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

[Venardhi]

In depth would be nice, but what I'm talking about is laying groundwork. Cersei hasn't been fucking around, so that plot is going to have to start next season too and somehow make sense with Jaime already home,

She's been fucking Lancel since season one. That alone should be enough for Jaime.

Yes, but it hasn't been a recent thing, and now that Jaime is back she won't have any use for him. I can't see her picking up a plethora of lovers with him around and that is kind of a key issue in her plot. Jaime's reaction to it is almost irrelevant next to the importance of her thinking she has turned herself into a master of intrigue through the use of her vagina. Bringing him back early also is going to mean having to invent stuff for him to do for the first two-thirds of the season.

Lancel hasn't been around since the first season so he gets thrown out.

He appeared 3-4 times in season 2.

My mistake, I barely remember him. I find it very unlikely that Cersei would have any interest in the TV version of Lancel, since his appeal is supposed to be in looking like a young Jaime and the timid little fella they cast bears no resemblance. I also can't see him replacing the Kettleblacks in the plot.

Looks about right. Sad that Oberyn will be a one-season wonder though. Probably only see him in 3 or 4 episodes and his death won't have nearly the impact as if he were around this season.

Oberyn doesn't really do much until The Duel so it isn't a big deal. I just hope they do the fight justice. The most intense chapter in the entire series. I nearly had a panic attack reading it, I was so damn excited .

I understand he isn't a major plot factor early on, but his presence gives his character credibility rather than appearing and dying within the span of a handful of episodes. He is going to have to hit the ground running to build up any sort of impact from his death.

This is why wasting screen time on torture scenes and invented subplots is so frustrating.

I really like the show but I agree the invented subplots are infuriating. It wasn't really a problem in Season 1, hell the added Littlefinger and Varys scenes were fucking awesome. Come Season 2 and 3 though, we have seemingly endless invented scenes in King's Landing.

I'm rewatching the show now and the showrunners have a serious boner for Margaery Tyrell. An incredibly minor character in Books 2 and 3, yet is given an abundance of new scenes for the show which add absolutely fucking nothing and go over the same material. Worse, it's at the expense of important stuff that could be done with Stannis, Jon and Arya's plots, which always suffer from being rushed. We saw Maester Cressen, one of the most tragic characters in all of ASOIAF, be demoted in to to being a faceless extra... in favour of excruciating padding regarding the fucking Tyrells.

At this point it's clear to me the showrunners only really care about King's Landing. All the plots outside of it get fucked with and have scenes trimmed all the time, while King's Landing always gets added scenes.

The show cut Arya and Jon warging in to their wolves, yet gave us Pod being the master of fucking whores, and dead-end subplots with Ros. A character that isn't even in A Song of Ice and Fire.
...
Rant over, before I head on to how much they've raped the character of Mance Rayder.

Agreed on all counts. Jon's warging isn't only important to the character but possibly also a key to his plot if it is how he avoids the imminent death we saw in ADWD.

 

[137th Gebirg]

Jon's warging isn't only important to the character but possibly also a key to his plot if it is how he avoids the imminent death we saw in ADWD.

I think Mellisandre will simply do a Red God reversal on Jon. No warging necessary.

 

[Dream]

Agreed on all counts. Jon's warging isn't only important to the character but possibly also a key to his plot if it is how he avoids the imminent death we saw in ADWD.

I think they will only have Bran be able to warg on the show, while ignoring the rest of the ability from the other Stark children. It makes Bran far more special, without making the audience question why everyone can't do it.

 

[InklingStar]

Jon's warging isn't only important to the character but possibly also a key to his plot if it is how he avoids the imminent death we saw in ADWD.

I think Mellisandre will simply do a Red God reversal on Jon. No warging necessary.

The theory is that warging is what prevents Jon from losing parts of himself ala Stoneheart or Beric. His full consciousness is "saved" by hanging out in Ghost during the time he is dead.

