They may have been poaching plenty of livestock before now, but Dany wasn't previously in a position of authority, with office hours, where people could show up and complain about it.

Yeah, it's a third guy playing the Mountain. The first guy went off to do movies (well, he'd already been doing action movies in Thailand, but he started to get work from Hollywood and Peter Jackson too). The second one was pretty obviously a temporary fill-in— he was a stuntman who didn't particularly resemble the…

"The state will show that the defendant was seen by millions of people slapping Joffrey once per second in a ten minute video."

But from Tywin's perspective, just having a Small Council seat isn't necessarily such a big deal. Tywin is the Hand (and was Hand before for decades) and is also effectively the King Regent; the Council won't really have any authority or know any information that he doesn't choose to give them. (Except for Varys, I…

Well, Bronn wasn't Tyrion's first choice. He picked Jaime right away, so presumably that was his plan and he didn't expect Lysa to rule out waiting for Jaime to get there (which someone other than Lysa might've allowed in order to preserve some shred of respect for aristocratic tradition, but Lysa is crazy and also,…

I'd also imagine that if you demand trial by combat and then lose, there's less chance for any clemency in the sentencing, since you've 1. more or less insulted the court by saying you don't trust them to reach an accurate verdict without divine intervention, and 2. gotten someone killed defending your guilty ass.

Right, we don't know what happened. We can only take Bronn's word for it that she even made it to the boat.

Ha, I hadn't thought of that— Jaime vs. Bronn is pretty interesting to imagine, since they've already given us some scenes with Jaime and Bronn semi-fighting as semi-allies.

(Posted something that was based on the season 4 previews, then thought better of it because it'll be more fun for people who didn't see that bit to keep guessing. Basically, if you don't want to know who the champions are, avoid looking back at the season 4 previews.)

Oberyn has had more time on the show than he did in the book. Here's literally all of his scenes in the book: 1. meets Tyrion, summarizes his backstory and talks about revenge; 2. makes a joke about Joffrey at the wedding breakfast; 3. attends the wedding banquet, but has no lines; 4. attends the trial; 5. fights. He…

Sure, kind of… I mean, I don't think there was ever any reason to believe that Tywin had a master plan from the start that involved throwing Westeros into chaos; even if he had been behind Arryn's death, that would've presumably been a power play within the capital, I don't see how it would've been aimed at starting a…

I don't think the show makes it 100% clear what Tywin hoped would be the outcome of that— it's also possible that he just wanted to draw out Ned personally, hoping that the Hand would try to deliver justice to Gregor himself and be killed, which ironically didn't happen because Ned had been crippled by Jaime and had…

I think that's right. On the show, Robb's last strategic decision before the Red Wedding was to make a major push into the Westerlands with the goal of taking Casterly Rock; he showed Cat a strategy map and it didn't look like they had gotten anywhere near there yet. And they played that up as the main reason why it…

BTW, there's a collection of the three existing D&E novellas, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, coming out in the US next year; it's already out in other countries but they pushed back the publication date here to do it up as a deluxe edition with illustrations. Previously they had only appeared in several different…

The second novella, "The Sworn Sword," was also adapted into a comic by the same people. Both of the comics were out of print for a while but have just been reissued, and they're working on an adaptation of the third one.

Well, Edmure continues to be an outstanding young man.

And Littlefinger's scheming has actually facilitated Varys's scheming (despite Varys's concern that the war might be happening a little too soon). LF is thinking only about political players within Westeros; he might not have been so eager to destabilize the kingdom if he knew that the ultimate winner might be a…

It was prominently featured in the "previously on…" segment this week, but if people don't look at that, it's a challenge.

And if those things had happened, Littlefinger would've shrugged and waited around until he found some other opportunity. That might've meant marrying Lysa sooner and relocating his scheming to the Vale, but he gains either way.

It's heavily implied in the books, yes, based on things Hoster Tully said on his deathbed. But I don't think the show has dropped any hints about Lysa's first pregnancy and abortion, so they may have decided it wasn't important.