You also watched your peers grow up (assuming you are still friends with the people you knew in high school).

 

Only had the chance to watch it now, trying not to get spoiled beforehand. Whew.
The recap is out btw

I found this episode miles better than the first. The character interaction was pretty sweet, and the Brienne scene was very touching. I did feel that the clapping at the end (while in line with Tormund's impulsive character) made the scene worse.

Kudos to Sam in this episode, class act and badass.

Given that the Night's King is not shown on the screen, I hope for a twist where the White Walker plot-line is the final one to be concluded. If mah white boy dies before E05, I'd be disappointed.

I have a genuine question. Do I need to adjust my monitor brightness just for GoT? Some scenes are so dark, I have trouble making out details. They really need to turn up the lights.

EDIT: I did forget to add. Fuck Arya's emotionless bollocks. Gendry just wants some poontang, fair enough. But I'm seriously hoping she dies this sunday.

 

No sunlight in any scenes.
If you are using an LCD monitor then there are problems, increasing brightness will let you see things but even then the picture is messed up.
Better if you watch it on an OLED screen.

 

Yeah I always have to close curtains/turn off the lights and watch in the dark to be able to see everything properly.

 

Monitor brightness is already at 90, and my laptop is unfortunately being repaired so I am unable to simply retreat to a darker room.

It's a bit of a shame. Even with my curtains drawn, I have issues. I guess I'll wait untill evening monday to watch new episodes.

 

At some point, the show devolved into a telenovela. Not quite that bad, but compared to the quality of the first three seasons, it’s understandable I feel that way about most of season seven.

Sure, the latest episode isn’t atrocious, but it’s not because of the absence of flashy stuff. It felt contrived and cheesy. Rhaegar hit most of them in the previous post, but most of the interactions in this episode felt robotic.

People commented on Sansa’s rushed arc, but when did she become an edgy sociopath? The bit where she fake-agrees with Daenerys was well played, but it looked so out of character. I get that being the plaything of Cersei, Joffrey, and Ramsay (to put it mildly) will do a real number on anyone, but she goes from naive child to tactician almost overnight. Her battle gear didn’t help.

And for what it’s worth, I don’t really mind the Arya thing. Arya has shown that she can be impulsive and she tries a bit too hard to be cool, but that’s a fairly normal teenager thing to do. Someone with more self awareness would’ve been more subtle about getting what they wanted, considering Arya’s skill set.

From her perspective, the blades at the wall act is a quick way of letting the guy know she’s not mucking about. Also, I think the whole
interaction was meant to have been awkwardly flirty?

As for whether the sex scene was creepy? There’s been so much weird stuff in this show, it seems like a strange thing to take issue with. Danaerys was meant to be fourteen when she was with Drogo. Didn’t Arya kill a pedophile at some point?

I just looked up how Arya’s looked across the seasons, and I guess I can see how it could upset some people. She still looks rather young. In any case, I don’t think the sex scenes add anything to the show.

 

Except matrilineal marriages weren't common in medieval Europe, if they even ever happened. It's mostly a game mechanic CK2 invented so that an heiress did not mean game over. Irl, it did mean a game over, as heiresses typically married in the normal fashion and even if they managed to keep their lands and holdings for themselves and from their husbands, it was the end of the line. See Eleanor of Aquitaine, who held half of France and did not marry matrilineally. Then again CK2's idea of houses and dynasties in the strict sense (well, not houses, seeing as cadet branches aren't in the game) only really developed and became rigid during the second half of the medieval era and over time. So we have examples of, say, a nobleman marrying the heiress of Hesse and their descendants being called the House of Hesse, but that's because that was what you called the nobles von Hessen at the time. Otherwise the only medieval example I'm aware of is between the Houses of Welf and Este, but one was already a cadet of the other and it's confusing. And even well outside the time period, when Maria Theresa married in the most famous example of a matrilineal marriage, the von Habsburgs technically became the von Habsburg-Lothringens. It's just that no one cares, the von Habsburg name was much more prestigious and that's why this happened in the first place.

