User blog:The Dragon Demands/15 minute "Ice & Fire: A Foreshadowing" preview airs on HBO

http://winteriscoming.net/2014/02/ice-and-fire-a-foreshadowing-airs-on-hbo/

The 15 minute "Ice and Fire: A Foreshadowing" preview for Season 4 was just posted.

Interesting points:


 * Forging two swords at the beginning.
 * During the fast opening montage, there's a shot of Ramsay Snow hunting...with an apparently happy girl running behind him. That will turn dark.
 * IMPORTANT: There's blink-or-you'll miss shot of riders holding banners...are these in Dorne or Meereen?  I hope Dorne.  New Heraldry always good.
 * The trailer clearly establishes that Jaime will be training with Bronn now. In the books, when Jaime gets back home he starts trying to retrain himself to use a sword left-handed, and he does it with Ilyn Payne (who, having had his tongue cut out, can't tell anyone how badly Jaime is doing).  This bit of shuffling from Payne to Bronn is apparently due to the actor who plays Payne having terminal cancer.
 * Jon Snow: "It's as if I went to sleep for a year, and when I woke up, the world's fallen apart."
 * Ah, drunken vindictive Cersei. Haven't seen this since "Blackwater".  "Oh, our poor little brother." -- Very much, "the truth is in the wine", and in the books when Cersei gets tispy all of the pretenses fall away and she bluntly admits how shockingly self-centered and flippant she truly is.  She holds everyone in scorn, and her enemies...her victims, in contempt for being weaker than she is.  Lena Headey is great - brought the flippant snarkiness that the role needed.
 * The "fan questions" were generic but not, as I feared, boring and predictable stuff tacked on at the end - they were really to motivate fun answers out of the actors. Fair enough.
 * Change from the books: in the books, part of the marriage-alliance with Dorne was that Myrcella gets sent there and in exchange, Doran Martell gets a seat on the Small Council - but instead, his younger and hot-blooded brother Oberyn Martell shows up.  Apparently this subplot has been simplified (many fans may have regrettably forgotten Myrcella), and they're simply saying that Oberyn came to King's Landing as part of the invitation to all of the high lords of Westeros to come to the royal wedding.  Minor change, actually fits pretty well (Oberyn would have reason to come to a royal wedding - his older brother is in declining health and can't travel well).
 * Joffrey to Jaime:
 * "I broke Stannis on the Blackwater, but you weren't there to help, uncle."
 * "My apologies, your Grace, I was rather busy."
 * "Busy getting captured."
 * Joffrey's Purple Reign -- haha, fun reference
 * Joffrey: "A royal wedding is history.  Time has come for us to contemplate our history."
 * Margaery Tyrell's post in this shot is full-on Anne Boleyn mode. Perfect.
 * Some have criticized that Margaery Tyrell is played too differently from the books, and trying to imitate Dormer's previous role as Anne Boleyn. I myself always thought of book-Margaery as like Anne Boleyn, so I see no problem.
 * Daenerys: "How can I rule Seven Kingdoms if I can't control a single city."
 * Emilia Clarke's very quotable description of Daenerys's new storyline, beginning at 6:10.
 * New set: Castle Black library.
 * Gwendoline Christie states that this season, Brienne bites a man's ear off and spits it in his face. This happened in the books, and I was worried that they might skip it.
 * Christie is also wearing a tunic with a nice House Tarth sigil on it, need a screencap.
 * I love the look on Emilia Clarke's face when they ask her what her most badass line is, she looks bemused and it's this "of course" matter-of-fact look, and she just says "Dracarys".
 * Arya quote this season about "Nothing isn't better or worse, it's just nothing."
 * At 12:30, shots of a frightened girl running through a culvert in a castle wall attempting to flee. Which leads to...
 * At 13:06...Ramsay Snow walks into Theon's dungeon, wild-eyed, shirtless and covered in blood.
 * Dear God, they're actually going to show how much Ramsay enjoys the Ultimate Game...and, you know, rape. Lots of rape.  And flaying, a lot of that too.
 * Great shot of Meereen at 13:05.
 * Oh cool, Jaime rewards Brienne with a new suit of custom-fitted armor. A point the costumers made is that armor is expensive, rarely custom made even for most nobles, and quite simply was never meant for women to wear (proportionately wider hips, etc.) So Brienne's armor in Seasons 2 and 3 is deliberately mismatching, to suggest that she mixed and matched pieces from different sets to get as adequate a fit as she could (i.e. getting hips parts from a size bigger).  So it's actually quite a gift to have one customed to a woman's figure.
 * OMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMG, they close with a shot of the new dragon design for Season 4! They're the size of a horse now.  They only got that big around the beginning of book 4, but they split book 3 across two seasons (though this does lead to the question:  if the dragons are this big now, why not just use them to fly over Meereen's walls and attack?  Well, they're not invincible yet).  The production team said they wanted them to start off relatively cute, soft and rounded, but that the older they get their horns become more pronounces.  Drogon has four huge ones now (not drastically different, you can see how the design is slowly growing into place).  Also, remember that "dragons are mostly wing, neck, and tail" -- in order to provide some rationale for how they can fly without violating the laws of physics due to weight.  But the body core is the size of a horse.  --The Dragon Demands (talk) 03:10, February 10, 2014 (UTC)