Well, you've posted about four [possibly unintentional] spoilers in other comments, so you're kind of the poster child for why experts need to be really, really careful about what they write on here. What you now assume to be general background information about the characters are actually reveals made in later books.

Good grief!

Good grief!

Speaking solely for myself, I prefer how most of the commenters here approach the show as a standalone work and judge it in terms of being a television show, not an adaptation.

Speaking solely for myself, I prefer how most of the commenters here approach the show as a standalone work and judge it in terms of being a television show, not an adaptation.

They were the Winterfell orphans that Bran sent to help the farmer bring in the harvest while his sons were off fighting with Robb.

They were the Winterfell orphans that Bran sent to help the farmer bring in the harvest while his sons were off fighting with Robb.

WAAAAAAAAAAAALLLLLLLLLLTTTT!!!

WAAAAAAAAAAAALLLLLLLLLLTTTT!!!

While I agree it would have been more logical from a character perspective to just have Jon find a cave to sleep in, mountain climbers survive much worse conditions all the time.

I believe the point wasn't so much to introduce Jaime's adventures on the lam but to introduce discontent in the Stark camp, specifically over the question of what to do with Jaime after he kills a bunch of banner-kids in a futile, though characteristically daring, escape attempt.

Actors, writing and the fact that you actually see all the characters interacting on equal terms instead of having most of them reduced to biased caricatures by the perspective of a scene's single point-of-view character.

How did Theon benefit from living with the Starks? Yes, they kept him dressed and fed as a child but the temporary and altogether fleeting benefits experienced in his childhood are far outweighed by the resulting loss of his claim to succession (and personal independence) as an adult… much like how the temporary…

@Kumagoro:disqus Based on map comparisons I've seen online, the comparison works because Westeros is very thin and, in terms of the comparison, "north Westeros to south Westeros" is basically a tilted Europe running from southwest Spain to northeast Finland.

@avclub-23dc117ef9479407fb6c6a666005af40:disqus Estimates are based on a comment by Martin that the wall is 100 leagues long which, assuming it runs in a straight line from west to east, would make the Seven Kingdoms comparable in size to Scandinavia, Germany, France, Spain, Britain, Switzerland and a chunk of…

@avclub-23dc117ef9479407fb6c6a666005af40:disqus After returning to the keep, the Hound specifically tells some extra-guard to "return the little bird to her cage" which seems to suggest that magnus is right. It may not be derision, but it's definitely some kind of [darkly] humorous reference to her situation than an…

Thinking about this a little more, I think the case can be made that Brienne is genuinely transgender. She does not portray herself, like virtually every other female warrior in fantasy and sci-fi, in the cliched "I'm NO MAN… GIRLPOWER" way but seems to actively reject any association with her sex (as we saw in her…

The problem is that changing things while keeping the plot intact may create unintended ways of angering non-reader viewers as well. Renly is actually a great example of this. We did spend more time with him and the show writers did a great job expanding on the character, but those efforts also meant his abrupt death…

Gethin Anthony deserves a lot of the credit for making the character as likeable as he was.

I think you're reading too much into Brienne's reaction. Loras wants to avenge Renly because he loved him. Brienne wants to avenge him because she swore an oath to protect the person who had finally validated her self-image as a genuine knight and is trying to cope with the fact that she failed miserably at her life's…