Entry tags:	episode reviews, game of thrones
Crossposts:	http://netgirl-y2k.livejournal.com/460984.html

I've worked out how to make my life that much more productive, and that's to have all the shows I love shown on a 24 hour delay. Which is to say I have spent the entirety of today avoiding the internet so as to avoid Game of Thrones spoilers. Which was kind of ridiculous when you think that I've read the books, twice...

Anyway,

-I can already tell this series may as well be subtitled Game of Thrones: Revenge of the Sansa Feelings. I just. She had one scene. One. And I just can't. One day Sophie Turner is going to grow up and have her own show and I am going to die from her face.

God, Sansa. She's such a survivor. And that's as brave as anything her brother's are doing, that's fucking heroic.

-I have long said that if Tyrion and Cersei could have found a way to work together they would have been unstoppable. Best scene in a pretty awesome episode.

-I have never been that interested in Stannis and his court, it's not that I dislike them, it's just that I sort of... forget about them. They turn up and I go... Hang on, didn't you lot die, like, three books ago? But here it seems like the show is doing that thing they did with Dany and Cersei, interesting me in characters I previously wasn't that bothered about purely through the power of awesome casting.

-Is it weird that by far the most interesting part of the Bran in Winterfell storyline is Osha?

-The show is also conspiring to make me ship Dany/all of the people. Seriously, Doreah, Jorah, Rakharo, bring it on. Whereas in the books I find Dany's taste in men so diabolically awful and unhelpful that I mostly ship Dany/dragons and Dany/being queen.

-Still fucking loving Dany's dragons. Although, did they spent the entire CGI budget on that scene, because I was much less convinced by Grey Wind, which was sad because it's basically a giant magic wolf, I should be eating this shit up with a spoon.

-Robb. King Robb. Mostly I appreciate that Richard Madden's default mode as Robb Stark is "smoulder" it makes for fun viewing, but there's a point where you're not sure if he's intentionally having UST with his own mother when it's just -- stop -- just stop.

-Okay, so this is the bit where I talk about how the Stark v. Lannister war is only notionally about Joffrey and Robb and is entirely a battle between these two fierce mothers, Lioness v. She-Wolf.

-One of the changes I really appreciated from the book is that Robb orders Cat to stay and be his envoy to Renly. Cat has always gotten a lot of hate for not returning to Winterfell, and I never really understood it, in the books they're at Riverrun where her dying father is, plus Robb's a much younger commander more in need of her. But, still, I wasn't looking forward to round 5 million of that argument in show!fandom so hopefully that's been neatly sidestepped.

I just loved their scene, Robb's trust in her, and promising her that they'll all go home, because that's what Robb's kinghood is to Cat, not a grab for power or freedom, but her last, her only chance to keep her family safe and together.

-Even though I don't always like her, Cersei Lannister is fascinating to me. I would watch an entire show about Cersei and fucked up gender issues. Because she's a character who has a lot of rage about being excluded from the halls of power on account of her sex, but at the same time has a lot of internalised misogyny towards other women. I think, part of it is because she's got a male twin, she doesn't have to imagine how her life would be different if she were a man, Jaime is the living breathing embodiment of it. Another is part and parcel of being a Lannister, the usual rules don't apply to her, or at least they shouldn't, she's not a woman she's a lioness. Look the her scene with Littefinger, that's a cat playing with its prey if ever I saw one. And then there's Joffrey, her golden boy, who she loves and adores more than her own life, who she has done terrible things for, and would do again. And he's fucking up all her carefully laid plans, and she's powerless to stop him. Her darling boy, treating her not as a queen or as a lioness, but as a mere women.

Now the rational, cold-hearted, Lannister thing to do here is to write Joff off as a lost cause and try again with one of the younger two, but Cersei will never do that because, as Tyrion says, she loves her children.

-Jon Snow was also in this episode. Hey, remember when Jon Snow used to be my favourite? I wonder what happened? Not enough Samwell, maybe?