View original postView original postIt was excellent across the board, with the last bit in Astapor really being a Crowning Moment of Awesomeness, this is IMHO the first time she's done much of anything interesting on the show, and even in the books it sort of a turning moment for Daenerys. I like the way they've been doing Tywin too, he doesn't exactly come of sympathetic but they've made him a good deal more real and human then he came of in the books, to me anyway.
View original postWell, I guess I'm only four episodes behind right now, having torn through the second season on DVD. Anyhow. The Arya-Tywin scenes in season two are some of the best character moments of that season, possibly of the whole show, rivaled only by some of Cersei's scenes with Sansa. Which now makes me wonder if that parallel between the two older-cynical-Lannister-with-young-naive-Stark "couples" was intentional.
Yes, I wasn't sure if those appeared in the book and I forgot or are new, previously Arya and Jon hadn't interested me much and on rereads I skimmed them at most. I think it probably was a deliberate parallel, though the added in Littlefinger-Spider chat implies they wanted to start humanizing and justifying the default bad guys of book 1 sooner in the show than in the book series.
View original postIt's funny, in a few cases like Joffrey, the show goes out of its way to make him perhaps even worse than in the books, Stannis comes off rather worse as well, but with Tywin and Cersei they do the opposite. Perhaps because the audience would not take too kindly to the period of Lannister domination, temporary though it may be, if there were no likable characters left on that side.
Yeah, pity too because Stannis is one of the characters I actually like, and they've blackened him a bit in the show, while lightening the Lannisters, the latter works well but the former seems unnecessary. Joffrey actually gets a slight moment of some cleanup in the most recent episode, I won't spoil it and it isn't much of one, but it does make me wonder if they'll change up the death scene for him, which in the book leaves zero room for sympathy at all.