I miss this filthy little chicken-rat. Thread on last season’s finale is here. 

This is a story about power.

There has been a lot of wanking in the nerdsphere over the show’s plans to diverge wildly from the chronology in which Martin’s books happen, over the decision to skip a bunch of stuff that, because I am invested primarily in Sansa and Jon and Ser Barristan the Hot and Stannis and Davos, I do not give a shit about. I am not interested in the why of those decisions, only in the story we’re being told.

The story is about power, and what it is, and now, primarily about what it isn’t.

Dany let the men and women she freed enslave themselves again, because freedom isn’t power. Freedom isn’t food and it isn’t safety and it isn’t a roof or a floor or a bed or a job. Freedom isn’t power. She chained up her dragons, shackled them beneath the stones, and they grew stronger. Wilder.

Stannis had right on his side. I know all the arguments, I do, and perhaps Stannis’s claim the the Iron Throne is no more valid than Robert’s was, since his descends from Robert’s. But if you accept that, then Stannis is right. He is the one true king, and he lost on the battlefield and he lost on the Blackwater and he lost and lost and lost. He’s losing now, even if he can’t see it. Right isn’t power.

Tywin Lannister rots on his bier. Money isn’t power. Brienne of Tarth failed every task Catelyn Stark set for her. Might isn’t power. Jaime Lannister knows that as well, with his golden hand and his loneliness. Love isn’t power. Cersei never made that mistake.

Mance Rayder may have had the right of it after all.  It wasn’t stubbornness, his refusing to kneel. He became King to save his people, to bring them together not to worship him but to travel south and live. If he knelt, he lost them, and they wouldn’t listen. Wouldn’t come through the tunnel and behind the Wall and into the safety he let them to. Freedom isn’t power and right isn’t power and money isn’t power and might isn’t power and love isn’t power.

Respect is power. Very few of the people we’ve met have that in any measure.

Quick takes: OH THANK GOD WE ARE SKIPPING THAT ENTIRE BOOK MARTIN WROTE ABOUT TYRION’S STUPID MANPAIN. I am bored senseless with Tyrion’s whining already and we are half a second in. “Boo hoo, I strangled my own lover and shot my dad who was a shithead.” Well, you could have … not done that, maybe? I do not feel one iota sorrier for him than I feel for Shae, who is dead and a whore on top of it.

Also thank God we are skipping Bran. I don’t miss Bran and his Hell-Wig. I do miss Hodor, though.

We are going to have to rename this show from Swords and Titties (™ Jude) to Swords and Man-Ass if this keeps up. I’m not complaining per se, but flesh is just flesh. (If we must have endless dudes naked I nominate Grey Worm because ROWR.)

I love that we got Cersei at the fortune-teller, because that moment of fear illuminates her entire character.

I do NOT love Daario Naharis giving Dany advice and ideas that should be hers, nor Petyr taking away my Sansa, but Robin made me want to smack him through the moon door so I guess it’s good we’re ditching him in the Vale.

Lancel Lannister is just as exhausting as a religious fanatic as he was as a sex-crazed Barbie makeup head in season one. And I’ve always felt sorry for Uncle Kevan Lannister, because he comes across in the books as competent and just sick of everybody else’s dramatic bullshit. Somebody has to keep the lights on, Kevan, and sorry but everybody else in the family has incestuous psychodrama to work out.

I AM SO GLAD THIS SHOW IS BACK NOW LET’S GET TO ARYA.

A.