You really didn’t grok onto the fact that Brienne’s function in book 4 is to take us on a tour of the countryside and to show us how the common folk are doing? You’re the one who made this personal, but you’re also wrong.

I mean, I guess. I’m just avoiding my life responsibilities and kind of hovering around the idea that GRRM might have originally had other plans for Jaime that don’t bear out after other plot changes. D&D were seemingly perfectly content to let Nikolaj’s resemblance to Sawyer/Josh Holloway cue us into a bad boy redemption arc that wasn’t actually present in the script. (Nikolaj was perfectly cast as Jaime, but we all know that D&D never saw a shortcut they didn’t take.) You look at Jaime’s first appearance and you already know he’s an outward asshole with a tragic backstory and secret sensitive side. People who only watched the show have no idea that Jaime was talented, and it’s easy to lose track of the fact that he’s a contemporary to Ned and not Jon (though some of that is due to us seeing Charles Dance’s Tywin as Ned’s peer). TLDR I think Jaime is being kept around and strung along because he’s one of the few living nobles who was in KL and actually knows how Robert’s Rebellion played out.

I guess I’m taking a weird overarching view of it, because a whole throughline of Dany’s arc is the question whether people want the Targaryens back, and the history in Fire and Blood/HOTD shows that they were most likely glad to be rid of them, so assuming a bit of public sentiment there…it just doesn’t track that Jaime has this reputation. I mean, Ned fought on the other side to depose Aerys. Did he think Aerys would survive that? The a-ha of honor is silly and it’s a false way to trigger an “all sides are bad” baseline when, again, it got the results Ned wanted anyway.

Then again, Ned is the buffoon who chose certain death when he still had the option of going to the wall to chill with his brother and the kid he loved as a son. He could have met Tormund. Honor and morals/ethics aren’t the same thing, Ned.

Except that’s why Arya’s role in the White Walker battle was so weird. They didn’t give her the dragon knowledge, so they trashed a bunch of prophecies.

I get all of that in the immediate aftermath. What beggars belief is that, in the intervening 15 years, no one seems to have asked Jaime why he did it. There were other people in the room. Aerys and the Targaryens in general had a reputation for being crazy and violent. It’s a bit of backstory meant to set up rivalries and character growth, but it depends on characters like Ned and Varys just not being very curious, or forgetting to ask easy questions.

Arya’s revenge stuff got so tiresome that I never even noticed that.

GRRM gives our POV characters perfunctory goals so they can serve their true literary purpose of observing new people and locations. The fact that the show bogged Maisie down with an annoying, repetitive arc instead of using her presence in Braavos to eavesdrop on politics or to play with the idea that the Faceless Men triggered the Doom and or explore their links to dragons…shows that D&D had a fundamental misunderstanding of the story they were telling. Like I’d bet a few dollars that Arya is going to return to Winterfell with intel about dragons, just in time to battle the Others.

Yeah it’s a really short season that ends with the death of Oberyn Martell.

Yeah they never sold the idea that Jaime was irretrievably doomed.

Honestly that was always bullshit. Aerys had already killed Ned’s dad and brother, and it’s not like Jaime’s motivation for killing Aerys is hard to understand. Why did Ned just…not get it? Why didn’t anyone? Everyone knew that Aerys was dangerous.

ASOIAF is really packed with “soul-searching knights past their prime.” It starts to be exhausting.

I wasn’t being sarcastic. Kim was an appealing normal looking kid and I was surprised to see how naturally pretty she is as an adult, simply because I hadn’t seen her in anything since she was in the awkward phase we all go through. But even if she were a hag…she’s Marnie.

What kind of marketing stupidity convinced Disney to go with a conventionally pretty blond newbie over the actress we already loved, especially in a property with a cult following?