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Elizabeth Sandifer

Elizabeth Sandifer created Eruditorum Press. She’s not really sure why she did that, and she apologizes for the inconvenience. She currently writes Last War in Albion, a history of the magical war between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. She used to write TARDIS Eruditorum, a history of Britain told through the lens of a ropey sci-fi series. She also wrote Neoreaction a Basilisk, writes comics these days, and has ADHD so will probably just randomly write some other shit sooner or later. Support Elizabeth on Patreon.

11 Comments

  1. Ciaran M
    June 14, 2015 @ 8:11 pm

    Stannis' death being a cutaway is an awful nasty ploy to get me to watch next season. There was something doubly heartbreaking as his men pulled their swords with him, even as half of them ran away. Buh. I am very sad. Also, if Stannis really is dead, that is like the fifth bloody shaggy dog story this show has had yet.

    The adventures of Davos, Melisandre and ZomJon on the wall should be fun, though.

    Tyrion in Mereen fills me with dread with the thought of spending another year trying to resolve foreign military intervention.

    Cersei's walk of punishment was bloated and gratuitous. Not an interesting payoff to the season's build. And goodness me did she have a buxom body double for it.

    Reply

  2. encyclops
    June 14, 2015 @ 10:51 pm

    I sincerely hope Stannis is dead because it's my very last chance to get any points this episode in the fantasy league. It's too little too late, but given that my most prominent characters were Melisandre and Brienne I think I did rather well.

    +1 to the props you gave Lena Headey. Cersei is infuriating at the best of times, but Headey herself is a class act and she reminded us all why the character is worth watching.

    And I have to say the Sparrow and his regime is one of the scariest, ugliest things I've seen on this show to date and I want to see him brought low more than just about anyone else on offer, including the Boltons.

    Reply

  3. Matt Marshall
    June 15, 2015 @ 1:26 am

    So how many characters whose deaths they cliffhangered on are actually dead, do people think?

    Reply

  4. Asher Elbein
    June 15, 2015 @ 8:58 am

    Sansa is alive. Stannis…that's a tough call. It's as good a point as any to leave off with him, but the prospect of Brienne pulling that punch and having buddy cop adventures with Stannis is too hard tempting to readily ignore. (Plus, no body.) Myrcella is probably dead. John Snow is dead but is definitely coming back in some form or fashion.

    Reply

  5. encyclops
    June 15, 2015 @ 11:12 am

    Agreed with all of those. I think Theon's going to live at least long enough to be like "sorry I was such a piece of shit," but I'm betting he won't walk away from that fall. Meryn, Miranda, and Selyse are obviously toast.

    Reply

  6. phuzz
    June 16, 2015 @ 2:50 am

    At least ending it on the same cliff-hangers as the books meant I could turn around to some of my friends and say "now you're in the same situation I've been in for four years".
    I'm also wondering how people think that Dany dropping her ring is going to help her be found. It's one tiny ring that's probably about to get trampled into the grass, several hundred miles from where they last saw her.
    On the other hand, she is right next to a 20m wide burnt area covered in chewed bones, so hopefully at least one of the pair will think to track the bloody great dragon, rather than the girl.

    Reply

  7. Re-animator
    June 16, 2015 @ 3:06 am

    This was a very hard episode to watch. I appreciate how Game of Thrones has consistently deconstructed the concept of comeuppance that is the core of most TV dramas – the "bad guy" getting his just deserts never happens here. Meryn Trant's horrific slaughter brought that point home spectacularly for me. The actions that caused Arya to devote her life to vengeance are a distant memory, years have passed (in Westeros and IRL) and other horrific acts have been added to the pile so watching Trant "finally get what's coming to him" doesn't feel like a justified act of revenge at all. Instead it's just another senseless act of murder.

    Aaron Bady wrote this thing about GoT that sort of relates to what I feel about it:

    The Red Wedding should have been the end of the show, I think; it’s the cathartic end-point, and the culmination of the Stark tragedy. We watch, we pity, and we feel fear: we have seen that being good, struggling for justice, for family, and for love, are not compatible with playing the game of thrones. To play the game of thrones, you have to play to win; you have to kill your darlings. If you don’t, you’ll die. The Starks don’t; they die.

    But what happens to this story once the Starks are all dead or scattered? Why does the story go on? Tragedies don’t usually continue after the tragic hero is dead, because they cannot, by definition, be tragedies any more. At a certain point, there’s no one left to kill. And Game of Thrones is, after the third book stopped providing source material, no longer a tragedy. The bad guys won, and if life goes on, the good guys don’t come back to life (or, if they do, it’s pretty awful). Ideed, so many of the good guys are dead that the show has no choice but to make bad guys into protagonists (how have Jaime and Cercei Lanister become protagonists, again?)

    I don't think this move makes the show unnecessary, and appreciate how Game of Thrones has forced the audience to identify with and invest empathy into progressively more and more broken, violent and unsympathetic characters. It systematically shows how myths and stories that are constructed around power concern themselves with the legitimation of power: the myth of the Good King that doesn't oppress the people, the Good Patriarch that treats his wife and children fairly, all these stories people tell themselves in order to convince themselves that power is right, power is good, power won't be abused. There's no such comfort in GoT and I think that's a genuinely progressive idea.

    I can't remember the quote, but I think George RR Martin once said that he imagines the ending of Game of Thrones to be "the wind sweeping over a plain full of bones" and I'm starting to appreciate the idea. As it stands, an ending where the entire human race in Westeros is wiped out is a happy ending. Finally, it would all be over.

    Reply

  8. Matt Marshall
    June 16, 2015 @ 11:27 pm

    Part of me thinks a really interesting analysis could be made between Arya's scenes this season and this Monday's episode of Steven Universe. That was a hell of a thing.

    Of course such a piece would have an audience of zero 😉

    Reply

  9. encyclops
    June 18, 2015 @ 9:15 am

    Bady's is a very strange piece. Since when were Jaime and Cersei protagonists? There are still four living Starks, more than have died, in fact, and of the pair that everyone thinks of as the protagonists, one is alive and cliffhangered and the other is dead but obviously cliffhangered. I guess if someone seriously expected that Robb would win the game, the Red Wedding would have been the end of the show, but really it's just a particularly steep precipice into the canyon of despair. I think your take on it makes a lot more sense.

    Reply

  10. SpaceSquid
    June 18, 2015 @ 11:56 pm

    That large circle of burnt earth provided me with my favourite moment in the whole episode, as Drogon, tired from his dance, found himself too exhausted to chase off carrion feeders, turning the circle into a feast for crows.

    Reply

  11. JohnB
    July 1, 2015 @ 7:31 am

    I thought she'd dropped the ring to get rid of it, assuming it was her wedding ring.

    Reply

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