And there was a line of dialogue from (I think) Tyrion where he tells Dany that they still have enough ships to take the Dothraki to Kings Landing to follow their original plan to lay siege to it

Robb's wife may have survived, or if Jon or Bran or Rickon had married their wife could be "Lady Stark". Or there could have been a false "Arya" like in the books.

I do think this is a place where the lack of the "Broken Men" speech was felt. I notice that the Newbies comments are full of people saying that these were soldiers Dany killed, not regular people so it's 'miles apart' from killing civilians and the regular people won't care. Which is obviously not really true, these…

Not only is there the question of how he knew which ship they were on, how did he even know Ellaria was on one of Yara's ships? I can buy that he could find Yara's fleet, they're pretty distinctive, and even that he somehow knew which was her ship, but how the hell did he know that Ellaria would be there rather than…

I think that's why The Yiddish Policemen's Union worked so well for me. It's an alternate history novel in which Jewish refugees from Europe were set up in a temporary settlement in Alaska following WW2 rather than forming the state of Israel (which was apparently proposed by the Department of the Interior but…

Having read the WWII-set book one of them wrote (I can't remember which and it was shitty enough I'm not looking it up), I don't trust this to be anything more than a schlocky torture-and-tits fest. I expect their take on slavery will just be a bunch of torture and rape scenes with the guise of a "progressive" take…

I for real met a guy named "Rocky" with a brother named "Sandy". His father apparently thought it was really clever.

I seem to remember that's a bit in one of the weirder Big Finish audios: the Tardis gets a voice and uses it to rant about how it hates all the companions because they're always leaving their stuff lying around everywhere.

I think the show is also drawing a lot of parallels between them and Ned and Cat in the costuming and the conversations. It's probably just to make them seem more northern and to remind us of the good times in Season 1, but Ned and Cat were also pretty much the only functional romantic couple on this show so it's a…

From what I vaguely remember from the books, inheritance in Westeros doesn't quite match up with medieval inheritance in our world. In particular, I'm thinking of that poor woman Ramsay married then starved to death. She married the lord of a House, then retained control over it when he died then transferred it to…

I think Sansa's argument is that if you're going to ask your army to hold strong against a horde of undying, terrifying ice zombies, you need to make sure you can trust that everyone in your army is going to hold strong. Jon is wagering that everyone grasps the severity of the situation well enough that even a…

She also seems to be the only one who has an idea something like the Red Wedding is coming and gives good advice to Robb on how to try to sidestep it. He doesn't take some of it and the advice he does follow isn't enough but she's the one with the best read on the situation.

Yeah, for all intents and purposes Catelyn stays dead. There's just a vengeance demon shambling around wearing her half-rotted corpse. I think part of the reason for the character is to make us think twice before we hope Melisandre brings Jon back. I also suspect resurrected Jon in the books will be different than on…

It's not just blood he's obsessed with. Remember when Clinton went to the bathroom on a break in a debate and was late getting back to the stage and he felt the need to inform everyone that he knew where she was, and how gross it is? It's because he's a misogynistic germophobe and he hates the idea of women having…

Well, Anne Helen Peterson is a pop culture writer who has a PhD in media studies and we're talking about her book on essays about pop culture, so I think we are talking about how we look at pop culture. Her piece on Kim Kardashian's pregnancy is a lot less "you should care about feminism because of how it affects Kim…

I guess I don't really see the point of hanging out reading things on a site dedicated to analyzing pop culture if you find analyzing pop culture so offensive. Or do you just find looking at pop culture through the lens of gender, race, sexuality etc. upsetting?

Her piece on Kim Kardashian's pregnancy talks about how celebrity culture is used to push back against women's reproductive rights, in particular talking about it relative to Roe v. Wade, the legal case that made it so that women could no longer be fired for being pregnant, and how Kim's pregnancy in particular…

I don't think they invented that. They're called "Pacto toilets" and they've been around for probably at least a decade. They're used a lot in remote mining and logging camps.

I also love the show but am a bit uncomfortable by Bilquis's character. She's definitely improved from the books, which I *really* had an issue with, but I still wish she were given more dignity and agency. It seems like they were trying to make her mysterious but went too far and made it so we don't see anything of…

I'm not exactly sure. He never really talked about it much, he was on my committee for a year and I had no idea before his own grad students told me. She said it was due to his strong religious beliefs so I'm guessing he just thought God did it, except that he was a Catholic and the Catholic Church supports the idea…