Yeah.... I think she's going to end up being a lot more important than people would have expected.
I am so cool with that.
About time a little ISFJ girl managed to actually rise into her full glory in a show like this, rather than just being someone's piddly floor scrubber. It's been kind of a wild ride to see her as a young teenager going through all her life crap and what it shapes her into. She will be formidable one day -- beautiful and terrible -- if she comes out of this.
I hate how Ramsay can take something consensual and pervert it so badly.
(And the scene is less about showing us something we didn't know about Ramsay -- we knew he was this bad -- and more about showing us what Sansa has become, and also as a catalyst to "breaking" the Reek persona. I think this would have destroyed Sansa a few years back... but she will rise above this. She won't be broken. She will either win or die.)
I'm not really a fan of what they did with that storyline. Ellaria in particular has become extremely one-dimensional.... her POV in the book is entirely the opposite of what it is now, and the changes they made don't really make sense. They kind of drastically simplified that plot to the point where it's just kind of stupid. Everyone in Dorne except Doran now looks like a crazy idiot. Unlike with Sansa, what they did with Jaime really does come off as a clumsy hodgepodge... it very obviously looks like the result of trying to mash two distinct storylines together. With the exception of Doran, I feel like the Dornishmen have been robbed of any depth or complexity. Undoubtedly , they couldn't include a long lecture on the history of House Martell, but they could have come up with something better than this.
Yeah, they all just seem so caricature to me right now. I liked Ellaria last season, now she just seems dumb. So much lack of nuance. Doran really is the only Dorne I like, and he's stuck in a chair. (Well, Jonas brother wannabe Tristan is kind of refreshing in just being a nice teenage boy who wants to kiss Myrcella...)
ANyway, it's just all below par what I expect from the show, unfortunately. I wonder who wrote/directed this... have they done other episodes? I felt like I was watching bad Xena with the Sand Snake stuff; should I be impressed that they held their own against an experienced sellsword and the former best swordsman in Westeros, or should I be disappointed that they suck so bad that three of them couldn't kill a one-handed man and an aging swordsman? There was no subtlety. Why did all this happen in pure daylight, in the middle of the garden? And I love how conveniently the guy supposed to be guarding Myrcella an hour earlier isn't anywhere to be seen except to conveniently stop the fight with guards later. This was supposed to be a cool little suberfuge mission with Jaime that could cost him his life, with stealth and suspense, and instead it was just fluff crap and the Sand Snakes are just petulant girls.
I got annoyed with Cersei's storyline in the book, too. I think the show is an improvement in that they've trimmed out a lot of the fat. Granted, Loras is another character that's really suffered in the transition from book to screen. What happens to him in the book is a lot better. This was just kind of hitting you over the head with "contemporary relevance!"
Yeah, anytime they want to drop all the overt gay stuff (and gay oppression by the church), I'm cool with that. It's just cliche in how it has been handled.
Tyrion's storyline is also vastly, vastly improved over the books. I like his take-downs of Jorah and his bickering with Varys, and the fact that he's using his head to get himself out with schemes. In the book, he just spends most of it as a kind of depressed alcoholic and gets stuck in this boring romantic subplot with one of the dwarfs who was at Joffrey's wedding (I'm not kidding). Tyrion was actually the weakest part of Book 5 because of this. Here again, they wisely trimmed out most of the fat.
Glad to hear this much at least, although Dinklage is such a strong actor that I think he makes Tyrion much easier to write for -- you can imagine easily throwing him into various situations and knowing what he'd say and do, the lines just roll out. They are really struggling with some of the other subplots.
So far, I think the Third Season was actually the weakest... it struck me as being a rather slow, aimless build-up to the Red Wedding, but that's how I felt about the first half of Book III, also. The revelations about Jaime never surprised me because I always saw the "Kingslayer" thing as bullshit. I did like the way they toyed with viewers about Ramsay and the Boltons, but Ramsay's introduction in the book is much better.
I think I was absorbing so much detail at the time, I don't remember much of it except for Jaime losing his hand + the Red Wedding.