Thoughts and Feelings on Game Of Thrones 7.1: Dragonstone

This is a SPOILER post since there are a lot of things I want to talk about both from the episode and how it relates back to the novels. If you haven't seen Dragonstone yet, proceed no further than this image of Tormund Giantsbane giving Brienne of Tarth the eye.

Let's start with Sam in Oldtown because in A Feast For Crows that is the most benighted, boring, time-wasting plot. Sam spends most of the novel on his way to Oldtown and when he gets there he meets an old maester who has a mysteriously burning glass candle. The candle-owning maester than sods off to Essos, leaving Sam behind, never to be heard of again.

The whole glass candle plot has been jettisoned in favour of giving us some background on the Citadel (courtesy a fabulously cast Jim Broadbent) and Sam actually using his skills to find out information relevant to the plot. The production team also discover a whole new way of disgusting the audience on HBO's dime in this plot, which is an achievement of its own on this show.

Then there's Arya, rescued from the second most benighted, boring, time-wasting plot of the novels to finally pursue her revenge across Westeros and what a fantastic revenge it is! David Bradley gives a fantastic performance as Walder Frey who is secretly Arya which forms a great showcase to cap off his involvement with the show.

Lyanna Mormont is still the best person in the North.

Nikolai Coster-Waldau puts in some great work continuing Jamie's face turn with a performance that makes it more and more clear the unspoken realisation that he is probably going to have to kill his sister.

(By the way, am I the only one who found Tommen's suicide hilarious last season? Just me? Okay.)

Said sister has gone full-on power mad, by the way, as she tries to form an alliance with the last possible ally she has left: Euron Greyjoy. Its a great way to impress just how bad a position the Lannisters are in even before the entire Frey bloodline goes down with a terminal case of Maisie Williams. They're broke; the North is in rebellion; the Sand Snakes declared war against them on behalf of Dorne; their own bloodline is effectively over with the death of all Cersei's children; and Cersei definitively broke all ties with the Tyrells who currently own all the food; and, of course, winter is coming and she's Seven damned pissed off!

Lena Headey does something fantastic with Cersei, something that isn't new but that I imagine will become central to the character in these last two seasons: she puts on a good front where Cersei's confidence never wavers whilst also making it very clear to the audience that Cersei isn't as good at this as she thinks she is. Jamie, meanwhile, is finally getting a clue and tries his best to get her to climb down from her position of insanity literally walking across a map of Westeros like she's cosplaying God (such a good scene...).

Up in the North, Sansa is finally back to being the character who was beginning to emerge after the death of Lysa Arryn before that unfortunate and incredibly tasteless version of the Ramsay Bolton storyline. I don't doubt there's some sort of reckoning coming between her and Littlefinger but now I have hope that she'll come out on top, a hope that I felt not a glimmer of when Ramsay was alive and she was being written as a cringing doormat again.

And, finally, a tiny snatch of a scene that proves my ship is still sailing: an almost wordless exchange between Tormund and Brienne as Pod watches on uncomfortably.

Don't judge me, this is probably the most psychologically healthy pairing this show has ever hinted at. 

It continues...

(No spoilers, just a funny photo since I haven't seen the actual episode yet)

I'm sailing this ship as south as south goes and I ain't the only one. The Independent has started posting “Brienne/Tormund romance updates” on their website (SPOILERS, obviously).

Castle Black, flat share sitcom GoT-style

[SPOILERS for the latest episode of Game Of Thrones]

Whilst most of season six is starting to move at a decent clip after a slow start (Dany is the God of Hellfire and she begs you to invade Westeros!), Castle Black is still sort of sedate.

I mean, there are obvious reasons. The Castle Black cast clearly has to wait for the Knights of the Vale to turn up before marching on Winterfell and delivering Ramsay his long overdue brutal murder. The result, though, is slightly odd. There's this scene where Brienne just wanders up to Ser Davos and Melisandre to passive-aggressively inform them that she was the one who killed Stannis. On the one hand this is oddly low key for Brienne, she's normally more direct than this, but on the other it actually manages to save Melisandre from the massive social embarrassment of confessing to child murder.

Meanwhile, Jon Snow is happy to see his sister alive and they have some great scenes together as a pair but once everyone's sitting down to lunch things get quiet and awkward. Dolorous Ed in particular seems completely unprepared for the presence of a highborn woman. He gets only a few lines but you get the impression he's constantly mentally reminding himself not to swear.

At the other end of the table, Tormund Giantsbane is giving Brienne the gladeye. I mean, he was obviously enchanted by her heavily armoured charms the moment she rode into Castle Black. “At last,” he thinks, “a real woman! One that could bench press me!”

I am so very much on board for Brienne/Tormund, you have no idea. Come on, let's have just a scene or two of Tormund awkwardly flirting with Brienne before the inevitable Battle Of Winterfell. 

Thoughts on A Dance With Dragons

(Game Of Thrones/A Song Of Ice And Fire Spoilers up to the end of A Dance With Dragons. Anyone purely following the TV series should come back in... oh... four years or so assuming Dance is done as two seasons.)

