The best album of my lifetime turns 15 today.

I speak, obviously, of Iron Maiden's Brave New World.

A Blog of Ice and Fire (Chapter 61) Daenerys VII: It’s Just A Flesh Wound

Previously on A Blog of Thrones, we wondered What Would Ned Do? Because this is a question worth asking, apparently. Well, buckle your seatbelts, dumplings. We're going for a ride.

Admin: test

I'm publishing a post under a separate account. Because reasons. Ignore this.

Character development is more than a costume/name change

See this analysis of the most recent Sansa chapter.

Yes, dammit, Littlefinger is playing her, both in the books and in the show.

5x07, take 2

Let's put a more positive spin on things.

Game of Thrones 5x07

Way too lazy to check the titles, because they really don't matter, do they??

I mean, this week we had an episode titled "The Gift." Now, in the holy and sacred text of Saint George of House Martin, "The Gift" is an area of land south of the Wall and north of Winterfell. It's conceivable that Stannis is doing the Big Napoleon in this stretch of land, so all told, tonight's episode spent about five minutes there. Hurrah.

Spoilers.

An alternative way That Scene might not be totally derailing

I want to spend yet another post yammering about That Scene.

It's the people who saw it coming but were still outraged - and specifically the book-readers(!) - that I want to talk about here.

The last word on That Scene

Detractors are complaining that nothing like it happens to that character in the books.

You. Don't. Know. That.

There are at least two more books to go through, and if you think they're all sunshine and roses, I wonder what series you've been reading, because it ain't A Song of Ice and Fire.

What if that last scene was exactly what Alayne wanted Ramsay to see?

Spoilers, trigger warning, etc.

Game of Thrones 5x06

SPOILER ALERT

TRIGGER WARNING

Reflections on the First Half of Game of Thrones Season 5

Some parts good, some parts bad, some parts ugly.
SPOILERS

Age of Ultron review

Avengers 2: Avenge Harder was the biggest disappointment since Avengers 1: Look What Our Lawyers Accomplished. 

Or it would have been if I'd actually been stoked for Avengers 2. But I would like to highlight something I said in that earlier post:

If that's the case, then Whedon comes off as the MCU's version of the Pierce Brosnan Bond: a that'll-do personage who can't live up to the hype, but that's okay because it's not like you could realistically expect someone else to do better in his constraints.

I'm repeating that here because that's basically my opinion of this movie. It's like GoldenEye. It's well-put-together and hugely entertaining, but at the end of the day it's totally mindless and nothing actually happened.

Actually that's not true. They did spend some time setting up both Batman v. Superman Captain America: Civil War and Avengers 3: The Magic Mitten Thingy. In fact, what was going on in this film was almost incidental to what was the film was doing in service of the MCU. What's going on in this film is that Tony Stark gets mind-raped into building a new robot - because JARVIS and the Iron Legion wasn't enough, apparently, but because he hasn't seen 2001 or The Terminator or The Matrix or played Mass Effect, he forgets to give it a soul and it starts trying to solve humanity's problems by ending them.

Ending humanity, I mean.

The Avengers re-assemble and fight a lot and there's some blatant CSO (green-screening, if you want to use the oft-inaccurate lay terminology, you peon you) and CGI and at the end a small team of heroes is able to overcome a legion of soulless monsters. And this is supposed to be a surprise, I guess. This is what I mean when I say it's like a middling Bond film; you know all the beats, and there's never any tension because - sorry - writer/director Joss Whedon's reputation for tearing your heart out by murdering your favorite characters is totally undeserved. Maybe I'm spoiled by Game of Thrones doing that much more brutally and regularly, or perhaps by the fact that all of the Avengers are signed up for at least one more movie, but the fact of the matter is that at no moment in this film did I seriously believe that the heroes were either going to a) fail or b) die.

SPOILERS

Imperial Double-Post, Part 2: Fighting for the Empire

So you probably know that the game Skyrim has as one of its major plots a civil war between the Empire and the rebel Stormcloaks. And the player character can only join one side. So just about everyone has at least one "alternate" character who joined the other side.

And having played through both campaigns, I keep going back and forth. One the one hand, Ulfric Stormcloak's cause is just - when the Empire surrendered to the Aldmeri Dominion and outlawed Talos worship, it lost its right to rule. (And on top of that, literally the first thing the Empire does in-game is try to execute you without a trial.) On the other hand, Ulfric himself is no better; with one exception (Markarth), no Stormcloak Jarl is better than their Imperial counterpart - and even in Markarth, "better" is a stretch (the Stormcloak is in league with the local underworld, while the Imperial is oblivious to the fact that he's a complete puppet). And Ulfric is ultimately a thug whose obsession with tradition trumps any respect for the rule of law.

(And no, the fact that Jarl Balgruuf sides with the Empire doesn't really have a bearing on my opinion. The community likes Balgruuf more than I do - the man's reaction to a half-starved ex-con wandering into his palace to bring word of a dragon attack is to send him to crawl through a zombie-infested dungeon.)

It's an annoying dilemma. My current solution is to take the Thomas Theisman approach (see the previous post), and save the Empire while at the same time decapitating it by, ah, "removing" its (here weak, there evil) ruler. Hopefully something better springs up in his place. General Tullius would have my vote, so long as you keep him away from his evil Cylon wife.

Imperial Double-Post, Part 1: Rooting for the Empire

I mentioned a while back that I'm reading the Honor Harrington novels, and yeah, now I'm at the point where everyone starts rooting for the "bad guys" because the "good guys" have their heads up their asses. (Book 10, War of Honor)

Basically the series, for those of you who don't know, is Horatio Hornblower In Space, kind of like Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan was, except with much more "hard" science fiction. There's "Space Britain" - the Star Kingdom of Manticore, the ostensible good guys - and there's "Space France" - the People's Republic of Haven, the ostensible bad guys (clue's in the name). There's also "Space Germany" and "Space... Um, Not Sure, Really. Conservative-Version-Of-The-UN?*" but they're kind of side acts, at least so far.

*By which I mean it's utterly massive, utterly inefficient, and the warring parties kind of tiptoe around it without it doing anything.

Now, here's the thing - there are some pretty blatant parallels, especially on the Haven side, where Robespierre and Napoleon both have pretty clear stand-ins. But... (SPOILERS)