HBO Game of Thrones Season 6!

[Zoraptor]

In fairness, book Sansa is 12 or 13 years old in Game of Thrones. I wouldn't call her stupid, but incredibly sheltered. She sees the world she wants to exist, and ignores the one that actually exists. Ignorant? Absolutely. Stupid implies the wrong attribute IMHO. She is much more interesting as the books go on, for sure. It's ironic that the one time she rebels against her father is the one time she shouldn't have, and the consequences were incredibly dire.

 

She also lied about the incident on the way to King's Landing that ended up getting her direwolf and an innocent boy chopped as a result. She'd had a good look at the real Joffrey and Cersei rather than the surface appearance then, and ignored it. I'd certainly agree that she was naive/ sheltered, but imo that carries her over the line into wilfully or deliberately naive rather than just being an innocent, and that makes her stupid.

 

GRRM has a tendency to overdo the stupidity on several characters to almost caricature level- Regent Cersei is at least as dumb as book 1 Sansa without any of her excuses and Sansa at least never thinks she's a genius while being a moron. Dany also suffers from it to a lesser extent when she's ruling, as does Jon as Lord 'forever alone' Commander.

[Ganrich]

I always suspected in the books we've seen the last of Rickon. GRRM sent a message with the name of his direwolf. The show might still make use of him though. I agree on Stannis though, I found him to be an interesting character both on the screen and on the page.

I agree. It could still have ramifications for Davos' arc, and/or the North in general.

 

@Gorgon - More likely Qybern learned that the wildfire placed by Aerys is still within King's Landing and placed accordingly. Especially given the premonitions of Bran earlier in the season. If those rumors are true then Cercei could burn the Sept down and destroy the faith in a single stroke.

 

@Zoraptor - Sansa is 12, and doesn't have your reasoning skills, yet. She just knows that the Queen was angry and protecting your son. She also spends her remaining chapters blaming Arya for it. I still don't see it as stupid. She isn't use to cruel, manipulative, selfish, power hungry people, and I expect it took a few instances for her to realize what she was seeing. She was raised on fairy tales, and always treated with great respect. She was then tossed into a hornets nest with noexperience to fall back on. After the beheading she starts figuring it out.

 

As for Cercei... She is single minded, and has always been stupid. She thinks she is smarter than everyone else, but that isn't the case. Even Tywin tells her this (in the show, but I can't recall if he does it in the books). I've known people like this. They have bipolar disorder, but I would dare say Cercei may as well to an extent.

 

Dany is a good Conqueror, but a stupid governor. I believe that is one purpose to her arc. Martin always talks about his dislike of typical fantasy of "Aragorn is a good King because he is a good man" when history has examples of good people being bad rulers. Tywin is a good ruler, Roose Bolton, And so on. They aren't good people though. Some good men in the series are good leaders like Eddard Stark. However, others like Edmure are not so great rulers. We don't get PoVs of Kings, but we do with Dany. It's easier to critique her when we are inside her head.

 

Jon is between a rock an a hard place. He knows of the dead rising, and has a group of men under his command who don't know or believe. He makes decisions based on what he knows, and his men see it as betraying the purpose of the institute.

 

All that said, I am rereading the books now, but only at Clash at the moment. I could easily be forgetting some stupidity. It has been a few years since I read the books, and I stopped re-watching the series before a new season prior to season 4. If you could specify your instances it could greatly help.

Edited June 15, 2016 by Ganrich

[Guard Dog]

Cersei is vain, paranoid, and not nearly as bright as she thinks. The only thing that saved her was she never had the power to ruin herself. Once Tywin died, she did. And she did.

[Zoraptor]

 

All that said, I am rereading the books now, but only at Clash at the moment. I could easily be forgetting some stupidity. It has been a few years since I read the books, and I stopped re-watching the series before a new season prior to season 4. If you could specify your instances it could greatly help.

