A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones Spoiler-Filled Discussion

So Arya's going to leave Westeros before the Red Wedding? Unless I'm misremembering, that's an arguably-important change for her motivation to go...

 

As I said in the episode thread, the changes they made to Robb's story this year just strike me as monumentally stupid, and, given where this is leading, stand to potentially derail the plot of next season in terms of narrative sympathy.

Robb's situation in the books was an understandable result of a sympathetic moment of weakness and the Starks' traditional ideal of honour above all else. Here, he's a fucking moron and doesn't merit an ounce of sympathy. Frankly, Lord Frey, at least, deserves to skewer him like a pig after this. And turning this all into some True Love nonsense speaks to a complete lack of understanding about what the original story was about.

 

Ultimately, he's a fucking moron in both versions. In the books, he married some girl because he slept with her, completely ignoring the fact that he swore an oath and Frey men fought for him - and forsaking your oaths is not a very honorable thing to do IMO. Just dumb stuff a teenager might do.

In the show, he married because of True Love. And he also slept with her. Same result, slightly different dumb reason.

At least what Catelyn did was sort of justifiable. Robb is a dumb teenager in both versions, who does dumb stuff for completely dumb reasons, ignoring all common sense and logic. His downfall was almost entirely his doing. Too bad lots of good men paid with their lives because of his stupidity.

 

I wonder if we're going to get some scenes with Ramsay and Theon next season. I can't imagine the writers leaving him out of the show for the next two or three seasons.

 

In the book he was despondent when his brothers were seemingly killed and slept with a girl. Having already done that, he felt he had no other choice but to marry her, since he's taken her virginity.

In the show it's Robb quite consciously choosing to break his oath for no reason at all other than he feels like it.

 

The show was very vague surrounding the fall of Winterfell. Did Dagmar and the others take Theon with them? Give him to Ramsay? What was the hood for? And it seems like the Iron Islanders burned the castle, not Ramsay's men, as we're not told otherwise. You'd think they could've given some lines to Luwin to help clear up the matter.

I kind of chuckled at Bran leaving Winterfell in the cart. Takes care of the issue of poor Kristian Nairn having to lug around the ever-growing Isaac Hempstead-Wright on his back in future seasons.

 

I liked how they addressed that Osha did not want to go North.

 

Clearly they didn't want to, to keep House Bolton's treachery more of a surprise (they also eliminated most of this book's foreshadowing about Roose's general character).

 

I agree with your views on it. In the books Robb is at this time what 16 years old? Being King of the North with his Father dead... He leads an attack on the Westerling's keep and takes an arrow during it. Jeyne is the oldest daughter of the noble household and she nurses him and tends to his injury. While he's there he receives word that Bran and Rickon are dead. Jeyne comforts him, they sleep together and he marries her the very next door because of feeling he had dishonored her.

He attacked her home, captured it, she nurses him from injury he sustained while attacking her home... He then takes her virginity in her own home (not that she was resisting). But the circumstances are more understandable than what the tv show did.

They give him a foreign woman who comes across as being around the bend 'once or twice'.

 

A penis is not an a gun you accidentally fire into a woman when you're not careful. Robb was pretty stupid in the books and the TV series, end of. It's true there's more forethought in him going after Talisa, but then, is this considerably older Robb the kind of man who'd randomly screw a girl and then decide he needs to marry her? I do wonder if part of the reason the plot was changed was to accomodate that he's quite obviously not sixteen.

But then, generally speaking, Robb is meant to be a character who has a natural gift for war but less than ideal judgement in political matters, leaving him as a man who both never lost a battle and also lost everything. The Talisa plot fits perfectly the man who'd innocently deliver Theon into the hands of his old family.

Not that I'm that wild about the Talisa story. Assuming she's part of that whole Tywin Lannister plan hinted in the books, how does it work? If both Robb and Tyrion end up betrayed by their beautiful foreign women 'cause Lord Tywin is pulling the strings it'll feel a little redundant.

She's not. Jaqen offered to take her to Braavos, but she said she wants to find her sisters and brothers and mother and the rest of it. I'm assuming that means the show will just set her on the course towards Catelyn.

 

Yeah, I misread the preview...

 

It doesn't really have anything to do with him being sixteen, it's a societal thing. He can either leave her a "ruined" woman or do the honourable thing and marry her, and because he's his father's son he chooses the latter.

 

You skipped a beat - the 'ruining' of her honour to begin with, which has everything to do with him being sixteen. I'd assume if he was older he'd be less likely to sleep with unmarried noblewomen if he actually cared about their honour.

Again, you can't treat him having sex with her like a gun accidentally going off. It's something he did on purpose and while conscious.

 

That makes a lot of sense to me. I was less than pleased that they left out Ramsay Snow from the season has he seems--at least to me--to be far too important a character to get rid of or demote to extra. Especially since they had no trouble keeping Roose around--though I did think that maybe they were planning on combining the two characters into one.

But keeping the Theon character around next year makes sense for so many TV related reasons (keeping the actor with the show, keeping the character in the audiences' mind, etc) that I could easily see, and accept, the Ramsay and Reek show playing out over the next couple of years until we get to the DWD scenes in season five.

 

Will say that after watching him on TV, more sympathetic to Theon (yeah, he's a little shit, and did bad stuff, but still feel bad about his situation), so his later storyline is gonna sit a lot worse with me now than it did when reading....

 

Because no one has ever made a rash decision in a moment of weakness, especially not a teenage boy with a girl offering herself to him. I was there not too long ago, I remember very well how easy it was (and sometimes still is) to get caught up in those feelings. You act as if people are always rational.

 

I think they'll do what they did with Jaime this year - show him in several episodes, suffering at the hands of Ramsay, trying to escape, get caught, suffer some more. ADWD runs in parallel with AFFC and Theon's imprisonment actually starts much earlier. There's no need to make him disappear for two years.

 

They went out of their way to avoid introducing Ramsay this year, and there's been no word on casting him, so I suspect he actually may not show up until Season 5.

 

Roose mentioned his bastard a few times and the ending scene in Winterfell needs some explaining for the viewers who didn't read the books. May be you right and Ramsay is pushed forward like Balckfish was, but I still don't think that D&D would abandon this story for 2 seasons. Alfie Allen is a part of the main cast and had a significant and unfinished story this year, and IMO Alfie was great in it.

 

Agreed. Ramsay needs to be in the next season for the sake of having a storyarc for Alfie Allen.