Game Of Thrones: Final Season --SPOILERS!

[Elfdart]

Danerys is getting so goddamned annoying that I'm starting to think Blue Maul might be right.

"You killed my father!"

Sansa could have pointed out that the Mad King killed her grandfather and uncle. I started wishing for the lord of Swamp Castle to come out and say "Let's not bicker and argue over who killed whom..." As I pointed out last week, Jamie is dumb as a fucking stump for riding to Winterfell, but Danerys is that much dumber for wanting to kill him at this point. Dumb as he is, Jon Snow realized they needed every swinging dick they could get.

Seeing as how they've made a big deal about Sam's sword, I hope it's +5 or something against the Deadites and not just one of several Valyrian blades floating around Winterfell at the moment.

Wouldn't it be fucking hilarious if Blue Maul just flew by Winterfell and strafed King's Landing with blue fire and turned all the inhabitants plus the Golden Company into Deadites, THEN put the vice on Winterfell? Danerys' dream showed a bombed-out looking throne room.

[NeoGoomba]

Wouldn't it be fucking hilarious if Blue Maul just flew by Winterfell and strafed King's Landing with blue fire and turned all the inhabitants plus the Golden Company into Deadites, THEN put the vice on Winterfell? Danerys' dream showed a bombed-out looking throne room.

That's actually close to my guess as to what will happen. They didn't show the Night King approaching Winterfell, so I'm guessing he's riding his frost dragon to go blow the shit out of King's Landing, the largest source of bodies around.

That or he's just going to kamikaze Bran in the Godswood and ruin all of their plans haha

[FaxModem1]

Here's a question. How old does a dead body have to be before it can no longer be resurrected? Because all the civilians are hiding with every dead body of the Stark family.

[The Romulan Republic]

Here's a question. How old does a dead body have to be before it can no longer be resurrected? Because all the civilians are hiding with every dead body of the Stark family.

That is a very good question, and one that is likely to be answered, given that the teasers show something chasing Arya through what appears to be the tunnels below Winterfell.

[The Romulan Republic]

Wouldn't it be fucking hilarious if Blue Maul just flew by Winterfell and strafed King's Landing with blue fire and turned all the inhabitants plus the Golden Company into Deadites, THEN put the vice on Winterfell? Danerys' dream showed a bombed-out looking throne room.

That's actually close to my guess as to what will happen. They didn't show the Night King approaching Winterfell, so I'm guessing he's riding his frost dragon to go blow the shit out of King's Landing, the largest source of bodies around.

That or he's just going to kamikaze Bran in the Godswood and ruin all of their plans haha

People are too hard on Danny, especially given the way so much of the fandom glorifies psychos like Stannis (who is basically Danny's sense of entitlement to the throne and fondness for immolation without the power to actually accomplish much of anything), and Tywin (who's pride lead his family and realm to ruin). Danny's arrogant, no doubt, but its a very plausible arrogance given the sequence of events of her story. You take an inexperienced, naive kid who's been helpless their whole life, hand them a single source of immense power tied directly to their bloodline while making it clear to them that the only way they can protect themselves and those around them is to take power for themself and not rely on others to protect them, and of course they're going to be arrogant and entitled and over-reliant on that one weapon. Danny's saving grace is that if she has good advisors, she'll usually listen to them, unlike Aerys. Plus Danny's early scenes show pretty clearly that she wasn't a bad or crazy or power-hungry or cruel person from the get-go, so her faults are pretty clearly a product of nurture more than nature.

That aside, having the Night King hit King's Landing would also be a way to bring Cersei/the Mountain back into the main plot. Have them flee the ruins of King's Landing and come North. Cersei tries some sort of back stab at some point because she's Cersei, resulting in her death (likely by Jaime's hands). Also allows for the long-awaited final confrontation between the Clegane brothers.

[Surlethe]

That aside, having the Night King hit King's Landing would also be a way to bring Cersei/the Mountain back into the main plot. Have them flee the ruins of King's Landing and come North. Cersei tries some sort of back stab at some point because she's Cersei, resulting in her death (likely by Jaime's hands). Also allows for the long-awaited final confrontation between the Clegane brothers.

