Game of Thrones s5e10 "Mother's Mercy" gifs and memes
Adam Rifkin stashed this in Game of Thrones!
Stashed in: GRRM, Drinking Games!, Iron Throne
WARNING: MANY SPOILERS!!
s5e10 discussion:
http://reddit.com/r/gameofthrones/comments/39v18c/s5_live_premiere_discussion_510_mothers_mercy/
http://reddit.com/r/gameofthrones/comments/39tz12/s5_parents_and_their_children_this_season/
http://reddit.com/r/gameofthrones/comments/39vaf8/s5e10_can_we_please_give_it_up_for_lena_headey/
http://reddit.com/r/gameofthrones/comments/39v7w7/s5_postpremiere_discussion_510_mothers_mercy/
Well, that's it. Five books in five seasons.
Winter has come and The Winds of Winter has not.
Gods help us, for now we are truly lost.
Grantland asks: Did [REDACTED] really die?!
http://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/game-of-thrones-season-5-episode-10-recap/
Have the producers taken too many short cuts?
No show on television is as yoked to history as Game of Thrones. I mean this in two senses. Every character, every scene, every choice presented onscreen is but the top layer of a seemingly bottomless iceberg of narrative, one that spans five gargantuan novels (so far), an encyclopedia-size tome chronicling thousands of years of a disputed, wholly invented monarchy (The World of Ice and Fire), and great swaths of the Internet, where wildling fans piece together theories, obsessions, and clues with the focus of Arya at a clambake. But after five seasons and 50 episodes,Game of Thrones is also teetering on a remarkable accumulation of filmed story and experience. To see Daenerys once again shivering with fear, alone on the Dothraki plains, was breathtaking to all viewers last night, whether they were versed in the literature or not — not because of the CGI horses or because of the casually mentioned reign of King Aegon V Targaryen, but because we know how far this young woman has traveled only to end up right back where she started. The journey, epic as it’s been, isn’t hers alone.
This was the year when Game of Thrones failed the first history test but, again and again and in surprisingly subtle ways, aced the second. If you think about it, the times the show has gotten into trouble — with fans, with modern sensibilities, with simple logic — have been the times when showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss took ill-advised shortcuts through the knotty forest of George R.R. Martin’s text. Ramsay’s hideous wedding-night rape of Sansa functioned primarily as a cheat to set up the redemption of Theon Greyjoy. The murder of Shireen Baratheon was the fastest way to get Stannis from mildly forgivable to utterly doomed. In the abstract (and when compared to other TV shows), Game of Thrones seems limitless: in budget, in imagination, in bravado. But making the show very often seems like a series of small, brutal cuts. Think of novels as the Unsullied parading around with their long, impressive spears. And then think of TV as the Sons of the Harpy, running up out of nowhere to puncture your lungs before you’ve had a second to catch your breath.
You know what? Maybe the better metaphor here isn’t war, it’s music. A season of Thrones can soar like a symphony, a hundred individual instruments somehow combining to play a rousing tune. But if you separate out specific players, it’s impossible to ignore the great gaps in the melody. Stannis was a major character played exclusively in major chords: He loves his daughter, he burns his daughter, he hangs his head in acceptance of death. My greatest frustration with this show isn’t its gender politics or its general air of pessimism and doom. It’s that I’m constantly cheated out of the time necessary to arrive at a place where critical actions feel dictated by critical characters, and not the other way around.
Of course, it’s not always that way — and that’s what I mean by “the second history test.” The apparent extinguishing of Stannis’s flame aside, I mostly loved “Mother’s Mercy.” I thought it was an exceptionally directed, surprisingly feisty episode of television. But its true strength came from the ways Benioff and Weiss used their great tower of story to build bridges between characters and between where we’ve been and where we’re going. After all these years, so many of Game of Thrones’s noisiest moments still feel like the very first: A child we didn’t know was pushed out of a window by people we didn’t understand. It shocked in a way that got our attention. But as the vicious hits kept coming, it often felt as if the powers that be had forgotten that some of this stuff was supposed to keep our attention, not merely bludgeon it into submission.
