Certainly there have been rapes on the show which involve gratuitous sexual presentation of women (the ones at Craster's, particularly, but there were a lot of problems with the depictions both of Dany and Drogo in Season 1, and Cersei and Jaime last season). It didn't seem to me that Sansa's rape was depicted that…

There were only three characters we knew in Hardhome - Jon, Tormund, and Edd (well, Rattleshirt, but he's a shit whom they kill before the White Walker attack). They need to kill somebody we've come to care about. Tormund and Jon have to survive. Which means they have to kill either Edd or a new character we meet in…

Well, the Dorne plotting has been awful, but the Water Gardens *look* good.

This episode took two of the better parts of the very lackluster fourth book (Arya as Cat of the Canals and Cersei in prison), and then added a whole bunch of material that was probably better than anything in either of the last two books - Dany and Tyrion and Hardhome, mostly, but Sansa finding out her brothers are…

Wasn't Anton Chekov also a walking Chekov? In that he walked?

Are you referring to a "white writer" or a "straight writer" on the grounds that Remender is a "non-mutant writer"? Because, I mean, there's no such thing as a mutant writer. A white writer making black characters say stupid things about the African-American experience is (potentially) offensive, because black people…

This crazy super villain is sermonizing them and they sit there and listen to them. In what way do they specifically give the sense that they haven't heard it before?

I think it is unwise to view the situation as Martin doing much of anything purposely anymore. Dorne is in there because he doesn't have a good editor/an editor willing to tell him to kill his darlings, not because of a desire to do much of anything. The story is completely out of control at this point. It's…

All-Star Lobo would have been great. Thanks, Frank Miller, for ruining everything with your shitty 21st century comics.

Hmm? The old lady was acting on behalf of Brienne,via the innkeeper, presumably. So if the candle actually got lit, that should cause Brienne to show up, surely?

In Deadwood the whores were never particularly sexualized (does that make any sense at all?) We're never supposed to be ogling whichever prostitute is giving Swearengen the beej - whereas there's definitely a lot of ogling going on on Game of Thrones. And obviously Deadwood was the better show, in general.

Yes. I'd also add that "sexy scene of grown man having hot sex with 13 year old girl" is gross on its own merits.

Obviously, though, Martin is (and, to a lesser extent, the showrunners are) interested in commenting on the brutality of the medieval period, which he is doing by telling a story set in a medieval world. In particular, what he seems to be doing is a kind of brutal attack on romanticized depictions of medieval or…

I suppose stuff like Sopranos and Deadwood wasn't very porny, while stuff like True Blood and Six Feet Under was more egalitarian. So it's the combination, I guess, that gets GOT in trouble?

This is just more post hoc justification. At the Citadel, he'd not be allowed to come home unless Randyll wants him to, which he won't. And once he's done at the Citadel, he'll be sent somewhere random. The basic reason that Randyll didn't send his son to the citadel is that Martin didn't really think about how that…

But how would this be revealed? We won't have seen the Freys.

How would you even set up Frey pies? Are you going to do the whole Davos in White Harbor plot? How long would that take?

IMDB, which told us that Gemma Whelan would be in "The Gift"? Maybe we shouldn't trust it?

Tarly disliked maesters because Martin hadn't considered the idea of Sam being sent to the citadel when he wrote the first book, and then realized that it made absolutely no sense for Tarly to send his fat, bookish son to the Wall when the Citadel was *right there*, so he had to invent some in-story reason that Tarly…

It certainly does seem like Game of Thrones gets a lot more guff about nudity than any other HBO show. True Blood was basically soft-core porn, and I don't remember anybody ever really complaining about it.