Sure. Sam might become head of House Tarly, given dispensation from someone who can give it. (Or theoretically by ruthless politicking, but try saying that and "Samwell Tarly" in the same sentence.) But he presumably isn't yet, since that hasn't yet happened.

If they've built their fortress wall such that Chaucer, Shakespeare, Austen, and Shaw (users of singular "they" all) lie outside it, it's possible that they've conceded too much ground, and have too few defenders inside the walls.

Don't tell him, tell Zapp Brannigan!

3D chess variants go back over a century[1], and so before people mostly started thinking of time as a dimension. So "two-dimensional" is a backformation to refer to standard chess.

Even Batman follows the Riddler's red herring at first. Especially in his own stories, where he doesn't have to be as omnicompetent as when he has to show why demigods bother to team up with him.

Sam's still technically Night's Watch and ineligible, isn't he?

Whereas Arya's more into Frey casualties.

"I've read that Euron's gift to Cersei is"-

Though it's pretty odd that he'd think that way, considering that as the firstborn he'd have always known a love match was no more on the cards for him than for Sansa even before he became an embattled king in an existential war. (Hoping for love to spring out of an arranged match, as it did for his parents and as…

Me too. But if they can't stick the landing, I think the first season of the show will still work. The story isn't over, but the first season doesn't hang so strongly on being able to cash mystery checks in some later season that it becomes worse in retrospect.

That's one where comics knowledge was actively misleading, because comics Adrian Chase is Vigilante and isn't Prometheus.

I'd say there's a difference between only taking joy from novelty and simply taking joy from novelty. I've read The Lord of the Rings countless times by now, but there was still the first time, and I wouldn't want to have missed the experience of seeing how it all unfolded that first time.

DC Comics had a story back in the 90s, "Armageddon 2001", in which one of the heroes (but which one?!?) was destined to become a world-conquering tyrant called Monarch ten years later. (Most of the stories involved flashforwards to see what "would" happen to Superman, Batman, etc. in the future, in the guise of…

I especially appreciate stories that manage to work both in making running into the surprises interesting and in being worth reexperiencing once you know them. I really hate to lose one option in favor of another.

You cannot write payoff-based TV anymore because the audience is essentially a render farm. They have an unlimited calculation capacity. There’s no writers’ room that can think more than 20 million people who can think about it for an hour a day.

Counterexample: Heinlein's "And He Built a Crooked House".

He can't be the rightful heir to anything unless he's legitimized, can he?

France abolished slavery (the first time) under Robespierre, who is at least not remembered with unalloyed admiration.

Before the show started, I had a crazy fan theory that "Rip Hunter" was actually Booster Gold pretending to be a Time Master. (Partly vindicated, since the premise that Rip was lying about their future status as "legends" and his backing by the organization was correct.) This suggests that I wasn't entirely off base.

Or Tony thinks he wants to be held accountable, but won't actually let himself be. (He's off violating Russian sovereignty without UN authorization before the ink has dried on his signature to the Sokovia Accords, and is shortly thereafter prepared to summarily execute Bucky for murder.)