*airhorns*

[Solauren]

Bypassing Winterfell (a hard target) is in line with the Night King's tactics as well.

He hit all the soft targets 'Beyond the Wall' first, and hedged everyone into one area (Manyce's camp, then Hard home, then headed towards the Wall.


If he repeats that in the Seven Kingdoms, then Winterfell is probably the hardest target. (Thanks to the fortifications, supplies, massive amounts of forces, and 2 dragons).

Meanwhile, everyone to the South of Winterfell, is expecting the Undead to hit WInterfell FIRST. Hell, many of them probably don't believe the stories of the undead. Hell, the Citadel didn't, and I doubt Cersei is going to admit it to anyone.

The only question is, what does undead-dragon fire do to it's victims? Burn them? Freeze them? Can they be animated?

If the dragon fire leaves them intact enough to effectively animate (near skeletal seems to be alright), then all the undead have to do is lay seige to winterfell, with ice-spears to take down the dragons (to keep them out of the fight), and then the Night's King can go off on a 'recruitment' drive to the South.

It may be that it ends up that civilization needs to be rebuilt from Winterfell when it's all said and done.

[Solauren]

Also, you're all underestimating the Danerys.

She used the carrot and the stick method when dealing with Jamie.

She couldn't be seen as just welcoming the man that killed her father. She has to know that the Northern Lords are not happy with the situtation.

So, she showed she is in charge to everyone, and could have Jamie killed (the Stick), gave Jamie a chance to talk, and listend to her advisors (the Carrot).

Is she happy with it? Probably not. But at least Jamie is now aware where he stands (and everyone is also aware of it).

[FireNexus]

They kept talking about how safe the crypts were. I knew that meant they were not at all safe, but I just figured out why that is when thinking about it: The crypts are presumably actual crypts, and so filled with dead people.

[The Romulan Republic]

They kept talking about how safe the crypts were. I knew that meant they were not at all safe, but I just figured out why that is when thinking about it: The crypts are presumably actual crypts, and so filled with dead people.

I mean, this is pretty much Zombie Apocalypse 101.

[FireNexus]

That aside, having the Night King hit King's Landing would also be a way to bring Cersei/the Mountain back into the main plot. Have them flee the ruins of King's Landing and come North. Cersei tries some sort of back stab at some point because she's Cersei, resulting in her death (likely by Jaime's hands).

*by Jaime’s hand.

[The Romulan Republic]

That aside, having the Night King hit King's Landing would also be a way to bring Cersei/the Mountain back into the main plot. Have them flee the ruins of King's Landing and come North. Cersei tries some sort of back stab at some point because she's Cersei, resulting in her death (likely by Jaime's hands).

*by Jaime’s hand.

Well, he could use his golden hand to do it. Not to be morbid, but probably it would even psychologically easier (though obviously not physically easier), since he won't have to feel his sister/former lover dying.

[FaxModem1]

Honestly, I think the Night King is going to go the route the Shadows did in Babylon 5, and the rest of the show will be dealing with Cersei. The fact that Cersei planned for that speaks to her awareness of the narrativium hitting Westeros and how she'll be the final boss.

Though, if the Night King just does actually bypass Winterfell and go straight to King's Landing, that would be hilarious.

[Solauren]

Though, if the Night King just does actually bypass Winterfell and go straight to King's Landing, that would be hilarious.

Added thought:
If Cersei had sent her forces Northword, they would not be moving as fast as Jamie did. (Infantry vs loan guy on horse)

Meaning the Night's King could (would) have hit them unexpectedly, unfortified in the field (before turning on Winterfell).

[Esquire]

I wonder how many of Qyburn's anti-dragon ballistae a paranoid tinkerer working for an ultraparanoid psychopath of a queen can churn out in a few months, and whether anybody in King's Landing thought to make a few dragonglass-tipped bolts for them? Late-season plot armor is stronger than early-season, but it wouldn't be completely impossible for them to go full anticlimactic subversion of prophecy for the Night King and spend the rest of the episodes on Cersei trying to milk her new savior-of-Westeros title for goodwill and failing miserably because, you know, ultraparanoid psycopath.

