game of gnomes tv show

[Mr. Tea]

All I'll say about this famous quote:

I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence.

is that JRRT could be one disingenuous motherfucker at times.

 

[droid]

I knew it.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Is there any problem that can't be solved by the judicious application of fire and tits?

 

[Corpsey]

Episode 3 was a bit dull but Episode 4 was something close to a humdinger.

My favourite strand of the show ATM is Tyrion as acting ruler of Mesreen. It was the role he was born to inhabit, had he not been born a dwarf.

Also, although I think the whole Sparrows storyline has been handled badly, I am actually finding the High Sparrow an interesting character, now. Partly this is down to Jonathan Pryce, but it's also interesting to see this force of moral censure enter this truly immoral world, albeit in a form somewhat repulsive to us (what with the gay/women hating stuff).

 

[Corpsey]

Has anyone noticed a lot more explicitly comical moments appearing this series?

Jorah trying to throw sand in matey's face, e.g.

Some of them have fallen completely flat but I enjoyed Tyrion's mangling of the language.

One thing I'm not a fan of is how many fights this series have ended with a blade coming through someone's face from behind. It's becoming a bit predictable by this stage.

 

[Corpsey]

Clive James on Game of Thrones for The New Yorker...

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/04/18/the-raw-appeal-of-game-of-thrones

Debarred by fate from military prowess, Tyrion has never been able to influence events except with his brain, and his trial is the show’s clearest proof that, in an unreasonable society, to have reasoning power guarantees nothing except the additional mental suffering that accrues when circumstances remind you that you are powerless. Your only privilege, even as the son of a noble house, is to understand the fix you are in, and to express yourself neatly when neatness can avail you nothing. Tyrion has enough influence to secure for himself, among his outsized supply of paid mistresses, a woman he genuinely loves: the camp follower Shae, touchingly played by Sibel Kekilli. But he can’t save her from harm, so even his best quality, his natural tenderness, becomes his enemy. Tyrion is the embodiment, in a small body, of the show’s prepolitical psychological range. A perpetual victim of injustice, he yet has a sense of justice: circumstances can’t destroy his inner certainty that there are such things as fairness, love, and truth. Those circumstances might lead him to despair, but he takes their measure by his instincts. To raise, for an uninstructed audience, the question of what comes first, a civilized society or an instinctive wish for civilization, can’t be a bad effect for an entertainment to have; although we might have to be part of an instructed audience ourselves in order to find that effect good, and we had better be protected by the police and an army from anyone who finds it trivial.

Philosophical conundrums aside, there is the matter of Tyrion’s indispensability; and here, surely, we finally come down to a certainty that there is one character the show can’t do without. We felt shock when Ned Stark was decapitated, and when Tywin Lannister was killed. But we could survive those shocks, and might even have been able to bear it if Ned’s darling daughter Sansa Stark (Sophie Turner), after seasons of being protected like a caged nightingale from the casual rapaciousness of the dreaded Joffrey, had been not only raped but killed, just as, in real life, some daughter, equally precious, is raped and killed every day of the week. Besides, to put it as compassionately as I can, the dramatis personae contain plenty of characters we wouldn’t have minded seeing the back of.

Of those we come to love, there are many, but we have been ready to see them go. Young Arya, for example, braves so many fatal hazards with so tiny a sword that it would not have been surprising to see her pinned by her own toothpick like a cocktail sausage. Clearly, the main thing keeping her alive was the showrunners’ determination to fascinate us with the process of her maturation, but from our own lives we know that the wish to see someone grow and thrive can be thwarted by chance. Everyone in the show is dispensable, as in the real world. But without Tyrion Lannister you would have to start the show again, because he is the epitome of the story’s moral scope. His big head is the symbol of his comprehension, and his little body the symbol of his incapacity to act upon it. Tyrion Lannister is us, bright enough to see the world’s evil but not strong enough to change it. ♦

 

[Mr. Tea]

Anyone else really enjoy Tyrion's star turn as the Throneiverses' prophet of neoliberalism? "Yes, as owners of slaves you're rich, but you can be richer still as employers of free men!"

 

[Mr. Tea]

Kit Harington is going out with Rose Leslie, a.k.a. his Wildling paramour Eedjit!

Edit: also, I'm sure you've all heard that Jerome Flynn and Lena Headey had a fling but it ended so badly the filming crew had to keep them physically separated on set, haha.

