Game of Thrones season seven trailer.

[Ziggy Stardust]

In what possible universe does Grey Worm at Casterly Rock merit some huge amount of time?

Not a HUGE amount of time, just enough for the plot point to actually MAKE SOME FUCKING SENSE. As it was, the entire Casterly Rock/Highgarden sequence was so full of huge plot holes it feels like the writers don't even give a shit anymore. Next episode we're going to see Dany flying on her dragon and she's going to turn her head, and see Euron's ship is flying through the air after her with him screaming like a moron. It would make about as much sense as the magical teleportation that went on in this episode.

It's not so much that they should have spent a LOT of time on it, but they could have spent a liiiitle more time actually setting things up so it made sense. And, hell, just write it so it wasn't fucking stupid? Like, instead of the Lannister army magically teleporting hundreds of miles across the continent to seize a bizarrely undefended Highgarden, have the scene be Tarly turning the Tyrell army against Olenna and seizing Highgarden and capturing her. It would only require a slight change of costumes and a couple of additional lines of dialogue for the scene to be played like that instead of how it was, and it would have made 1000 times more sense (as well as actually tied into the events of last episode ... as it was, what was the point of having the scene of them trying to turn Tarly against Olenna, if they are just going to take care of Olenna with their magical transporting army? Yes, yes, I know Tarly was WITH that army, but all of those soldiers were Lannister soldiers, so they just ignored the whole plot point of betrayal they set up just one fucking episode ago).

[ray245]

The armies depicted on screen are also painfully small. Is that really 10,000 troops we saw on screen?

[Imperial Overlord]

So yeah. Anyone who thinks Book 5 is good is kidding themselves. Same with Book 4. Martin could have combined them into one and not a whit would change

Martin's problem is that he intended to do a time skip between books three and four and then changed his mind. It forced him to rewrite book three and through his plot development time line off the rails which is one of the reasons we have so much filler. Now I don't know how problematic the time skip would have turned out to be, but given that I'm a rabid Bakker fan boy and the time skip between the Prince of Nothing and the Aspect-Emperor really worked out well (although it was easier to pull off), I'm inclined to believe that Martin really should have tried to make the time skip work.

[TheFeniX]

It's not so much that they should have spent a LOT of time on it, but they could have spent a liiiitle more time actually setting things up so it made sense. And, hell, just write it so it wasn't fucking stupid? Like, instead of the Lannister army magically teleporting hundreds of miles across the continent to seize a bizarrely undefended Highgarden, have the scene be Tarly turning the Tyrell army against Olenna and seizing Highgarden and capturing her. It would only require a slight change of costumes and a couple of additional lines of dialogue for the scene to be played like that instead of how it was, and it would have made 1000 times more sense (as well as actually tied into the events of last episode ... as it was, what was the point of having the scene of them trying to turn Tarly against Olenna, if they are just going to take care of Olenna with their magical transporting army? Yes, yes, I know Tarly was WITH that army, but all of those soldiers were Lannister soldiers, so they just ignored the whole plot point of betrayal they set up just one fucking episode ago).

The double-whammy of teleporting Lannisters and Greyjoys was so bad, I had this mental image (in my defense, I just started up another run through) of the Skyim console being brought up on the screeen and someone typing

placeatme LannisterSoldiers 10000
placeatme OPGryejoyShips 5000
prid MotherofDragons
ToggleCombatAI

NOTE: I'm not typing "help" to get the hex codes. In my addled brain, you can use names in the skyrim console.

Like, I'm laughing because it seems just to make a show out of this Cersei knows fucking everything Danny is doing or will do and Danny and Co have no fucking idea about anything other than their own movements. Plus, you know, Lannisters and Greyjoys just showing up wherever they happen to be needed at any point. Danny is totally getting Stannis-ed here.

On to something else I laughed about the possibility of because I don't want to just sit here and shit on everything:
How much is it going to suck (even more) to be Jorah Mormont if/when him and Jon meet?

The bastard "son" of the man that stripped you of everything is now King in the North.
After maybe a day or two, the woman you are madly in love with is already treating him more as an equal than someone to just bend a knee.
I'm not big on "shipping," but Jon and Danny could unite Westeros by marriage. And honestly, as this goes on it's not too far out there. How many other eligible badasses are still around for Danny to marry?
Jeor possibly treated Jon more like a son that Jorah and was grooming Jon to take his place as Lord Commander.
Oh yea, Jon is totally rocking out with the Mormont family sword.

Holy shit, it must suck being Jorah Mormont. Greyscale was like the least of his problems. Life itself just enjoys kicking Jorah in the dick.