 

 

I've said pretty much all of it for Sansa, and there it is mainly a matter of semantics as to whether she was foolish/ naive or stupid. I may sound stridently in the "she's dumb" camp but I happily accept she was also naive, or that it was her naivete that made her dumb.

 

One thing I would say first for all of Jon, Dany and Cersei is that it would have worked better with the originally planned '5 year break'. We could assume that Jon/ Dany's/ Cersei's accumulated stupidity was meant to be spread over a far more believable 5 year stint rather than condensed into months. GRRM needed stuff to happen and for it to happen there had to be a lot of teh dumb occurring over a now condensed timeline and there could be commensurately fewer things that they did well.

 

Cersei, hmm. She's probably the most interesting case actually. My presumption has always been that her POV chapters were meant to humanise her in the same way that Jaime's chapter's humanised him. You don't end up thinking that Jaime's a paragon of virtue but you understand where he is coming from, that he has a- to him- justifiable framework for his actions and that he is, in his own way at least, both honourable and misjudged. But Cersei doesn't really end up humanised because she comes across as vindictive, venal, quarrelsome, conceited and paranoid every bit as much as she did without the POV. The revelation that Aerys planned on blowing King's Landing up and barbecued Starks justifies Jaime's actions at least in that case, but the equivalent for Cersei is the revelation of The Prophecy and that just reinforces that her journey to stupidity and viciousness started early. If there's one thing that the show has done incontrovertibly better (imo, of course) than the book it's humanising Cersei. Book wise though she takes the Lannister's from pretty much uncontested to near war with former friends in a matter of months, and without any balancing successes. Possibly excluding Robert Strong but that seems... unlikely to end well, ultimately.

 

For Dany and Jon it's a lot less clear that they're stupid because they're both in far more difficult situations than Cersei, so their mistakes are more easily justified and you'd expect them to have larger, less reversible consequences. For both though I would say that while they managed a decent balance between expediency and principle and were highly competent on their rise to power (Dany scammed the Unsullied off their masters as eg, Jon infiltrating the Wildings) their balance in power was off terribly and both were inconsistent in such a way as to maximise the dumbness, and ended up antagonising both their allies and their enemies unnecessarily. Jon in particular should have done better as he had plenty of direct leadership role models in Eddard, Mormont and even Mance he could have emulated.

[Ganrich]

I definitely agree Cersei's humanization in the books isn't all that great. The only good thing about her is that she loves her children. Otherwise she is a powerhungry monster that tends to hate being born a woman. Many of her decisions aren't about her kids but about her power, and that makes her not very human in many people's eyes. The TV show Cersei is probably a bit better, and I like Lena Headey. She rocks that part.

 

The 5 year break would have helped, but it may have hurt in other areas. He would have spent a lot of time going over what happened in that time, for instance. That makes skipping the period pointless if you are going to cover large parts anyway. Either way would have had some issues.

 

Jon and Dany I feel the same way about. They are in crappy situations, and they do what they can.

 

Dany is a good example of why the 5 year break is something that may have been a good thing. Those Dragons gotta grow, and she needed something to do while it happened. If the break happened she could have chilled in a city, and not much happened.

 

Jon, I feel, didn't try to bridge the gap with dissenters in the Night's Watch. He is shown as being tired of their opinions, and I agree he should have known better. Morale cannot be ignored in a military group, and that is sure to be worse when the institution is as old as the NW. That hate takes a long time to die, and Jon should have known that.

[Volourn]

Wanting power is a very human trait...

[Rosbjerg]

We are however expexted (at least outwards) to rise above the selfish need itself and attain it for a higher reason- it's all about the willingess to do the part/theatrics.

[Oner]

I definitely agree Cersei's humanization in the books isn't all that great. The only good thing about her is that she loves her children. Otherwise she is a powerhungry monster that tends to hate being born a woman. Many of her decisions aren't about her kids but about her power, and that makes her not very human in many people's eyes. The TV show Cersei is probably a bit better, and I like Lena Headey. She rocks that part.

