I don't think it's really a "blood made him strong" thing. It's more that he happens to be strong, and his blood may legitimize his claim. But the true basis for his claim will be his ability to assert it. You may have the better claim but I've got the bigger army and all that.

For a long time I thought that this whole series was basically a parable about how human beings get so caught up in the pettiness of our power struggles and bullshit that we fail to anticipate or prepare for giant, epochal events that come by and re-write everything for us. See, e.g., global warming. There's been…

http://pbfcomics.com/103/

Ridiculous. It's not even a meal without some kind of capon. Honey glazed capon. Grilled capon. Roasted capon. Oh there's all kinds of capon. I could go on and on.

I wish you illlll, Ice Zombies. Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got to go home and put water in Roose Bolton's fat wife's dish.

I hope all the bad things in life happen to you and only to you.

A large enough army can legitimize a bastard, or a younger brother. Right, Stannis?

Robert Strong dies fighting the Hound, and the Hound kills him with fire, since he's a zombie and that's the only way. Hound may sacrifice himself to the flames to do it, too, since otherwise it's too happy. That's the only way the Robert Strong thread can go down—the Hound story makes no sense any other way.

If you re-read the first book, I think you'll find a lot of suggestions that Lady Arya may very well end up behaving a lot more like she were Lord Arya Stark, ruling a holdfast and generally being a badass. That's all she wants—to do all the fun things that the boys get to do and that are denied to her because of her…

I am not convinced that there is an overarching theme to GoT; I think it is more complex than that. The thing that I always think about when I think about the violence in GoT is power, though. There's a riddle in the books (that I think made it into the show) to the following effect: a man with a sword meets three…

Also: wasn't "Buy you a New Life" (or whatever it's called) their first hit?

There are so many unrealistic things relating to the scale of the wall, the giant arrows are really the least of it. I mean, consider the arrow landing on the far side of the wall with the brother still impaled on it: what are the odds that he's going to stay on the shaft of the arrow instead of sliding down to the…

Wait til you see how long it takes him to write his fifth tweet.

He was then-king Maeker's third son, so the realm already had an Heir and a Spare—more than that is asking for trouble. So he took his Maester's vows at 19 (following 10 years in training). I'm not sure how much this has been discussed in the show, if at all, but Maesters are kind of the non-partisan, expert civil…

I'm not sure how much of the book timeline they've kept, but Maester Aemon is over 100 years old in the books, which meant that he had been a Maester for decades before Lady Olenna was born. They could have changed it for the show, but it seems unlikely.

It's not a straight historical allegory, but Martin has literally said that the Starks and the Yorks and the Lannisters are the Lancasters. There are parallels beyond the phonetic similarity and the fact that they're competing for the throne. Like the Yorks, the Starks are northerners, charged with holding an…

Okay, so you were wrong on the facts and you're a douchebag. Copy that, Guy Who Seriously Doubts the Biomechanical Bona Fides of Fantasy Shows.

What are you even talking about. The Mountain was on top. Start at 0:43: https://www.youtube.com/wat…. I don't know what's "part way" about that. His thumbs are going into Oberyns eyes, so you can surmise that a significant amount of his weight is being pressed down on the skull.

In the show, unlike the book, he's on top. I have no trouble believing that a guy who weighs 400 lbs (before accounting for however much his plate mail armor weighs) could exert 520 lbs of pressure from that position.

It's funny, because I remembered it being head explodey, and then I went and re-read the scene after watching the episode, and you're totally right. Face pummeling, no head explosion. Just a "sickening crunch".