witchkitten

Thanks. I didn’t catch the letter difference. I’m only familiar with Hertfordshire and couldn’t figure out why the article said it was near the border.

The article says Hertfordshire is near the border between England and Wales, which is not how I would describe it at all, unless they’re talking about a different Hertfordshire (not the county featured in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice).

I just saw the pictures. Forget the dress, what happened to Alison Brie’s face? She looks like a shadow of her former self. I used to think she was pretty but now...yikes. I know most, if not all, of this transformation is her unhealthy weight loss. I wish these actresses didn’t have such distorted views of their weight.

Miley Cyrus puts out a statement on Instagram regarding her divorce:

Ugh. I thought they shouldn’t have made the second or third movie. The first one ended perfectly, IMO, and I think it’s clear they hadn’t originally intended for there to be another other films.

If you were thinking Pitt you weren’t the only one. When I first read Hoya’s post I did a double take until I remembered that her Glee boyfriend is also named Brad.

The press was brutal towards Fergie as well. I know she’s done a lot of horrible things since but they were unrelenting before she went off the rails. I feel like you have to be at least a little crazy to marry into that family.

I have no idea about her personality and if she is high maintenance or not but I find the avocado BI very hard to believe. Wasn't Suits filmed in Canada? The climate there is also not good for growing avocados and she survived. It's not like she's never lived without avocados and I find it hard to believe she couldn't get them at least occasionally with all the money she has. I do wonder if she's having some second thoughts related to the viciousness of the press. Unlike Kate, she wasn't under their scrutiny for very long before getting married and may not have been prepared enough. She had some exposure being an actress but she wasn't even an A-lister and even the biggest movie stars, as intrusive and vicious as the press can be towards them, don't have it as bad as someone who marries into the royal family.

I think that it’s hard to delineate actors by format these days because there really aren’t too many strictly television stars or strictly movie stars or strictly streaming stars. A lot of movie stars now do both television and streaming, and many television and streaming stars also have significant roles in films. The stigma of doing television isn’t there anymore because TV (including streaming) is in its Golden Age and often better than a lot of the stuff being released for movie theaters.

How are you liking them? I read them after the second season of the show.

Why? There is no reason to remake Four Weddings and a Funeral. It's not like the movie is missing something because it doesn't take place in modern times. Who is the audience for the remake supposed to be?

Louis looks so much like Kate. I think the boys favor her, although George has a lot of William too, while Charlotte favors Queen Elizabeth (i.e. William's side). I also find it interesting that Charlotte and now Louis (although it's too soon to know if it will last) seem to really like the attention of the crowds and play it up for the cameras, whereas George, the future King, seems more reserved. I think William and Harry were the same way. William seemed more reserved and uncomfortable with all the attention he received whereas Harry seemed to enjoy it.

I wasn't actually as outraged by the season finale as I was episode 5 or even episodes 4 and 3 because I already expected something truly awful. As soon as they had Arya kill the Night King in episode 3 with Jon and Bran having nothing to do with it and being completely ineffectual during the battle with the dead I knew this season wasn't going to go well. Don't get me wrong. When Arya first stabs him I thought it was an awesome moment but then I was left feeling unsatisfied and underwhelmed. I realized that while it was a "kickass" moment it really didn't make sense from a thematic standpoint. Arya had absolutely nothing to do with the Night King and had only learned of the WW threat two episodes earlier so her getting the kill just wasn't satisfying. There was no sense of "Finally, Arya gets to kill the Night King" because I never really connected her with that plot and neither did the writers. It really should have been Jon or Bran. Their storylines have been all about the WW threat and their respective connections to the Night King. Even if Arya was the one that stabbed him, it needed to be a team effort between her and Jon and/or Bran. By having her be the one to kill him they completely robbed Jon of his storyline and made his character even more underwhelming than he already was. Back to the finale. Why in the world would they still have a Night's Watch? There is no longer a White Walker threat, the reason the NW was created in the first place, and even the wildlings are on good terms with their southern neighbors. And even if the wildlings weren't on good terms with those on the other side of the wall, why would the Six Kingdoms send anyone to protect the North since it's a separate kingdom. Not to mention there is a huge gaping hole in the wall so what really can they do? It just doesn't make any sense like most of this season. I'm relieved the show is over so I can move on with my life but I should be sad. I invested 10 years of my life into the show, read all five books (and I had to slog through books four and five), read and participated in discussions online, and then to have them end like this (I'm taking about the entire season) was just so disappointing. I feel sorry for all the Star Wars fans out there because D&D (the showrunners) are slated to write the next big Star Wars trilogy. Instead of petitioning HBO to reshoot season 8 people should petition Disney to drop them from Star Wars and find more competent writers. I'm convinced that nearly every good writing decision they made on the series came from GRRM, despite books 4 and 5 being kind of a mess.

