First of all, take a look at this. The first is a young Michelle Fairley, our Catelyn, found here. The second is Maisie Williams as Arya.

Second, there be spoilers inside for the finale.

So I was having this whole Facebook conversation last week about Dany and Sansa, and about how they’re equal opposites in terms of how they deal with the wheelbarrows full of bullshit that Westeros makes women tote around. Dany sets the rules on fire, just literally flat-out burns shit to the ground, because nine times out of ten all the rules do is perpetuate the rules. It’s not even that the game is designed to benefit the gamemakers. It’s that the game isn’t the point, and the minute you firgure that out is the minute the board flips.

Sansa? Sansa who is 90 pounds soaking wet and surrounded by people who at best think she is an idiot (those are the ones not trying to beat or rape or poison her, by the way) and would pretty much kill her and then go have lunch? Sansa looks at the rulebook and says okay, fine. This is the game? Watch me. And she turns that fucker inside out, such that it doesn’t mean anything anymore. She is alive, and her monster of a fiancé thinks she loves him, and the rules of court that should have crushed her become her salvation. Littlefinger is a fucking dick, okay, and every minute we spend with him is a minute I want to bug-bomb my entire mind, but he wasn’t wrong tonight, about all of them being liars. All she has to do is get better at it, and she can. Look how far she’s come.

Quick takes: DRAGONS! And even though we spoiled something book folk don’t get until much later, seeing them come into their own was magic, and seeing Dany strong and powerful with them and with Jorah at her side made me yell FUCK YEAH out loud and throw pillows into the air in celebration.

I think someone heard my plea and tweezed Dany.

The burning of Winterfell was tremendously upsetting, and one of those things that translated so well to the screen — everything gone, and everyone dead. I wish I could say I didn’t laugh at Theon’s speech or the way it ended, but I did. I’m a bad person.

Robb Stark. You are a total idiot. You come from a long line of total idiots, but I think this really might have been the crowning achievement of your entire family’s history of idiocy.

Sometimes I have a whole post about everything about Tyrion that bugs me, and then Shae just says it right to his face, like you are complaining about your lot in life to your hooker, please have the self-awareness God gave a carrot. This is where he starts to fall apart, and where his fanboys get super fucking annoying, and justifying his actions as any better than anybody else’s becomes a quick route to madness.

Here’s a secret. The safe’s always empty.

Every promise someone has ever made to you, to save you, to get you out of trouble, to make your dreams come true, they’re always lies. Every door you open, thinking the answer is behind it? Just another door. Around and around, in the House of the Undying, a thousand lives you could have lived and some you did, and none of them are the ending you’re searching for, because nothing ends.

Catelyn was originally betrothed to Ned’s brother, and he was going to make her the lady of Winterfell. Brandon was the answer, and she opened that door: He rode off to war and never came back, and she married Ned in his place. They built their love slowly, stone by stone, and she is a widow, the mother of a king.

Sansa was going to marry Joffrey, and it was going to be horrible in all the ways marriage to a man like that is horrible, all the predictable horrible ways. She opened that door: He cast her aside for Margaery Tyrell, and though the relief on her face was incandescent, who is she now? Where does she go? What does she do?

Jon Snow was a man of the Night’s Watch, finally in a family to which he could completely belong. He opened that door: It led to Qhorin Halfhand, the greatest ranger the Watch had ever known, dying in his arms, on a cliff above an army larger than any he has ever seen.

Stannis Baratheon was meant to be king. He murdered his brother, lost thousands on the Blackwater Rush, willingly destroyed his old gods for the new. He opened that door: Now it’s just him and Melisandre, believing they can see the future in the flames.

Xaro Xhoan Daxos was going to buy Danaerys ships and armies, to take back her kingdom for her, win her all she wanted. She opened that door, behind which was all she desired, and the vault was bare. And she could put her betrayers in it and walk away, because what she needed was never under lock and key. Was never behind the door at all.

A.