User blog comment:The Dragon Demands/Season 5 trailer officially released/@comment-5014364-20150203004208

0:00 - 0:09 - Tyrion's murder of Tywin has left Cersei as the new head of House Lannister.

As regent for the pliable boy-king Tommen, Cersei is now Ruling Queen in all but name.

0:10 - Sansa Stark is now Littlefinger's protege; Sansa's storyline has mostly caught up with the current novels already, this is new.

0:16 - [PAUSE on this image] - New characters: the "Sand Snakes", Oberyn Martell's daughters. Here we see (left to right) Nymeria, Obara, and Tyene.

0:22 - [PAUSE on this image, of blonde girl cutting finger] -- Season 5 will for the first time include flashback scenes from the novels - which the TV series has avoided up until now.

Here we see Young Cersei as a teenager, on a day that has haunted her ever since.

0:24 - 0:27 [PAUSE] Margaery is now Tommen's Queen to secure the Lannister-Tyrell alliance.

[SECOND WORD BUBBLE] The Iron Throne was already bankrupt under Robert, and Joffrey's wars bankrupted the Lannisters. The Lannisters are now dependent on the Tyrells to help with the debt crisis - so the Tyrells aren't pretending to be nice to them anymore.

0:28 through 0:38 - [THESE 4 WORD BUBBLES WILL OVERLAP/BE ON SCREEN AT SAME TIME] Varys and Tyrion have fled to the Free City of Pentos. Notice that they are in Illyrio's mansion from back in Season 1.

Recall that back in S1 "The Wolf and the Lion", we saw Varys conspiring with Illyrio, and that Varys is a secret Targaryen loyalist.

By rights, Tyrion should succeed his father as head of House Lannister, not Cersei. He pointed this out in the Season 3 premiere: Jaime can't inherit as a Kingsguard, and Cersei ranks behind him as a daughter.

The crime of kinslaying against his own father, however, has forced Tyrion to flee from Cersei's wrath.

0:48 - 0:53 - We don't know if Tyrion will still find out what happened to Tysha - the main reason he killed his father in the novels, omitted from the TV version.

0:53 - [PAUSE on this image of the opened box] Oberyn's daughters want to avenge his death by provoking a war with the Lannisters. To threaten Cersei, they mail her a dead viper with her daughter Myrcella's lion pendant necklace jammed in its mouth.

This spurs her to send Jaime to Dorne to check in on their daughter (Jaime didn't go to Dorne in the novels, this is a condensation).

0:56 - Melisandre burns an offering to the Lord of Light at Castle Black.

[SEPARATE BUBBLE] The Night's Watch needs to have an election for a new Lord Commander

1:00 - [PAUSE] Jon Snow has a lot to do in Season 5 - unlike Sansa, his storyline is actually relatively behind the others.

Several Jon subplots are also being expanded, such as political maneuvering with a few wildling groups that still refuse to surrender.

1:03 - [PAUSE on this image] Dorne is inspired by medieval Islamic Spain. With the wild success of past seasons, for Season 5 HBO spent the money to actually film Dorne scenes in Spain's preserved medieval Islamic palaces, which are World Heritage sites.

1:09 - [PAUSE] Daenerys's attempts to invade and reshape Meereen's society have only sparked off a massive sectarian conflict.

[SEPARATE BUBBLE] The "Kill the Masters" graffiti in English, mentioned in the last Fannotation, appears yet again. Linguist David Peterson told GoTWiki that even he didn't know why Ghiscari slaves would be writing in the Common Tongue of Westeros.

1:13 - 1:14 - The man speaking is the High Sparrow, leader of "the Sparrows" - a popular disgust religious movement which spreads among the commoners grievously harmed by the war and debt crisis.

[SEPARATE BUBBLE] The nobility of Westeros fought over power while the commoners starved to death; now the Sparrows are ransacking brothels and spilling the nobles' expensives wines into the streets.

1:15 - 1:21 - Arya in Braavos at the House of Black and White, headquarters of the assassins' guild known as the "Faceless Men".

1:24 - 1:32 -- Varys and Tyrion actually go in different directions at this point in the novels, and it appears that the entire "Young Griff" subplot will be omitted.

1:34 - Daenerys's dragons are getting big enough to ride, but she cannot control them yet.

1:36 - [PAUSE on this image] The Missandei/Grey Worm subplot is invented for the TV series, because they're not POV chapter narrators. The TV series is showing them having lives outside of Daenerys.

1:37 - 1:43 - Season 5 will condense the subplots from books 4 and 5 into one TV season, though the two novels occur simultaneously, following different sets of characters.

1:44 - Controversially, this scene was filmed in an actively used bullfighting ring in Osuna, Spain.

1:46 onwards - Daenerys has the Harpy statues on Meereen's pyramids pulled down. Harpies are the symbol of the old regime of the slave-masters.

1:53 - Apart from Young Griff, Arianne Martell may have been cut entirely from the TV continuity, and we don't know if the Greyjoy uncles will appear either. There is still some chance they were just pushed back for Season 6 due to time constraints.

No word on "LS" though that may be the season finale of Brienne's storyline.

R+L=J?