It’s not a new idea.
But it’s like so much of the plot post-GRRM. The writing seems so weak that we try to save it by fanwanking the superficial flawed story something deeper and much more clever… but no, it turns out the superficial flawed story is all there is, and the writing is just weak.
1500 miles from Eastwatch to Dragonstone. If we assume that a raven can fly 50mph, it would take 30 hours. Add 6 hours for Gendry’s marathon.
How fast can a dragon fly? 200 mph, maybe? That’s 8 hours. So the whole thing is 44 hours assuming the ravens, after thousands of years of breeding fly 50mph and dragons fly around as fast as a quick biplane.
I’m okay with that. If it turns out that ravens fly at 75 or 100mph, then even better. Maybe dragons fly at 250 mph. Who knows?
It’s not a plot-hole because even with a conservative guess, it’s not impossible to survive that long. Especially since Dondarion can light his sword every once in a while.
As for the NK’s spear-fu, I’m assuming those javelins are probably special, or he was casting a spell into them. There is no reason to assume that he made the throw specifically by the mechanics of his muscles.
Sure there is. There was a scene several seasons back where a guy rode his horse to deliver a message, and got there before the ravens. Assuming ravens fly at 100 mph, that proves that Westerosi horses can gallop at over 100 mph for sustained distances.
Wouldn’t Bran have called her out on that though if this were actually the case?
Focusing on the raven is missing the main point that this episode contained several events that at face value look contrived, inconsistent or impossible: the lone wight, the superfast raven, gendry’s return journey, the NK’s choice of target, jon surviving the drowning / exposure, the existence of the island and lake ice that conveniently allows all the living to get to high ground but zero wights, the big chains and more I probably can’t remember right now.
Of course we can always come up with post-hoc rationalizations for such things, but generally it’s considered poor storytelling if we have to do this very frequently.
If we’re all happy with such explanations, we can of course say no movie, TV show or book has ever had any plotholes or inconsistencies. We just need to think long enough for an explanation.
Here, sadly, is what I think the most likely scenario for the show is from here:
More and more standard fantasy tropes and lack of consistency until it’s just the Hobbit trilogy. Ratings remain high right to the end, however, so the writers continue to handwave any criticism.
Not until they try to launch a spinoff series, do they notice interest has started to wane. Merchandise profits fall quickly too.
They just figure the concept has had its time, and move on to something else, still not really understanding what made the original concept so successful.
Yep. It was a stupid emotional act by the Hound, which he instantly regretted. :eek:
And by the way, I’ve given up expecting a smart show. I have lowered my expectations and simply enjoy the larger story (and the visuals) without getting all wrapped up in the inconsistencies and examples of bad plotting. But it is still fun to read all the Doper’s outrageous reactions to them. 
How would The Waif have recognized Hot Pie? Or done most of the things that Ayra has done. It doesn’t makes sense.
Before the show started, GRRM walked the showrunners through his notes and plans on the ending of the series. D&D know what ending GRRM has planned. They’re not flying blind, they just don’t have the detailed scenes and dialogue that they cribbed from in the early seasons. They only have the broad plot points, and are having trouble getting from A to B without resorting to tropes and contrivances. I can’t say I blame them. GRRM is having the same difficulties, that’s why The Winds of Winter still isn’t published yet.
Well, it made sense immediately after the Waif-Arya episode. At that time, it might have redeemed the incoherent Braavos storyline to some degree, when that was the only really weak part of the writing.
I don’t think motivation is a problem - the Waif came after all Arya’s enemies as part of the cult of death. After killing Arya she comes after all of Arya’s sworn enemies too, to restore the cosmic death balance. This kind of cultish motivation makes more sense of the Faceless Men than “killers for hire”.
But now - yes, of course socializing with Hot Pie makes no sense, nor does her emotional reaction to the news that Jon is now King. And in any event, we now know that all we need to explain Braavos is that the writing has become terribly weak across the whole show.
I think, in the rush to criticize the writing, people are missing a really critical fact; it’s a systemic problem with the show and I’m not sure that even the best writers in the world could fix it:
The Army of the Dead is really fucking boring.
Oh, it can be cool when it’s used for one-off horror episodes (Hardhome, The Door) or in brief scenes where it’s mostly serving to color the main events. But the show was inevitably going to have to bring the Dead around to be the central antagonists, and in that capacity, they’re sorely lacking. They have no interesting motivation. They have no dialogue. Unlike every prior antagonist, they don’t fight among themselves or jockey for position, or fall in love or make jokes. They don’t even have personality traits, other than “implacable.”
I’m just not sure there’s a compelling way to write ten coherent hours of television about a battle with such things. It’s like writing a story about fighting a rock, or a tornado, or a flood. Sure, the pure action can sustain you for a few hours, but once you get beyond that there’s just no story anymore.
