A castle full of armed criminals and undesirables now with no clear mission and few threats to face …
A capital idea!
why is the Night’s Watch suddenly a problem for the north now? They were founded 8000 years back.
Because the North is independent now. Would you be okay if a different country was dumping their criminals in your back yard?
Castle Black is intentionally not fortified against an attack from the south. This is specifically to allow the Stark in Winterfell to roll over the place if (when) necessary.
I suppose Sansa can try to get rid of the NW and maybe she can do it if the other 6 kingdoms agree. Or maybe her request to get rid of them creates a big problem , even a war
The North was independent for 7600 of those 8000 years. The unified Seven Kingdoms have only been a thing since Aegon I.
Warden is a royal appointment. The “warden” of a region is the military majordomo of the Seven Kingdoms in that area. Traditionally there were only four; wardens of the north, east, south and west. Dorne, for instance, does not have a Warden at any point in the story; the Warden of the South is out of Highgarden. It was briefly the Tarly guy before he was flame-broiled.
The top person in House Stark was traditionally Warden of the North but it didn’t have to be that way.
Reminds me of how Cuba is not happy about the US being at Gitmo. But they can’t do anything about that.
Jon told the Wildings they can have lands south of the wall if they joined his fight. Since he was Kingadanorf, I think that offer remains. But since there are no more Others and they like it up there, they remain north of the wall. Also, there is plenty of empty land north of Winterfell. The NK killed everyone.
Sidenote-- Since Sansa is Queen of the North, can’t she decided that she no longer has to appease Grey Worm and Jon and live wherever the hell he wants in The North?
Of course, the Night’s Watch folks are also dependent on the “Gift” for food and whatnot. Winterfell could just blockade the fortresses and starve them out.
It’s clearly fortified to the south in the show. Sturdy gates and a stockade around the whole thing. And it was attacked from the south in the show.
That was a tremendous scene, one of the best the show has ever had. It’s not subtle, but it fits right in with the arc; Danerys is a tyrant. She believes what she’s saying, but she’s clearly a conqueror. She believes that was is right is what she wants; later on she reaffirms this with Jon, saying, in essence, “I know what’s right because I know.” She’s Genghis Khan, and let loose, she’s going to kill ten million people.
I liked this season but it would absolutely have been better if it was 2-3 more episodes long. I like every major decision; it was just done more quickly than it should have been. We just didn’t get enough time with Jon - his ending was wonderful, I wish we’d been able to savor it more.
I agree with this. A lot of decisions in the show make sense to me once I really think about the underpinnings of the scene: the placements of armies, the previous conversations between characters, the emotional impacts of certain events. And I’m not someone who likes spoonfeeding plot points.
All the same, having some of these wonderful inevitabilities fleshed out would’ve made me much happier. I’m not super into the battle sequences, so if they’d removed about half an hour of jump cut ultraviolence I would’ve been down with that. Or they could’ve added another couple of episodes, that would’ve been dandy as well.
If that was the case, I don’t recall it being shown in the show. The raiding party climbing the Wall was presented a highly exceptional thing, even though the Wall was essentially unguarded for almost its entire length (only three forts being manned). And Osha’s party getting as far south as Winterfell seemed to be entirely unexpected. (I don’t think it was explained how they got around the Wall, but it was presumably by small boat.)
The Wall by itself presented almost an insurmountable barrier to the Wildlings. Even if they got over or around it they could hardly have brought anything back by climbing over it or by boat.
I’m sure Sansa would have heard that Edmure ordered the surrender of Riverrun and got the Blackfish killed to save his own skin.
Presumably he would have been freed after Arya slaughtered all the Freys, but we weren’t shown this, and we don’t know where he’s been or who has been running Riverrun since.
The difference now is that the Wildlings are unlikely to be a constant threat
That occurred to me. At the time they had to appease the Unsullied to keep them from executing Jon or fighting the Northern troops. But now the Unsullied have buggered off, there’s no reason they need to abide by an agreement made under duress.
However, given his sense of honor (not to mention guilt over killing his queen and his love), Jon himself will abide by the deal. Even if he finds the deal difficult he will stand by his oath. On the other hand, there’s nothing that says the Night’s Watch have to stay at the Wall. He’s presumably reverted to being the Commander, so he can technically go where he wants.
There’s nothing to say that the North won’t also participate in sending people to the Night’s Watch as a multinational force.
Agreed - just for one example, we hadn’t actually had any scenes re-establishing the close friendship/shared history/bonds of loyalty between Dany and Missandei this season, and I think not even last season. So even if you’re prepared to overlook the astonishing co-incidence that it’s Missandei, the one person whose death would destabilise both the woman with the dragon and the man in command of the armies, who gets captured when the Iron Fleet turns up out of nowhere again, the impact of her death is diminished because the character work hasn’t been done. I mean hell, she only had a two-line conversation with Grey Worm and that was the cliched “after this battle we’ll be happy together” death-bait done without any finesse or care whatsoever. It’s a perfunctory bare minimum, and they could have chosen to do more.
Ditto the total skipping over of what could have been the other end of an amazing arc for Grey Worm, when he evidently decides not to instantly kill/ceremonially execute Jon until the diplomatic stuff (Missandei’s area of expertise) has been thrashed out. Well worth spending time on, but nothing done.
This is a good point; a lot of the actual things that happened were fine, but the buildups to the events were rushed and the motivations tended to contradict the character arcs they’d been building.
One thing that doesn’t make sense though is Bran both becoming King and the North becoming independent. Seems like you can have either one, but not both at the same time. This is a feudal system, and Bran’s only actual base of power is in the North. It would make sense for him to let Sansa actually run it on a day to day basis (like King Robert let his brothers run the Stormlands), but since that’s the only region that would have any loyalty to him personally, he absolutely will need to be able to call those banners should the need arise.
Why? It’s not like he ever has before. 
Well, he will until he’s killed and resurrected again.
Jon attempted to violate his oath once when he rode off to join Robb, but was persuaded to come back by Sam and his other friends. And he violated his celibacy oath with Ygritte. (Technically, though, the oath is just to take no wife and father no children, not strictly to never have sex.) As far as I recall, he otherwise adhered to the oath until he was killed. And since the oath is to continue in the Watch until one’s death, his being killed technically let him off the hook.