It had to be worked out by the readers with clues, which could eventually be done (by people with more time than me).
I believe, though, that technically the identity of the second man (not-Varys) was never 100% certain, there was always some wiggle room where it might not have been Illiryo.
Now, though, it was 100% clear.
Like Renly and Loras, stuff could have been worked out through comments (I’ll stick my sword where even Renly couldn’t have found it), but I don’t think that it was ever completely clear this early on. And certainly no slurping noises…
Yeah…I resented the hell out of him for the stab in the back that was the Red Wedding, but on reflection, Robb was stupid to alienate (and, basically, mortally insult) the Freys by marrying that nobody ninny instead of a Twins daughter.
God damn it, I’m defending Cersei, what’s the world coming to?
So she’s at fault for what her lover does? What could she have done after that point to make it better? Telling anyone anything about it ends with her dead.
The wolf… hmm. They’re known to be dangerous animals. One just attacked her son. If your child had just been mauled by a pitbull (yeah, they’re not bad, lay off pit lovers), and there was another one there… Well, stupid, overreacting, not nice, etc., but there’s a twinge of understanding.
Still hate her, but she’s not in the top 10 of most evil characters.
You should know better than me if you’ve read the books, but it makes a lot of sense. The TV series doesn’t have the time (or the narrator) to drop hints and inferences that will eventually lead the viewer to some deeper understanding.
I was going to say that in television, you can’t go back and watch a scene again after seeing a later scene that suggests you missed something earlier – not like you could skip back a few chapters in a book at least. But that’s no longer true. With DVRs, VCRs, On Demand and whatever else, you can return to any moment and replay it at will. Actually, I’m gonna start a new thread on this subject…
There were a lot of “wink, wink, say no more” hints to Loras and Renly in the books. Jaime makes some comment about it when threatening Loras in book 3, for example. “I’ll shove my sword so far up your ass it’ll reach some place Renly never found.”
They are making small changes as they go along, usually to make things more obvious, which they pretty much have to do given the constraints of time and medium.
In the scene you’re talking about, the TV version has Arya telling Ned about the room with the dragon skulls, and he appears to take her warning seriously. In the book, she talked about the room with monsters, and Ned laughed everything off as something she was imagining.
I can see why you are not satisfied with the sign “EVIL” nailed to her head (well, you might ..) but would you agree to call her one of the major destructive forces in the books? Whatever Cersei gets under way, it always seems to make matters worse, regardless of her intentions.
He was saying that in the book it wasn’t obvious who the two men were who were having the conversation in the room with the skulls. In the TV show it was 100% clear it was Varys and Illyrio.
And as for Ned taking her seriously in the show and not in the book, well, that’s a consequence of aging her three years. She’d have sounded like a complete idiot if she was a ten or twelve year-old talking about it.
Cersei merits some pity because all she wants is to be happy, and being with Jaime makes her happy, yet she must deal with her duties as a Lannister and the expectations that the society places on women. She probably feels like she can never truly get her way and is frustrated at having to sneak around and be cunning.
Yeah, Cersei is pretty damn evil. Her primary concerns are (1) seeing her kids take the throne and (2) keeping herself on top of the power structure. She’s absolutely ruthless in pursuing these two goals. She knows her and Jaime’s kids aren’t really entitled to rule, she either aborted or killed her and Robert’s sole legitimate heir, and her only regret about Bran’s fall is that he wasn’t killed by it. By scheming to have her own husband and king killed she bears a very large share of responsibility for the “clash of kings” that has killed, wounded or displaced tens if not hundreds of thousands.
Ok, I’ll disagree and toss my hat into the ring with those who think Cersei is plain ol’ evil. I do think she loves Jaime, but not nearly as much as he loves her. She would have gladly forgotten all about him if it would have meant she could have Rhaegar.
Ok, she wasn’t completely on board with shoving Bran out the window (so she claims), but she didn’t put up much complaint, either.
The clincher is her treatment of Margaery, who probably is no angel either. But trumping up charges of adultery for no real reason other than she thinks that Margaery might be trying to gain the favor of Tommen (her husband, by the way)…that’s treading into psychotic evil territory.
Was anyone else annoyed that the dragon skulls weren’t black? :-/
The other reason that Arya wasn’t taken seriously is that one of them me refers to the other as “a wizard” and Arya takes that seriously and tells her father an actual mage is trying to kill him.
And I don’t think she’s look any stupider telling her father THAT as an 11 year old, honestly, she’s just repeating what she heard.
I think it’s pretty clear that Cersei was not only on board with shoving Bran, but it was her idea, and indeed, she’d make Jaime’s life hell had he not done it. From the book (Bran’s perspective):
Yeah, that scene was plenty dark to begin with. I almost wondered if something was happening in the lower-left foreground of the screen in the three or four seconds before the scene shifted from the dungeons. Almost thought I saw something there as Arya was finding her way out.