e the hound happy game of thrones reddit season 8

The episode cuts hard from Jaime and Brienne–themselves recently back from the front–by the golden shore of King’s Landing to the bleak, gray forest, and you can practically smell the haze of smoke from ruined villages. This is life for millions of ordinary people while a few of their superiors tussle over whether a stag, a wolf, or a dragon sits on the big pointy throne.Īrya and the Hound, having just left the scene of the Red Wedding, are wandering the Riverlands, the region of Westeros where the Lannisters and Starks have been clashing the most intensely. It means devastation, mayhem, insecurity, the collapse of economies from lack of trade, lawlessness, and the robbery, murder, and rape of the defenseless. But for the common folk, war is a long, lingering condition, like an endless winter, or a plague. For armies, it’s brutal, intense engagements like the fiery battle of the Blackwater in season 2. There’s an actual war for control of Westeros, which we rarely see because it mostly happens offscreen, and we spend most of our time with the parties calling the shots, not with those firing them.įor kings and queens, war is about troop movements like the pieces on Stannis Baratheon’s map board. Not just a “power struggle” of political machinations, not a 3-D chess match, not a mythological, magical saga–though there are elements of each.

It can be easy sometimes to forget that Game of Thrones is a story about a war.

E the hound happy game of thrones reddit season 8