 

Jon, I feel, didn't try to bridge the gap with dissenters in the Night's Watch. He is shown as being tired of their opinions, and I agree he should have known better. Morale cannot be ignored in a military group, and that is sure to be worse when the institution is as old as the NW. That hate takes a long time to die, and Jon should have known that.

In her Pov chapters Cersei sends her handmaiden's to Qyburn and the screaming is enough for even her to not want to know what he does with them. Schemes for the Kettleblack bros to seduce Margery for the whole trial thing. Etc etc. Oh and she looked down on Tonmen for not being her awesome, great Joffrey. So yeah. Book humanization just didn't happen.

 

Jon did try several times to explain why they don't need an extra xx thousand zombie wildling breathing down on their necks. They could barely hold the Wall against the wildling army and later they want to face the "surviving" wildlings and the Others and all the other zombies with even fewer numbers. If simple math wasn't enough to convince them, nothing else would have so Jon had two suicidal chose and he went with the one that got only himself killed.

[Fighter]

Cercei went with religious fanatics and they turned on her. Now she's relying on some necromancer guy who made her a zombie warrior. I doubt she's in control there too.

[Chilloutman]

Cercei is not in control of anything, that makes here dangerous as she is desperate

[Oner]

So they wasted a whole army because sombody didn't tell anyone that they have reinforcements incoming. Can I call her stupid now?

[Hiro Protagonist]

Not really. If Ramsey saw them before hand, he would have holed up in Winterfell. They had to draw him out.

[Oner]

Except that's not at all what happened.

[ktchong]

So they wasted a whole army because sombody didn't tell anyone that they have reinforcements incoming. Can I call her stupid now?

 

Sansa likely did not know if Littlefinger would keep his words until the Knights of the Vale actually arrived.  With Littlefinger, you'd never know if he would keep his words...

Edited June 20, 2016 by ktchong

[Longknife]

I don't get the praise for the episode. I just don't see the appeal of battle scenes like that. I thought the past battles (Blackwater, Hardhome, the Wall) were all betterr cause they incorporated more tension and also more dialog between characters. Maybe it's just me, but yeah, I don't get the appeal of watching Jon swing a sword for 15 minutes. Also felt like the pacing was really off, AKA with Hardhome there was a sense of "we need to leave NOW," with the Wall it was the growing number of Wildlings overwhelming them and the worry that characters would die as that happens. With this episode...? It starts out with Jon and Co. just royally screwed, and it got to the point I was thinking "at this point Jesus is gonna need to descend from the heavens and use a Kamehameha to save them." Instead we got some horses running at a bunch of guys with spears and just like that the battle is suddenly over within the course of 2 minutes.

 

Wun wun's death, while HIGHLY expected, just felt dumb, cause I mean wtf it was so avoidable. Get him armor. Get him a club. Get him ANYTHING and he'd be a huge battle asset. Instead they're like "nah this is fine" and let him run around half naked until he succumbs to tiny injuries that he accrued over the entirety of the battle. I feel I would've been more satisfied if he had done something big but died in the process. For example let's say he charges through one of the edges of the shield wall, basically running to his death, but due to his sheer size he's still able to break the line, allowing his comrades to escape. Nah, he's gonna die because Jon and his genius army thought sending a naked guy to attack a bee hive was no problemo. I realize resources are an issue, but to me it seems like the effort needed to get Wun Wun SOMETHING would absolutely be worth the time expended.

 

 

Speaking of fighting half-naked. Ramsay. This guy has, in the past, fought armored knights half naked. This episode. Jon punches him once and he's like "whelp that's it, guess I better lay here and accept my death lol." This is the very same guy who on two seperate occassions, had a knife hidden on him and used it to get a kill. He pulled a fast one on Osha for example, but Jon...? Nah, no tricks, no cunning plan. Just "lol I'm dying lol." Even his death to his dogs felt awkward to me in the sense there's a dozen different ways his death could've been satisfying, and the writers chose the one where Ramsay and Sansa have to dialog a bit to convince the audience this isn't immersion-breaking. Those kinds of convos themselves already take me out of the scene, personally.

