I'm not sure (honestly can't remember) how many people know/are sure that she was poisoned. Jaime and Cersei clearly do, but you'd think that the Iron Throne would be at war with Dorne if it were generally known. Agreed that it's a weird lapse if Tommen does know, especially since Myrcella wasn't cruel to him like…

Castamere was Tywin Lannister. The Lannisters generally have waxed and waned, and don't really have the enduringly terrifying reputation of a house like Bolton. Tywin's father, Tytos, was kind of a pushover, which was the whole reason the Reynes thought they could get away with shenanigans.

Yeah, but that's pretty small fry in the scheme of things. It's not a good thing for the Great Houses to have the Faith Militant around any more than it would be for them to have another Great House to contend with, but it's hardly defeat. As for the honor point, Lannister took it harder than Tyrell, so I'm not…

Well is she Ali's son or Lar's son? That name is confusing.

Nah, if it was just "he pantsed us and got away with it," the Queen of Thorns wouldn't be so wroth. She'd be amused and insult everyone, but the situation would have been resolved for the most part. All she really cares about is stability and House Tyrell growing stronger. If the Crown allies with the Faith…

That works too, though the lack of a significant foreign presence and general inferiority of the chief ecclesiastical figure to the King reads more Anglican to me.

The very hottest of takes. GoT is more violent and grimmer than real medieval history? Are talking about the same medieval history that included a score or more significant wars per century (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wi… ) and a series of plagues grouped together under The Black Death that killed between a third…

It doesn't make a ton of sense to me either, but I think what the Tyrells/Lannisters are upset at is the High Sparrow taking "control" of Tommen and Margaery. In reality, HS would just be one of the numerous influences on the boy king, and brokering a peace with a newly vitalized Faith Militant would be an almost…

Even in the books it's not well-enough fleshed out to know (speaking only of ASoIaF—not sure about the non-ASoIaF entries in the mythos), but it seems safe to assume that the Faith of the Seven are basically a stand-in for the Anglican Church. And not the modern, wishy-washy Anglican Church—the 16th century Anglican…

I just realized how much I wish Kyle Chandler was playing Randyll Tarly.

Myles, for the last time, there is no "religious exemption" to public indecency charges. Especially not when your religion is all elves and dragons and twenty-sided dice.

I think GRRM is on record as saying that Rickon is one of the casualties of his timeline getting screwed up. He was originally going to have a several year time-jump, and planned for it by making the Stark kids pretty young. Once he was into the story, he realized that he couldn't just have years of events unfold…

You have higher expectations than I do. Every week the new bet isn't "The hobbits never reach Dumbledore" I'm astonished.

This feature exists solely because Disqus can't handle the thousands of comments each GoT episode review gets, even spread across two reviews. The AVClub keeps the pageviews coming by giving us more space to talk about the series with this and other more or less equally insubstantial GoT topics.

This is so, so true. And yet I continue to play online games. Life is a mystery.

Blending in the religious zealotry isn't a genre trap—it's actually a great touch. A lot of popular uprisings with which one might generally sympathize also carried to the surface local bigotries. Polish nationalism in the 19th century, for example, was often inextricably blended with local antisemitism.

Really? The Hound spent his entire life unhappy and putting on a hard front because of his evil, abusive brother who scarred him both physically and emotionally, and who committed obscene acts before and after being religiously anointed as a knight. The Hound hates knights, and refuses to be anointed, for that…

Technically he's being punished for his homosexuality, which is wrong, but the Sparrows are almost entirely a reaction to the great houses playing the "game of thrones" and destroying the countryside. It's a peasant revolt with a religious backbone—not an uncommon occurrence—but it's much more anti-aristocratic than…

What is hype may never die, but rises again hyper and stronger.

Not to be negative, but I want to mention a game I won't be playing this weekend. I picked up Planetbase on the strength of the Steam reviews and because I love both Startopia and Banished. Planetbase is like if someone tried to combine those two games, but gave up about a quarter of the way through and pushed the…