The biggest story beats for our biggest characters last night were plenty surprising — including the biggest, which I swear I’ll get to in a moment. But, by and large, they were also very much earned. My displeasure with all the time spent in the House of Black and White — really, little more than a glorified mani-pedi salon for corpses — remains. But Arya’s anguish, as the puffed-up vanity of her revenge melted away into childlike petulance, terror, and then something else altogether, was unsettling in the best possible way. The very things that we, the audience, love about Arya — her spunk, her confidence, her literal dedication to the long memory that her native North values so highly — are precisely the traits that compromise her success in the titular Game of Thrones. Killing Meryn Trant — and boy, she really killed the shit out of him — felt good in the moment but did nothing to change either the greater world or Arya’s immediate circumstances. What she was really stabbing was the past.
Zoom out for a spell and it’s not hard to remember that Westeros is a land that demands a near-impossible balance between hot passion and cool intellect. Tip the scales too far in one direction and you’re likely to fall to your death. Consider the fine line between Tyrion, who killed his father and lover but knows when it’s time to toss old allegiances into the sea like so much human waste, and Stannis, who swapped the rigidity of one set of conventions (family) for another (a murderous religious cult). Is it heavy-handed that Arya appeared to go blind as punishment for her lack of foresight? Probably. But like all great classical figures, she’s the one who’s ultimately responsible for putting out her own eyes.
Yes! Yes! She was stabbing the past!!
And then the article talks about Sansa's rebirth and Theon's redemption and... Jon Snow.
Yes, Kit Harington is out there saying all the right things, but what do you expect? He’s a professional with a new career as a comedian to promote. Besides, loose lips and the reliable ravens of IMDb will reveal if he’s back in Iceland for Season 6 soon enough. The most important argument for Jon’s survival is actually less dependent on actor availability than it is on TV convention. Because let’s be real: There are likely only two seasons ofGame of Thrones left. That’s 20 hours to remake a world, fight off a frozen death army, and maybe, just maybe, stage a Stark family reunion. (Don’t worry, party planners: You can book a small room.) And to do all that, we’re going to need heroes — or, in Martin’s parlance, “POV characters” — and there simply isn’t enough time to call for reinforcements. Let’s heed the lesson that Stannis learned the hard way just last night: If you don’t have the horses, you can’t win the war. Daenerys can fly the dragons and Tyrion can crack wise and advise her, but someone’s gotta swing that great big sword, you know? And, real talk, it ain’t gonna be Rickon.
From that article:
What was instructive about Ned Stark in Season 1 was that his good intentions were swamped by his unconsidered actions.
YES!
tl;dw The Queen, The Bishop, and The Pawn: http://imgur.com/a/5jFLz
Reddit comments:
http://reddit.com/r/gameofthrones/comments/39zfqh/tvs5ep10_tldw_season_5_episode_10_the_queen_the/
From the author:
Previous recaps (Imgur):
1.1/1.2/1.3/3.10/4.1/4.2/4.3/4.4/4.5/4.6/4.7/4.8/4.9/4.10
5.1/5.2/5.3/5.4/5.5/5.6/5.7/5.8/5.9/5.10
the last image has a link to my patreon page if anyone's interested in supporting me
All the Jon Snow theories:
http://huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/14/game-of-thrones-finale-jon-snow-dead_n_7557158.html
Ranking the finale cliffhangers:
http://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/game-of-thrones-season-5-finale-shootaround/
Emergency Awesome:
io9 has all the ways Jon Snow might not be dead:
http://io9.com/all-the-ways-game-of-thrones-s-redacted-might-not-be-1711760621
Ask the Maester Jon Snow season finale:
http://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/ask-the-maester-jon-snow-season-finale/
The hero we need:
Reddit comments:
http://reddit.com/r/gameofthrones/comments/39vcp1/tv_the_hero_we_need_right_now/
Losing her religion:
And this wasn't the usual smirking, mysterious "I know something you don't know" Melisandre. She was just as broken as Davos when she walked into Castle Black. I don't think he'll take advantage of her since they're both abandoned at the Wall without their king.
