The whole Littlefinger goes north plot doesn’t make a lot of sense. His move north doesn’t seem to gain him much. Even if he ends up with the full support of the north, it’s a broken north rent by a ruinous war with the Lannisters and then a civil war. On top of that the north was the weakest area to begin with. His move should have been to liberate Riverrun on the behalf of the Lannisters/Freys and then taken it for himself.
But the plot needs Jon to get back into Winterfell and discover the truth about his lineage. That, along with the resolution of the Sparrow situation, is going to be the big reveal in the next episode. IMHO season 7 is going to be Dany/Jon retaking Westeros and ending up as married rulers. Season 8 will deal with Winter and the Night King.
We also know Arya is making her way back to Westeros and at some point will take out an important character (my money is on Littlefinger).
In my mind there’s not a lot of question of the broad strokes of what will happen. I’m just watching to see it happen and have the details filled in.
Varys going MIA on a secret mission is interesting. My money is that he winds up in Bravos with Arya.
I thought he might be going to meet Yara and Theon’s fleet. Now I think he’s going to try to get the backing of the Iron Bank. That will get them the rest of the ships they need.
I was unimpressed by the Mereen scenes. Especially the negotiations with the masters, as caricatural as usual. I was dissapointed that Danaerys was talked out of razing cities to the ground by Tyrion, although I still have hope that she will become a villain. She’s now relying on the worst kind of murderous pillagers on sea and on the worst kind of murderous pillagers on land. And it’s the second time she’s warned about not becoming like her father. Still, her final talk with Yara seemed to go in the direction opposite tothe one I’m hoping for.
I loved a lot the chaos of the battle. Great filming.
I expected Ramsay to use Rickon as a bait and then shot Jon, but indeed it was much better to use Rickon to bait Jon into baiting the whole army into a trap. I also was thinking that the Umber and/or Karstark could defect, so it created some suspense. Of course, the arrival of Littlefinger to save the day was a given. I wasn’t certain Jon would survive the battle.
I would like to believe people who think that Sansa acted deliberatly, willing to sacrifice Jon to win the battle in the same way she accepted to write off Rickon. But I’m affraid it’s again a case of “the cavalry arrives just in time”. Besides, I think not telling Jon about the arrival of the knights of the Vale was a very bad move if she was aware of it. Depriving the acting commanders of this vital information would be quite stupid. In any case, she seems to have reached the required level of bitchniness and cold-heartedness required to survive in Westeros.
Thanks to the posters who pointed at the battle of Cannae.
The way Davos found out about Shireen is extremely contrived. But I’m happy that this issue finally came back to the surface. Melisandre seems to still believe in the powers of her God but to have lost any trust in him, if I understood correctly her last line (something like “we have so God we have”, and implied :“we unfortunately have to deal with it”).
Here’s an idea they could have used that would have justified Sansa not telling Jon that the Vale forces were coming, and made it less of a deus ex machina.
They could have implied that there was a spy in Jon’s camp. At the meeting where Jon and Ramsay were discussing the relative size of their armies, Ramsay could have told Jon precisely how many troops he hard from each house, and exactly what Jon’s plans were. Or perhaps they could have learned it earlier than that, explaining more of Sansa’s secrecy. So, Sansa and Jon know there’s a spy among them, but they don’t know who, and they never find out. This would make it essential that nobody knows that Petyr is coming.
You forget that the only thing he really cared about was Catelyn, and now, by extension, Sansa. I don’t think he would abandon her for some material gain. He fails at his own test. He isn’t fit for climbing the ladder of chaos because he’s in fact motivated by the “illusion” of love, as he puts it in his famed speech. I think the only reason he ever tried so hard to climb this ladder was to reach Catelyn.
Remember that the crucial part of the strategy is that if Jon had the knights of the Vale from the get-go, Ramsay would never have brought his troops to the battlefield. He would have stayed inside the castle walls and hunkered down for a siege.
Sansa baited Ramsay to come outside his walls, and then waited until he fully committed his troops to the battle before unleashing her finishing move.
Sansa doesn’t know battles but she knows Ramsay: He doesn’t fall for traps, he’s the one who traps you. The key from that is Ramsay won’t walk out to face a fair fight, or even one where he has a slight advantage. He’ll come face you if you have no chance, because pulling wings off of insects and burning ants with a magnifying glass is in his DNA.
This reminds me of something I thought while watching the Mereen scenes. We see the sons of the harpy slaughtering freed slaves (or whoever) and I started thinking to myself: Now the dragons are going to come kill them, and I’m going to be annoyed because we’ve already been shown that the sons of the harpy aren’t afraid of dragons; they already beat Drogon in the arena.
Several seconds go by and this thought is getting me more and more worked up, and then…a mongrel horde! Woot! Take that, sons of the harpy! hehheh.
From a logistics-of-the-period point of view, how likely is it that Ramsay’s army and allies did not know of the impending arrival of a huge army on horses?
That is, wouldn’t some ally of Ramsay’s (or some of his scouts) send him a crow with the message that the knights of the Vale are moving towards Winterfell?
Or could Littlefinger’s force move so stealthily that their arrival was a complete surprise to Ramsay? I find it hard to believe, even in an era without wireless communications.
Did similar things happen in the real world in medieval Europe? (i.e. a whole cavalry arriving to a battle without the other side being aware about their possible arrival)
Pretty much impossible in the real world. The Knights of the Vale had to cover almost a third of the entire continent, and half of the North. They had to ride past Moat Cailan, which was a bottleneck. It would have taken them weeks or months.
