# Game of Thrones 6.09 "Battle of the Bastards" 6/19/16 \[Show discussion\] **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [June 19, 2016, 5:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/game-of-thrones-6-09-battle-of-the-bastards-6-19-16-show-discussion/757789 "2016-06-19T17:59:13Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 15\ **Page:** 27
**Author:** ![Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/7cd45c/32.png) [@Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Elendil_s_Heir)\ **Post date:** [June 26, 2016, 4:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/game-of-thrones-6-09-battle-of-the-bastards-6-19-16-show-discussion/757789/521 "2016-06-26T16:48:25Z")
> [@Jackknifed\_Juggernaut](#): > > Yes, I guess because it’s fiction we have to take her word for it. In real life, one might question the complete accuracy of her recollections. Cersei, lie? Perish the thought! ---
**Author:** ![SenorBeef](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/senorbeef/32/2220_2.png) [@SenorBeef](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SenorBeef)\ **Post date:** [June 26, 2016, 4:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/game-of-thrones-6-09-battle-of-the-bastards-6-19-16-show-discussion/757789/522 "2016-06-26T16:54:03Z")
> [@Peremensoe](#): > > Most people never watch it with captions. You are contending that they are all missing an integral part of the work? For fucks sake, what lengths are we going to go to in order to try to make a pointless argument that we know is wrong? We know how the names are spelled. I can’t believe people are making a fucking battleground of “well technically maybe we don’t know how they’re spelled if you ignore lots of information! I CAN SPELL HOW I WANT!” This is way worse than the fucking potatoes. ---
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [June 26, 2016, 5:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/game-of-thrones-6-09-battle-of-the-bastards-6-19-16-show-discussion/757789/523 "2016-06-26T17:28:01Z")
> [@SenorBeef](#): > > The most familiar way the ravens would work is like homing pigeons, which would mean that traders or someone else running the routes between cities would bring one or more ravens to other cities or castles, who would only know how to get to their home castle. So you take 10 ravens whose home is King’s Landing and send in the back of a trader’s cart to Winterfell. Now Winterfell can send 10 messages to King’s Landing when the ravens fly home. Some other trader (or the same guy on a return route) would bring 10 Ravens from Winterfell to King’s Landing, and now they can send return messages. Once those ravens reached home, someone would have to physically transport them to another city. > > But we’ve seen nothing that suggests this is how it works, nor have we been told that they’re trained to fly between two castles or really anything about how they work. That’s just how it would work if medieval Earth were to set up a bird communication network. Right. A system analogous to homing pigeons would be enormously complex and cumbersome. Homing pigeons only work in one direction: they will return to their home loft once removed from it, but you can’t send them anywhere else. For the ravens to work like that you would have to be constantly shuttling cages of them back and forth from Dorne to the Wall, and getting a raven to the right place would take weeks or months. Once you’ve sent your ravens that home to Kings Landing out, you’ll be out of touch until they (or others) can be shipped back. > [@](#): > > Aside: homing pigeons uses a variety of senses to be able to do this bizarre trick of theirs, but the primary one they actually use is smell. When the wind comes from a different direction, bringing in the scents from that way, they learn what different ways smell like - so they build a smell map in their head, which is the main tool they use to find their way home. It remains controversial what senses they use. Smell of course only works within a fairly short distance from the loft. Birds in general are capable of returning to specific localities over many thousands of miles. They may use landmarks, navigation by the sun or stars, or magnetism as well. > [@wintertime](#): > > It makes sense for a tv show with limited resources that ravens can find more than one location; as long as they are not shown studying maps, I’m fine with it. > > Strike that, I’d love to see that. Some animals on the show, like direwolves, appear to have psychic abilities that their real world analogues lack. Real ravens are extremely smart - some studies compare them to primates - so you wouldn’t have to ramp up their abilities too much to be able to say to one, “Blackie, fly to Kings Landing,” and have the bird know where to go. ---
**Author:** ![SenorBeef](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/senorbeef/32/2220_2.png) [@SenorBeef](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SenorBeef)\ **Post date:** [June 26, 2016, 5:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/game-of-thrones-6-09-battle-of-the-bastards-6-19-16-show-discussion/757789/524 "2016-06-26T17:40:08Z")
There are already trading caravans, so it’s possible you’d carry dozens or hundreds of ravens at a time bound for various cities, and they’d spread city to city, castle to castle, along a big network. So you’d need to restock as many messages as you’d be sending per the restocking time from one place to another. It’d be more common to send shorter distance ravens - Lannisport probably sends more ravens to Casterly Rock than The Wall does to Sunspear. Of course if this were how it was done, sending a raven would probably done with significantly more care - every bit of parchment would be used up by the various messages that accumulated, you’d only send one for very important information, etc. How long have humans known about the ability of carrier pigeons? Have we ever used them like that? As far as the smell things go - I’ve read little about the subject but what I’ve read suggested that we’ve tried handicapping them in various ways - unfamiliar areas with no landmarks, small magnets on their body to disrupt their magnetic senses, using them on overcast days, etc. and it was only when we took away their smell that they were completely lost. ---
