My understanding is that the dire wolves were too difficult to work with so that’s why they have been little used on the show.
Practical matters like this have always influenced productions.
Books are always better that way.
Nothing I’ve seen on the show has shown them to be any more magical, badass, or intelligent than a regular wolf or even a large dog.
IIRC Bran’s wolf sensed that he was in danger when the catspaw tried to knife him in season 1 and saved his life.
Aren’t they just regular dogs that are made to look larger using CGI? I doubt they’re any more difficult to work with than the dragons.
I have to agree with this. Even if it was just Pod slashing at zombies while Brianne corrects him: “You’re lunging again. Stay off your heels! You’re leaving your flank open!” And maybe Jaime has a dragonglass flail attached to his right arm and he’s discovering new and interesting ways to use it. Anything but just failing to die for 60 minutes as wave after wave of undeads bury them.
You can easily buy wolves like that up here. Just go to your nearest Canadian Dire.
She would in fact know pretty much everything about Arya’s backstory and even feelings. She interrogated her relentlessly about every detail of her life. There’s nobody more prepared to impersonate Arya than the waif. It would in fact explain why they acted this way.
As for why she would, for instance, take revenge on the Freys, that would require a bit convoluted explanation, but still possible : doing what Arya would have done would help fooling people who had known her. Or/and they felt a moral/religious obligation to eliminate people she would have killed, either because a life was owed or because Arya’s list was the equivalent of the request made at the temple of black and white for someone to die. Or/and impersonating someone and wearing her face tends to turn you ( or rather : “no one”) into this person so the waif becomes progressively indistinguishable from the real Arya.
No, I think the main reason why this couldn’t happen is become fans would hang the writers at the nearest lamp post if they were told that Arya died miserably in a dark cellar years ago. I love the idea, though. In fact, given what the faceless men are, no one, whether this person is “the real” Arya or the waif or even Jaqen shouldn’t even be obvious or matter from their point of view.
Ooh, I like that. Perhaps even better would be replacing his golden hand with Wolverine/Freddy Krueger dragonglass claws - it seems like a lot of his weapons training would translate to something like fairly well.
So, Meera Reed is a dead wight? I’m saying this because all the Stark bannermen that didn’t make it into Winterfell were fighting for the Night King, yes?
Edmure died a slow, horrible death locked up in his honeymoon suite because all the Freys were dead.
Darrios? Living the good life as King of Meereen.
Robyn Arryn died of thirst when his only source of liquid fell through the moon door.
Hot Pie opened on on-line bakery called You Know Nothing, Jon Dough (this is true for real in real lilfe!).
The Reeds are from Greywater Watch, which is south of Winterfell. No reason to think she’s dead.
Isn’t Edmure in control of Riverrun, not in a dungeon?
The dogs are real animals, who, I read, were found difficult to use.
The dragons are just special effects.
Not necessarily the same people. I never complained about anybody’s death, even though I think that some deaths could have been handled better (i.e. Littlefinger). Also, not wanting your favorite character to die doesn’t mean you have an issue with non-favorite characters being dispatched.
This show has become so big that what happened on it seems to now be dealt with like news would be “Breaking news : according to witnesses, Brienne would have survived the attack on Winterfell”. Any courtesy rule wrt spoilers seems not to apply anymore in the case of GoT.
Meh. Regular dogs in real life do that.
This.
Glad to hear about Meera. As for Edmure-- I don’t remember hearing anything about him after Jaime made the Freys take him down off the gallows. Doesn’t mean things didn’t happen, though. It’s pretty easy to lose track of people.
Jaime released him into Riverrun on the condition that Edmure would surrender the castle. Perhaps it’s mentioned that he also agreed to return to captivity afterwards, I’d have to rewatch the Jaime/Frey scene.
Nobody says that narrative convention should just all be discarded. And anyway, even if this is a proper ending, the show still has dealt with the threat they build for 8 years and countless episodes in the blink of an eye. It disappeared essentially as soon as it actually materialized, while every petty rivalry during the rest of the show took many episodes to be told, evolve and be resolved. The attack of the undead should have gotten much more screen time, including drama, events, build up, involvement of main characters, etc…over the course of several episodes, maybe ending up indeed with this “last stand at Winterfell”. It really would not have been difficult to come up with many distinct events, adventures, dramas, smaller scale battles, etc…and build up a sense of doom and dread and fill up a large number of episodes. That would have been vastly more satisfying even if the end was exactly the same. As it is, it feels it was just a distracting detail they unfortunately had to deal with quickly in some way before the end, like say, the fate of Littlefinger.
She was out of time. Bran was seconds away from being killed.
She was saving her brother, not killing the Night King. That’s was just a bonus.
Normally when she kills, she lays and executes an elaborate plan. Like she did with Ser Meryn Trant. And the Freys.
This was her winging it.
Well… Melisandre’s arc seems to have hit a significant milestone. 
Ah yes, I remember now. The Blackfish was not happy about that at all. I don’t know how I forgot this since my husband insists he got away from Riverrun on a boat. We disagree on this, like the Blackfish would slink away and not die defending Riverrun.