 

[Dream]

The theory is that warging is what prevents Jon from losing parts of himself ala Stoneheart or Beric. His full consciousness is "saved" by hanging out in Ghost during the time he is dead.

At this point, I think it might be too late to have the other Stark children warging into their wolves on the show without it seemly coming out of nowhere. We have at least been given hints of Bran's power in the first season.

 

[sidious618]

If they need John to warg then he'll warg. Audiences will be able to figure it out.

 

[Anwar]

Or Jon not being changed by the Red God revival will either be because Melisandre did it better, or because Jon's "special".

 

[Venardhi]

When last we saw Jon he was collapsed in the snow at Castle Black right? Opening the next season with a Wolf PoV and then turning it into a twist when it is Jon who wakes up instead of Bran might work. The suggestion being that it takes being near death to trigger the warging ability, which also works effectively as foreshadowing.

 

[Captaindemotion]

Rant over, before I head on to how much they've raped the character of Mance Rayder.

I don't know if you could say they've raped him given that they've hardly featured him. Which is odd, given that the chatter pre-season 3 was that they wanted a name actor, someone of the status of Sean Bean, for the role.

IIRC, The Wire's Dominic West was pursued but turned it down as he didn't want to be away from his family. Hinds is another actor with clout but he's had a handful of scenes. I can only assume that they're going to make more use of him in the next few seasons.

I'd say that there's a stronger argument that Tormund Giantsbane has been 'raped' as a character, though it seems to me that they've sort of merged him with the Magnar, even though the latter is apparently going to be in S4.

 

[Brendan Moody]

The amount of screen time Mance has is in line with his appearances in A Storm of Swords, which are memorable but pretty minimal. It feels like less because the show has let all the air out of the character, wasting Ciaran Hinds and leaving one to wonder how this Mance ever got to be king in a society that rejects most notions of authority. But of course what really mattered was endless scenes of Jon and Ygritte exchanging flirty banter, even though they had already erased his arc in A Clash of Kings to overload us on those. That's also the problem with playing up the Tyrells so much in season three: the producers are skipping stuff that can't be done later in order to create dragged-out versions of stuff that can. We're going to get two more years of Cersei and Margaery exchanging veiled threats before anything actually happens between them.

 

[CaptainCanada]

Arya's warging will be saved for season 4 for when she uses Nymeria to do...you know what.

Unlikely they're going to have that, given time issues.

 

[Anwar]

Arya's warging will be saved for season 4 for when she uses Nymeria to do...you know what.

Unlikely they're going to have that, given time issues.

They'll have a whole season to have some minor scenes of Arya warging until that particular scene, which will likely be the finale of S4 (the end of Book 3).

 

[CaptainCanada]

They'll have a whole season to have some minor scenes of Arya warging until that particular scene, which will likely be the finale of S4 (the end of Book 3).

No, that really wouldn't work. The body was retrieved almost immediately after the wedding, before it could rot.

 

[Anwar]

I thought it was 3 days afterwards?

 

[CaptainCanada]

Exactly, not long after. If Arya was going to retrieve the body via warg, we'd have seen that in the finale.

 

[Anwar]

Hmmm, that is a puzzler.

 

[Ayelbourne]

Exactly, not long after. If Arya was going to retrieve the body via warg, we'd have seen that in the finale.

They could still have that scene in the first episode of the next season.

 

[Venardhi]

I imagine that Stoneheart's birth will be the last moment of episode one next season. I doubt Arya's warging will play a part, though perhaps Nymeria will make a brief appearance leading them to her?

 

[Brendan Moody]

Empire Online reports that Neil Marshall, director of "Blackwater," is returning to helm the season four finale, which will feature the Battle for the Wall. If that's all true, they may be shuffling the order of events, or Jon's election as Lord Commander may be held off until season five. But I wouldn't be surprised if there's some miscommunication, and the episode is climactic, but not the actual finale.

Edit: Winter is Coming has been told by its own sources that the report is "not entirely accurate."

 

[Captaindemotion]

^Based on previous seasons, one might imagine the battle for the Wall to be Episode 9.