“Bittersweet” can also mean, “all of the bad guys are dead, but most of the good guys are, too.”
Btw, did the TPTB explain at some point why that happened?
Clearly, Jon failed on every possible level:
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He wasn’t able to rally enough of the Northern Houses around his cause to even get close to the support the Boltons still held; he neither showed the charisma to sway houses nor the political acumen to do so. He didn’t even come up with any convincing argument in their favour on his own.
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Jon didn’t counterbalance the disparity of forces with strategic wit or some cunning plan (the one he had, could have been devised by Baldrick),
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even though there was no expectation to win an open battle against superior forces in front of the mightiest stronghold the Boltons securely held, even though Stannis, a far more experienced leader, had already failed to win such a clash, Jon still chose to seek the confrontation then and there, giving his bastard-counterpart every possible advantage.
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Then he failed to save the legitimate heir of the King of the North, his half-brother. But in hopelessly and stupidly trying to do so …
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he forced his captains to either accept the quite likely fatal blow to morale if they abandoned Jon in his suicidal attempt - or ruin the defensive battle plan that gave the Stark-forces at least a tiny chance to hold out against the Boltons and wait for some mistake that might turn the tide eventually.
Jon had destroyed the Starks in the North at that point.
It was Sansa who had the one idea that saved them. Of course, she went about it in the worst possible way - and I still have no idea, why she didn’t just tell Jon what she had done after she had already asked for Littlefinger’s help.
Jon might not have relied on Littlefinger’s help. But he might have still adapted his plans or might have been lees desperate when the battle started. He might have resisted the urge to throw himself in this suicidal rescue attempt and, instead, stuck to the plan, hoping that mighty forces were on their way to give the Bolton army a nasty surprise.
Sansa acted stupidly. But she wasn’t the one responsible for the campaign that led them into this deadly catch.
Jon failed to show any of the abilities a wartime leader needs; … and yet, the Northern lords rewarded him with the crown. It makes no sense.
season 8 episodes could all be movie length
'Game of Thrones' final episodes might be as long as movies - CNET
Melville is a fine writer and a near-peerless fantasy world builder, but he has more axes to grind than a dwarven armored division; more, in fact, than I suspect that he’s aware of himself. I’ll concede, though, that I may have given him short shrift. He makes the very many points he wants to make not because he thinks they’re cool, but because he honestly, sincerely believes in them, but that doesn’t change the fact that he often places principle ahead of story and character. Personally, I find him both enthralling and frustrating to an equal degree.
Since we are all just speculating wildly. I will throw some out there just so that I look like a genius if I get lucky and guess right…
Sansa Stark or Tyrion Lannister takes the Iron Throne. I don’t see Daeneris and Jon Snow fighting each other to the end. Daeneris has Tyrion as her Hand, and he knows Jon Snow well. There may be initial conflict between them until they understand that they should be fighting on the same side. But I don’t see them marrying and living happily ever after. Jon Snow is too damaged, too resurrected for us to believe he’s heading for an idyllic life. If he survives the show, it will be as the leader of the knight’s watch, rebuilding the wall.
More likely, I see both of them dying in battle, maybe side by side, maybe in different battles.
In the meantime, LittleFinger, ever the self prevationist, gets Sansa out of the North and heads south. He’s going to cut a deal with Cersei, but it all goes awry because Daeneris wipes out King’s landing, and when he gets there he finds Daeneris sitting on the Iron Throne with Tyrion as Hand. Perhaps Sansa and Littlefinger are sent to negotiate with Daeneris and get her to join forces to defeat the walkers or something.
Anyway, in the end Littlefinger tries to usurp the throne through some means, and he is killed by Sansa, or Arya, or Brienne, or Tyrion or the Hound, and Sansa and Tyrion rejoin and one of them sits on the throne. Brienne becomes the head of the Kingsguard. Sam becomes head Maester. Dany and Jon die heroically in the battle to defeat the white walkers, Or Dany dies and Jon becomes the head of the night’s watch. That would be… bittersweet.
Also, Arya reunites with Nymeria. We have established that there is a mystical bond betwwen them, so if Nymeria lives, she will find Arya in time.
Things I expect to happen:
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The White Walkers destroy the Wall and over run Castle Black and essentially end the Watch.
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Dany aligns with Dorne and uses it as a base of operations. The Tyrells betray the Crown and join them.
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The end game of the series is the dragons and Valerian steel defeat the White Walkers. The rulership of Westeros is turned upside down. Dany ends up married to Jon Snow (who of course is a Targaryan (sp?) and she is installed as Queen.
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One of the generally beloved characters will die before it’s over (Tyrion. Jamie, Brienne, or Arya). I predict only one of them will die but don’t know which. Probably not Arya.
Number two has pretty much already happened as in that last shot of Dany’s fleet we see Tyrell and Dornish banners on some ships.
