My thinking is that Arya is what a daughter would be to the Hound and that the Hound is a temporary replacement father-figure for young Arya.
Each cares for the other, but each also thinks the other is stupid or foolish.
She still has “breaking the wheel” to look forward to. But I wonder if Martin (or the showrunners) will flip that to show that the wheel cannot be broken. I mean, even in our modern and democratic United States of America, we’ve still had our aristocracy–the Hearsts, the Vanderbilts, the Rockefellers–who could very often flout the law or use economic pressure to make whole populations do what they wanted.
The wheel might very well break her if Cersei sticks to her plan to mop up after the monsters kill each other. If only she had a couple of elephants.
Waif: Tell me about The Hound.
Ayra: Also dead. Ayra Stark left him to die. He was on her list.
Waif whacks Ayra with the stick to indicate she is lying
Ayra: He was not on her list anymore. She’d taken him off it.
Waif: Why? Didn’t she want him dead any longer?
Ayra: She did and she did not.
Waif: She sounds confused.
Ayra: Yes, she was.
I’ll predict that Jon will convince Sam to keep his identity secret, but something will happen that forces the issue. Perhaps the dragons will start obeying Jon over Daeneris, or some magic will be needed that only the true king can accomplish, and it will have to be Jon. Something like that.
There’s no way he can just announce that he’s the rightful heir to the throne based on the word of his friend who has reason to hate Daeneris and his strange little brother. It will have to be revealed to everyone in some spectacular way, I’d think.
Also, the Golden Company may be there to fight for Cersei, but I suspect that if they run into the army of the dead they may simply fight for the living and join the northern alliance. Games of Thrones take a back seat to survival against pure evil.
I was wondering about that. Why didn’t Jon ask how Sam knew his true parentage? And yes, convincing everyone else is going to require some evidence.
For Cersei:
Sam told him how he knew:
“Bran and I worked it out. I had a high septon’s diary. Bran had…whatever Bran has.”
But I think Jon doesn’t ask for more information because in his heart of hearts he knows it’s true.
I believe the books Sam stole from The Citadel probably included the septon’s diary, so it’s not just his word. But it would be a bad move for Jon to announce it publicly. Which means that’s exactly what he will do.
Yep. Our boy isn’t the sharpest pencil in the case. If there’s a way to fuck it up, Jon will find it.
I think ive guessed the outcome.
Dany and Gendry marry for political reasons. They have a miserable loveless marriage. Jon sits in the north and broods like Conan at the end of the first Conan film.
How about Grey Worm teams up with Varys? Between the two of them, one set of male genitalia.
I also thought I remembered seeing a baby bump. And in a normal world, she should be several months into her pregnancy by now. The first couple of seasons made it a point to drag out how long it took to travel from one side of Westeros to another.
The only way to reconcile what we’re seeing in this season is to assume that time has stopped. Castle Black is closer to Winterfall that any other major location. The White Walker army should have beat everybody else there or be lurking on its doorstep. Cersei should be massively pregnant. The dragons should be eating the corpses of the thousands of Dothrakis dying from the cold. Instead it’s time loops all the way down.
I didn’t mistake one scene for the other, but I just watched the episode, and there’s no such scene, indeed. I don’t have the slightest clue how I imagined this, but I was firmly convinced I had seen it, and believed since the last season that she had been shown having a miscarriage. That’s weird.
That scene was part of a massive spoiler leak for the season, however. Maybe that’s where you got it.
I think you guys are missing a thematic point about Jon Snow’s leadership and savvy. That’s understandable, since the show’s writers did too.
We all think of being Ned Stark as being dumb, but that’s an oversimplification. Who wouldn’t want Ned Stark’s leadership right now, rallying the world against the army of the dead? Ned Stark was bound strictly by a code of honor. His code of honor was an effective, positive trait for ruling the North. Life is hard in the North, they don’t have the luxury of big harvests and mild winters that allow the rest of the Seven Kingdoms to have enough prosperity to waste a lot of it with in-fighting and playing the Game of Thrones. You have to have loyalty and unity up North, and wise leadership, otherwise everyone is going to die when winter comes. Even regular winters, not even end of the world army of the dead winters. So it makes perfect sense that a ruler from the North would need to be different than a ruler from anywhere else. Ned Stark was a great ruler, a wise man, and a good man. If he had never gone south, he’d be leading a united, relatively prosperous, peaceful North against the army of the dead. He just wasn’t a southern ruler, and didn’t have the ability or sense to account for that, because he spent his entire life up north. But that doesn’t mean he was dumb or incompetent. It just means he had values that made him vulnerable to the snakes and backstabbers down south.
Jon Snow is very much Ned Stark’s son, regardless of his lineage. Jon Snow is exactly the leader that the North needs now. He doesn’t care about power, or ego, or having people kneel to him. He only cares about doing whatever it is he has to do to lead the North against the darkness coming for them. He is absolutely 100% the king the world needs now. The world needs Ned Stark, or Ned Stark’s son.
So when you make fun of Jon Snow for saying something stupid or botching the politics, this is exactly the sort of thing that shouldn’t matter, if everyone around him wasn’t dumber or more petty or more concerned with their own power than he is. That’s more their flaw than his flaw. Granted, if he was infinitely savvy, he’d somehow work within his own code of honor to be able to handle all of the various troubles before him, but no one is perfect. He’s a believable character, he’s Ned Stark’s son, and he’s what the world needs. Whoever in that world who doesn’t realize that is undermining the chance the living have to make it out of this alive.
There was no baby bump, she just kept touching her stomach while talking about the future. So if she was pretty early on, she might just be 3/4 months.
It’s always safe to assume on this show that despite being shown in the same episode, events in separate locations are not necessarily happening at the same time. The ice dragon taking down the wall might have just happened the day before Jon/Dany got to Winterfell.
The movements of the Army of the Dead seem to operate on Heisenbergian principles. They were first seen at the Fist of the First Men in Season Two. Then in Season Five they are at Hardhome, which is way to the east. Then in Season Six they are at the Cave of the Three-Eyed Raven, which is presumably much farther north. They finally reach the Wall at the end of Season Seven. So it is impossible to determine both their speed and location at the same time.
I think people have a notion that the army of the dead is heading right for the wall but took 7 years to get there. That’s obviously not true. The army of the dead can’t move south until winter came. So they were wandering every which way around the area north of the wall, killing wildlings and adding to their army, waiting for the time to come to move south.
If a frog had wings, he wouldn’t bump his ass on the ground when he hopped.
Yet despite the supposed importance of “honor” in the north, a number of Northern Houses went over to the Boltons when they looked to be more powerful. And Jon was assassinated by the members of the Night Watch who believed that he was betraying them, not some sleazy southerners.
Given that Cersei was drinking wine like a fish in this episode, I think there are two conclusions:
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She isn’t actually pregnant, and the pregnancy was a ruse for Tyrion. In that case, Sansa is right, and she’s smarter than Tyrion at least when it comes to evaluating Cersei.
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She’s pregnant, but she’s fully in Mad Queen mode an doesn’t intend to survive until the baby is born. Her entire goal now is to murder her enemies then go out in a blaze of glory.
I wonder if we’ll get a scene where the dead overrun King’s Landing, and the Night’s King steps up to sit on the Iron Throne - and the whole place goes up in Wildfire, killing the Night’s King along with Cersei. This would make her the unwitting hero of the entire battle.
I’m pretty sure that between them they have zero sets of male genitalia. “Cut root to stem” as Varys put it at one point.