If the King of the US tells them to.
I think this episode has really opened a few doors as far as signalling the final ending. The children of the forest made the white walkers, but apparently they have lost control of them. My take on that is that the white walkers are not good or evil, they are necessary. A force of nature that exists to right a balance.
Bran is fleeing south marked by the white walker, he’s not the saviour, he’s the event that allows the white walkers to bring down the wall and threaten the south. Now lets take the lord of light and the priestesses view that they will “purify the sinners” with fire, eg with dragon fire and lets think about Dany’s background as the ancestor of the mad king. The lord of light likes sacrificing people to fire, we already know that from the fires on the beach with Stannis and from his sacrificing his own daughter to the lord of light, which causes the snows to melt. It’s pretty apparent from this that the “lord of light” is not by any means a “good” god, he’s greedy for fire sacrifice, even for a father to sacrifice his own daughter. So we have good reason to suspect the lord of light is “evil” and the children of the forest are “good” but they created the white walkers, originally for a “good” purpose.
Take all that together, means the whole series is a “Breaking Bad” for Dany. She will become the prime villain while the white walkers will be a necessary force that rights an ancient wrong.
PS, also Dany will kill Tyrion. Thats the event that will transform her from a sympathetic character to one that the audience loves to hate.
Thank you, King Joffrey (who had just as little idea of what the actual powers of a king are.)
No, of course they won’t send their goods off for nothing in return. They would rise in rebellion before that. We’ve already seen how the Iron Throne can’t pay its debts and is in big trouble because of it. King’s Landing only has food because the Tyrells are sending it to them on credit.
I see the White Walkers more as a bio-weapon that got out control. They’re no more a “force of nature that exists to right a balance” than the zombies from Resident Evil, or the mutagen from Prometheus, or the nuclear stockpile from reality.
I like this idea exactly as much as I hate this idea. I hope you’re wrong, but that would certainly be a new water mark for GoT gut punches.
I don’t know that that’s how it’s all gonna play out, but I definitely would watch it.
Googling for that interview, I’m dubious about producers refusing to let her wear a merkin. Pretty sure what she’s saying is that she asked to wear a monster bush merkin, ala Last Tango In Paris, because she’s a wildling. Producers refused, having her wear a more trimmed 'n groomed merkin.
I concede it’s hard to parse her meaning perfectly, though.
You’re Number One! You’re Number One! You’re Number One!
I agree with that and I commend the writers for sticking to it. Its probably very tempting to attempt to humanize them, show them enjoying a cup of tea, or a zombie gladiator match or some such. Having them only kill, create tools for killing, and create more of themselves definitely makes them more menacing. I suspect they are more like the autonomous, self replicating military robots that will be the end of us all than we are able to appreciate right now.
However things turn out, surely we can all agree the ongoing misery that is the Iron Islands storyline is pointless, stupid, and boring?
Honestly, why this is not completely removed from the story I cannot begin to imagine. There is nothing about it you need anymore; Theon Greyjoy could have been killed at any one of a dozen points now, the Iron Islands forgotten, and the story in general would clip along at a much nicer pace.
I’ll grant it’s a fantasy story but the continued absurdity of what appears to be never more than eighty people at a time on a few islands you can get across with maybe four good shots of your 5-wood constituting a “kingdom” was always bad. What was worse still was when Newguy Greyjoy shows up and somehow claims the throne by announcing he’ll build a thousand ships, because, I guess, he is the first person in the history of this maritime power to think it might be cool to have a lot of ships. He presents the imbecilic idea of selling thier services to Danaerys Targaryen, a promise roughly equivalent to someone being elected Prime Minister of the United Kingdom by promising to quadruple the size of the Royal Navy and then use it to help out the strongman who just took control of Bangladesh to invade and conquer Europe. And then, after being sort of “elected” King - this was my favourite part - he and all his friends, of whom there appear to be maybe forty, set out to murder Theon and his sister, who run away with all the ships - a number of ships that appeared to be in the dozens, meaning Theon’s sister had, what, 400 followers at least? 600? More? Why did all those people run away from Newguy Greyjoy and his 40 people? Didn’t someone look back and say “Hey, hey, wait a minute here… there’s hundreds of us and forty or fifty of them. Should we go back and hold a recount? Or maybe just hang them?” Of course, meanwhile, Newguy Greyjoy orders them to cut down every tree on islands that appear to have no trees at all and waste all their other time making ropes and sails despite the fact that the islands don’t seem to have a functioning economy and it’s hard to tell how they stay alive, and incidentally they just lost a war rather convincingly, but hey, if at first - er, second, I guess - you don’t succeed, try try again, right? They must be pretty short of soldiers and supplies but no one mentions that. Do we have to look at these miserable, fishy-smelling, damp, black-clad idiots again? Why?
