Grumpkins and snarks.
Not much discussion of whether the supernatural long winters have ended. At the end, we saw a plant poking up through the snow, and Jon seemed to marching north on a very light dusting of snow rather than the meters-thick snowpack you would expect.
There are so many unanswered questions. Are House Stark’s words going to be “Winter is Gone” from now on? And what are house Blackwater’s words going to be? “Pay up, sucker!”?
I think it’s like a battlefield promotion. Sam demonstrated his worth, and he’s also pretty much trusted by everyone. He may be the Grand Maester but I assume he’ll be like a military officer who will defer to the older and more experienced NCOs on the practical matters of maester-ing. He oversees their organization and chain of command, they do the actual hands-on work.
They don’t really now. Winters aren’t always superlong. Sometimes they’re short. And I think the maesters just kinda guess if it’s going to be long or not.
The Grandmaester isn’t in charge of any other maesters or the Citadel. You’re getting him confused with the Archmaester. The Grandmaester is just the maester assigned to King’s Landing. More important than other maesters because he advises the monarch, but not in charge of other maesters or the Citadel like the Archmaester is.
I guess it was too much to hope for Grandmaester Sam at the end of the scene to say “It’s like a jungle sometimes, it makes me wonder how I keep from going under. Ha ha-ha-ha ha ha.”
He could have, but people wouldn’t have liked The Message it would have sent.
How do we know that the White Walkers, who bring the generations-long winter, aren’t necessary to the ecology of the planet? I think there should be a sequel about the consequent ecological collapse of Westeros and the death of everyone through global warming because they messed with the natural order and killed the creatures that bring the winter that all the plants and animals have evolved around.
Precautionary principle, people! Leave those walkers alone!
Sometimes an executive does something and sees if anyone tries to stop em. We’ve seen that in real life.
For me the proof that we were presented with very poor writing was the Drogon scene taking Danny away. Sure it was a great visual and poignant scene but it shows how poor the writing was because it leds to nothing.
We have no clue of why Drogon did what he did and we have no clue were it is going and what it going to do… Just vanishes in the sky…
Its just another cheap shot writing. Those guys suck.
If the Night King was associated with the winters (and he did seem to have some control with the snow storm he brought to the Winterfell battle), why was it snowing in King’s Landing after he was dead? We saw snow starting to fall when Jaime originally left to go north but in all other scenes after that there was none. Then suddenly after the KL battle, it’s snowing so hard Drogon gets covered in it while he is taking a nap. Of course it’s gone again a few weeks later when everyone meets up to name Bran king. Yeah, I know that continuity may not be something anyone was really paying attention to (given the rushing of everything in the episodes) but that would seem to be an indication that winter was in King’s Landing absent the influence of the Night King.
Maybe westbound Arya will eventually cross paths with eastbound Drogon.
I wasn’t watching super carefully - Were there any giants walking north with Jon and the Wildlings? That would be cool
I don’t think we need to know. Mystery is fine, sometimes. Make up your own story.
But I found it terribly cheesy, and on top of it, the dragons never showed before that they were capable of such reasoned actions. They have never been depicted as being more than relatively bright animals. So, I would have expected a dragon to do that as much as I would have expected a dog.
Didn’t like this scene at all.
I think all the giants are dead.
Nope.
I did notice two very, VERY tall people walking with the group but I think it was mentioned that Wun Wun was the last of his kind, but I’m not sure. The very tall people were not quite Wun Wun sized but way taller than The Mountain, it seemed to me.
Lots of hedging words there but I did notice the tall ones right away and thought, “Hey, they must be hybrids or something.” But (last ‘but’, I promise) this finale seemed much more focused on fan-service than in-story continuity, so. . . maybe giants?
Concur.
My interpretation was rather that he knows (or believe) that what happens must happen. He more or less said to both Jaime and Jon that they were exactly where they had to be or did exactly what they had to do. It seemed pretty fatalistic to me.
So, my assumption was that he knew he would be king, whether he liked it or not. Jaime couldn’t not have pushed him out of the windows. Jon couldn’t not be in the North. He couldn’t not become king. Everything was already “written”, more or less.
A more optimistic view would be that things could have happened differently, but the way they happened was the only way leading to a positive outcome. If Jaime hadn’t pushed Bran out of the window, he wouldn’t have become the three eyed raven, and the Night Walkers would have won. In this case, it might apply to Bran becoming king too. It might be the only choice that won’t result in a civil war, for instance.
Makes me think of a SciFi novel, “the stochastic man” : Robert Silverberg: The Stochastic Man - an infinity plus review , where the protagonist’s mentor knows everything that will happen, but cannot change anything about it, making it more a curse than a blessing.
I have a similar view, but I don’t think Bran knew before he left Winterfell that he would be chosen to be King. It’s more of a way of saying “I’m fated to be King, because if I wasn’t, I wouldn’t have left Winterfell.” He doesn’t believe in free will anymore.