On the other hand, with their dynasties lasting for thousands of years, it's not outlandish or surprising for matrilineal marriages to be practiced in Westeros at all. My point is simply that irl, most medieval houses went the way of the Peverells.

re: the crypts

 

Game of Thrones - Everything We've Been Through.

A very nice fan music video summing up all callbacks from the past two episodes.

 

That's a damn nice video. I definitely missed more than a few of those in my own viewings.

 

This is worth posting here instead of Funny Pics

 

Let’s not forget this:

Spoiler

Tyrion: Bran, you see dead people. Let’s talk about it.

Everyone else: So where the fuck did Bran go?

Honestly, the best part IMO, was the Sansa & Daenerys interaction. Yes, Sansa’s character change has been a bit abrupt, but at least it had some basis. We can see where it developed and some of the steps along the way. It was basically the only interaction in this episode (besides the knighting) that didn’t feel forced or deliberately written to pander to the fandom.

The Arya-Gendry bit was just cringeworthy on multiple levels. The “Lyanna the Disney Princess” line is patently absurd. The foreshadowing for the crypts is so blatant it hurts. I mean, you’re fighting an army that raises the dead, why the crypts anyway???). And lastly, why the fuck is Sansa wearing a motherfucking battledress thing? Has any other female character near a battle ever worn anything remotely like it?

We are watching a bad fanfic.

 

We at least got Portman singing.

 

I'd stopped watching this around season 4, spent the last month slowly catching up before the first episode dropped.

I'm ambivalent.

I'm enjoying it, but it feels like the wires are starting to show a bit. Endings are tough, I really get that, because now you're locked in to answering questions, not asking them. But they're handing out multiple idiot balls per episode, now. I very much enjoyed the fireside chat last episode, the moments of...waiting, and talking, that made GoT so enjoyable for me (the scene that hooked me originally on the series was the Cersei/Robert conversation they have mid-S1 about their marriage), but...

I'm just not sure who I'm rooting for anymore. The Tyrion who was so fucking fun and at odds with people and vying for position and making moves as the Hand in King's Landing in the lead up to Blackwater is just... gone. It's like he died the moment he fired that crossbow. Arya dueling Brienne was such a fun fucking scene, but I'm not even really sure I like her anymore. Is this aloof, hands-clasped-behind-her-back person really an upgrade? Jon? Dany? They worked a lot better when they could play off people who were different, more colorful, because they're both kind of overly-serious protagonist types. Together they're just... kind of bland.

At this point I'm just kind of rooting for my pet tertiary characters like Tormund, who's basically a walking meme at this point but at least he's fucking funny.

I'm definitely invested, totally open to the show pulling it back for a highlight finish, but the small things have added up to a noticeable sag for me. The characters I liked have changed in a way that I don't like, and the ways the characters have to painfully contort themselves around the plot to get where they need to go....

Jon: "I saw the Night King raise tens of thousands of people from the dead."
Also Jon: "Let's put all the vulnerable old people and children with all the dead bodies."

???

You can't make the idiot balls that blatant. You just can't.

 

4 episodes left out of which one is going to be all about battles up North.
How are things south of the Neck even going to fit in ?

 

https://i.imgur.com/3bceIm9.gifv

 

For me, the largest problem is that we do not get conclusions to any of the interactions. It's basically infodump, "Lyanna is my mother" and then Dany reacts to it for just a few seconds before the horn blows and they need to rush out. Why not draw that scene out some more and show some actual dialogue between the characters?
It's the same in all the interactions, and while I get that they are strapped for time in each episode they are giving us little reason to like these S8!Versions of the characters.

 

So, hot take. Kit and Emilia have all the romantic chemistry of a class full of pre-schoolers and that's a big part of the reason why their relationship feels so awkward and why rooting for that to succeed (over, say, the North independence payoff we've seen the region fight for seasons to acquire) is so difficult and met with resistance.

Fight me.

 

Podrick's version is much better than the Florence and the Machine version, IMO.



I really hope this makes it onto the soundtrack as a full version. My only regret is that we're unlikely to get a full Podrick version that still has the background sounds of soldiers marching, horses galloping etc.

 

No one has posted my favorite meme from Ep2 so here it is: