Vee

That's about it. Jaime hit it with his sister and has spent most of his life thinking that's the world; Cersei is smart enough and has been through enough to know better, and has never IMO, not in the world of the show at least, had the same emotional investment in Jaime than he does in her. She loves him in her own way, yes, but in the end, in a pinch, she has and will always default to using him as a tool - a protector, an executioner, whatever. She's not as besotted as he is, she never was, or at least not since adulthood. It's never been a relationship where they have mutual understanding and agency, because Cersei has always had it over on him. That has nothing to do with the scene the other night, either; it's just how I've seen it from the start of the series.

She was absolutely wrecked by what happened at the Red Wedding. Her reaction was onscreen in those two episodes in Season 3. She wasn't catatonic, but she was certainly hysterical. I don't see how any of that makes her a sociopath. Nor does her enjoying getting revenge on that !@#$%^&*] knight make her a sociopath. Just because she enjoys becoming a, uh, swordswoman? and at times takes a little too much pleasure in what she's learning from the Hound doesn't make her a sociopath - and even as she did, she called the Hound on what she felt was unnecessary brutality towards innocent people. (And the Hound, while he can be rotten, is no sociopath either - he feels things keenly, even when he acts opposite.) She's been going down a dark road, but it's all been fueled by her own loss and heartbreak and what she's suffered. Her reactions have all been based in emotion and trauma.

Except I don't think Arya is a sociopath at all - that's counter to her character arc in Season 3 as well as the last episode, IMO. She did enjoy getting bloody revenge on the knight in the premiere, but the writing isn't painting her as just some shallow little badass. She may or may not end up losing her humanity because of what she's been through, but she certainly had a reaction to the Hound's treatment of those villagers. Even though he had a point about them not being able to survive the winter, that didn't make Arya approve of it any more. There's always going to be fan favorite characters on any show who the mass audience take to or the ones they don't, but I think the more committed audience takes to most of the characters. I think people like not just Tyrion, or Arya or Daenerys, they also can like Sansa or Bran or Cersei or Jaime or Brienne or whoever else - it's not either/or.

There's always going to be too-glib reviews of popular TV shows and obnoxious fans thereof. I try not to let them get to me in terms of your own viewing. And I think it's unfair to say Arya doesn't feel anything - she feels plenty, especially at the close of Season 3. As does the Hound, who is a difficult person at best but who is not without humanity. But Arya's circumstances and tragedy have also hardened her to life and to what she feels she must do to survive where her parents didn't. That doesn't mean, though, that she didn't call the Hound out for his treatment of those villagers - she felt a great deal of sympathy for them. She enjoyed killing the man who killed the little boy from Season 2, but that was presented as something very bad for her - and even after that, she's already shown she's far from a sociopath. And the Hound, while at core a very traumatized person and a relentless, brutal pragmatist, is not a monster either.

But we're not talking about the books, we're talking about the show. And on the show, Cersei, as I saw it, just kept chanting "it's not right" while wrapping her legs around him. I'm not talking about them raping each other, I'm talking about really disturbing [!@#$%^&*]. Which is what I felt the scene showed them and their relationship to be. And I'm sorry, but since you've made the comparison twice now, I find rough, ugly sex between twisted people who've been doing this for years to be very different from the scene on DAYS where E.J. held a sobbing Sami at gunpoint and raped her in a car on the side of the road. I watched that live; it was rape. So I guess we can all see these things differently. No, I get that argument and I sympathize with it. I don't think it's simply that Cersei does it or that Jaime does it - I think they both do it to each other, and I think their father made them this way (and maybe another generations of incest, who knows). And it goes beyond the physical. I don't know if either of them can ever have a functional, decent romantic relationship with anyone else, but I know they can't with each other.

I don't think Jaime has been raping her for years. And I do think the scene between them last night ended with her going for it as well while hating herself - chanting "it's not right" while wrapping herself around him. But I do suspect that sort of ugly tableau, with the iffy lines of consent, the violent action, the need to prove something to one or both of them, is not new for either of them. When we first saw them together, as lovers, he was doing her doggy-style in somebody else's tower amidst the hay and the dirt, and I just never saw that as being about respect. IMO their whole relationship is built on dysfunction and how they equate sex and their need for each other with all sorts of thorny things, including power. And from the start, Cersei had the firmer hand. The show claims they didn't do the scene just to show Jaime was "still bad" and not a woobie hero, and I agree with that. But I think they did the scene to show just how deep the sickness between them goes, and how easy it is for both of them to fall back into old patterns. In a sense, IMO, they are both addicts. That's what I thought would happen when Jaime returned to King's Landing at the end of last season and I was dismayed to see it in the trailer, when they showed the beginning of the scene (Jaime grabbing her and kissing her), but I wasn't surprised. Their relationship is the filth they live in. They tried to make it work again in the ugliest way possible, with a scene that polarizes the audience, and it should polarize them IMO because what it sends back, no matter how any of us read the scene, is that that relationship and who they are together, how they treat each other, just doesn't and will never work. There's just nothing good in it for them.