[Vympel]

Not a HUGE amount of time, just enough for the plot point to actually MAKE SOME FUCKING SENSE. As it was, the entire Casterly Rock/Highgarden sequence was so full of huge plot holes it feels like the writers don't even give a shit anymore. Next episode we're going to see Dany flying on her dragon and she's going to turn her head, and see Euron's ship is flying through the air after her with him screaming like a moron. It would make about as much sense as the magical teleportation that went on in this episode.

It's not so much that they should have spent a LOT of time on it, but they could have spent a liiiitle more time actually setting things up so it made sense. And, hell, just write it so it wasn't fucking stupid? Like, instead of the Lannister army magically teleporting hundreds of miles across the continent to seize a bizarrely undefended Highgarden, have the scene be Tarly turning the Tyrell army against Olenna and seizing Highgarden and capturing her. It would only require a slight change of costumes and a couple of additional lines of dialogue for the scene to be played like that instead of how it was, and it would have made 1000 times more sense (as well as actually tied into the events of last episode ... as it was, what was the point of having the scene of them trying to turn Tarly against Olenna, if they are just going to take care of Olenna with their magical transporting army? Yes, yes, I know Tarly was WITH that army, but all of those soldiers were Lannister soldiers, so they just ignored the whole plot point of betrayal they set up just one fucking episode ago).

On this I agree. It's a pretty egregious series of impossible moves that can be short-cutted with some very minor tweaks that wouldn't actually take any additional time.

[Elfdart]

Maybe they could do red lines on a map like Indiana Jones.

On second thought, nothing kills SoD for me faster than voiceovers and title cards telling me where someone is or how much time has gone by since the last time I saw them. If it takes weeks to get from King's Landing to Highgarden then I assume the reason Jamie Lannister is in the capital in one scene and in Olenna's castle the next is because weeks went by.

[FaxModem1]

So yeah. Anyone who thinks Book 5 is good is kidding themselves. Same with Book 4. Martin could have combined them into one and not a whit would change

Martin's problem is that he intended to do a time skip between books three and four and then changed his mind. It forced him to rewrite book three and through his plot development time line off the rails which is one of the reasons we have so much filler. Now I don't know how problematic the time skip would have turned out to be, but given that I'm a rabid Bakker fan boy and the time skip between the Prince of Nothing and the Aspect-Emperor really worked out well (although it was easier to pull off), I'm inclined to believe that Martin really should have tried to make the time skip work.

I think the big problem is that 'Winter is Coming', and the marching of the Others/White Walkers is a bit of a joke in the show, due to them seeming to be lost/making a wrong turn at Albuquerque/taking a piss break/make more modern art with human bodies/whatever. if there's a time skip in the books, it shows that the White Walkers really are taking their time and it's not that big a deal, since either they're so slow that they take forever to get anywhere, or they really don't intend to come to the Wall at all and it really was just a Wilding problem after all.

[Kane Starkiller]

Oh my god what a glorious culmination of a great episode.
Tyrion giving a cliche speech about fighting for what you believe in vs fighting out of fear, Tyrion revealing his oh-so clever plan with the super-secret passage, Grey Worm jumping around like a circus clown using his fancy kung fu to mow down Lannisters left and right, my annoyance with "hollywood" ending slowly increasing...except it doesn't fucking matter because gold mines of Casterly Rock are empty and winter is coming so you need the food production of Highgarden.

Suck on that Daenerys you pompous bitch .

Seriously though, from a narrative perspective I think Deanerys needs to loose the conventional engagements and loose them badly in order to justify unleashing the dragons on Westeros without her coming across as just a tyrant. Although "mad queen" could be where the show is headed anyway.

Edit: Bran stuff was kind of dumb. "How do your powers work?" "You were pretty when you were raped." Wow. Quality writing there.

[Darth Yan]

So yeah. Anyone who thinks Book 5 is good is kidding themselves. Same with Book 4. Martin could have combined them into one and not a whit would change

Martin's problem is that he intended to do a time skip between books three and four and then changed his mind. It forced him to rewrite book three and through his plot development time line off the rails which is one of the reasons we have so much filler. Now I don't know how problematic the time skip would have turned out to be, but given that I'm a rabid Bakker fan boy and the time skip between the Prince of Nothing and the Aspect-Emperor really worked out well (although it was easier to pull off), I'm inclined to believe that Martin really should have tried to make the time skip work.