 

Top that all off, it was just predictable. We all expected Ramsay to lose, we all expected Wun Wun to die, we all knew Rickon was a goner, we all expected the Vale to save them, etc etc etc. No curveballs, no surprises, just exactly what was expected.

 

 

 

For me the best parts of the episode were actually Sansa and Dany. These two saw character development....however bad it may be. I've long harbored a belief that GoT is gonna have a cycle of an ending, where at the end of it all we'll get a "happy" ending, but we'll notice the characters in power are very similar to the ones we had at S1. I expect Sansa to be Cersei's replacement, because Sansa has only ever experienced cruelty and learned from cruel people her whole life. It'd also be poetic in the sense that of all the people Cersei has dealt with, Sansa is the one person she showed sympathy to and the one girl she DOESN'T suspect of replacing her; it'd be fitting that she's paranoid of Margaery but then no, Sansa is her replacement, and Sansa is only where she is now partially thanks to pity shown to her by Cersei. And Dany...? The obvious answer is "the mad queen," and sure enough we saw her back to her old methods, though this time a tad less receptive to her advisors than usual, with the battle cutting Tyrion off mid-conversation. Here's to hoping we someday see that smug bitchy smirk wiped off her face.

[Guard Dog]

Jon has never played MTW I or II apparently. You don't meet a cavalry charge with a cavalry charge especially if you are outnumbered. If your force is primarily infantry you keep your cavalry on the flanks. Davos had a good plan. Collapse the center and draw the cavalry in and hit them on the wings. That is exactly how Hannibal won at Cannae and he was outnumbered too. Charging was stupid. They got all bunched up where they could be enveloped by a shield wall. The only way to break it would have been a flanking attack by their cavalry IF they had held them in reserve. That was how the knights of the Vale broke the shield wall. It is unwise to meet strengths with strengths unless you have a superior defensive position or superior numbers.

 

Too bad I wasn't in that tent. I'd have told them all a few things. Then invited Sansa back to my tent for a private strategy session!

[Ganrich]

The episode was meh. No Manderly. They lost me. Honestly, they could've gotten two seasons out of ADwD, but they consolidated everything and hamfisted it. I agree, Longknife, about the predictability of it. You can definitely tell they don't care about the details of it, and don't have Martin's work to copy anymore. On the plus side... I don't have to worry about the show spoiling the books. It's hard for bad writing to spoil good writing, and they have gone so far off the rails that I know the books will still be satisfying.

 

Jon's plot armor was amazing though. It kept me at the edge of my seat. /sarcasm. They should've kept Stannis alive, and ended this season with the pink letter. They could have rezzed Jon just prior to read it. Honestly, if this season ended on all the points of ADwD the internet would be tearing itself apart. It would have been entertainment enough to see people squirm at all those cliffhangers.

 

I love how Ghost has been MIA since Jon was brought back. They could have a few less dragon scenes and give us a dire wolf. They've killed all the other wolves save Nymeria and Ghost. At least let us see some wolves.

 

Edit: also, I'm tired of Littlefinger being the Deus Ex Machima machine. It's boring. He needs to die so the Starks can learn to stand on their own feet.

Edited June 20, 2016 by Ganrich

[Guard Dog]

The episode was meh. No Manderly. They lost me. Honestly, they could've gotten two seasons out of ADwD, but they consolidated everything and hamfisted it. I agree, Longknife, about the predictability of it. You can definitely tell they don't care about the details of it, and don't have Martin's work to copy anymore. On the plus side... I don't have to worry about the show spoiling the books. It's hard for bad writing to spoil good writing, and they have gone so far off the rails that I know the books will still be satisfying.