What should “really” happen on Game of Thrones is everybody, everywhere should drop everything and fight the Dead until they’re gone. Arya and Sansa should be like: holy shit, ice zombies, maybe we can wait to hash out our childhood drama and Cersei should be like holy shit, ice zombies, maybe I should change my facial expression for the first time in six years and Euron should be like holy shit, ice zombies, I won’t burn any boats until those are taken care of. But then there would be absolutely no story to tell, beyond a series of battles against faceless ciphers that can’t end until the show does.
So they have to invent these ridiculous ways for the human conflicts that actually provide story beats to continue. And again, I think that’s an essential problem with the overall structure of the story, and the fact that they put it off as long as they did is actually pretty impressive.
I think they could make the Arya/Sansa plotline, or the Cersei/Dany war plotline, or pretty much anything but the stuff up north more interesting independent of any lack of good story coming from the walkers. They’re not really hitting any of the stories very well this year.
Entirely endorsed. You’ve got two entirely distinct genres here - the fantasy historical fiction intrigue plot, and the omnicidal necromancer horror plot. They don’t mesh well; the ice monster invasion of Westeros is nearly as jarring as it would have been in real life Angevin France or Yorkist England. But having established the undead army at the beginning, they’ve now got to resolve it. It’s pretty clear that someone or other (probably Jon Snow) will fight the Night King, and kill him, and then all his armies will instantly and anticlimactically die. At which point I guess everyone will go back to doing what they were doing before? I guess?
This doesn’t excuse some of the bad writing and especially a lot of the dramatic shorthand (e.g., apparent at-will teleportation of the main characters) this season, but I agree that even the best writers in the world would have serious thematic problems trying to work in the demonic invasion angle after so many seasons of stuff that doesn’t really work with demonic invaders.
It’s not that hard. And it would be the ultimate in trope subversion. The first episode of Season 8 there is a battle. The forces of Man retreat. The Night’s King strides forth at the head of his army of undead, trips, and impales himself on a dropped dragon glass spear. The undead army goes back to being dead, and the forces of Man then have to deal with the problems they’ve been mucking about with for 7 seasons.
The End.
But maybe the horses are magic horses!
Seriously, the speed of the raven is probably more than 35mph. Some of the news distribution would take time, so that’s not a great measure.
Consider that they have shown ravens being shot by archers. At some speed, it would be near impossible to do. They have shown ravens in flight that looked basically like normal bird flight speed. There has been no indication in the show that ravens fly at some speed vastly different than our understanding of ravens.
Perhaps the speeds could be mathed out to work, so fine, it’s incredible, but okay. What can’t be worked out, is how Dany managed to change clothes after the battle while on the boat with Jon and company. We see her getting on Drogon and leaving sans carrying anything wearing her new winter coat she must have had ready just in case. All the sudden she has another bad ass outfit? And why the hell are they taking a boat back anyways?
I’ll posit that Jon survived hypothermia for the same reason that Dany survived the funeral pyre and that big hut at Vaes Dothrak(?). Of course, if that’s what they were going for, they probably should have depicted him afterwards as comfortable as she was coming out of the fire.
Not to mention that Nymeria probably wouldn’t have been so lenient when they met up in the forest on the way to Winterfell. Nor would not-Arya have said to herself, “That’s not her.”
Too right. They could have begun the show with the hordes of undead right outside the wall hacking at it with swords, left them there for 7 seasons, and we’d be about where we are now.
It makes me think the story of the summer that just ended (mainly Robert’s Rebellion) might have made for a better TV show than the winter coming. But very different. There was pretty much no magic going on then.
lol. God she is awful. I watched some early episodes recently, and people putting up with her shit is one of the most implausible parts of all of it.
Eh, I think the only problem with the army of the dead is that they put them behind a thousand foot tall magic wall. There’s just not a logically sound way for them to get past it. Other than that, they are a useful external threat and have provided some dramatic moments.
Someone upthread posted a map comparing the movements of the Night King’s army with those of Jon Snow (though I can’t find it right now). I think that map really makes it clear that the timing problems we’ve been seeing (and complaining about) really were baked into the show from the beginning. Imagine that the main arc still moved at the same pace as in the first few seasons, with journeys from place to place often nearly taking up whole seasons; and then, imagine the army of the undead, that has to take all that additional time to move those last few miles to the wall.
So, in other words, you can’t have it both ways: either the south-of-the-wall story moves faster, or the undead move slower (at a glacial speed, you might say)—after all, both have to meet at the same points. I’m not sure how that really could have been prevented—other than introducing the threat from the White Walkers much later, or having them get to the wall much sooner, and then, lacking a ways to cross it, just kinda hanging out there.
Not a fan of the zombie genre as a whole I take it ;)? I’m not either, particularly. But I think GRRM’s army of the dead is a suitably epic antagonist and I like epic fantasy. Blending it with an otherwise low magic world works just fine for me.
What doesn’t work quite so well is the show-runners post-GRRM handling of it and most other things. And this despite preferring the show-runners take on, say, Cersei. But that seems to be a pretty universal complaint at this point. I’m still enjoying some of the performances especially by the supporting cast, but I wish GRRM had been a faster writer.
Wait, are you talking the character Cersei or the actor Lena Headey? Because I think Headey has been excellent :).