Yeah, but so what? This is ostensibly a medieval-like setting, and he's regent of the Vale. Jon's aunt was married to a man old enough to be her grandfather, who was coincidentally also Warden of the East and Lord of the Vale. (LF is only regent or protector or something of the Vale, but same thing functionally.)

Yes, but Jon was thousands of miles away at the time, and I don't think that anyone in the north other than Littlefinger knows what Littlefinger did or didn't do, except maybe Sansa, who I don't think even knows the full story since she would have mostly gotten it from Littlefinger himself.

What the fuck is Arya's arc now? She just spent how many seasons training and enduring trauma becoming a sociopathic magical assassin and now she's like "Eh, Cersei will keep, let me ride 1,000 miles north and say 'hi' to Jon. I knew he was still alive before anyway, but Castle Black is soooo much father than…

Does Jon Snow know anything about Littlefinger other than that he (a) saved Sansa from torture and death and (b) saved his ass at the Battle of the Bastards? I don't understand why he's incredibly hostile to him (understandable if he knows about what Littlefinger's done) but not ready to execute him?

Nymeria showing up to remind everyone that "This shit is too expensive that's why we're not doing it" was somehow not the worst thing in this episode. Well played Benioff & Weiss, well played.

I honestly don't have a great working theory for how things shake out in the books. I think that Book Euron is going to have a much bigger role in the final arc, and I can see a plausible world where Dany turns out to be the villain. Martin's been up front about his title: both fire and ice are great for…

I kind of trust the set dressers and costume designers on that stuff. Daario's babalicious swords, for example, could really only work in pulpy writing like Martin's or a Richard Corben-illustrated comic. There's no non-ridiculous way to fit them into a live-action show. Might be the same deal with the Free Cities'…

Dany is core to the story the same way that Henry VII is core to the War of the Roses. But the nonsense in Slaver's Bay really got away from Martin, and he's said as much. The trouble can all be traced to Martin making the kids too young and realizing like halfway through A Clash of Kings that he couldn't put his…

The chains are working great as an anti-theft device.

I'm not sure what you're saying, but if you're saying that the medieval sources weren't inflating the numbers because they were accounting for the train, that's not borne out by contemporary sources. Quartermasters logs from the era, for example, consistently show vastly smaller numbers than after-the-fact accounts…

I mean, the books are literally in a place called The Citadel, entrance to which is granted only to maesters and maesters-in-training. I doubt theft has been a real concern in a very long time.

True. Until I read about it, though, I always had this image of the Athenians massed on the grassline and the Persians marching through the surf only to be broken and driven back to their boats in a heroic charge. It seems less heroic to have the Athenians and Persians cautiously milling about creeping towards each…

Figure of speech. "If you want to square what's shown on the screen with what's said, you have to treat the show…"

You're talking more like 40 men for a smallish longship (https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…, let alone those pseudo-frigates that were shown sailing in the show.

Yeah, you have to treat the show as an unreliable narrator of the events being portrayed.

This is very true, but it would be like saying "raise me an army of a billion men." At some point the hyperbole gets ridiculous. Cursory googling says that a Trireme (a small, very simple warship) took 6,000 manhours to build. A galleon took "hundreds of skilled tradesmen … working day and night for months." The…

Right, but they're never attached to the books in any scenes that we see. Don't you need iron rings on the spines to make a chain system work?

Maybe the most realistic part of the show. Medieval sources often describe battles between thousands or tens of thousands of men where the contemporary evidence suggests hundreds or low thousands.

Wall goes coast to coast, so the Walkers would need to learn to swim or sail.

If you look at pictures of the "Plain of Marathon" the battle didn't really take place on a beach (although it's often poetically spoken of as the Athenians throwing the Persians back into the ocean). Marathon is proof that mountainous terrain was defensible, not coastline.