My prediction is that Stannis dies trying to lay siege to Winterfell, but Lady Selyse burns Shireen without consulting Stannis first. 

I agree on everything except Dorne being more interesting than anything. I agree the Greyjoy stuff has been a slog, but it’s less bad than Dorne.

Your point about his looks isn’t entirely true. There had been dark haired Targaryen kings in the past as a result of getting out of their own little kiddie gene pool. Rhaegar’s known, legitimate kids had dark hair because their mom was Dornish.

I think it was the other way around, her brother’s death led to Jaime stabbing the mad king. Robert smashed Rhaegar’s chest in at the Trident, which caused Tywin to finally pick a side and march on King’s Landing, which led to the mad king trying to burn down King’s Landing, which led to Jaime stepping in and taking…

I’m absolutely hoping for semi-feral child lord Rickon Stark winding up as the warden of the north in the books. He’s out there hanging out with cannibals and wildlings on Skagos with his wild, untamed direwolf, ready to stir things up.

I thought that’s what the point of the How To Train Your Dragon sequence was going to be. They’d fly south, weez on some grindage, and come back. Instead they went to some snow cave or whatever.

Or under Winterfell!

The ice dragon is stupid and I wish they would’ve used the Horn of Joramun in the show. The whole wall crashing down after blowing an enormous horn is way cooler than melting 100 feet of it with blue ice fire.

Thad Bingel.

It’s never established in the show, but the Tyrells are kind of looked down upon by other houses in the Reach as new money. They were given Highgarden by Aegon despite other houses having a better claim to it (primarily the Florents, who initially sided with Stannis due to his wife being a Florent). What I’m saying…

One of the things the show does is make it seem like the only members of these great families are the ones we see on screen, so if they die their houses and lineage die with them. It makes things tidier, which I suppose is what they’re going for, but it seems too convenient. There had to be other Tyrells beyond…

I hope we actually get TWOW someday because I really want to see how The North Remembers stuff plays out now that we’ve seen the show totally butcher it.

I’ve long had a theory that what separates true “prestige” TV from the pretenders is levity. The Sopranos was outright funny, The Wire had McNulty and Bunk’s quips, Mad Men and Breaking Bad both had plenty of pitch black humor. The Walking Dead has all the budget in the world but it’s so relentlessly grim that it’s a…

IIRC from the books, the Umbers were kind of forced to submit to the Boltons because the Greatjon was still held captive by the Lannisters. The Manderlys were subverting the Boltons/Freys in secret and the Karstarks had split into pro-Bolton and pro-Stannis factions. I know they had to speed things up in the show, but…

I don’t know, it was still pretty flimsy. Olly had the most motive of any, Thorne was just being a prickly ol dingus.

Stannis is still alive in the books. He’s basically mounting an army to march on Winterfall.

I think it’s pretty safe to assume GRRM is going to bring him back, should we ever get the next book. The manner of doing so may be different (my favorite book theory is that he wargs into Ghost just before he dies so his consciousness lives on even while his body is still dead) but I don’t think he’s gone for good.

Also, their reasons for killing him in the first place didn’t make sense. A group of Nights Watchmen had been to Hardhome and had seen the army of wights and White Walkers. The threat was real, the need to get the wildlings south of the Wall was real. In the books, Bowen Marsh leads the mutiny because Jon wants to…

His “next time, don’t bring me back” comment to Melisandre conveyed something, but it hasn’t been explored since.

True, and Jon wasn’t killed in nearly as gruesome a way as Beric had been (impaled by a lance, for example) but I do wish they could portray that Jon wasn’t just magically fine post-resurrection.