In the series, I’ll give you, simply because we only had the visual. Textually, I’d argue Martin gave the good payoff. He could have easily shortened it up given we knew the effects of the Strangler already. Instead, he let us have the whole moment, complete with watching Joffrey claw his throat bloody for air.

Gonna respectfully disagree.
GRRM having Joffrey die in agony as a result of a poison slipped to him by one of his in-laws at the height of his dickery was INCREDIBLY rewarding.

What came after got bleak, but oh God, for that shining moment that wedding was a spectacular payoff to his spending the past 2.5 books being a…

Ultimately it’s control. Abstinence is just an aspect of said control (i.e. You are only allowed to have sex after you’re married and only to have children—YOU DO NOT GET TO ENJOY IT!—And if you somehow break that rule and wind up pregnant out of wedlock, well that’s just the Lord punishing you for being a harlot.

...wo…

Ah...damn.

It is nice there’s still options, but like many here, the digital only has me leery.

At most, I’m probably going to approach this the way I plan to do CBS All-Access.
Wait till the thing I want to see is all available (have they said if they’re spacing out their releases or going the Netflix route of ‘Here’s the full season, gobble it down, swine!’?) and then sign up for a month (optimally pay by gift…

Memory serves, wasn’t Williams Street doing something akin to this with their Adult Swim library for a time?
Not sure if they still are or not, but I seem to recall finding out about this around the time was looking into seeing if seasons 2 and 3 of Moral Orel had gotten any sort of physical release.

I should be shocked, but sadly I’m not.

Still holding out the hope they loosen their grip on Devilman Crybaby enough for us to get a BD release of it stateside. I mean, region-wise, importing the Japanese discs IS an option, but I can’t say I’d be thrilled to shell out triple digits on a ten episode series just cause…

“You should have gone for the head” just took on a horrific new context.

To be fair, Black Widow already had an established record of ultimately getting done dirty by the directors before the Russos. IM2 started her off getting eye-fucked by the camera to Hell and back. Whedon sort of kept it together for the first Avengers before throwing her into a clumsy as fuck ship with Banner for AoU.
…

Looking at the way that scene was drawn, I got the sense it was less ‘hugging goodbye’ and more, however futile the action, ultimately trying to shield the younger Bernie from the ‘blast’ with his own body.

Either read is still a genuinely human and noble act, admittedly. Just tossing in the $0.02 is all.

I feel like the ending is a big knock against the movie, but not because of the lack of the squid.

For me it’s the one-two punch of Snyder, Hayter, and Tse clearly picking a side (Rorschach’s death reading less like a genuinely broken man committing the cosmic version of suicide by cop and more an angry man going down…

In some cases, I’d agree, but in the case of Watchmen, there is something to be said for it.
Besides the fact it’s expressly riffing on comic book elements, the book itself is structured very particularly. The chapter Fearful Symmetry is probably the most overt example of this, but also things like how much the story…

Correction - incompetent and slowly, but surely, going utterly mad.

...I’m trying NOT to see this turn into the formation of a Wildling version of Scooby-Doo.

Trying and failing.

Morally, it’s six of one, half dozen of the other.
One of the big recurring things from his reign was his inability to produce an heir and the extremes he went through to remedy this.
It also marks one of the first salvos in what becomes a recurring theme throughout the book - the inbreeding causing several cases of…

On its own, yeah. It’s a fairly innocuous bit of the overall family legacy.

Then you get into shit like the reign of Maegor the Cruel.
That nickname wasn’t being cute.

I’m still floored at how much the show sapped out of Euron as a character. Goes from being this insane/creepy pirate with an affinity for the occult to becoming just this obnoxious horndog whose sole driving motivation now seems to be getting it wet.

Also accepting that inbreeding was cool, but ONLY for the Targaryens to preserve their pure dragon blood.

If it was every so often, that’d be one thing, but the show has been pretty regularly banking more into crowd-pleasers since the Battle of the Bastards.

And for a series that famously caught on for its willingness to subvert crowd expectations, a little fan service goes a long way.

The last act slow-mo especially.

A lot of my grievances I could roll with, but one biggie for me this time, and I think it’s because it was already a grievance I was still feeling from Endgame as well - that moment when your slowing and dragging out your finish for dramatic tension moves past ‘edge of the seat’ to ‘FOR…