Some Game Of Thrones Thoughts

18 April, 2019

The Night King’s progress

If they were really going for Winterfell, why not take the Kings Road? It’s quicker than marching across country and with the advantage of being able to slaughter any mortal they encounter on the way to add to their forces.

After blowing up Eastwatch, the White Walkers destroyed House Umber’s stronghold Last Hearth. They didn’t bother wheeling around and attacking Castle Black from the near. If the White Walkers motivation is killing all mortals to add to their army as has been assumed, why avoid picking off a small but noteable garrison of warriors?

Come to that, they ignored Samwell Tarly when they had him at their mercy several seasons back and marched on past him.

Unless of course despite their slow progress (it was across tundra, mind you), the White Walkers are working to a strict plan and time table – rendered stricter by the discovery the mortals have got dragons. So has the Night King now, but only one. He has no idea whether Daenarys has more than the three he saw.

His army is now vulnerable as the mortals have learned all you have to do is kill any White Walker (the wrinkly Jeremy Corbyn lookalikes) and whatever wights they’ve created (the shambling skeletal figures) are destroyed with them. Weight of numbers is no longer an advantage.

The Night King’s best bet, therefore, is head south, and fast. Leave the grand alliance at Winterfell to freeze and starve waiting for an attack that’s not coming.

If the Night King is any sort of stratagist (and he’s had a few thousand years to brood on his last defeat and where he went wrong), he’ll head south, kill whoever is left in the Dreadfort and Hornwood so as not to betray his position, and make for White Harbor – the citadel of all that Maester knowledge on the old times and how to defeat White Walkers.

He may chose to split his army, send a force to sacrifice themselves against Winterfell to keep those inside convinced a bigger army is coming.

Once he takes the Moat Cailin (the traditional chokepoint between north and south Westeros in an area covered in marsh), the north is trapped and the south at his mercy, a south without dragons or dragonglass. No army has ever taken Moat Cailin by attacking from the south.

Past Moat Cailin and the marshes of the neck lies plenty of forest land where an undead army can hide and shelter away from dragon attacks, all the while pressing further south, killing to add to their numbers, as winter bites harder weakening and starving their opponents.

Cersei’s stupidity knows no bounds

Cersei in her usual overconfidence has been busy building up an army to defeat a mortal one, not an undead one – and she used up the Alchemist Guild’s remaining store of wildfire (the only realistic weapon left against the White Walkers) to destroy the Great Sept of Baelor and a number of surrounding buildings at King’s Landing. It has never occured to her the Night King may choose to attack her first – which would explain the visions everyone’s been having of a wrecked snow covered capital. The work of a certain undead dragon perhaps?

Even within the field of villainous leaders, whether real life or fiction, it’s possible to sort the Lenins and Mussolinis from the Hitlers and Stalins, or the General Woundworts from the Voldemorts. Cersei is up there with every stupid and cruel leader there ever was who enjoyed an unnatural amount of success owning to events largely outside of their own control, but in their narcissism took to be divine providence.

Cersei Lannister has the worst superiority complex in the whole show, earned in the worst manner – that of who she was in the first place – and fails to understand it. Because of her marriage to the king, because of her father Tywin, because of her two sons on the throne whom she wanted to be her puppets, because of the Lannister gold mines. All of which are gone.

Yet she still believes she can bribe, bluff and brutalise her way to staying on the Iron Throne. When she told Littlefinger ‘power is power’ in a rather crude demonstration of strength at the Red Keep, she proved how little she understands it, except in the crude fashion of a bully. She wanted war elephants which the Dothraki horseriders would have made short work of (worked example: the various Mongolian Khans against every single army the Indian subcontinent was ever foolish enough to put into the field against it – speed and manoeurvability wins battles, seldom brute strength).

Contrast with Varys warning to Tyrion Lannister that ‘power lies where people believe it lies – it’s a trick,’ observe the story arcs of Tyrion, Jon Snow – and Daenery.

Daenerys lapses into hoity toityness are jarring when she gets too Targaryan for her own good – forgetting she earned her massive following precisely by making sure everyone underestimated her at every turn in order to get their true measure before crushing them (as most of Essos now knows to its cost), and her Spartacus persona is as much her selling point as the dragons and the Dothraki hordes.

Yet the moment she realised North Westeros wasn’t exactly welcoming her arrival, and that the Lady of Winterfell, Sansa Stark, certainly didn’t want her around any longer than she had to put up with, her response was taking Jon Snow on a dragon ride ostensibly right over the citadel where perhaps the fate of the whole continent will be decided. There they saw Snow riding with she who would be queen, on a dragon of his own, as equals. The message to those below could not have been clearer – she was not going to be another awful southern based ruler only interested in bossing them about, but one wanting to take them higher and further than previous rulers had ever before.

Anyone who says people dislike Cersei because she’s a ‘strong woman’ are up those with those who come up with excuses for all manner of awful leaders for reasons other than their leadership incapabilities. Usually because they find them hot, either sexually or because they conceptualise leadership as sanctioning cruelty for the pleasure of demonstating the ability to do so. Game Of Thrones is overrun with strong women characters. The strongest two, Brianne of Tarth – the very paragon of a medieval knight tied to the code of chivalry – and Arya Stark don’t even require a gang of flunkies like all the other supposed powerful in the realm. Both have slaughtered those who wronged them and had whole armies to protect them – all by their own hand.

Name one event Cersei has managed that was by her own hand only rather than getting others to do her dirty work for her. Her constant wine drinking epitomises who and what she is – a parasite living off the hard work of others.

When she exploded the Great Sept of Baelor, she not only wiped out the Tyrells bar Olenna (the Queen of Thorns), but the High Council bar Qyburn, and Ser Kevan Lannister – a highly respected war hero, the brother of Tywin, and Hand of the King at the time of his death. Cersei had him killed off with all the others because he dared to disagree and refuse to be one of her puppets. With Casterly Rock having fallen, a Lannister army slaughtered by the Dothraki at little loss to themselves, and the only Lannister left those in the Lannister owned Westerlands still respected and trusted now dead at the hands of the queen, this is someone that’s run out of friends. Even Jaime’s now left her, and Euron Greyjoy’s about to lose the Iron Islands he’s left undefended.

All she has left largely are mercenaries – and as Stannis Baratheon discovered to his cost, they’ve got a habit of turning their back if their employer turns out to be a headcase.

Is Qyburn about to betray another employer?

You know an army of the dead is coming because you’ve been told the Wall has been smashed at Eastwatch. Your employer expresses delight.

The mercenary army turned out to be smaller than the brochure promised.

The captain of your employer’s navy couldn’t even keep their ships guarded properly.

While Captain Clott and Bitch Queen are shagging away her disappointment about no elephants, you go off and tell another mercenary that Bitch Queen wants the brother she’s been shagging since childhood and the other brother killed with the crossbow which killed the father she’d fallen out with hours earlier after.

There’s a big barrow of gold waiting outside as upfront payment.

This mercenary is one that has shared combat and saved the lives of both brothers in the past.

That the whole operation was heard by a Lannister soldier of course, was also rather unfortunate. Jaime being very popular for staying with them and almost getting himself killed during the Battle of the Gold Road.

Which means Qyburn is very, very stupid, or is hoping Bronn heads north with gold Cersei cannot afford to lose to confirm her treachery – and the only man capable of leading her armies with any remote chance of success has gone. Perhaps with some of the army with him.

Ever got that feeling someone’s decided a certain employer is more trouble than she’s worth?

People likely to do something VERY STUPID in the next two episodes