I thought Cersei told someone (Ned?) that she hadn't let Robert consummate the marriage in years - that she'd just had him between her legs and "finished him off in other ways" to trick him, as he was generally drunk when he came to her bed. I was under the impression that their dead son, the one she told Catelyn about at Winterfell at Bran's bedside, was likely the only child she and Robert had ever conceived. I'm glad Martin weighed in that the scene is not necessarily as consensual as some may claim in the books. And I think that Vulture article covers what I saw as well - she's wrapping herself around him, clinging to the table not to try and get away but for some bearings. And more than the blocking, this kind of venom and ugly [!@#$%^&*] is how they work, what they've become in their family. I think Alyssa Rosenberg at the Washington Post said something similar as well. Whether it was or it wasn't rape, whether it was or wasn't wholly consensual, what I never sensed was that it was new. It's something they do together, that they've done to each other. And I've always felt Cersei had the upper hand over Jaime in the past - always, always. She had the control in that relationship. She was the one with the power, he was the one in the Kingsguard, condemned as Kingslayer - he was at her beck and call when we met them. When he left, she just grabbed Lancel. When he came back changed, and when he had spent a year not at her beck and call, leaving her to the whims of the ebb tide of King's Landing, she found him to not be the man he was and immediately rejected that. I don't think Cersei has any kind of safety valve in Jaime, but I do think they found some vague solace in each other. He thought she made him a man, she thought he would always be the fallback guy. Now neither of those things are true and he is trying to get it back and can't. This I agree with as well, from the Vulture piece. But I don't truly believe either Cersei or Jaime respect their father so much as fear him, and in their home they have confused that with respect and admiration. He's abused them, he's created what they are. It was clear in Season 3 just how much he's been belittling and controlling their views of themselves - all of them, not just Tyrion.

I tried looking online at some of the criticism but when I got to "it ruins the beautiful Cersei and Jaime relationship," I closed that tab. It was gonna take more than a road trip with Brienne to fix what's wrong with Jaime Lannister. The question is if he'll get there. As for whether it was true to Jaime or their relationship, IMO yes because I think they've done this sort of [!@#$%^&*] plenty before, these sort of ugly, quasi-consensual scenes even if we as the audience have not been privvy to it. From what we've seen on the show they're sick people. But that's me. Nobody wants you to keep your views to yourself, though. It's okay to disagree.

I don't know if either Jaime or Cersei saw it as rape - I didn't see it as necessarily rape by the end of the scene, myself. I thought it was abruptly and a bit poorly done, but I suspect a lot of scenes like that have played out in their lives together. I doubt that's the first time they've gotten that harsh with each other. Jaime has a monster in him like so many other characters on the show, he does monstrous things, but he's also pathetic. Cersei is a monster but that's not all she is; she's also pathetic and like Jaime, a fascinating, quasi-tragic character despite how loathsome she can be - there is a horribly wounded nobility to just how wrongheaded she is, what made her that way and what she has had to become in order to live. And what Jaime did with her tonight was pathetic, too. I did read those articles, and I think what Nikolaj Coster-Waldau was trying to convey is that it's just symptomatic of their awful life together - this kind of ugliness is what their family has bred and what they breed. I see people online who actually root for Cersei and Jaime's romance, find it functional, or think that Jaime was going to have some strictly heroic track going forward and I think they're off their nut. That's bringing something subjectively personal to the characters which is not a part of who they are or the story the show is telling, in my eyes. The side issue is that there's always been a segment of the fandom which expects progressive conversation generated on the Internet to be fixed to and imprinted upon a quasi-medieval world, or any show on television, the same way a handful of people were offended by True Detective being a show fixed around two men, even though their misogyny and fatal flaws were explicitly burnt into the texture of the show and condemned. That's not gonna happen and IMO it shouldn't. I dunno if the show will address Jaime and Cersei's ugliness tonight going forward. In the universe of the show it may or may not make sense for that to happen. I do think the way it was shot was mishandled, but I think Coster-Waldau's interpretation of the scene and the characters is the same as mine. As for the rest of the episode, I thought it was pretty good. Especially Tywin quickly taking Tommen under his wing, and Cersei sort of crumbling internally to see it. Soon Tommen will be just like her and Jaime, and Tyrion. It was all in her eyes. Also, Podrick's goodbye was heartbreaking. I didn't call Littlefinger being behind the assassination. I fear for Sansa. God knows what he's up to.

