I suspect she may appoint a new khal and order the Dothraki to return to Essos once she’s won back the Iron Throne. Whether or not she can make it stick is another thing.
We also saw it on the sails of his ship.
Jon’s plot armor was so strong it brought him back from the dead once. It’s not plot armor that keeps him from being killed again, since Beric has been brought back many times. It’s that using the same device over and over for a main character would be boring.
Even if you have plot armor you usually aren’t shown escaping death more than a couple times per episode. The fact that Jon avoided being killed again by pure chance several times within a couple of minutes I think did indicate he was under some special protection. Maybe the Lord of Light is just lazy and figures it’s easier just to save him in the nick of time rather than having to resurrect him over and over. 
Maybe. But Tormund made it too. A lot of other people did. Most of the ones in the initial charge died, sure. But not everyone. There’s nothing special about Wildling #47 not taking some arrows, or getting trampled, or stabbed. Just skill and a lot of luck. Kind of reminded me of, I think, Robert Duvall’s scene in Apocalypse Now IIRC…the colonel/whatever just walking around and talking like nothing’s happening while shells are falling next to him, I guess realizing that either he’ll be hit or he won’t so whatever; and apparently that’s been working out well for him so far.
I and (I think) Sam Stone are talking especially about a maybe 60-second sequence where Jon almost gets killed about a half-dozen times but then at the last second someone or something comes out of the blue and prevents it: the attacker is killed by someone else, ridden down by a horse, and so on and so on. It’s not the fact that Jon survived, but that he was apparently miraculously saved over and over by a fluke in a short time that makes it look he was under some kind of supernatural protection. The others who survived weren’t shown dodging death repeatedly like that.
“The very molecules protect you!”
From back when I was 13, Bink had the coolest magical talent, I didn’t know Pierce Anthony was a pederast that hated women and that the Xanth Series would fall right off a cliff after A Spell for Chameleon. Anyway, that’s what Jon’s battle armor reminded me of.
Well, it would explain how the kookaburras got into the jungle.
Maybe Jon will show up with this guy on his shoulder.
Yeah, but as Willard noted, Kilgore walked around like he just knew nothing was going to happen to him. Jon Snow was shitting himself from the time he saw the mounted troops upon him until his head poked up out of the scrum.
Yeah, Jon isn’t being fatalistic or oblivious to the possibility of death. He’s very much trying to avoid it. He isn’t aware of his own protections.