Unknown, but my assumption would be that they’d be paying lip service to the Boltons for now, while being ready to turn on them if/when the north rises again.
Makes a difference from the usual ‘The south will rise again’ doesn’t it?
http://www.theonion.com/articles/south-postpones-rising-again-for-yet-another-year,377/
The old gods willing.
Who else needs killin’?
I’d have to watch it again to be sure, but I think he lost his dagger in the fight with Brienne.
I wonder if we’re missing an obvious “what happens next”…Arya leaves…a little bit later Pod and Brienne find him. Brienne puts him down after trying to get a bit more information out of him.
Something that is being ignored in all this talk of Arya becoming a cold blooded killer (or whatever) is that she continues to show empathy and caring for the innocent. She’s happy to stick her sword through someone who helped kill her brother or Lommy, and clearly the Hound has committed any number of horrible crimes, but she on multiple occasions prevented, or attempted to prevent, the Hound from hurting innocent civilians.
That’s why I think she’s still a sympathetic character. (She’s unquestionably still an ENTERTAINING character, but of course that’s not necessarily the same thing.)
Just to keep this in perspective, I’m not saying she’s unsympathetic or expressing any kind of dislike of the character. She’s still one of my favorites on the show, but I’m still commenting on the path she is on and how her experiences have changed her.
I’m late to the party, as usual!
Is anyone else wondering if Daenerys might just sort of “settle”? She seems less and less concerned with Westeros and more and more consumed by more local affairs. She’s learning there’s more to ruling than conquest, and that doing the right thing is rarely easy. She used to imagine a black and white war where bad people would die and good people would get what they deserve, followed by a just rule that everyone would thank her for. Maybe she’ll end up staying to rule over what she has already taken, maybe expanding a little, but giving up on the whole Queen of the Seven Kingdoms idea. Maybe she only exists, as a character, to supply dragons.
I’m not too bothered by Arya. The harder and colder she gets, the less likable she becomes for me. But we will probably see Arya, Tyrion, Varys and Daenerys all on the same continent. I wonder what they could get up to together. Tyrion and Varys, and Arya and Daenerys could both make good teams.
Ever since The Hound told Arya the story of how he got his burns, I’ve been half expecting, half hoping, that he would get to kill The Mountain. We left the previous episode with good reason to suspect The Mountain is dying. Turns out he’s not. Now we have good reason to suspect The Hound is. Will it turn out he’s not, too? He didn’t die on screen, and even for GoT it would be weird if we’re expected to just assume he has died of his injuries. The likely scenarios (if it were real) seem to be that he would die alone, or more likely, be found by Brienne and Podrick and killed mercifully (and yeah, it’s pretty clear that would be mercy). But having a dying character show up for five minutes at the start of a new season, just to be finished off, would be a little strange, too. I don’t see how he could survive, but I’m certainly not writing him off yet.
We don’t know much about the skeletons, do we? I had assumed the zombies at least needed some kind of flesh to hold them together, but now we see full-on skeletons walking about. Are they the same thing? I got the impression they were sort of specific to that little place around the Tree of Magicality; perhaps they’re the same thing but just turned up to 11 in that area for whatever reason (concentration of magic, or whatever), making walking skeletons possible where sinew would otherwise be required.
As for the anti-magic views in this thread, I’ve assumed for a while that the story is, at least partly, about the resurgence of supernatural stuff in Westeros. We start in a world where dragons have been gone for a long time, White Walkers for even longer. The Targaryans had become weak and obviously not part dragon, literally or figuratively. The House of the Blue Lips was weak and unimpressive until recently.
Now we suddenly have dragons and part dragons and White Walkers. Bran became magic, and other magic kids are showing up. The House of the Blue lips got powerful; they seemed to give the dragons the credit, but “correlation does not imply causation”; both events may have a common cause. Melisandre is introducing Stannis, a man disinclined to believe bullshit, to the importance of magic. In the first episode, when the Starks found the dire wolf pups, someone mentioned that you didn’t normally see them that far south. The wolves we see are very intelligent - is there a supernatural element to them, too? I thought it was significant, even if the idea was simply that it was meant to happen according to some silly fate which required the Starks to have wolves. Even giants are unexpected by those from south of The Wall.
So I think this sort of thing is to be expected, but obviously few viewers are interested in seeing ordinary people become completely impotent compared to magic.
Since this is about a non-existent things, I’ll use a spoiler box. But it’s not really a spoiler - I’ve only seen the show and these are all details from previous episodes:
Besides the dragons, we already have the Lord of Light whose followers seem to enjoy burning people, getting visions in fire and wielding flaming swords. We also know that burning corpses stops them becoming zombies, and Wildfire played an important role. I was wondering if it would show up again at The Wall, to be thrown at White Walkers. Fire is a convenient weapon - especially against ice monsters, presumably - so it may be that the “Fire” is more general than the “Ice”. Or perhaps only one is the real “Fire” and the rest are red herrings.
Don’t know if someone else has already answered this, but yes, they appeared to be already wights when they were picked up. Sam noted that they didn’t smell decayed even though they’d been out for a while. Presumably they stop decaying when they become wights, and their general condition depends on how decayed they were before they became wights.
Can we not use spoiler boxes for things that aren’t spoilers?
I thought I explained it well enough.
ETA: Well it was a little cryptic, I suppose. The point was that, if we’re being strict about the books not existing rule, speculation about the meaning of the title shouldn’t be happening here. But we do see that title in the actual episodes. I thought I’d err on the side of caution.
God, these are just the best.
“Arya Stark has left the group Westeros Is The Besteros.”
To what are you referring? I haven’t read the books. Are you claiming that I accidentally came up with something that’s actually in the books?
Even as a book reader i have no idea what that was about.
I was just thinking that she needs allies. As the “last” Targareyan, she doesn’t have the hoardes of uncles, cousins and nephews the other big families have that she can install as lords in each place she conquers. So should she marry into a big family of good politicians? Who might fit the bill here - the Tyrells? She’s got plenty of soldiers, Unsullied and freed slaves alike, but now that Jorah’s gone, precious few advisors, too.
Well, that makes me feel a bit better; it was really confusing. Perhaps it was just free-floating anguish and general misery about this having been the end of the season, that manifested in a random ALLCAPS accusation.
*WORLD YOU WILL PAY FOR MY HAVING TO WAIT!!!1!!!-*style of thing, maybe. No doubt many are feeling rather bereft.
I think it was the repeated references to the series as “Song” (i.e. A Song of Ice and Fire - the books) and talk of George R R Martin, rather than the show itself and its writers.
I don’t think the post did any harm, but perhaps SeaDragonTattoo, understandably, avoided reading too much of the post in case it did contain spoilers. It is easy to post accidental spoilers by leaving more clues than you realize, and I suppose that’s why the rule doesn’t say “do not post spoilers” but tells you to pretend the books do not exist at all.
Look at what was quoted:
(my bold)
It’s not a huge deal, but you did reference the books a few times.
So far as I am concerned, he’s the creator of the TV show as well. So I read it in that context