Of course it's poisonous. They're brother and sister and they trust no one and nothing but their own; they were driven to the depths of that dysfunction by their tyrannical, domineering father who has been emotionally disembowling them for years. They've made at least one demented, psychotic child. I'm talking about the television show when I talk about them - they have no functional, real relationship with anyone else (Jaime's relationship with Brienne is still embryonic at best). They fucked at Winterfell and Jaime casually tried to kill Bran for seeing them together. They joked about killing John Arryn over the same secret. They use and abuse each other. Even though the books aren't IMO relevant to my talking about the tweaked continuity of the show, I've read the book excerpt and I don't agree that it would be better. I think the TV scene was harsh and abrupt and probably unnecessary, but I understood the point it was trying to get across and I think if they'd done the original scene, with her begging him and saying 'oh, you're home' as they swoon and copulate over their dead son, it would have been sheer camp. I think the violence of the scene in this episode gets across what they really are together, which is sick and wrong and terrible for each other. As was made abundantly clear for both of them last year, everything about their family is bad for Jaime and Cersei, especially Cersei, who's been sold off as chattel at leaast twice in her life. And I don't think it's a comparison with E.J. and Sami on DAYS - E.J. held her at gunpoint and raped her in the passenger seat of a car. Jaime and Cersei's scene was definitely vaguely consensual at best, but it has a context. And I heard her saying 'it's not right' but I saw her pawing at his clothes - I thought she had succumbed to his advances while hating herself for it, but I also thought it wasn't shot clearly enough. At least, that's how I saw it. It was awful and I question the wisdom of the choice, or at least the pacing. But I do think it was intended to be awful. And I think people who thought Jaime was on a 'hero's journey' over the last couple years and are outraged by this have forgotten the pilot. They can't reduce the character to another sad-eyed antihero, and they definitely can't excuse what he and his sister are to each other. IMO it's not some great, equal relationship, some solace - it's disease. That's what that scene represents, the ugliest end-state of those characters as they are together.

I've seen scenes like that play out before and I know what he's talking about. It's ugly, but it's not the same thing as how soaps romanticize rape and rapists. It also has a lot more to do with how Cersei and Jaime are, IMO. Jaime is not a good man - he's been carrying on an incestuous affair with his sister for years and he opened the series by pushing a little boy out a window to his intended death. Almost every 'protagonist' left alive on GOT is compromised, Jaime especially so. I hated how he took glee in bringing down Ned. I could barely look at him or care about him at all until Season 2, when they begin dissecting who he really is. But for all the goodness in him, both he and his sister are still deeply toxic people. Whether or not he chooses to move out of that cycle of poisonous filth is another story. But the scene they had together - the dysfunction, the vague consent (which I don't think was that vague by the end of the scene), the violence, all of it in front of their dead son - I think it's part and parcel of who they are and how they work and how they treat each other, how they see power and control and how their sexuality is so bound up with twisted ideas about that stuff as well as about each other. IMO, it's supposed to be about his (and their) relapse into the sick muck of who they are together. The Lannisters are terrible for each other, and Cersei and Jaime are terrible for each other. The only way Jaime knows how to feel like a man is by being the swordsman and the man Cersei desires - they've fucked anywhere and everywhere, he made light of knocking Bran out a window mid-tryst. He wants desperately be that man again but he's not anymore, because of the loss of his hand as well as because of his time away, his self-reflection, his friendship with Brienne, etc. He thinks he can reverse it all and go back to being the man of the hour by 'seducing' Cersei again, in such a repulsive context. But nothing about it is supposed to paint him as a good man, or them as a good couple - they're horrible together. It's not supposed to be alright, it's supposed to be awful. The scene wasn't romanticized and he wasn't; he took advantage of her vulnerability, he victimized her, and they fell back into their old sick pattern. It just goes back to how they and their family are ruinous to who they are as human beings. I willl say my biggest complaint about the scene was that it was, IMO, very abrupt, too abrupt. I'm interested in why they made the change to the original scene, which was apparently a lot more bodice-ripping with her begging for it or something. That would've highlighted the sickness in them just as much, but maybe they felt the show had made Jaime's character too safe and 'woobie' in Season 3, and that's a valid concern - he's not just misunderstood and lonely.