I mean, clearly this won't happen, but it's another avenue for hilarity.

[The Romulan Republic]

Or just have Cersei win, if you really want to subvert expectations.

Or Cersei marries the Night King and becomes Night Queen, ruling over the Kingdom of the Dead.

[FaxModem1]

Well, let's assume, for the moment, that Cersei becomes the Night King's target before Winterfell. What would that mean for the people, assuming that somehow, the living win against the dead? Would they have enough food to survive, or would they have to really resort to cannibalism once they find out Dany burned down the convoys carrying grain in the Reach, Cersei spent gold they didn't have on the Golden Company, and they have many more mouths to feed than food in stock?

Wouldn't that be an appropriate ending for the show, they win the war, and then it turns into Alive as they debate on whether or not Little Sam would be good with barbecue sauce.

[The Romulan Republic]

The North's food storage wouldn't be much affected by the war in the South. By the extra mouths of Danny's army and refugees from King's Landing, possibly. Depending on whether anyone makes it out of King's Landing.

[Solauren]

The North's food storage wouldn't be much affected by the war in the South. By the extra mouths of Danny's army and refugees from King's Landing, possibly. Depending on whether anyone makes it out of King's Landing.

On the plus side, if the Undead go and kill everyone south of Winterfell, and then come back and are destroyed, odds are, food stocks will be unaffected.

And then, there will be all this unoccupied land to take over....

[The Romulan Republic]

Also, I know I've mentioned this before, but the Arya/Gendrey hook-up was the most out of character, shameless pandering to fanfic writers that I've ever seen.

I repeat: there is zero good reason to ship these two. I'm not the only one who finds this off, either:

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/20 ... verso=true

“Hang on—how old is Arya Stark?” Is a question you might have asked yourself Sunday night, when the teenage assassin played by Maisie Williams jumped the bones of noted Westeros hottie Gendry (Joe Dempsie) on what might be the last night of their lives. In every other way, this story is kind of classic. Two people who have been staring at each other for a few seasons finally getting it on when their fear of losing each other overrides everything else—that’s TV Drama 101. Change the setting a bit, and it’s an episode of Grey’s Anatomy.

It’s great to see Arya getting hers, if this is what she wants, and certainly she deserves some happiness where she can find it. But still, for a large subset of the population, there’s something that sticks out about this scene. Game of Thrones has played fast and loose with time and space, and Arya’s age specifically. In the George R.R. Martin books, the story begins when the character is just nine years old, and she’s barely aged over the course of five novels. (It’s much easier to make time move slowly when child actors aren’t growing like weeds in front of your eyes.) On the show, Arya was aged up to 11 for the first season; thanks to Williams’s gamine face, she’s plausibly seemed to be a young teenager ever since.

Especially in recent seasons, the way this show has measured the passage of years has been . . . convenient. Initially, the show was painstakingly careful to create a realistic sense of time for the viewer—remember how long it took the Starks to get to King’s Landing? As it’s outpaced the books and been forced to plot its own journey, those fine details have given way. Take, for instance, Gilly’s baby, living proof of the show’s confusing timeline: Little Sam was born in Season 3, but still appears to be a babe in arms as of Season 8—maybe a toddler, at most. “Obviously, the passage of time is murky on the show for lots of reasons,” veteran Thrones producer (and this episode’s writer) Bryan Cogman conceded in a conversation with V.F.’s Still Watching podcast on Monday. “Obviously, Tommen grew up really fast.” (The eventual boy king was first played by child actor Callum Wharry; from Season 4 until the character’s death, he was played by the older Dean-Charles Chapman.)

Perhaps because everything has grown so confusing, the characters have stopped specifically defining their ages—though hours before Sunday’s episode aired, an HBO Twitter account tweeted a joke that indicated Arya is officially 18 now. That makes her just old enough to consent to sex without anyone making a fuss about it.

