Me too. I felt it might be going too much to soap opera side in the personal relationship areas. But they struck a great balance there. Building the relationships and the incidents in them into the plot lines. They are not emotional fluff. I really appreciate that effort.
I also like how very personal character F ups veer the possible plot line off the rails. They are very plausible to happen, and make you have to rearrange your own plot line guesses. Characters at such high levels of state, can make an odd, simple mistake and it changes things so massively.
They are building the complexity very well. But keeping me wildly guessing.
I found the final dinner of King Viserys to be sad. It was obvious he was the only thing holding it all together, and even he was barely doing it.
I just wanted to drop in to say that I find the Painted Table to absolutely beautiful. What an awesome way to display a map of the Kingdom. The only problem is that I think the tabletop would be far too hot to actually use, given that it is being illuminated by candles.
Do’h. I kept confusing the names all season. An old co-worker had a son named Jace and he looked just like that actor. I constantly had to remind myself that his name was Luke. And still fucked it up.
I had one grandmother die the day after Easter and a few years later my other one died the day after Thanksgiving. Both times in front of me.
That Thanksgiving dinner was particularly awkward. Grandma had Alzheimer’s and advanced pancreatic cancer so was in home hospice and practically comatose. The whole family gathered for dinner and the adults took turns sitting with her in the living room because we were afraid she’d die during dinner in front of the children. Since I was 19 I was an adult. She died the next day in her living room. It was anticlimactic.
Your story is not really like what I was thinking of, but that scene was a good one if it can mean something to us both
It was pretty clear both dragons were running the show by that time and in the end both dragons bit off more than they can chew. It’s just Vhagar did it literally. Animals don’t do the smartest things sometimes but it did look to me like the fire did hurt him.
Yes, but that history book had quite a bit of humor as well. It was deliberately written by an unreliable narrator cobbling together fake histories of the past including one which was deliberately bawdy and gossipy (which the unreliable narrator reported but tended to dismiss a bit). The bawdy gossipy stuff came from a court jester who was also a dwarf… and the HOTD may have thought having another wise cracking dwarf may have not been a great idea.
I don’t think it would be too awkward to have some trusted retainer or second-tier nobleman who’s in the important meetings and could get in a wry comment now and then. The show would be better for it.
Having a character with no plot relevance who is just there to make funny quips would massively stand out and just not work out at all. All the funny characters in GoT weren’t pointless additions, they were all important to the story.
Yes, the important thing is that the characters fit into the story. I see no need for a funny character just to inject humor into a story, if it doesn’t naturally emerge from the story itself.
Yeah, Mushroom. He is not in the show, and it is a good decision. But Tyrion was also a dramatic character, he was not just comic relief. His being a dwarf was a particular source of uncomfortable scenes. Many of the dramatic characters in GOT had funny moments, and barely anybody tells a single joke in this entire season. Maybe it was an intentional decision, I don’t know.
From the source material:
Familiarity is the father of acceptance, it is said. The High Septon who had crowned Aegon the Conqueror remained the Shepherd of the Faithful until his death in 11 AC, by which time the realm had grown accustomed to the notion of a king with two queens, who were both wives and sisters. … The humbler members of the Faith—village septons, holy sisters, begging brothers, Poor Fellows—still believed it sinful for brother to lie with sister, or for a man to take two wives.
It would be a bit of an adjustment for Westerosi society, I’d imagine.
It helped if they thought of their rulers as demigods. Did the ancient Greeks have any problem with Zeus marrying his sister?
At the end of the day it doesn’t matter what the people without dragons think of the people with dragons.

At the end of the day it doesn’t matter what the people without dragons think of the people with dragons
You’d think someone would have developed specialized anti-dragon weaponry at some point during the tine when Old Valyria was rising to power.
We saw Tyrion and others using crossbows. If they exist in this world, then the ballista is a natural outcrop of that tech. The ones deployed by the Iron Fleet or by Bronn shouldn’t have been a surprise to anyone. They should have been invented quite a long time ago, in-universe.
They did have them, the Dornish took out one of the three original dragons from the conquest with one. It was just considered very very hard to do.