I got that she was definitely very attached to Renly from the moment he spoke to her. I don't know if it was love, but it was a definite infatuation of sorts. It was all over her face and in her voice. Her whole life was in service to that guy. What Brienne feels for Jaime she hasn't really begun to vocalize to herself or anyone, and it's very complicated. I wouldn't call it as simple as just love, but there is that. What Jaime feels for Brienne he is lightyears from understanding.

I don't.

Books aside, it's not that up for debate on the show. I don't know if she's in love with him, but she definitely has strong feelings for him. The books and the show are different creatures. I don't see much Bran hate around, I never have. Sansa used to get it pretty bad, but these days, especially since Season 3 when her role got built up, I think she has a lot more support, as she should.

Robb was a good man. But he, like his father, like most of the elder Starks, didn't understand how to play the game to survive. He was noble and idealistic and ultimately paralyzed. In order to survive in Westeros you must compromise yourself, on some level. Unless you're Daenerys Targaryen, Mother of Dragons. Daenerys compromises herself in other ways, but it has nothing to do with the conventional moralism of the civilized Seven Kingdoms. Daenerys is a conqueror who must learn to conquer, but in the end, anything she doesn't like she can incinerate and burn off the face of the world. Arya has learned how to survive in her own way, Sansa is starting to do the same. Bran is sort of the kid who's run off and joined the hippies for the moment, but the talent he is cultivating will make him indispensable. Like Jon who's been beyond the Wall, like Daenerys who is making her way across the far continent, Bran has gone to ground and is reconnecting with some basic, primal truths and powers that supercede those of the civilized world of Westeros. But IMO the only way to truly survive, for any of those three (Jon, Daenerys, Bran) or anyone else, is to meld their bone-deep power and knowledge with the cold cunning and calculation of the smartest people in the proper kingdom. For me, House Tyrell is among the smartest in the game. Tyrion used to be, but he got bamboozled by his infatuation with Shae and his inability to do the (potentially murderous) necessary to overrule his father and sister's machinations - for now. Joffrey was just a homicidal little idiot.

Looking at it now, it is clear Daenerys's long story is her slog through the various Free Cities of Essos (or Pentos or whatever the hell it is). She's hit them each one by one, starting with Qarth and making her way uptown, so to speak. I'm fine with it, but I'm ready for this new one to be the last. Arya's story has picked up for me considerably. It didn't get going for me last year until she found the Brotherhood. I can only see her and the Hound palling around for so long, though - they are great together but I guess I'm just tired of her perpetual isolation.

I can see part of the motive if it's who is being heavily hinted at in what I've seen, but I can't understand why they'd do it - and I'm spoilering this simply because if it was me I'd guess what I'm talking about - Supposedly there is more to it, but I don't know how much yet. I'm sure I'll still enjoy whatever is behind this unraveling and being revealed. I just know Kotaku ruined my day a little by talking about stuff you can clearly see in the episode if you rewatch, as I was planning to, calling it "spec" and then swerving to a GOT wiki entry on a specific element - not a future plot development per se, but something that could not possibly be brought into the equation and guessed unless someone has read ahead. Specifically, When that got mentioned it was clear their article was not just "spec". Now as to actual spoiler territory, this is all I'll say about it and I don't want to discuss it further because I don't want to be spoiled, really:

Pretty sure I just had the culprit at the Purple Wedding spoiled for me by fuckin' Kotaku, in an article that was only labeled "don't read if you haven't seen Episode 2!" - and then proceeds to invoke expository [!@#$%^&*] from the books that we have yet to see on the show. Ugh. I had a feeling based on what I saw in the premiere that one of the key elements of one of those last scenes might have something to do with what happened to Joffrey, but the !@#$%^&*] writer over there made it very, very explicit and labeled it as "spec". All I'll say is the information is all right there onscreen, but the motive isn't, yet. I'll definitely watch again.

I know a lot of people who seem to prefer the show to the books. I have no dog in that fight, I just watch the show and that's what I have time for these days. GRRM seems very happy with the changes so I'm good.