Nothing new to add but I just binge watched the last season and I am very much pumped up for season…sorry, lost track, what season will the next one be?
Anyway, I just got the latest issue of Time, with GOT as the cover story. WTF, !? I just don’t get the photos that accompany the story. Pics of the cast in GOT costume, I would understand. Pics of the cast in everyday street clothes, understood. Pics of the cast in costume for some non-existent movie set in the 1930s?
Jon Snow betrays himself, by proxy of Littlefinger. Both perish.
Sansa and Arya realize they’re sisters and move far away from each other.
Dany continues to have no personality. Her dragons somehow makes up for it. When the CGI is up for it.
Ramsey gets resurrected. He views life differently this time around, and vows to restore Reek’s penis by whatever means necessary. Torture, even.
Jaqen loses his face. Sam’s also, and Gilly’s.
Bran suddenly becomes awesome and does stuff.
Tywin, as a ghost, haunts Tyrion just for fun. And Jaime doesn’t like it - But he doesn’t really do much about it.
The freaky suckling-kid from the high place with the well meets Bronn. They quit GOT and start a new buddy-cop show together.
Varys secretly has a degree from MIT, and finds it necessary to letter-bomb the shit out of the iron throne and everyone around it.
White walkers get all the way to kings landing, only to realize they don’t really like the climate.
The end.
I just think it’s very unusual to encounter strongly leftist fantasy - there’s a lot of centrist liberal SF, but not a lot of strongly socialist stuff in the fantasy side, so it makes the political leanings of the author apparent to general readers in a way the strongly libertarian and authoritarian streaks in mainstream fantasy don’t (unless you’re a strong leftist as I am, in which case it’s merely refreshing after all the libertarian and yay-monarchy crap out there,). All China’s doing is not hiding his beliefs that- but I don’t consider that socialist “axe-grinding”, any more than Pratchett was grinding a humanitarian axe, for instance.
I really don’t see Dany and Jon hooking up. It would run counter to both their personalities.
Now, Dany and Sansa…
Well, all absolutely perfectly valid point. The explanation is that the TV show is badly written and plotted, so even the exciting episodes are full of plotholes and the spirit of the original books have gone.
Stannis was the one who united the remaining north in the books. They killed him in the show. So Jon became Stannis doing that, but if he had the mountain clans then it wouldn’t be such a dramatic loss. Oh yes, and THE NORTH NOW FORGETS.
The kid just can’t bloody zig zag. A prerequisite, I’d think, for a king of the north, would the ability to run away from arrows not in a straight line. Utterly stupid.
Jon Snow then reacted the most stupid way and charges into a massive trap. golfclap
Sansa doesn’t reveal the plan because then the dramatic save, all is lost, yay, we won, 101 shit writing plot wouldn’t work.
So in the end, Game of Thrones is just stupid now, don’t try and explain how they managed to get halfway across the world in 2 minutes of plot time, or how anything really makes sense anymore.
It became an expensive but badly written fan fiction around beginning of Season 6.
But in the absence of anything else from GRRM, well, what can you do? Accept it, to get a rough guide to what eventually might happen in the books he’s never going to finish writing…
Ramsay was right all along, and the usually politically shrewd Roose was off the mark: The name “Stark” was not just totally ineffectual to unite the Houses against the Boltons, it was a liability - and not even loyal House Mormont was eager to call Jon or Sansa legitimate representatives of that old name.
Roose would have been better off to either ignore Littlefinger’s offer or trap Sansa and send her (better yet, both of them) to King’s Landing with his regards.
Yet I do agree with the writers’ decision to show considerable disapproval of the Starks within their old domain.
The former Kings and Wardens of the North failed their vassals in many way. Isn’t it reasonable that the Houses resent them for their costly political naivety and military adventures, but - most of all - for Robb’s breach of promise, that ultimately led to the Red Wedding where so many of the Houses finest representatives died needlessly?
On the other hand, the Boltons should be resented even more in the North; they conspired to murder not just their liege-lord and king, but also many of the families they now rule. And while we hear (in passing) about Bolton cruelty to secure their position and witness Ramsay’s insanity firsthand, we are shown no ill effect on anyone’s loyalty toward them.
In fact, Ramsay even managed to add to his power base when the Umbers did an unexpected U-turn.
The writers didn’t balance the resentment against the Starks with an (at least) equally strong rejection of the traitorous Boltons. Worse, we are not shown any kind of desire or need to flock around the Stark-name at all, even though the viewers are well aware that a very pressing need exists.
The writers could have rectified this by showing us that the more northern Houses were finally beginning to catch up with the viewers about the real threat looming north of them.
Some Houses could have still refused to fight with their old enemies, the wildlings, but a compromise at that point would have rather highlighted the long way the lords of men had still to go to create a unified front against their worst enemy than the complete irrelevance of the surviving Starks and their incompetence.