 

[Corpsey]

Is that why Bronn has disappeared?

When you think about all those beautiful people hanging around on set together all the time, it's a wonder they're not ALL shagging each other.

 

[Mr. Tea]

I'm really, really, really hoping there's some more Bronn very soon.

 

[Mr. Tea]

[SPOILER ALERT]

WHOAH.

I know I've been pretty down on the magic/supernatural elements, but I actually really liked the weird reverse causality thing that caused Hodor to become Hodor. Made me feel very sorry for him, too.

Really hoping Arya doesn't fuck up this time with her assigned task.

And just when you thought those Ironborn dicks couldn't get any more unlikeable, eh?

 

[droid]

Best episode in ages. Hodor reminds me of Owen Meany.

Awful casting with uncle Greyjoy though - probably the worst in the entire show.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Awful casting with uncle Greyjoy though - probably the worst in the entire show.

God yeah, I mean I guess you're not meant to like him but he just seems incredibly annoying and boorish. He also looks a good 30 years younger than his 'brother' Balon.

Sansa's confrontation with Littlefinger was one of the most awkward scenes I can remember. I find with characters like him and Ramsay (and Joffrey, of course) that I feel very much in two ways about them: wanting them to die horribly, of course, but also not wanting it, because then they won't be around to enjoy hating.

 

[HMGovt’s Glorious Return!]

The reverse causality twist was clever, reminded me of the fact that most dreams are only experienced because you wake up in the middle of it. Ghost mode until waking, you'd never know what happened.

 

[Mr. Tea]

OK, so who else correctly guessed the identity of Bran's mystery rescuer?

(And who else is wondering just how many nick-of-time rescues the series can bear before it just becomes too silly for its own good?)

Quite pleased Walder Frey has turned up again. He's so lovably hateable!

I like the vaguely Alien-vs-Predator-ish backstory of [SPOILER ALERT] how the White Wankers were created by the Children as a sort of biological weapon.

 

[Corpsey]

I enjoyed the last few episodes, but I have had to accept a general level of cheesiness and nonsense in order to do so. The whole iron born choosing their king scene was DREADFUL.

MORE MOANING

All that children of forest throwing fire grenades at zombies is so boring/stupid. Khaleesi riding the dragon really felt like a "who cares" moment. Sam Tarly's whole story is a who cares moment. Sophie Turner still can't act.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Sophie Turner still can't act.

She's not great but I think she's come on in leaps and bounds. And she's still better than Emilia Clarke - or should I say 'Jane Bond'?

Agreed that the Children-vs-zombies grenade-fights are ridiculous. Just makes the whole thing look like a cheesy video game. Kill zombies. Pick up 'manna'. Press space to interact with NPC. Repeat.

 

[Corpsey]

Also, I'm being slightly unfair to her as she is being given eye-roll inducing dialogue to work with.

I guess my biggest problem with Game of Thrones has always been the plate spinning necessitated by so many plot lines and characters. Things haven't been pared down over the course of the show: they've proliferated. Every story line is either overly compressed, so that you're forced to make logical leaps, or tediously drawn out, in order for you to remember characters exist. Presumably this stuff works a lot better in the books, where there's room to really delve into things.

And then OTOH there's these weirdly indulgent bits like the comical play which Arya's forced to watch. I mean, it was sort of interesting to see how the popular perception of those events was so bastardised as to make Joffrey an innocent, but it seemed to go on forever. Funny seeing Kevin Eldon in GoT, though! It's a wonder Gervais hasn't wormed his way into it, tbh.

 

[Mr. Tea]

It's also interesting in that some of it is clearly news* to Arya, a good few years after the events have occurred. I think it quite effectively gives you an idea of what it must have been like to live before the creation of modern communications networks - I mean newspapers, telegraphs, the penny post, that sort of thing, never mind phones, TV and the internet.

(*to the extent that it's true, of course - but even then, while Tyrion obviously didn't kill Joffrey, it's true that he was accused and convicted of the murder and that most people in Westeros presumably believe him to have been guilty of the crime)

 

[Corpsey]

Enjoyed the latest episode. Good dialogue, badass hound with a good heart, ultraviolence, things heating up war-wise, THE RETURN OF BRONN! Jamie showing he's still got that evil in him (unless of course he was bluffing).