YMMV / Game of Thrones S1E1: "Winter Is Coming"

• Alternate Character Interpretation: Sansa is about the only character Cersei is nice to when she arrives at Winterfell. Is Cersei just being passive aggressive, performing a Sherlock Scan on the girl who's about to be betrothed to her son? Or is she making a genuine attempt at friendship, figuring that she may as well attempt to have a positive relationship with her eventual daughter-in-law? It is possible she feels that Sansa reminds her of herself at that age, prompting a softer side.
• Broken Base: Big time with changing Daenerys's wedding night with Drogo from a "consensual" love scene, to him raping her while she cries. Many fans think this was much more realistic, and there is the fact that even fans of the books argue that it was not consensual, considering that Daenerys is a 13-year-old girl forced by her brother to marry Drogo. Emilia Clarke defended the change, saying that it was important for the audience to feel sympathy with her—and that it was better for her Character Development in the long run. Others find it cheap and exploitative—using rape for shock value, and it doesn't help the fact that the rape is never brought up until Season 7.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The whole episode is that for most fans, when you remember that this is the first and only time that all members of the Stark family are together and happy before everything that will happen to them throughout the series.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Catelyn making Bran promise "no climbing" brings to mind Littlefinger's famous "chaos is a ladder" speech in an episode appropriately titled "The Climb."
  • Given how infamous the show would become in later seasons for Traveling at the Speed of Plot, the repeated emphasis that the journey from King's Landing to Winterfell took a whole month becomes this.
  • Rickon is the only Stark child who doesn't get spoken to by Robert, just a casual ruffle of the hair. Becomes quite prophetic of how he'd become Out of Focus in the series.
  • Robert briefly struggles to remember Arya's name, because a girl is no one/has no name.
• Narm: Arya mentioning Jaime as Cersei's brother when Robert arrives at Winterfell, only for Sansa to shut her up. It is painfully obvious that it is an expositive dialogue added in post-production.