And if they do someone sail all their goddamn ships halfway around the known world to Mereen, why would Danaerys Targaryen care? Nice boats you have there, but see, I just used my giant army to take back these other cites and now I have thier boats. Or I’ll build my own damn boats, I rule an entire region of Essos. Or buy them; there appear to be many ships in that area of the world. Greyjoy who? Who are you again and why do you smell like fish and shit? Here, let my dragon eat you. Munch munch.
They seem to have some level of intelligence and awareness of human emotions. The night king sure seemed to be taunting Jon Snow when he raised all the wights at Hardhome. And they presumably have sufficient technology/organization to manufacture their clothes and weapons.
Dany’s ships were burned during the season premier.
Maybe a plot device to get Yara and her followers not only into action, but also with no hope of returning to the shitty Iron Islands. They evidently make it to Essos, the previews for next week show
Some girl on girl action between Yara and a girl adorned with a teardrop tattoo
And I don’t think the White Walker vs The Wall battle will be Ep. 9 this season (mentioned upthread), there’s still a tease of a Bolton vs Wildling battle in the preseason trailers.
The ships in Mereen. They aren’t the only ones in Essos. With a Dothraki horde behind her she can probably take any city she wants, along with its ships.
As someone else pointed out in a previous thread, the Iron Bank of Braavos wants to get back the money it lent to the Iron Throne. If Dany agrees to pay them back, they would be happy to rent her a fleet on credit.
Although maybe she would prefer to deal with pirates rather than bankers.
Everybody has story-lines they hate and wish would disappear. Not me. I love them all.
No, wait. I’m a liar. Sam and Gilly should run into highwaymen on the way to whatever boring place they are headed, killed and the baby taken back up north to be turned into a Night Walker.
Except wasn’t it Meera yelling that?
The weapons look like magical shards of ice, and the clothes might have been found on corpses. I see no indication of manufacturing.
Yes, all of that. Like I said upthread, where are they supposed to be getting wood for 1,000 ships? And you point out something I immediately latched onto but I’m not sure it made it into my previous post…all those ships Yara & Theon went off with; how many people would it take to crew all of those? A LOT. Certainly more than the medium-ish-sized posse that seemed to be with Euron, so what’s up with that? Do the crews not get a vote, and so they just (reasonably) followed orders from a couple of Greyjoys to take off? It seemed like Yara and Theon and a medium-ish-sized posse ran to rowboats at shore, right? So they probably rowed out to crewed boats at anchor and took off, and the crews just didn’t know/didn’t care who won the vote.
It would be nice if they could have used a few bucks in the CGI budget to, at least once in a while, make it look like all of Pyke and the Iron Islands consists of more than a couple of rocks with about 50 people on them. Or at least make it clear(er) that most of the population basically lives at sea fishing, raiding, pirating. But the whole Kingsmoot scene did turn out pretty stupid…BOTH candidates pretty much just said “we’ll build a bunch of ships.” I didn’t think proposing an alliance with Daenarys was the stupidest thing, though…surely she can always use more ships and fighters. The marriage bit, though :dubious: As someone mentioned it upthread, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Yara and Theon end up stealing that idea. What else are they going to do? All the previous times they tried to take over land by themselves, they couldn’t do it. They need to team up with somebody.
I’ve heard one analysis that says the White Walkers are an analogy for climate change. It definitely fits better than I wish it did. Plenty of people think they’re a myth, and most world leaders are too busy screwing around trying to feather their own nests to do anything about them. Hell, at this point, winter itself also fits that description. Everyone’s so tied up in various power struggles that they’re not even preparing for the widely believed major climate event that they know is coming.
Agreed. They probably create the ice weapons using some kind of magic, and everything else they just take from the people they kill. Their ice weapons can shatter conventional swords, so they’re definitely magical.
Where would they do that? The Westeros Times? Or perhaps go the more academic route with the Westerosi Journal of Science and Medicine? They have very inefficient communication media in this world, and the closest thing to a center of learning and knowledge that we know of has to be the Maester’s citadel in Oldtown. So maybe Jorah will go there. Maybe he’ll meet Sam and Ghilly. Maybe Sam will find the cure!
There kind of is, in that we haven’t seen anything supernatural happening with any followers of the Old Gods or The Seven. The only religious practitioners that clearly have mystical powers are the followers of R’hllor, and to a lesser extent the Faceless Men (their main thing seems to be the face trick; albeit still a cool trick). But R’hllor’s followers have demonstrated unambiguous supernatural powers that nobody else has.
Of course, that doesn’t mean their faith is necessarily “right” or that the god they believe in exists as they perceive it. But all we know is that they’re on to something, while we haven’t seen any evidence that the other religions are.
Thank you - it bugs me when people do this. Not to get too off track but it bugs me even in TWD threads (and I get it, it’s a “zombie” show, but when the show is specific about not using the term it strikes me as disrespectful to the source material). But here, they clearly are not zombies so it’s an inappropriate term anyway.