I think the big problem is that 'Winter is Coming', and the marching of the Others/White Walkers is a bit of a joke in the show, due to them seeming to be lost/making a wrong turn at Albuquerque/taking a piss break/make more modern art with human bodies/whatever. if there's a time skip in the books, it shows that the White Walkers really are taking their time and it's not that big a deal, since either they're so slow that they take forever to get anywhere, or they really don't intend to come to the Wall at all and it really was just a Wilding problem after all.

The whites have been bette in the show. Aside from two scenes they aren't present. Hardholme is off screen in the books.....having it be on screen was one of the shows better decisions since it showed "holy shit these guys are dangerous"

[Imperial Overlord]

I think the big problem is that 'Winter is Coming', and the marching of the Others/White Walkers is a bit of a joke in the show, due to them seeming to be lost/making a wrong turn at Albuquerque/taking a piss break/make more modern art with human bodies/whatever. if there's a time skip in the books, it shows that the White Walkers really are taking their time and it's not that big a deal, since either they're so slow that they take forever to get anywhere, or they really don't intend to come to the Wall at all and it really was just a Wilding problem after all.

Yeah, but during book three the White Walkers aren't marching, they're building their strength. You have that and a couple years of Autumn pass off screen and bang bitches, open book four with a light snowfall in the North.

[NecronLord]

The armies depicted on screen are also painfully small. Is that really 10,000 troops we saw on screen?

Almost certainly. If not more. There's a persistent problem of people seeing armies and thinking they're an order of magnitude lower. In Lord of the Rings they originally tried a version of the Siege of Gondor with ten thousand orcs as in the book and people thought it looked pathetic, so they re-did it with a hundred thousand and then something more like three hundred thousand.

If you mean the Lannisters each block of men which we'll call a company for clarity (I don't think the term company was used in this sense in the Middle Ages), is about twenty men abreast and at least eight men deep, so a hundred strong. The first line including the three vanguard companies is eleven companies so well over one thousand men. Jamie has them in approach with about eight lines deep, some are larger companies, some lines are smaller but that's very likely to be ten thousand men or more.

Daenerys' unsullied approach Casterly rock in 'companies' of fifty, five wide, ten deep (accounting for the man with the shield at the front) at one point we see sixteen companies on screen at once - so eight hundred men. That formation is three companies deep. At another we see that their line is at least ten companies wide as they stretch off into the distance from the camera point, so we may assume that's at least 1500. But remember they're surrounding a castle and disembarking from ships. That would be about a fifth of the remaining unsullied shown on screen.

[NecronLord]

It has the virtue of being better than nothing, which is more than they had before. And we know that they have worked in the past -- over a century earlier, at least one dragon (Meraxes) was brought down by a bolt from a scorpion (which is basically a small ballista, if the term means the same thing in Westeros as it does to us) -- so there is some precedent on the side of Cersei and her lot. I would expect the hit rate would be rather low, though.

I wonder if Qyburn's dragon-solution isn't some sort of wildfire projector. The Byzantines could project greek fire in flamethrowers by all accounts; it may well be that wildfire would blind a dragon by burning its eyes (their known weak-point) out and kill the rider, if nothing else. It may also be that wildfire is sufficiently unpleasant that the dragon's flame-resistance is worthless against it.

[Vympel]

Maybe they could do red lines on a map like Indiana Jones.

On second thought, nothing kills SoD for me faster than voiceovers and title cards telling me where someone is or how much time has gone by since the last time I saw them. If it takes weeks to get from King's Landing to Highgarden then I assume the reason Jamie Lannister is in the capital in one scene and in Olenna's castle the next is because weeks went by.

Yeah, there's definitely a balance to be had between exhaustively and explicitly litigating every single damn decision a character makes and maintaining dramatic flow and what not - I just think in the instance of this episode they went too far. The common GOT explanation re the flow of time almost always works - the order you see things in is not indicative of anything but the most general linear timeline and they may not all be happening at the same 'speed'. But having Euron in King's Landing one minute and then destroying the Targaryen fleet at Casterly Rock the next was just too much even for me - how they could ever reach the Westerlands in time merits explanation.

[Kane Starkiller]

But Jamie was in Kings Landing as well when Euron was giving Cersei her gift and then stayed with Cersei for an unknown amount of time. I don't think it's a stretch to say that Euron had time to go around the continent while Jamie made all the preparations, moved the army from Casterly Rock and then marched on the Highgarden.

