You make some good points and should Bran and Meera turn up fine next week, with no further explanation, I will share your annoyance. I found the scene to be powerful so I admit that I may just be making excuses for it, but I think that (if you squint) the character motivations can be explained by assuming that the…

I'd have said Bran is motivated by his usual frustration and impatience, the White Walkers motives are as vague/mysterious as ever and the Raven is motivated by saving and imparting final wisdom onto Bran. The stakes are simply life and death and I don't see how what we know about Hodor is betrayed, his nature…

I'm with you on Bran acting like an entitled twit but am unclear why this is bad from a narrative perspective (there are clear echoes of his wall-creeping from episode one here), should the Starks only ever do what is right and never make rash decisions? Should a tragedy always be achieved through a character…

It's the obvious conclusion if you assume that the writers considered this point.

I agree, I didn't get any sense of 'downloading' at all. Did it sound like they thought they communicated that in the episode?

Surely the fact that Hodor was an innocent pawn hijacked for someone else's war only adds to the tragedy. What is wrong with the depiction of choices being made for someone else? George RR Martin spent the entirety of A Feast For Crows hammering home the point that the smallfolk suffer when the Lords ride to war, I…

Do you think it's possible that the Raven knew what was going to happen and deliberately made sure that the Hodor causality loop remained closed? The only other explanation I can think of would be that there was more important information in that flashback but the white walker attack prevented Bran from finding it.

Yeah, I don't quite understand how they can criticize Bran's scene for having unexpected emotional progression and Arya's for having expected emotional progression in the same episode (I agree with the latter criticism). Surely the jarring nature of the juxtaposition between the attack and the peaceful…

The Hollow Crown S2 E1
The first half of the BBC's streamlined adaption of Shakespeare's Henry Vi plays. Doesn't quite manage GOT's scale and grandeur in terms of set design (although they did steal Qyburn to play 'Exeter'), but its quite well done for a smaller budget and seems well shot, so it's not quite as…

With regard to the seating thing, rather than looking like 'best buddies', I thought it made Tommen look like a small(er) child being gently corrected by a kindly grandfather. Although it initially seems like the High Sparrow is expressing vulnerability by emphasizing his decrepitude, it allows him to gain control of…

"Phillips and Oldford’s strategy for playing American involves stone-faced super-seriousness, bereft of identifiable personality."
Do you consider this an inaccurate portrayal?

I always thought air-conditioners had a kind of misogynist look to them…

Finished Shooting An Elephant by George Orwell, which I really enjoyed. Straightforward and insightful essays on such subjects as: British rule in India and Burma, the death penalty, homelessness, the Spanish civil war and patriotism. There is also a more deconstructive and literary vein covering Dickens, Swift and…

Upvoted for upvoting me for getting the general point.

It's actually just a result of the fact that my friend and I once spammed each other with pictures of Michael Gove (I forget why), so it was the first avatar that came to hand. I don't think I could muster the sheer toxicity needed to stand out from the regular crazies on modern Guardian comment boards.

I'm not religious so I don't really have a position on whether there is a correct way to read the bible, although yours sounds reasonable. My point was more that to a certain kind of person certainty in the idea of biblical truth is a huge part of the attraction, as it gives them a perceived divine authority for…

But if the Bible is considered to be open to interpretation then using it as a moral guide requires thinking for yourself and that way madness lies.

Go Tell It On The Mountain by James Baldwin:
Starts off as a tightly focused examination of a young boy's troubled relationship with his father, his faith and his position as a trodden-on minority in depression-era Harlem. In its second chapter it veers off into a short but extremely sharply drawn and powerful…

How else could he demonstrate the concept of a spaceship being launched? Sometimes science needs sacrifices The Artist Formerly Known as Y.

Okay, you make good points , I guess my mind just rebels at the concept of the line of Kings being kept pure through 900 years and 16 generations of nomadic wandering. (I looked at the wikia, apparently Aragorn's claim to Gondor is weaker than his claim to Arnor)