**Author:** ![Peremensoe](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ce7236/32.png) [@Peremensoe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Peremensoe)\ **Post date:** [June 26, 2016, 5:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/game-of-thrones-6-09-battle-of-the-bastards-6-19-16-show-discussion/757789/525 "2016-06-26T17:49:59Z")
> [@SenorBeef](#): > > For fucks sake, what lengths are we going to go to in order to try to make a pointless argument that we know is wrong? We know how the names are spelled. I’m not making any argument at all about spelling the names. (I use the generally-accepted spellings, but I don’t care if anyone hasn’t picked all those up.) My only slight interest there is in the question of what is the text, the actual substance of a work, versus what is external and therefore inessential to a viewer’s interpretation. ---
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [June 26, 2016, 6:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/game-of-thrones-6-09-battle-of-the-bastards-6-19-16-show-discussion/757789/526 "2016-06-26T18:00:07Z")
> [@SenorBeef](#): > > How long have humans known about the ability of carrier pigeons? Have we ever used them like that? Homing pigeons were known in ancient Greece. They were used as a message-sending system in the Middle East by the 1100s AD and later in Europe. They would be appropriate medieval technology. > [@](#): > > As far as the smell things go - I’ve read little about the subject but what I’ve read suggested that we’ve tried handicapping them in various ways - unfamiliar areas with no landmarks, small magnets on their body to disrupt their magnetic senses, using them on overcast days, etc. and it was only when we took away their smell that they were completely lost. One of the problems in identifying the methods birds use for navigation is that they are multiply redundant. You block one sense, and they find their way home anyway. As I said, the subject is controversial. Some researchers advocate smell, but as far as I know magnetism is more favored. In any case, smell couldn’t work over thousands of miles or when the wind is in the wrong direction. ---
**Author:** ![MaxTheVool](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/9fc29f/32.png) [@MaxTheVool](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MaxTheVool)\ **Post date:** [June 26, 2016, 6:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/game-of-thrones-6-09-battle-of-the-bastards-6-19-16-show-discussion/757789/527 "2016-06-26T18:06:59Z")
> [@Peremensoe](#): > > I’m not making any argument at all about spelling the names. (I use the generally-accepted spellings, but I don’t care if anyone hasn’t picked all those up.) > > My only slight interest there is in the question of what is the text, the actual substance of a work, versus what is external and therefore inessential to a viewer’s interpretation. I think that spellings of names are a bit of a special case. Even if there were no books, and even if we never saw the names written in the show (ie, on letters, or in the closing credits), it still benefits the show’s fan community as a whole to have a single set of agreed upon spellings, because it makes communication easier. Basically, for the same reason that it’s nice to have agreed-upon spellings for actual words and names in the real world. So even if there were no books, and no credits or anything, I’m sure HBO would have a website with lists of characters and forth, and I think it would be entirely reasonable to refer to those spellings as the “official”, “correct” ones. I view people who misspell character names the same way I view people who misspell “real” words and names. It’s a teeny bit irritating, and in the context of the SDMB where accuracy is prized, a teeny bit disrespectful, but fundamentally not a big deal. ---
**Author:** ![wintertime](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/c68b51/32.png) [@wintertime](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wintertime)\ **Post date:** [June 26, 2016, 7:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/game-of-thrones-6-09-battle-of-the-bastards-6-19-16-show-discussion/757789/528 "2016-06-26T19:51:52Z")
Please, tell me the discussion about spelling is tongue-in-cheek. You just have fun participating in a mockery of those done-to-death nitpicking-threads, right? Right? Right. ---
**Author:** ![Acsenray](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/acsenray/32/4519_2.png) [@Acsenray](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Acsenray)\ **Post date:** [June 26, 2016, 8:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/game-of-thrones-6-09-battle-of-the-bastards-6-19-16-show-discussion/757789/529 "2016-06-26T20:00:36Z")
> [@wintertime](#): > > Please, tell me the discussion about spelling is tongue-in-cheek. You just have fun participating in a mockery of those done-to-death nitpicking-threads, right? > > Right? > > Right. It is actually annoying, in the same way that constant misspelling of other words and names based on “I just cant be bothered” is annoying. ---
