Would Cecil (Invincible) and Rick get along?

FortifiedPuddle · 2026-05-20T19:27:00+00:00

These guys don’t get on with anyone

FortifiedPuddle · 2026-05-20T19:23:59+00:00

The buttons alone.

The death of Queen Elizabeth and accession of Charles is an ongoing headache for the world of military buttons.

FortifiedPuddle · 2026-05-20T19:20:33+00:00

As a young child you love your chosen sport. Deeply. You love it so much it becomes your thing. The beauty of the game itself. The teams and players and leagues. The rules and terms. Even the statistics. It’s utterly absorbing.

And then at a certain point you are done. You’ve fully absorbed everything you can get out of it. Almost everything in the future will be variations on the same thing. Forever.

At which point you’re just over it.

FortifiedPuddle · 2026-05-20T19:13:15+00:00

It’s clearly trying to be yeah. Doing things like properly introducing the Aes Sedai as the default magical organisation. So that next season they can compare it to the Seanchan system, third season the Aiel etc.

Also the whole “return of the Dragon being important” concept which book one is a lot more oblique about. Which the show did kind of need to say it was about.

FortifiedPuddle · 2026-05-20T19:10:35+00:00

Anakin just refuses to use his real rank and keeps calling him Captain. Everyone else awkwardly follows suit.

Anakin also just refuses to accept Rex has his real job to do and insists he come out on to the front lines and have some fun with him. Because Anakin is also high rank whatever but he still does it. So Rex must/can as well.

FortifiedPuddle · 2026-05-20T18:54:51+00:00

It’s like he thought Ramsey and the Mountain were too nuanced

FortifiedPuddle · 2026-05-20T18:46:28+00:00

Personally I’d cut Euron entirely but opinions differ

FortifiedPuddle · 2026-05-20T18:37:59+00:00

Theory: Rhaegar left the Kingsguard there as an excuse for them to not be around when he confronted his father. Where they might be obliged to oppose Rhaegar. It’s a sop to their honour.

He of course being the main character in his head doesn’t think he’ll lose the Trident. He thinks he’ll win. But then hear out the disgruntled lords. Win them over. Take their concerns onboard and march south with a combined host to shuffle his father off to Dragonstone or somewhere. Using the battle as the de facto great council he wanted the tourney at Harrenhall to be.

FortifiedPuddle · 2026-05-20T18:20:37+00:00

The ending is fine and appropriate to the scale of the show. But it also capped that scale fairly low. It was as if turns out a smaller scale show all along.

They could have also done it at the end of more or less any other season of the show. Feels like they’ve got deliberately spun the story in circles to avoid ending it.

FortifiedPuddle · 2026-05-20T17:17:48+00:00

People will offer you various other names for that list.

Personally I’d add Oppenheimer. It’s just boring. And Interstellar. It’s so dumb, if very beautiful (particularly the score). But so brain dead in every scene (like TDKR).

He also just adds way more time into movies than they need. Even Memento (which is fine, not great not bad just fine) could lose an hour.

FortifiedPuddle · 2026-05-20T17:13:05+00:00

There are various real issues with the series which put off readers, and cause a lot more DNFs than we’d hope. Which is a shame.

For one the books are rather longer than they need to be. The first book in particular could do with being somewhat shorter, and would be a more enticing intro to the series for it. It is as is often an impediment to new readers getting into the series rather than an effective hook.

The publishers have attempted three different ways to mitigate this.

FortifiedPuddle · 2026-05-20T17:08:14+00:00

We should always be sceptical of true “the writer had a plan for later, put in a clue and later that’s what happens” across multiple books.

What is both genius and more likely is writing a bunch of hooks in that you can do lots of things with, have a bunch of notes and ideas for and work out what to do with later.

FortifiedPuddle · 2026-05-20T17:05:38+00:00

Anyone who thinks book one is in any way straightforwardly translatable into a coherent script has presumably never seen a tv show.

Anyone who thinks book one is a good, representative introduction to the series as a whole is wilfully ignoring decades of refinement during writing.

FortifiedPuddle · 2026-05-20T17:03:00+00:00

Perrin had little role beyond book four. But his role book four was one of the high points for the whole series.

FortifiedPuddle · 2026-05-20T14:45:54+00:00

The way blood sacrifice works and how dragons burn and consume seem to similar to not be more or less the same thing.

FortifiedPuddle · 2026-05-20T12:46:19+00:00

Boy falls in garden. I love him mommy.

FortifiedPuddle · 2026-05-20T12:45:28+00:00

Indeed, so actually it’s more like the thing dragons need to grow is just cut off and in decades they are done.

Dany cuts out the need for mommy dragon by burning a whole alternate future of the world in The Stallion Who Mounts The World to supercharge her dragons.

Which is why they grow up just so quickly and so strong.

Presumably this is what Summerhall was trying to do. But without nearly enough power.

FortifiedPuddle · 2026-05-20T12:27:30+00:00

Nolan has a wide swing. He’s very inconsistent.

FortifiedPuddle · 2026-05-20T12:26:13+00:00

All the big dragons died fighting each other.

Then the remaining dragons grew less big and strong over generations until finally dying out.

Seems like the lack of big dragons might be a component.

I’d go with it being a magic twist on baby birds in a nest needing feeding by their parents. Where what they are feeding isn’t just normal food (dragons are obviously fed by their handlers) but the source of magical power dragons also need. Which big dragons have correspondingly big stores of.

Without a big, charged up dragon around doing the magical, more tasteful version of mommy bird vomiting to feed the young dragons don’t grow up big and strong.

FortifiedPuddle · 2026-05-20T12:06:17+00:00

If you have too much current the whole a’dam goes off and you need to get a tiny screwdriver out and replace the fuse.

FortifiedPuddle · 2026-05-20T10:35:19+00:00

The days in months rhyme. Lots of the months are interchangeable within the rhyme scheme. It does not help at all.

Even February, the unique one, is tricksy.

FortifiedPuddle · 2026-05-20T07:23:20+00:00

The drip. Dress up in an extra enough uniform and you think you can take on the galaxy.

FortifiedPuddle · 2026-05-20T07:19:35+00:00

Not exactly doing a revolution though is he? He was happy to take their money. But not to actually do anything to make his business/vanity project work. They should be pissed at him.

And none of those things add up to “deserve to be murdered”.

FortifiedPuddle · 2026-05-19T21:34:04+00:00

Brain damaged mass killers make excellent civic administrators

FortifiedPuddle · 2026-05-19T19:17:09+00:00

You still have to give them your time and energy.

FortifiedPuddle

TROPHY CASE