 

Jon's plot armor was amazing though. It kept me at the edge of my seat. /sarcasm. They should've kept Stannis alive, and ended this season with the pink letter. They could have rezzed Jon just prior to read it. Honestly, if this season ended on all the points of ADwD the internet would be tearing itself apart. It would have been entertainment enough to see people squirm at all those cliffhangers.

 

I love how Ghost has been MIA since Jon was brought back. They could have a few less dragon scenes and give us a dire wolf. They've killed all the other wolves save Nymeria and Ghost. At least let us see some wolves.

 

Edit: also, I'm tired of Littlefinger being the Deus Ex Machima machine. It's boring. He needs to die so the Starks can learn to stand on their own feet.

Like I said a while back, the show is like a cliff note version of the ASoIaF story, Small, more compact. The story the books are telling is huge. It complex and IMO more interesting. But the show is a nice distraction on a night nothing else is on. I'm not even comparing the two anymore. 

Edited June 20, 2016 by Guard Dog

[Oner]

Jon has never played MTW I or II apparently. You don't meet a cavalry charge with a cavalry charge especially if you are outnumbered. If your force is primarily infantry you keep your cavalry on the flanks.

It wasn't Jon's plan to let the two cavalries fight it out, Tormund just ordered the charge to save Jon's ass after he fell for Ramsey's taunting.

What bothers me is that with this setup, the Stark force was unlikely to succeed and then Jon reduced their winning chances to 0 and then Middlefinger came to save the day. I mean, if the Starks are supposed to be the protagonists, when will they actually accomplish something? The only one who managed to do anything up until now was Jon and even he "only" kept the Other situation from becoming worse than it already was.

 

Daenerys right now feels like a carbon copy of Sansa to me now. She stands there with that smug smirk, but I don't hear any cogs turning in her head. Unlike Sansa she just has dragons behind her so she gets to do what the other doesn't. The negotiation with the Greyjoys was pretty weak as well. She tells them to stop raiding. Ooookay. I'm sure the rocks they live on will spontaneously grow farming fields and exra land so they won't need to raid. Or something. (To be fair, considering all the crap that went down and will go down, there might be a big enough economical vacuum that they could switch to trading, but they didn't even bring any of this up.)

And the people who've spent centuries/millenia cultivating a pirate culture will find this just a dandy idea I'm sure.

 

I liked the battle itself mostly, especially that gorgeous Oner (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheOner).

[Volourn]

"So they wasted a whole army because sombody didn't tell anyone that they have reinforcements incoming. Can I call her stupid now?"

 

The stupid one was Jon.

[Guard Dog]

Oner is right about one thing. There is a definite trend in TV shows and movies to not allow the protagonist of any particular plot to be the "hero". Even in the battle of castle black last year Jon had to get help to prevail, the same at Craster's where Karl actually won the fight until he was distracted. I'm not sure what the reasoning behind this is but I've seen a lot of instances in this show and others. It does no service to the story though. 

[BruceVC]

Oh my hat, I have enjoyed every episode but the latest one with Bolton final battle was amazing

 

The best one by far, the dragons kicked ass and Daenerys Stormborn was looking  so hot 

[Lexx]

On a scale of 1 to 10, how dumb can Jon Snow still become?

[Gorgon]

Battle looked kinda comical. Bolton infantry are hoplites now ?. Wasn't invested as it is by now clear that the lord commander is unkillable. I had hope when he took the bait and sent an opening cavalry charge outnumbered 3 to 1 like an idiot.

 

I had kinda gotten used to the sadist Bolton with the dogs and the flaying and whatnot.. More interesting than Sansa and emo commander anyway.  

[BruceVC]

The episode was meh. N

You guys are almost impossible to please.....seriously   

 

This episode should be considered one of the best single episodes of any series. It had so many exciting threads and ended so many story lines....how can anyone not love it