It's clear that she is in shock from incorrectly interpreting her visions.
I'm disappointed with the whole Stannis story arc.
Last season he was the greatest soldier in Westeros.
This season he marches on Winterfell arrogantly and then does the ultimate desperate act.
Seems inconsistent for a character who once spent a year under siege living on rats keeping a stronghold during Robert's Rebellion before the series began.
Erik Kain is angry!
I never thought Stannis would be king, or at least not king for long, but he was the only one of any of these kings and pretenders—including Daenerys herself—who saw clearly that the realm itself, that all of Westeros and the whole entire world, were in peril.“I was trying to win the throne to save the kingdom, when I should have been trying to save the kingdom to win the throne,” he tells Jon at one point in the books. What other king says such a thing, puts aside his own life and his own world and kills his own family all because he’s been led to believe that not only is the world coming to an end, but he alone can save it? He was thoroughly convinced of his role in all of this by Melisandre, and she was wrong.
In the books he sees a glimpse of it, of his fate, and tells Davos, “I know the cost! Last night, gazing into that hearth, I saw things in the flames as well. I saw a king, a crown of fire on his brows, burning… burning, Davos. His own crown consumed his flesh and turned him into ash. Do you think I need Melisandre to tell me what that means? Or you?”
Stannis isn’t burned to death in the end, but his whole world turns to ash before he dies. He burns his daughter at the stake so that her ashes might melt the snow, only to see half his army desert and run off with his horses. His trusted adviser, Davos, is gone. His own wife is found hanging, cold and dead. His world is ash, and when he finally comes to Winterfell he finds himself vastly outnumbered, and his army is slaughtered.
Stannis says that line in the show, too.
And Erik Kain is right. Stannis knows there's a bigger looming threat in the White Walkers.
That makes him alone among the would-be kings.
The only other people who are taking this threat seriously are Melisandre and Samwell Tarly.
And Jon Snow.
Long live Jon Snow!
io9 has all the ways Jon Snow might be alive:
http://io9.com/all-the-ways-game-of-thrones-s-redacted-might-not-be-1711760621
Ned Stark beheads a deserter in Season 1, dies later on that season.
Robb Stark beheads a traitor in Season 3, dies later on that season.
Jon Snow beheads a traitor in Season 5, dies later on that season.
Reddit comments:
http://reddit.com/r/gameofthrones/comments/3a5mcn/all_spoilers_a_pattern_i_noticed_with_the_stark/
Mario Party says the winner of season 5 is Balon Greyjoy.
Reddit comments:
http://reddit.com/r/gameofthrones/comments/3a75yj/s5_the_real_winner_of_season_5/
Stannis with the sword in battle:
http://pandawhale.com/post/64348/stannis-the-mannis-swings-his-sword-gif
P.S. THIS EPISODE HAD SO MANY FEELS!!
Reddit comments:
http://reddit.com/r/gameofthrones/comments/39v9ww/s5e10_we_all_knew_this_would_happen_but_this_face/
Drogon is like Ash's Charizard.
Perfect!
Dammit, Drogon, we're surrounded by hostiles. Can you at least fly us outta here??
Kit Harrington on Jon Snow:
http://www.ew.com/article/2015/06/14/game-thrones-jon-dies-interview
http://reddit.com/r/gameofthrones/comments/39v9ke/s5e10_interview_with_kit_harrington_about/
Jon Snow theories:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/14/game-of-thrones-finale-jon-snow-dead_n_7557158.html
http://reddit.com/r/gameofthrones/comments/39vacv/all_spoilers_theory_game_of_thrones_season_6/
Sansa and Reek jumping:
Reddit comments:
http://reddit.com/r/gameofthrones/comments/39v91r/s5_e10_sansa_and_reek/
From those comments:
8:00 PM Jun 14 2015