Game of Thrones | Song of Ice and Fire

Tommen has a new successor. Good luck getting anyone in King’s Landing to care, apparently. Caution! Spoilers immediately ahead for  Game of Thrones  Season 6, Episode 2, ‘Home.’ Go watch it, it’s a really good one.  The body count in Westeros is really starting to pile up — and the return of one resurrected Lord Commander  doesn’t begin to make a dent in the numbers. In Season 6’s first two episodes, three of the Seven Kingdoms’ most powerful leaders have been usurped and unceremoniously tossed on the scrap heap: Roose Bolton (along with his wife and hours-old heir), Balon Greyjoy (last of the participants in the War of the Five Kings and the last of the leeches burned in the fire by Melisandre) and Prince Doran Martell of Dorne (that guy in the bathrobe and wheelchair). But the most important death is the one that barely got any attention: the poisoning of Princess Myrcella Baratheon, sister to King Tommen and official heir to the Iron Throne. ...

If you watched this past Sunday’s season premiere of  Game of Thrones , you were treated with a brief return to Dorne, that south-most region of Westeros where last season’s most boring storyline took place. And then,  after seeing one of the show’s greatest deviations from the books , you started wondering what the hell is happening here. Spoilers ahead… On a surface level, Ellaria Sand and the daughters of the late Oberyn Martell assassinated Prince Doran, tired of waiting for him to get around to taking revenge on the Lannisters for the many, many Martells killed at their commands. It’s almost as if the Sand Snakes had watched season five themselves, and got bored waiting for something interesting to happen in Dorne. Certainly now that Doran is dead, things are about to move a lot faster. But where, exactly, is this story moving faster towards? There’s no coup in George R.R. Martin’s books, and while the Sand Snakes are very much trying to pick a fight with King’s L...