But there’s a huge difference between announcing, via tweet, that a character has reached the age of maturity and writing a character arc over eight seasons that makes this maturity obvious. What’s most perplexing here is that while Arya has murdered, spied, escaped, and infiltrated—with the unnerving, cold heart of an assassin—we’ve never actually seen her go through the oft-wrenching process of female-bodied puberty. She’s never spoken about menstruation, or her changing body, or her new, weird feelings. Many viewers don’t see the character as an adult woman because the show hasn’t given us the arc of a preteen or pubescent girl, though it has given us similar story lines via Sansa—who, to her dismay, got her period for the first time in Season 2—and Ygritte, who in Season 3 proved her mettle to Jon Snow by pointing out that “girls see more blood than boys.”

Puberty is, of course, a crucially transformative time for girls—and it comes with a host of negative side effects. In the non-fantasy realm, it corresponds to plummeting self-confidence; the mechanics of menstruation can force some girls out of physical activities they once enjoyed, one week out of every four. Nearly every other female character on Game of Thrones has been defined by such an experience; two of the show’s youngest female characters, Sansa and Dany, were both forced into marriage at a precocious age precisely because they were deemed to be post-pubescent.

Arguably, Arya’s violent initiation into adulthood replaced puberty for her; her time in Braavos seemed to be a coming-of-age, albeit a meandering one. If anything, though, that points to even more dissonance between what Arya used to be and where the show has put her. Arya’s defining story for the last several years has hinged upon how deeply inhumane she has become, a killer intent only on finding her marks. That Season 7 interlude with Nymeria (remember Nymeria?) and the period of time where she gave up her own name indicated a lot of internal anguish, the sort that naturally follows after watching one’s own father being beheaded, then coming achingly close to reuniting with one’s mother and brother before they were killed, too.

I wonder where all those feelings have gone, now that Arya’s back at Winterfell; certainly, if she’s trying to get close to someone she cares about on the last night of her life, you’d think that some of them would come spilling out. Yet Arya is eerily calm and controlled about sex with Gendry. In its own way, this might be an interesting take on compulsive, risky behavior from traumatized individuals—Arya’s always been eager to prove herself. Then again, based on V.F.’s interview with Cogman, Arya and Gendry’s sex scene was simply supposed to be about hormones. “Teenagers have sex,” he said. “She’s not a kid anymore.”

Arya would certainly not be the first girl in Westeros to grow up too fast—and more to the point, the series is ending in just a few episodes, which means there’s only so much time left to tell deep character stories. Still, to me, the Arya/Gendry story is deeply unsatisfying—not because she’s a teenager who has sex; not because it was non-consensual (Arya knew exactly what she wanted); but because it glosses over too many character beats, and indicates too many missed opportunities.

In order to grow, what Arya really needs to learn is not how to take charge, as she did with Gendry; she’s always been able to do that. What’s hard for her, instead, is softness—vulnerability, honesty, openness, qualities that take real courage and work to manifest. Perhaps Arya has stuffed all of those feelings under all of her understandable armor—but that adds an element of tragedy to her sex scene with Gendry, one I’m not sure the episode was conscious of. Gendry cares about his old friend, and would have been willing to share those feelings with her—but she pushed them away. In a world that has shown Arya and her loved ones nothing but violence, it’s hardly a surprise that she’d be allergic to gentleness. But she needs it; we all do.

Still debating whether this is a "ruined forever" moment for me.

[The Romulan Republic]

Honest to God, it feels like they're just cribbing from Fanfiction.net at this point.

Edit: And yeah, its a little icky that they conveniently confirmed Arya's 18 just in time to rush a relationship with Gendry.

[Esquire]

Meh. My read of that scene was very much 'literal end of the world could be tomorrow; what boxes can we check off the lists?'; it seemed appropriately immature. It is just barely possible that Vanity Fair may be reading more into an adaptation of an unfinished fantasy series than is really warranted. I honestly didn't care one way or the other about this; if anybody did I'd be intrigued to hear why.

[FaxModem1]

You do realize that Arya was giving appraising eyes on Gendry back in season 2, right? While she is critical of his stance in this scene, she seems to be doing more than just observing his fencing form. Or a season later, in which they seem to have a real connection here. Given that sort of buildup, it doesn't seem totally out of character that the two harbored feelings for each other, and only when both are older and a lot wiser, and with the apocalypse around the corner, do they act on their feelings.