What an episode. I had suspected this was coming for Joffrey this week since just before the season started - I had no rumors or anything, but I knew the Purple Wedding would be significant somehow, and I soon noticed there was no apparent footage of Joffrey following the wedding in any previews; I also couldn't see why Tyrion would be in chains. I still think it was either Ser Dontos or him in collusion with someone else - I can't imagine who. The Martells seem too obvious. Margaery remains the best and for my money, the smartest player around. I hope she comes through this alright and continues to take an active role in things somehow. You could tell she could barely stomach being around Joffrey. The stony expressions on many faces during the dwarf play were something else - that whole sequence was incredibly tense. I don't know what pleasure Cersei could possibly get out of any of that debacle at this point, or out of being so petty as to insist on feeding the leftovers to the dogs and not the poor. She knew what her son was, she knows she's not as smart as she thought. After the last two seasons, how much longer can belittling the less fortunate to exert some last shred of power possibly sustain her? She seems to be teetering on the brink as is. I didn't follow how she could have known about Brienne and Jaime, unless I've forgotten a scene or two last week. Still, Gwendoline Christie was amazing as always. I loved that we got back to Dragonstone and Stannis's family - they were fascinating last season and they're even moreso now. You can tell, as I have suspected since the start and as was confirmed late last season, that Stannis, dogmatic and bullheaded though he is, has never been as truly committed to the Lord of Light as his poor, desperate wife or Melisandre, the woman who seduced him. In a way, his infatuation with her and that faith is almost a metastasized midlife crisis on a monstrous scale, infecting not only his own family but every aspect of his little fiefdom. He knows it's out of control, he wants out but he's too rigid, too Stannis to ever say so, to Davos or anyone else. That miserable family dinner scene in that wet, soggy cave with the bad meat said it all. He's always gotten the short end of the stick, ever since holding Storm's End. I believe David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have always said their angle on bringing GOT to HBO was to do for fantasy what was done for the mob with The Sopranos, or the cop drama with The Wire, or the Old West with Deadwood - 'making them dirty and reinventing them,' they've said, and here it's a case of bringing fantasy down to human Earth. Stannis and his family and his holdings could, on a smaller, less fantastical scale, just as well be any family in crisis anywhere in America on a contemporary drama - a broken family, a dysfunctional home rocked by the presence of an alluring intruder who completely turns their world upside-down. They were already primed for someone like Melisandre and her red god to come in and totally turn them inside-out. Great stuff with the Boltons, too - it's enthralling to see them portrayed as, from what I've observed, sort of the mirror-universe version of the Starks, with Ramsay as the scheming Roose Bolton's closest hand; unlike Jon and Ned, Roose's bastard is given real position, but is a demented sadist. Not unlike Stephen Dillane as Stannis, Michael McElhatton does a great job with the very extreme control Bolton exerts over how he presents himself to the world. Even when he looked Catelyn in the eye at the Red Wedding just before the carnage started, even when he stabbed Robb in the heart, his face barely shifted beyond mild neutrality. He's the same today. I think someone BTS mentioned that their take on Theon now is that he has been completely subjugated and brainwashed by Ramsay, whereas in the books Theon supposedly only obeyed out of fear. I've been tired of Shae and her dramatics for a while - when she came onto the scene she postured as a woman of mystery, claimed to be so in tune with the ways of sociocultural and sexual politics, so in command of herself but she's been bitching about the necessities of Tyrion's public life for two seasons. Nonetheless, her rejection by a very pained Tyrion was heartbreaking all the same. Great work by both actors. I cackled when I saw Loras and Oberyn Martell making eyes at each other. Naturally! The brief stuff with Bran was great - Isaac Hempstead-Wright really sold the feral nature overtaking him. The look in his eyes was something else. I hope there's much more to his storyline this year; last season was mostly treading water. Great show. I will agree Cersei is my long shot for killing Joffrey - maybe she just couldn't take it anymore and is hiding it that well, she just wanted it all to be over. She wanted herself freed, she wanted the Tyrells gone. Who knows? Other than her being the remote possibility, I have Dontos and...I dunno, Olenna? No, that wouldn't make sense; making Joffrey her grandson by marriage secures their house's future. It could also be someone working from beyond King's Landing - the Brotherhood, or Melisandre, or the Targaryen loyalists from Essos. I loved the look on Varys's face throughout the wedding. He was just dying inside wanting to get out of there - priceless.

That was an idea they floated, but it never got onscreen.

I know, but I was under the impression you'd denied yourself other stuff on streaming. Oh, it was TP because of the Log Lady intros. Never mind.

You won't get Netflix Instant, but you are down for HBO? What am I doing with my life? (I have my friend's HBO Go; I could afford HBO but I may make a move soon and I'm trying to be conscientious for the moment.) I don't know if there is a video showing all the locations. It wouldn't surprise me. I personally don't get to commentaries until between seasons or after viewing the whole block.

It's been like that since Season 3, IIRC.

The civil rights and politics in the world of GOT aren't the same as ours. Daenerys can only do the best she can for those people from her subjective experience and position of power. I do think she'll continue learning some lessons, but IMO to dismiss what she does as out of touch is to judge her by a real-world perspective that is removed from the context of that fantasy world and the way it is ruled.