[Alferd Packer]

It's about 500 miles from King's Landing to Highgarden. Assuming you have a well-heeled commander and a well-organized army, you could probably march around 15 miles a day as an average, or 33.33 days to make the trip. Call it an even month, since you're marching down the Roseroad and don't have to deal with rough terrain and river crossings. It looks like it's a similar distance from Casterly Rock to King's Landing, and for sake of argument, we'll consider the Gold Road to be of similar development to the Roseroad, so we'll say it takes a month to march an army from Casterly Rock to the capital. Add in a few weeks to organize and provision the army once it reaches the capital, and you have a window of approximately 2.5-3 months from the departure of the Lannister armies from Casterly Rock to their arrival at Highgarden. That's probably enough time from Euron's fleet to sail around from the capital to the Rock.

The actual timing of the arrival, on the other hand, is a bit too on the nose for me. Unless he was shadowing the Targaryen fleet the entire time, it is kind of ridiculous that he shows up a few hours after the Unsullied take the castle.

[Vympel]

But Jamie was in Kings Landing as well when Euron was giving Cersei her gift and then stayed with Cersei for an unknown amount of time. I don't think it's a stretch to say that Euron had time to go around the continent while Jamie made all the preparations, moved the army from Casterly Rock and then marched on the Highgarden.

Yeah, that's a fair point, but the issue is the only amount of time that could've reasonably passed is between Euron's triumph and Cersei killing Tyene Sand and leaving Ellaria to watch (because then she immediately goes to bang Jaime, and they wake up next morning and she goes to see Tycho Nestoris). I can't imagine she would've held off very long.

[Kane Starkiller]

I don't imagine Jamie stayed for long either and maybe if we sat down and really went into detail it wouldn't add up but from a narrative perspective I'm satisfied in the sense that both Euron and Jamie started from the same place, had a lot of things to organize and had a long road ahead of them.
I've seen a lot of complaints about teleporting fleets and the show screwing up the passage of time from a lot of reviews lately but from where I'm sitting in the second episode we've had Sam starting the greyscale treatment on Jorah,Euron Greyjoy attacking Yara's fleet and Jon Snow deciding to go to Daenerys. Then in the third episode Jorah is cured, Jon has arrived on Dragonstone and Euron is parading his captives in King's Landing.
Then Jamie and Euron depart on their missions across the continent from the same place and execute their mission at the end of the episode.

There is no explicit mention of passage of time but all threads seem to reinforce one another.

[Elfdart]

But Jamie was in Kings Landing as well when Euron was giving Cersei her gift and then stayed with Cersei for an unknown amount of time. I don't think it's a stretch to say that Euron had time to go around the continent while Jamie made all the preparations, moved the army from Casterly Rock and then marched on the Highgarden.

Another thing to keep in mind is that Jamie doesn't have to go to Casterly Rock to get them to move their army and empty the stronghold.

[Knife]

Well, I guess that is one way to break up enemy formations. Geez.

[Elfdart]

I don't understand why she went out of her way to napalm the grain wagons. She gets dumber with every episode, and next week's preview makes her out to be dumber still.

[Knife]

I don't understand why she went out of her way to napalm the grain wagons. She gets dumber with every episode, and next week's preview makes her out to be dumber still.

Yeah, I caught that too. A bit short sighted but not sure if the grain would have made it through the battle without a dragon burning everything.

[NecronLord]

Honestly she could have easily looted the grain, it's not like wagons are going to outrun Dothraki.

[JLTucker]

I don't understand why she went out of her way to napalm the grain wagons. She gets dumber with every episode, and next week's preview makes her out to be dumber still.

She's been dumb for the entire series. It's not out of character. And given her current losing streak, she probably didn't think straight.

[Kane Starkiller]

Damn that was a magnificent battle, if only Bronn managed to hit that fucking lizard right in the eyeball.
I don't know why but I just can't bring myself to cheer for Daenerys. Maybe it's the whole "rooting for the underdog" thing. You can't ride on a dragon and effortlessly burn people alive while your gigantic army of bloodthirsty savages is slaughtering the stragglers and be the underdog.

It would be cool if Daenerys tries to have Drogon burn Jon in the next episode only for the green dragon to save him.

EDIT: Drogon is a fucking pansy. Remember all those arrows Wun Wun took and still kept coming? This pussy takes one in the shoulder and cries like a little bitch.

[ray245]

I don't understand why she went out of her way to napalm the grain wagons. She gets dumber with every episode, and next week's preview makes her out to be dumber still.

She's been dumb for the entire series. It's not out of character. And given her current losing streak, she probably didn't think straight.

She's like "I need to burn something, but I can't burn most of the soldiers because my horde is engaged in a melee". So she just burns anything she can find because something needs to burn.