They killed Pyp and Grenn! I know they were tertiary characters at best, but it’s still kind of strange they would deviate so much from the books. I guess it gave the episode more emotional resonance. Plus they needed someone to take Donal Noye’s place. But damn. I liked those characters. I suppose they weren’t too important in the grand scheme of things. Grenn gets sent to the Shadow Tower in book five if I recall correctly. And Pyp is just sort of there.
Man, that epi was craptastic. First of all, to me the Wall is the most boring section. Next, we have the most incredible stupid tactical decisions I have seen. Then the battle scenes. Guys in black killing other guys in black, in the dark. Why not just do a radio show? Finally, the death scene of what’s her name was so trite I vomited a little in my mouth.:mad:
I liked the episode well enough. The giants were cool, etc. But I hated the Ygritte death scene. It was cliched, telegraphed, and was an example of one of the most annoying tropes around - if a main character dies in the middle of a furious battle, it’s like a zone of invulnerability appears around him or her - another character can sit for minutes on end, cradling the corpse in his arms and wailing tears, and no one will shoot him with an arrow or walk by and club him in the head. So long as you’re rocking back and forth and crying, all the enemy fighters will leave you alone.
As for why the hundred thousand didn’t just swarm the wall in many places - that’s exactly what would have happened if Jon Snow hadn’t led the party to kill the traitors at Craster’s keep. Snow had convinced Mance that the wall was protected by thousands of men all along its length. In a situation like that, your only chance is to concentrate your forces on one section and hope to overwhelm them.
Had Mance known there were only a handful of men guarding the wall, he could have easily defeated them by simply breaking his army into a hundred groups of a thousand men each and attacked the wall in a hundred different places. But if the wall had as many men as Snow said there were, that would have been suicide.
True. That’s a venerable melee cliche.
I liked the episode overall. My favorite bit was the swinging bladed weapon that swept the wall clean of climbers. Frustrating to see the defenders wait so long before trying to stop the giant and the mammoth trying to pull out the gate. Sorry to see the guys die down in the tunnel, too - the leader of the party had been a recurring character, right?
I’m sorry, amid an hour of honour and gore - obv none of that was cliched or a trope, there will be moments that appeal to non-males. The redhead’s death scene wasn’t intended to work for middle-aged men, who otherwise had at least 50 minutes of this episode to get excited about.
Seriously?
Are you doubting The Fornicator?! He knows what chicks like and the babes all went for redhead’s oh-so-not cliche’d death. Oh yeah! Fornicate, pontificate!
P.S. That dying in the arms was dumb. That probably why it wasn’t written that way in the book.
Meh. Battle tactics that made my eyes roll so hard it hurt. Scenes shot in the dark with everyone wearing black, so all you saw was dudes in raggedy black killing dudes in raggedy black- and you could barely see that. So, what exactly was there for us middle-aged men, then? :dubious:
And also- what did 100,000 people eat north of the Wall- snow? I mean, think about it, there’s almost no one living for a couple hundred miles South of the Wall as it’s too cold and poor to farm, so how do the wilders have a huge migrant population?
The bit about not attacking elsewhere made sense. Honestly, very few people can climb a 1000’ wall, and you certainly can’t bring supplies or giants with you. Mammoths are not good climbers.
And, don’t get me started about Fire arrows. :rolleyes:
Yeah, I’m not sure why the defenders were lighting their arrows. You only do that for two reasons - to ckeck your aim (like tracer rounds), or as an inciendiery attack against flammable structures. When firing into masses of enemy, you’d like your arrows to be as invisible as possible, lest people simply dodge them.
Oh, I forgot the most important reason for fire arrows: They look cool on TV.
If you hit a mammoth with a fire arrow, you could start a fatal stampede, I guess?
Firing off an 800’ wall at night would be very difficult to range properly. I’d assume you’d want to light your arrows so you can correct your aim if the first arrow is way short or long.
Also, looks cool.
If it’s anything like the books, the 100,000 people doesn’t translate to anything like 100,000 fighting men. It’s a mass migration of a bunch of women and children and elderly and other noncombatants of all sorts, and they’re presumably using the supplies that they were saving up for the winter from their previously dispersed camps all over the north. If they don’t get through the Wall they’ll starve, but they’re assuming that being stuck up there with the ice zombies is even worse.
Yeah, but they apparently couldn’t hit one. :rolleyes:
That’s why I said “people” not “soldiers” but where did they get the supplies they were saving? What did they eat during the last few years? Remember, for a hundred miles or more SOUTH of the wall it’s basically empty and uninhabited, so how did NORTH of the Wall get 100000 people? What have they been eating? “Each other” doesn’t work for more than a few months.
The inhabitable part of the lands beyond the wall is nearly as big as the rest of the North, or basically bigger than all the other parts of Westeros (aside from the North) put together. I thought the implication was that Mance basically assembled all the wildlings that could leave. Whether 100,000 is a reasonable population of hunter-gatherers over a land area that size in the weather conditions described is something that I couldn’t possibly answer, but it could represent a pretty low average population density when they’re not all gathered in one place.
The maps and descriptions I have seen show the area North of the wall being considerable less than 1/4 of the Kingdom of the North.
You may be right; it just appeared that way to me by looking at a couple of Westeros maps (could be the fault of the projection). I thought they don’t actually know how big it is since no one can explore the Land of Always Winter, but since people don’t live there anyway it’s a moot point. Anyway, I’m still thinking it’s big enough for low population density of hunter-gatherers under normal conditions. According to Wikipedia, the density of people in the Paleolithic is estimated at one person per square mile, so maybe that’s pushing it a little bit. They probably wouldn’t have that much spare supply, either, so they’ll be goners if they don’t get through quick.
Here’s a neato map. With this map there doesn’t seem to be an end to north of the wall although much of that is Always Winter. But it doesn’t look like all the north of the wall is always winter. There is a sizable amount of living area. About the same size as the Iron Island with much less mountain.
If I had to fanwank the logistics of this massive migration, I’d say lots and lots of smoked and dried fish. Perhaps wrapped in kelp or something to provide nutrients fish don’t have. Plus there’s cannibalism. I guess we could also fanwank that the forests may be full of moss and weeds that on Westeros are highly nutritious.
The real answer is probably that George RR Martin just didn’t think a whole lot about logistics. He’d be in good company there - How did all those massive armies in the Lord of the Rings trilogy eat? How did they dispose of all their waste? Where did they get the water they’d need?
Logistics are usually an afterthought in these kinds of tales.
The Wildlings aren’t just hunter gatherers, some of them (like Craster and his wives) farm. And one of the reasons they need a gate is so that they can bring their herds through with them.
I’ve never thought Westoros’s wacky weather conditions were a very well thought through idea, but it’s clear that all sorts of trees and vegetation grows north of the wall, so presumably certain food crops would too.