I thought it was the worst season finale I have ever watched and this has been the worst final season. I say that as someone who watched Battlestar Galactica, Lost, and How I Met Your Mother. I just felt like it failed in every respect. The mythology was handled terribly, the characters and their arcs were handled poorly, the pacing was terrible, the dialogue was uninspiring. Everything about it was bad. At least with Lost, though the answers to the mystery and the mythology were just horrible, the characters and their arcs were beautifully written. That’s why I was still invested in the finale, because I still cared about the characters. With GOT I just stopped caring. Tyrion and Arya were my favorite characters but I would have been fine if Dany had roasted them both. Tyrion in no way deserved to be hand of the king. Talk about failing upwards. Seasons one through four Tyrion was intelligent and totally would have deserved it but he’s been nothing short of a disaster since he left for Essos. This just illustrates the larger problem with the show since they ran out of book material which is that choices and actions stopped having consequences the way they did in the early seasons. Ned being beheaded, Robb being killed during the Red Wedding, those were horribly tragic events but they were earned (not deserved but earned). Ned’s choices led him to that end as did Robb’s choices. Tyrion and Jon have repeatedly failed upwards until the end in Jon’s case. Jon’s parentage not meaning anything was a huge misstep. The story would have been exactly the same had he really been Ned Stark’s bastard. What was th point of all those pregnancy anvils they dropped for Dany last season? They served no purpose. It’s almost like it was a dropped storyline and the fact that they were dropping plot points like that between seasons 7 and 8 shows in part why this season was a mess. We know they did this for at least some plot points because Cersei was supposed to have a miscarriage at the end of season 7 according to the released scripts. Brienne writing Jaime’s Kingsguard page was pathetic after what he did to her and after all his character development was flushed down the toilet so they could give their favorite character, Cersei, the best sendoff she could hope for. You can tell GRRM told them Jaime and Cersei will die together and Brienne will finish Jaime’s Kingsguard page so they included those plot points but he also clearly told them Jaime is the valonqar (younger brother from the book prophecy) and will kill her in the end, and they dropped that destroying his character and arc and making Brienne’s actions just pathetic. Jon’s character was so useless. He’s one of my favorite book characters but on the show he is stupid and ineffectual. I’m glad they had him and Ghost have a moment but they couldn’t have spent a little more on CGI to have him go off with Jon when he joins (or escorts home, it wasn’t clear) the wildlings. The only part of the finale that moved me besides Jon and Ghost was Drogon finding Dany’s body. That was a knife to the heart right there. The CGI dragon out acted every single person in the finale. Bran being endgame king was something that could have made sense had the setup been there. The writers knew he was going to be the endgame king since season 4 at least and yet they dropped him completely from season 5 and they did no character development for him. He has not only been completely uninteresting since he lost everything that made him human, but he was also totally useless the entire previous two seasons. And don’t get me started on the North gaining their independence. D&D love Sansa and part of me thinks this was their way of showing love for one of their favorites because the North being independent makes no sense. Why would the North even care if a Stark is on the throne? And if they were granted independence there’s no way Dorne and the Iron Islands wouldn’t also demand their independence as well. In fact, the Iron Islands were already granted independence by Dany so they should have been insisting on it from the beginning. Quite honestly, I would have been happier if the last scene had been of a bed in Winterfell and we see Bran awaken from being pushed out the window and it turning out it was all a dream, and I hate those endings. It would have been better than what we actually got though.

They’ve supposedly known this is where Dany is going since at least season 4 and maybe even season 1. Weiss and Benioff just aren’t good writers. I could see Dany slowly sinking into the depths of madness or I could see her become very Machiavellian and burn the Red Keep, killing Cersei but also all the innocent people there, but burning the entire city, after the surrender, was not true to her character. Not being able to handle being disliked when she was strongly disliked in Mereen for a long time is also unbelievable. No one’s actions this season have made any sense.