[The Romulan Republic]

Meh. My read of that scene was very much 'literal end of the world could be tomorrow; what boxes can we check off the lists?'; it seemed appropriately immature. It is just barely possible that Vanity Fair may be reading more into an adaptation of an unfinished fantasy series than is really warranted. I honestly didn't care one way or the other about this; if anybody did I'd be intrigued to hear why.

Yeah, pretty much the only way I can sort of stomach it is if you read it as "world's ending, Arya suddenly realized that she's still a virgin, and she just decided to fuck the only person of the opposite sex present (other than close family) with whom she had any emotional attachment whatsoever, and Gendry went along with it because he's scared/he inherited his dad's screw anything with tits genes."

You do realize that Arya was giving appraising eyes on Gendry back in season 2, right? While she is critical of his stance in this scene, she seems to be doing more than just observing his fencing form. Or a season later, in which they seem to have a real connection here. Given that sort of buildup, it doesn't seem totally out of character that the two harbored feelings for each other, and only when both are older and a lot wiser, and with the apocalypse around the corner, do they act on their feelings.

Arya harbouring feelings for him... maybe. But that was years ago and it would be hard for it to be much more serious than a first crush.

Gendry harbouring feelings for her since then... well, only if Gendry is canonically a pedophile, given her age at the time (yeah, I know Westeros, being a backward shit hole, doesn't really have an age of consent, but IIRC sex with pre-pubescent kids is still generally frowned on in the setting, even if it isn't explicitly illegal).

And to be clear, I'm aware that Arya is no longer a little kid. I'm just saying, its weird to ship characters who's interactions mostly occurred when one of them was a little kid. That it feels rushed, and that I have a strong suspicion they did it purely as fan service, and not because it made sense plot-or-character-wise.

Edit: I guess what it comes down to, aside from the ick factor due to ages, is that I hate hate hate when writers pander to the fandom. And I see more and more that franchises are just being built around catering to what the most vocal fans post on social media, and the result of that is going to be endless pablum written for whoever shouts loudest on the internet, rather than consistent and thought-out narratives. Its going to be the death of writing, with scripts being written by committees of thousands or millions on social media sites. And if you think that sounds snobby, well... I dare you to browse the titles/descriptions on Fanfiction.net for five minutes, and tell me that that is what you want the new bar to be.

[FaxModem1]

You do realize that Arya was giving appraising eyes on Gendry back in season 2, right? While she is critical of his stance in this scene, she seems to be doing more than just observing his fencing form. Or a season later, in which they seem to have a real connection here. Given that sort of buildup, it doesn't seem totally out of character that the two harbored feelings for each other, and only when both are older and a lot wiser, and with the apocalypse around the corner, do they act on their feelings.

Arya harbouring feelings for him... maybe. But that was years ago and it would be hard for it to be much more serious than a first crush.

Gendry harbouring feelings for her since then... well, only if Gendry is canonically a pedophile, given her age at the time (yeah, I know Westeros, being a backward shit hole, doesn't really have an age of consent, but IIRC sex with pre-pubescent kids is still generally frowned on in the setting, even if it isn't explicitly illegal).

And to be clear, I'm aware that Arya is no longer a little kid. I'm just saying, its weird to ship characters who's interactions mostly occurred when one of them was a little kid. That it feels rushed, and that I have a strong suspicion they did it purely as fan service, and not because it made sense plot-or-character-wise.

Edit: I guess what it comes down to, aside from the ick factor due to ages, is that I hate hate hate when writers pander to the fandom. And I see more and more that franchises are just being built around catering to what the most vocal fans post on social media, and the result of that is going to be endless pablum written for whoever shouts loudest on the internet, rather than consistent and thought-out narratives. Its going to be the death of writing, with scripts being written by committees of thousands or millions on social media sites.

Define 'little kid'. If Gendry was aged up to the actor's age, then yeah. But if he's supposed to be 15 while she's 12, and now 21 while she's 18, are you really making a mountain out of a three year difference?