Thank you, but I do want to clarify that I do not consider myself "brave" for posting a critical review of Game of Thrones - I think that we need to temper our respect to acknowledge the low stakes of this enterprise.

Lucky Westwind, which isn't half-bad.

I'm going to bed, but so that I don't have to reply to all y'all individually in the morning, a few thoughts.

Nah, my Mom stopped reading the comments after she got offended when people thought my name was fake.

I see where Jon may not necessarily value his life in the same way that you or I might. But before the battle he's spending time laying out strategy, and in that moment with Ramsay he isn't being reckless at all—he's doing what he's always done, which is risk his own life in the interest of potentially saving others.

I'd say less "hating both houses" and more "understanding it as a story about individuals working WITHIN two sides I didn't necessarily care about."

Ahem—I think you mean self-hating average well-educated white guys. Which I think explains a lot, no?

The reading on Jon's choice with Ramsay is a bit confusing to me—is there any reason to doubt Jon's claim that he was simply checking to see if Ramsay's ego would be such that Jon could easily defeat him in single combat? Jon is a trainer warrior, and Ramsay is a torture expert bastard, and there's no way that's not…

Kind of weird to have a character moment for Sansa when she's not even there, though?

I was speaking more to the way the battle was framed in advance (the "hype" if you will) and enacted, versus how it was ultimately solved. But even there, I felt like the denouement weirdly glossed over any of Sansa or Littlefinger's motivations, which delays any search for clarity/exploration of ambiguity, thus…

Appreciate the comprehensive deconstruction of the argument, even if I should totally be in bed by now and wish I'd spent less time sifting through the outright dismissals and discussed this instead.

Man, you're really dialing in on the pastoral elegy thing, you're welcome for giving you that fastball over the plate.

Can you put this in Tormundspeak?

I really expected you to pick out something way more obtuse than this.

Dude, this show asks *tons* of existential questions. What is the Lord of Light except an Existential question machine?

Provided Disqus doesn't collapse in on itself, you're going to discover you are NOT going to get slaughtered for this, just FYI.

The Meereen stuff worked—I agree it may be too good to be true, but there I thought the thematic dynamics and convergence resonated. I think I wanted to feel similarly about the other side of the coin and just couldn't get there.

This is astute. I do think it's partially "you can't write 2000 words about how great a battle is, and what's the point of it if you could?" My way of "enjoying" a show is deconstructing and engaging with my reactions, and sometimes that means grappling with a sense of disappointment. But this is not a normal way for…

I'd concur if I'd said "Game Of Thrones is entertaining, but it's empty." But I'm not dismissing the show, or the notion of popular entertainment, nor is a B indicative of a lack of value. I just believe this show has done better balancing its large-scale action with its character arcs, and this fell short of that.…

It's not really an issue of disbelief—I mean, I COULD have written 2500 words about how there are plot holes here, but my issues are more a lack of clear character arcs feeding into the battle than any type of "Itchy strikes two different bones on the skeleton xylophone but they play the same note" situation.