#I’ve done Jorah Mormont now so there’s really no limit to who might be next lmao

[melrosing]

back w more!! it’s team dany 🐉

[gascon-en-exil]

Joining the Game Late: S3E8 “Second Sons”

Synopsis

The Hound catches Arya up with the main plot. The Titan’s Bastard enjoys money and getting rimmed (by women, of course). Melisandre tells Stannis about the lambs. Davos is Stannis’s morality pet, but he’s not doing a great job at it.  So much impending marital incest, and no one’s happy about it least of all Cersei who’d much rather the real thing. Joffrey continues to find inventive ways to be a dick. Melisandre seduces Gendry so he can get sucked off in a very bad way. Tyrion is too drunk and honorable for his own wedding night. The bishonen Second Son betrays his captains for a protagonist, where have I heard that one? Sam explains how names work to Gilly before facing a scene from The Birds and finally doing something with that dragonglass.

Commentary

The wedding at the center of this episode is fantastic, as it leads to a bunch of great scenes and great performances by all my favorites that hit perfectly one right after the other. It’s never explained why the wedding between Tyrion and Sansa has to come before the other two being planned - maybe that’s in the book? - but I’m not complaining. Tyrion shows he can be just as entertaining a drunk as Cersei, Joffrey vacillates between petty bully when he takes away his uncle’s footstool at the ceremony to complete monster when he comes up to Sansa and casually tells her that he’s going to rape her that night (he doesn’t), Tywin is still very much in charge, Olenna’s having her fun (”your brother will become your father-in-law, that much is beyond dispute”), Shae is still pissed but is quietly approving that Tyrion didn’t sleep with Sansa, and Cersei is done with the Tyrells and isn’t bothering with propriety anymore. She delivers the monologue explaining the significance of “The Rains of Castamere,” necessary knowledge for the next episode, which is by itself a not-so-subtle warning, but then she throws Margaery off completely with an explicit death threat. Not at all appropriate, but we know that Cersei has her limits. Also, Sansa still has her symbolic doll from Season 1 that’s obviously meant to represent loss of innocence. I’m surprised it’s still in the show after it was a visual focal point of her scene with the Hound last season.

Everything else in this hour though doesn’t hang together quite so well. I’m going to use two examples to illustrate this, and leave the other material for when it reaches more of a point (except to point out that when Melisandre is getting Gendry in bed the base of his shaft is visible for half a second...while she’s showing full frontal. Typical.). Let’s start with this episode’s other source of female nudity. Daenerys’s scenes in this episode at first feel like a rehash of the one last time, with her “negotiating” - threatening more like - someone in a tent outside Yunkai while her visitor makes disparaging remarks directed at her, her entourage, and her ideas about slavery. This time it’s a trio of mercenary captains making lewd passes at her and Missandei, and the result appears to be more or less the same...but then the show follows them back to their camp where they draw lots to see which one will have to sneak into Dany’s camp and assassinate her. Turns out it’s the long-haired one who’s morally opposed to prostitution (even as his companion points out that mercenaries also sell their bodies, just in a more violent way), and when he infiltrates the camp and comes before Daenerys he’s there not to kill her but to present her with the heads of the other captains and offer to join her. This setup is such typical Fire Emblem that I laughed a bit while watching it, the most conventionally attractive of a group of enemy mercenaries swayed to the playable side by a pretty woman. They might as well have played a recruitment track over this scene. However, this being GoT the pretty woman in question is naked at the time, which could be considered a power move since she’s so clearly unimpressed by this guy even as he’s ogling her but...I don’t know. Dany’s messaging is just so damn confusing; I get the impression that nobody involved with this show had any idea where her character was headed, so they just threw a bunch of stuff (and fanservice) at a wall to see what would stick. In any case, on top of Jorah we can now add a mercenary army to the list of people following Daenerys specifically because they want to tap that. Lovely.

The other scene I want to talk about is this episode’s climax, given to us by Sam and Gilly of all people. I say that because this is their only scene and the last time they appeared was two episodes ago, and yet for all that scattered pacing the show uses this climax to reveal a plot point that will no doubt be crucial to understanding the big battles in the final seasons. Sam uses that dragonglass he’s been holding onto since halfway through Season 2 to stab a White Walker, instantly destroying it. This would have been a strong climax had there been sufficient buildup to it, but here it feels completely random. The writers needed a big moment to end the episode - the one immediately preceding the Red Wedding! - so they tacked this quick but very important action sequence onto the end of a dialogue between Sam and Gilly about baby names and how much their fathers suck. To be fair I’m not even slightly invested in the two of them as a pairing - Sam is such a painfully transparent author avatar, and the best thing I can say about Gilly so far is that’s she’s not blatant wish fulfillment material but comes with a lot of her own baggage including parental rape - but the lead-in to the White Walker is this confused pileup of symbolism where a flock of cawing ravens roost in a nearby weirwood tree and warn the pair to come out of their makeshift shelter. Are ravens associated with White Walkers now, or was it actually a warning sent by some supernatural being? Is this going to be relevant to any other plotlines any time in the next three or four seasons? No idea on the one, and I rather doubt it on the other. My understanding is that the equivalent book scene comes earlier, when Commander Mormont is still alive, so I can say with confidence that as with Theon this is another case of the show stretching a small and undeveloped story point in the source material out over too long a period of time. 

Alright, time for the really big shocking twist!...that I’ve known about for over half a decade, but I’ll try to act surprised.