Relatedly, I wish they had made Shae's character make sense at some point. Totally unresolved why she was in Tywin's bed and sounding happy to be there. Who was she really? Where did she really come from? Did she really not understand why Tyrion sent her away? From scene to scene she would swing from shrewd and clever to naive, obstinate, and seemingly incapable of basic reason.

What I really enjoyed is how people were so intrigued by Arya's "what's West of Westeros?" angle that the show runners felt it necessary to immediately come out and say "no, we're not doing that, but we will develop like six other things that nobody asked for instead."

Absolutely! I've been a Shannara fan for decades, it was the first fantasy series I discovered on my own after Tolkien as a kid, and I understand it's not as sophisticated and complex as, say, Wheel of Time or Malazan, but Brooks is flat out a terrific storyteller. Especially the Jerle Shannara series; that is a trilogy of 10/10s in my eyes

Hipster list. For classic metal albums in the last decade you can't overlook:

Fates Warning - Theories of Flight

Exhorder - Mourn the Southern Skies

Fires in the Distance - Air Not Meant For Us

Blind Guardian - The God Machine

Karkosa - Esoterrorcult

Ihashn - Arktis

Testament - Titans of Creation

Katatonia - Fall of Hearts

Tailgunner - Guns for Hire

Flotsam & Jetsam - Blood in the Water

Warbringer - Weapons of Tomorrow

That's just off the top of my head. And Sarcator's new album will likely be taking its place on the list after it has a few months to percolate.

I do think they stripped some important nuance from that scene.

But the big thing that I never understood was why Aidan Gillen played Littlefinger so preposterously arch. Like he delivers every single line with a hilarious, over the top, mustache twirling, villainous, sotto voiced flair, that everyone around him seems to pretend they don't notice.

I know Westeros is not reality, but there is no way anyone in any world would hear that man talking like that and think "this guy has my best interests at heart and totally won't immediately betray me to further his own ends."

The episode of SNW with the Lower Decks crossover was so bad that it almost made me bail on the entire series. And I love SNW. Cannot understand what people like so much about this awful, smarmy, cheesy, fan-service cartoon.

And I find the shipping of Bashir and Garak just plain weird. DS9 doesn't need fan service retconning. What are they doing here? DS9 is classic and stands on its own, unlike this Lower Decks drek. Lower Dreks? Lower Dreks.

I agree it's a bit odd, but all of us in the ASOIAF fandom are making peace in our own odd ways with the clear reality that we'll probably never read the actual ending to this story. I assume articles like this are just another manifestation of that.