**Author:** ![wintertime](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/c68b51/32.png) [@wintertime](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wintertime)\ **Post date:** [June 26, 2016, 8:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/game-of-thrones-6-09-battle-of-the-bastards-6-19-16-show-discussion/757789/530 "2016-06-26T20:33:06Z")
> [@Acsenray](#): > > It is actually annoying, in the same way that constant misspelling of other words and names based on “I just cant be bothered” is annoying. Nicely done. ---
**Author:** ![TruCelt](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/trucelt/32/523_2.png) [@TruCelt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TruCelt)\ **Post date:** [June 26, 2016, 11:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/game-of-thrones-6-09-battle-of-the-bastards-6-19-16-show-discussion/757789/531 "2016-06-26T23:39:02Z")
Ja’qen has a name. The waif does not. And he identifies with the slaves who started the FM. He seemed to be recruiting Arya from the moment he saw her pick up a sword. Clearly he would have known she was castle taught and holding castle-forged steel. And clearly he would like the idea of a leader who frees slaves wherever she goes. I think both the faceless men and the LoL have reason to be pro-Danaerys. (Flame worshippers have got to be over the moon about her, right?) And whether Melisandre realizes it or not, she’s done an incredibly huge favor for Dany; she’s knocked out four challengers for the throne of Westeros. Not to mention a couple-three armies that she’s worn to a nub. And the fleet at King’s Landing is gone thanks to her. She has paved the way beautifully. Likewise the faceless men took out Balon Greyjoy, who would never have worked with her. I hope they get Walder too, in fact I hope Arya does it. Or maybe Nymeria will slip up on him in the woods one day. . . Let’s see, how else have the FM helped her? And now this Red God. Is it the same as the LoL? That bit confuses me. Melisandre always wears red, so I think they’re the same. Maybe Meli’s just been out of touch with HQ. Anyway, each of the Westerosi sub-plots seems to be a wearing down of the resistance, one army destroying another so that she can come in to clean up the ashes. Just sayin’. Someone said above that the snow in the throne room could be ashes. It makes perfect sense. I could totally see her striding in to take the throne as the city burned all around her. ---
**Author:** ![SenorBeef](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/senorbeef/32/2220_2.png) [@SenorBeef](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SenorBeef)\ **Post date:** [June 26, 2016, 11:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/game-of-thrones-6-09-battle-of-the-bastards-6-19-16-show-discussion/757789/532 "2016-06-26T23:49:54Z")
Ja’qen was just the cover name he was using when Arya met him. He put on that face (or someone did - there’s no reason to think it’s the same guy) because that’s who Arya is familiar with (and so they could re-use the actor). And Euron Greyjoy killed Balon. Not sure where you’re getting faceless men from on that one. ---
**Author:** ![EllisDee](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ellisdee/32/4531_2.png) [@EllisDee](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/EllisDee)\ **Post date:** [June 27, 2016, 4:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/game-of-thrones-6-09-battle-of-the-bastards-6-19-16-show-discussion/757789/533 "2016-06-27T04:49:27Z")
Just noticed an article on the Battle of the Bastards in last week’s Entertainment Weekly, which says: > [@](#): > > “I watched every pitch-field battle I could find looking for patterns, for what works, what doesn’t, what takes you out of the moment, what keeps you locked in,” says director Miguel Sapochnik, who also helmed last year’s standout “Hardhome.” “I was particularly interested in depicting both the horror of war and the role of luck.” Since the director was “particularly interested in depicting the role of luck,” I think it’s safe to assume that he wasn’t trying to show divine intervention as the means of Jon’s survival. It was just luck. ---
**Author:** ![Lobohan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lobohan/32/79_2.png) [@Lobohan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lobohan)\ **Post date:** [June 27, 2016, 5:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/game-of-thrones-6-09-battle-of-the-bastards-6-19-16-show-discussion/757789/534 "2016-06-27T05:26:46Z")
> [@EllisDee](#): > > Just noticed an article on the Battle of the Bastards in last week’s Entertainment Weekly, which says: > Since the director was “particularly interested in depicting the role of luck,” I think it’s safe to assume that he wasn’t trying to show divine intervention as the means of Jon’s survival. It was just luck. Yeah, you’d think Audie Murphey was divinely protected, but sometimes the arrows, or bullets, just don’t hit. ---
**Author:** ![TonySinclair](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/49beb7/32.png) [@TonySinclair](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TonySinclair)\ **Post date:** [June 27, 2016, 5:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/game-of-thrones-6-09-battle-of-the-bastards-6-19-16-show-discussion/757789/535 "2016-06-27T05:43:25Z")
> [@SenorBeef](#): > > And Euron Greyjoy killed Balon. Not sure where you’re getting faceless men from on that one. From a non-existent source. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/game-of-thrones-6-09-battle-of-the-bastards-6-19-16-show-discussion/757789.md?page=26)