Lets say the opposing forces had been more evenly matched. Then, Jon would not have looked like a total fool when he chose to attack Ramsay, and the knights of the Vale could still have tipped the scales.
Or, if the writers wanted to show more amplitude in the dramatic arc, they could have revealed to us Smalljon Umber presenting Rickon to Ramsay and let their forces join Jon’s army.
Then Jon would have been doomed by betrayal (in best, worst Stark tradition), and not stupidity. Sansa’s knights of the Vale could still have played the pivotal role in that scenario, but Jon’s ascension would not have felt so undeserved.
Back on topic: I speculate that Jon needs to send men beyond the Wall to present irrefutable evidence of the threat to the Southern Houses. Imprisoning a wight in a cage and sending it south could do the trick: It’s harder to argue against an army of the dead when a half-rotted corpse is snarling at you from behind bars.
As Leslie Jones said while watching with Seth Meyers: Zig, motherfucker! Zag!
That bothered me, too.
I don’t think the Starks were out, it just seemed that way because:
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Many House houses didn’t have the courage to stand up and were just keeping their head down hoping not to get noticed.
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Houses that had actual grudges against the Starks saw their chance and became the new inner circle.
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Houses that were the most loyal to the Starks were weakened the most by losing the war.
You already know why she did what she did the way she did, its right there in your post. Jon is a moron, incapable of anything other than inspiring others to fight. Hes a terrible leader, terrible commander, and completely useless from a tactical stand point. Sansa quite clearly told him that Rickon was already dead and she told him to not do whatever it was Ramsey wanted him to do. What did he do with that? he tried to save Rickon which was exactly what Ramsey wanted him to do. He literally was going to get the Wildling army dead, The northern army dead, lose the battle with the white walkers before it even started because he was to stupid to listen to Sansa.
of course she didn’t tell him her plan he would have just gotten the knights of the Vale killed as well.
Tyrion will lead or at least direct the Unsullied through the very tunnels he used against Stannis, Cersie’s death was predicted by that crazy witch a few seasons back, A younger more beautiful woman had something to do with it.
I thought the prophecy was that a younger, pretty woman would take her crown and her little brother would kill her. Everyone expects that it will be Tyrion (well, not everyone. A lot of people think like I do) but I think it’ll be Jaime. He likes killing the reigning monarchs. It’s a thing he does.
Well, this is where the books do differ from the tv show a lot, and it’s off into fan fiction and plot shortcuts.
But in the books, when they say “The North Remembers”, it means something. In the TV Show, they just say it because it sounds cool and ominous but does not mean a damn thing.
An example is Manderley, a family who moved into the north 1,000 years ago and are still regarded as newcomers. They remember. Like 500 years later, wipe out the Lannisters remember.
They might remember and actually blame the one who broke the sacred oath of Guest Right (a taboo on the level of cannibalism), rather than the one who assumed that nobody would be as inhuman to break that. Robb led a relatively successful war with the south, which was not over at the time of the Red Wedding, but relied on not just betrayal of the Boltons and the Freys, but breaking of sacred unbreakable oaths…
And THE STARKS got the blame for that?
That was a massive plot disconnect there. What disapproval of the Starks? This was throwaway can’t be arsed plot writing by people screwed over by the Boltons and the Freys, the ones responsible for these people’s family getting killed at the red wedding. When ELSE would they get a chance for revenge?
The Game Of North does not remember.
All true. It’s less her rationale that I consider ambiguous, it’s her motivation.
Longer than any other character, Sansa had been a plaything of other people’s interests. She had no control over her life for pretty much the entire series, and it’s apparent (well, to me) how much she resents by now to be at the mercy of others.
When she was violated by Ramsay in her own childhood home, she plummeted to rock-bottom. But after despair, I see defiance. She finally reached a point of “no more”.
During her flight came a scene that, imo, is more significant than it appeared to be to hint at a stirring determination to control events and not be controlled.
When Brienne swears fealty to her she receives the much needed confirmation that she is someone who is potentially able to do exactly that - if she is willing to bear the responsibilities of the lady of her House.
When she meets Jon, she appears to be perfectly willing to let him lead, but she still insists on giving him advice repeatedly, yet he doesn’t listen. Worse, he fails in rallying the needed troops and in devising a plan of action that has any chance of success. She makes it quite apparent that she thinks Jon is going to destroy their House.
So, should she save him from his bad decisions by lending him the aid of the knights of the Vale, or should she focus on saving her House by coming into the battle when the Bolton forces are committed and Jon’s wilding army is on the brink of defeat with the architect of the disaster already likely dead … or if not dead, at least revealed as a failure?
I don’t want to rule out the possibility that her motivation to withhold the information was more littlefingerish than she admits afterward.
Frankly, I wish it was the case.
In effect, almost no one was willing to stick his neck out for the Starks. And neither Jon nor Sansa gave them any motivation to change their minds.