Amph Game Of Thrones (uh i guess it's done now? Edit: No!)

that, and less assuming that everyone else held to honor and honesty at least a little bit. i think that was his greatest flaw honestly, thinking that everyone still had that basic spark of "goodness" if you will. which obviously they didn't.

 

nah, ned wasn't some naive, sheltered guy who was out of his depth. he knew some people had no honor and he cut off their heads often. he just sucked at the game, because you pretty much have to be a scoundrel to play it well.

 

Yeah, his biggest problem was that he wasn't willing to compromise his morals and stoop to their level to play the game. Which worked fine for him in the North -- he ruled, he did the right thing, he won the respect of far more people than he made enemies of, and if someone opposed him, he punished them. He did the right thing, he played within the system, and the system worked. That was his experience, and he thought it would work in King's Landing if he just imposed it hard enough and had the king behind him.

Ned thinks the Lannisters are snakes, sure -- but he thinks Tywin is the real snake, the real power, the guy to be worried about. He thinks Jaime is untrustworthy and ambitious. But Cersei -- she's ambitious, but he has no experience of that kind of personal ambition in a woman. His experience is women who want to advance their children, their brothers, their fathers, who do their bidding and say nice things about them at court and protect their children's interests. Not women who murder their husbands and arrange palace coups on their own initiative, have the political power to effectively depose the rightful authority of the Hand of the King, and will do all that rather than flee the king's justice. I don't think you can underestimate how much Ned relied on the fact that he was Hand of the King -- he was the greatest official in the realm. That authority was completely ignored and disregarded when it mattered by everyone in King's Landing. That's an outrageous situation. Ned didn't expect that the system would be that broken, in a perfectly normal peacetime situation. He spoke with the voice of the king, and the voice of the king was ignored by everyone from lords down to guards. In a medieval society, that's outrageous, incredible, inconceivable. Ned wasn't naive, but he had a base expectation that the system of power would work without completely breaking down. That's not a ridiculous expectation, because he couldn't know going in just how bad it was.

 

havac said pretty much what i meant far better than i did. so... yea. that.

 

But anyway, six days to what I believe will be the best season of Game of Thrones!

 

The showrunners have always said that they think if they pull off adapting the major events of the third book, the rest of the series is guaranteed to be aired.

 

IDK, I personally think some of the audience would struggle with AFFC's pacing, but we will see. I expect they'll do the first half of AFFC and ADwD in season five.

 

Events from those two books will likely start happening in season 4.

 

Yeah, future seasons will likely not coincide with the plots of the individual books. There's going to be a lot more overlap and fudging with the timelines.

 

As season 4 is going to be the second half of ASoS, I will have to defer that season 4 is going to be the best.

 

Interesting article on TheVerge.com on a Q&A session with GRRM - no spoilers

Ha!

 

Just found out that David Nutter is directing the last two episodes of the season. Excitement has gone up tenfold.

 

the reason he wouldn't accept renly's aid is because renly wanted to become king. and ned just couldn't do that because stannis SHOULD be king. so...

 

Did any of you see the history and lore of Westeros? Awsome voice overs

 

I've seen them all, they're really good.

 

My favorites were Quarth and the Free Cities, the actors who play Daxxos and Mormont have magnificent voices, but i figure they might straddle the spoiler lines.

 

Not really. The histories at most hint at later developments and revelations.

 

Qarth