Too obvious- just wait, the Night King is a Stark, and Rickon and Benjen will come back as child raping cannibals.

There needs to be fall out from that. Will Selyse turn on Melisandre?

So, who are we rooting for- Stannis, the Boltons, or the White Walkers? The North is a bleak, bleak place right now.

I'm talking in terms of emotional impact. It's rough seeing a charcter you like have his character assassinated. They basically killed Stannis right there (though they say GRRM told them that he was going to do it).

Great post, but don't let GRRM off too easily- he could have written the rest of the story to set things right if D&D are truly going off the rails. He's complicit in this.

Holy crap. The Shireen sacrifice was devastating- it was the Red Wedding for Stannis fans. I couldn't really care much about the pit scene because I was still emotionally stunned from the Shireen scene. I think that it was too abrupt. Stannis's desparation wasn't adequately established, even though Stephen Dillane…

Me too!

I agree that it would have been more fun to see the Bolton & Frey vs. Manderly politics. Optimally, Dorne would have been cut, Sansa and Littlefinger would have been kept mostly offscreen in the Vale , and Arya would have had her scenes diminished in favor of Winterfell politics. In that case, the whole Jeyne story…

I agree that Dorne has been a disaster- poorly thought out, poorly written, poorly acted (for the most part). Thankfully, it has been barely featured. Arguably, Qarth was less of a disaster in terms of quality, but it was still bad. This was magnified by the sheer amount of time it consumed. In ACoK, there were…

I agree that Season 1 has been the best overall season, though I think Seasons 3 and 4 are close.

I agree with your top three, but I'd swap Blackwater and Rains of Castamere.

The only other realistic alternative that I can think of right now would have been to keep Sansa and Littlefinger off screen for most or all of this season (a la Bran, since, like Bran, the Sansa plot had essentially reached the end of the books at the close of season 4), ditch the Jeyne Poole story altogether, and…

That's not a guarantee that it won't happen. At best, it's saying that he wouldn't describe it in a POV. He could "cut away from it" as it was starting, much like the camera panned to Theon's face.

Sansa already had an arc, one that didn't involve her being raped.

Yes he did. If he didn't take the time to even bother looking into who he was marrying her to, then he was taking the risk that he marrying her to a monster. It shows that, to Littlefinger, it didn't really matter what type of person Ramsay was. It was a calculated risk he took because sacrificing Sansa was worth…

She already knew that Littlefinger considered her a pawn. That was expressed in episode 408.

He doesn't need her to be particularly skilled in the books, either. He's the one who arranged the wedding to Harry. She's only needed to get Littlefinger access to him and to give the Vale a Stark to help justify / spur into action the Vale's intervention in the North. To the extent that he does teach her things…

Even presuming that the lack of knowledge is true, you don't think that Littlefinger's act of leaving Sansa with someone who happened to be monster because it improved Littlefinger's position without first taking the due diligence to learn about said monster constitutes a betrayal of Sansa? Any you don't think that…

No, that's actually not a good case. It's not logical from Littlefinger's point of view- why put at risk something that you already have (i.e. control over the Vale). Littlefinger is not really Sansa's well-meaning mentor. He doesn't really care what she learns. To the extent he truly wants anything from her, he…

It's hard to say exactly since the arc is still ongoing, but it (and the Ramsay-Sansa marriage in general) will likely serve several narrative purposes. It has likely destroyed any trust that Sansa has in Littlefinger, which should have repercussions for both him and her. As for her being a passive victim, we've…