Did Napoleon have no idea that the Prussians were even in the field? Because we’re not talking about the unexpected arrival of cavalry that you know are somewhere in the theater of operations, but an army coming from hundreds of miles away that you have no idea is even in the vicinity.
I was all-in for complicated Arya theories about face-switching and things not being how they were shown. But I’m not down for that with the Sansa story. To me, the simplest, and likely actual, reason for not telling Jon about the Vale is that the letter she sent was a last-ditch appeal for help when she felt hopeless that Jon was going to charge ahead with so few troops (she tried to appeal to him to visit Cerwyn, Manderly, etc.). She had already told Littlefinger to go suck an egg, threatening even that Brienne could and would kill him on the spot. After that, how could she know that he would show up? She didn’t. So if you’ve got to make a plan to go with the army you have, make it the best plan to do that without hoping that somebody might show up.
She went to meet him initially in secret, too…why? Because she was pissed at him and wanted to tell him off for doing what he did to her, and didn’t need or want Jon to try to talk her into laying off in the interest of securing more troops. So she went and did it behind his back so she could do it on her terms. [EDIT: it strikes me on re-reading this that there was different reason for meeting in secret? She didn’t know until the meeting that he brought the Knights…] She potentially burned a bridge. In order to then tell him later, “well, the knights of the Vale might be coming,” then she would have to explain all that and admit that she turned down a really good army just for a moment of personal satisfaction.
Now, if anybody was hanging back waiting for the right time to attack it was Littlefinger on his own accord. Things would probably be move convenient for him after the battle if Jon and as many wildlings/Jon-loyalists as possible are dead. And Sansa probably considers that Littlefinger owed her and they’re even now, but I’m sure LF will try to push for more.
They showed this, didn’t they? Ramsay nocked and drew an arrow, then turned his head and grinned at the man standing beside him as he shot an arrow off in Rickon’s general direction. He was playing with him.
Elsewhere, someone raised an interesting point: what if the burning flayed men were actually positioned at 50 yards, 100 yards, 150 yards, etc, providing Ramsay convenient range finding tools for the Rickon run?
I think the Sansa theory is certainly true. She knew Jon would be goaded by Ramsay, and if she’d turned over the troops to him, it would have been closer to a fair fight, and Ramsay might just have decided to hold up in Winterfell and wait them out.
Think about the scenario, if the Vale troops put them at equal numbers, Ramsay hangs back. They wait, and maybe Ramsay gets some reinforcements, or maybe it snows, or maybe anything. They pretty much lose. But if Ramsay thinks that he has overwhelming force, he’ll go all-in to crush Jon’s army.
It makes total sense to hold them back. If Jon knew about it, he might not have walked into Ramsay’s trap, and the Bolton forces might not have committed to being on the field. They’d run the chance of some large number returning to Winterfell and locking the gates.
As for Ramsay making it to the gates, that’s not necessarily a super-big fuck up. Maybe the terrain didn’t allow a force to be in position to cut them off. They did wait until the Bolton units had swung around the Snow units to attack them from behind. It’s not a given that they could maneuver some horsemen between Winterfell and where Ramsay was stationed. In fact, that’s pretty unlikely.
You do realise that you argue my broader point here? Undetectable armies don’t make sense.
Though I had two reasons why I didn’t include Stannis’ ride to the totally nonsensical examples:
We can assume that those lands where mostly empty of men, in contrast to the southern north and the staging area of the gathering fleet. And the people still present might not have had a means of communication that beat horses, again: unlike the other two examples.
There were, of course, the wargs who should have been able to spot the army. Yet, the wargs might have been focused too much on the wall and didn’t pay attention to other areas - those guys were not trained military reconnaissance, after all. And my handwave has always been Melisandre; back when she was still confident, she had some amazing powers and keeping the army undetected from warging eyes could have been one of them.
While Stannis (and I’m going to present him as the prime military mind he was suppossed to be) must have had scouts operating ahead of the army who should have given him some idea about the lay the land and the situation prior to his arrival.
Be that as it may, … you already know what I think of that shortcut in the narrative.
I’m confident that she is going to be the villain in the other format and it looks like the producers deliberately try to keep her future open for as long as possible on TV; she can still become any face of the many faced god.
Unless she didn’t believe him capable of doing the necessary at the right time. We’ll never know how Jon would have acted during the battle, if he had had any hope at all. But we do know that a victory was not feasible the way Jon had organized the campaign and the battle.
OTOH, he wasn’t wrong either to force a decisive battle given the situation beyond the wall, and he might have acted totally different in setting the stage if he had known about the army of the Vale.
I don’t know if Sansa was stupid or insightful regarding Jon. But it’s clear to me that she didn’t trust him at all – and if that is true, she was willing to sacrifice him just like her other brother.
Cold-hearted? Yes, I think so, and worse. But it would not surprise me if her character wasn’t about to take some other detours in following episodes.
It makes sense to me that he takes the North first, as long as he already has a plan in place to deal with the Freys. Once they are subdued, he controls an enormous block that is close to impenetrable (the vast lands of the north as well as the mountains of the Vale) with a staging area for battles west and south of his main lands that keep his supply lines comparatively safe and short and allow him to attack any arriving enemy from multiple angles.
So, why not take the Freys out first? Because that would have alarmed and might have reunited the Lions and the Roses - and their coalition would have bound his armies south of the North - a north that could then turn on him anytime. The Twins are not the only way into the Vale.