I think the problem many people had with this novel, myself included, is the weight of expectations was against what we got in the end. This book was six years in the making and most of the plots it picks up are even older, dating back to A Storm Of Swords. I guess we all expected resolution, we knew it wasn't the end of the series but we had Dany ruling a city, Jon leading the Night's Watch and Bran beyond the Wall it felt like we were moving into the endgame.

What we got is more a transitional novel with pieces still in motion, moving towards the endgame but not there yet. Danaerys, Jon and Bran's plots all pick up with them learning to cope with their new positions rather than leading a charge from those positions. Against all those years of expectations it can be a bit of a disappointment but once I started to take the novel for what it was, an overdue and weighty transitional phase, I started to get into it.

The Tyrion chapters are a joy, of course, especially after he hooks up with Jorah Mormont which just gives us the best sort of comedy: two people who hate one another trapped together. As much as I enjoyed those chapters, though, I would bet you cash money we'll not see the dwarf mummer Penny on TV as she'll just get in the way of Peter Dinklage and Iain Glen squabbling. We might see her at Joffrey's wedding next season for the mock joust but aside from that I reckon she'll end up on the scrapheap of adaptation alongside Strong Belwas (“Strong Belwas needs milk,” best line in the novel).

The only chapters I found at all trying were the Danaerys ones not least because she spends too many of them banging her head against various brick walls: dragons that won't listen to her, enemies she can't identify, killers she can't find, a prophecy she doesn't understand, a man she can't allow herself to shag. Dany's story has always been about hardship but it's also been one of escalating victory, just look at how all three TV seasons have ended. There's also the odd way in which her plot doesn't so much end as stop. Most of the characters in this book come to some moment of resolution or a decent cliffhanger by the end but Dany (and the whole of the Meereen plot) takes steps towards resolution but stops just shy of it. Obviously this will be picked up in The Winds Of Winter but since we're years away from that even now it seemed like an odd end point.

The second half of the novel, the half that follows on from A Feast For Crows, has a few gaps. We get caught up with Arya, the Sand Snakes, Cersei and Jamie. Sam Tarly, Sansa and Littlefinger remain out of the picture, which is a pity.

The one that rankles somewhat is Brienne. When last we saw her in Feast she was about to get herself hanged. She appears in Dance hail and hearty at the end of one chapter to drag Jamie off somewhere mysterious and then she never appears again. No explanation of her survival, of what agenda she's working to or any more information on her would-be executioner. After a six year wait with that cliffhanger a little resolution would have been nice, some might even say polite.

As to the new characters introduced in this book I rather liked them. Quentyn Martel might not be as interesting as his bastard cousins the Sand Snakes but we get a good tour of Old Volantis out of his group's adventures. His story definitely meets with resolution which makes a nice difference from the other characters who find themselves in Meereen. Griff and Young Griff interest me more (yes, I know there's a spoiler warning but I don't want to say who they really are in case someone ignores it) and heartily look forward to seeing where they go in The Winds Of Winter.

Which brings us to why it took me so long to read this book: there's no sense of urgency to it. The last interview with Martin I read predicted that Winds would be out in 2015 at the earliest. I really enjoy this series, I really enjoy Martin's writing, but it is a very long book and giving someone lots of time to finish a task usually encourages them to leave it for a while hence this being probably the most delayed review of the book going.

A Dance With Dragons (take 2)

Spoiler warning: for TV followers of Game Of Thrones I mention events from the first quarter of A Dance With Dragons so come back in... oh, three years and it should make sense).

Over the weekend I started my second attempt to read A Dance With Dragons. When it first came out I bought the hardback and got about halfway through before giving up. I'm not entirely certain why I gave up when I did (though I remember being a bit bored with some of the Danearys chapters) but I think it might have had something to do with the weight of the book.

You see I get a lot of my reading done at work during my lunch break. Anyone who bought the hardback of A Dance With Dragons will understand why I might have got tired taking it to work every day. To use a favourite phrase of my father the thing is “bastard heavy”.

So those are my main memories of the book: heaviness and a major storyline that I found dull even when it asked me to imagine Emilia Clarke naked.

The second time around I'm glad to say that neither of these impressions seem all that accurate. The Dany chapters are a little slow compared to her storylines in previous books but this time I'm actually enjoying watching her learn statecraft whilst Barristan Selmy scowls in the background and Zaro Xhoan Daxos (he's the richest man in Qarth) exhibits previously disguised homosexuality.

Meera and Jojen Reed are also a lot less annoying now I have their television counterparts to imagine. I don't know why I took again the Reeds the moment they were introduced in the books, it's just one of those irrational things, but the TV versions made me like them.

As to the weight problem I decided to splash out a little and get myself the Kindle edition of the book, which might seem wasteful but the hardback seems to have gone walkabout (probably leant it to someone) and I am determined to read it since my friends and co-workers keep having to pause and censure themselves when they start talking about the series. I probably know more of the plot from the moments when they couldn't stop themselves in time than from actually getting halfway through the bloody thing first time around.

That said I do like that this is a series that I can enjoy as a social experience like with Harry Potter back in the day.