Jon also loves his staredowns with certain death. Vyserion died and Jon went full terminator. It was excellent. He also should have drowned but whatever.
It was
so, so very dumb. Why the
fuck would they have had him decide, even
with that Hero Complex he's always kinda had, that he ought to heroically hold the
door line, a lone man and his trusty Plus-One Sword, to cover the evacuation of a bunch of fully-armed champion warriors, their hogtied prisoner, and - oh, right, let's not forget, -
a big ass fire-spewing mother fucking dragon. What was he
thinking? "Oh, y'know, those straggler wights that the pond and dragonfire hasn't managed to kill could be a potential tripping hazard for whoever's trying to climb up on the dragon when they show up, best go boldly stand against them, clear them out so my comrades may be assured of stable footing on their safe, secure, totally OSHA-compliant route of egress?"
I don't really mind all that much, but it bothers me that I've tried
really hard to understand how it could make sense and yet, I've got nothing. They just decided that was gonna be a selfless-hero-sacrifice scene.
I'm willing to forgive the raven travel time since they made it seem like at least a day or two passed in the frozen lake before the fighting started.
I don't even wanna get into the logistics... bottom line is, they needed a momentous last-minute dragon appearance to save the day and make Plot happen, so they fibbed it on the offscreen stuff. Same stuff they've been doing since early on in this season, but a lot more so this time because they literally sent all the way to Dragonstone for reinforcements, and got them, all in the amount of time it took the Night King and his compadres to get a pond to freeze over.
Not too mad, though, cause I actually really wanted to see the dragons roasting zombies up there anyway and so I'll accept that some writer hijinks were required to male that happen for me. Extra bonus point for seeing a dragon killed off for real this time, which I've just been cockteased about for entire seasons until now.
Probably the first Game of Thrones episode I was disappointed with. The Sansa/Arya plotline is shit. I don't understand how Arya can just come home and already be threatening to murder her sister. The fact that she can't empathize with her sister having been held prisoner by various terrible families, but can empathize with ragtag soldiers who fight for one of those terrible families is bewildering. Yes, a little girl was stupid enough to believe that they wouldn't harm her father if she played ball. In fact, everyone did until Joffery took it upon himself to have Ned Stark killed in an impromptu display of authority. That's not really hard to believe, and frankly understandable.
You're not an angry little girl whose major life lesson for the past few years, as you went from pre-teen to young adolescent without the guidance of any kind of responsible parental figure, was: "you really don't have to compromise on anything at all if you really don't want to." Arya's also so profoundly inexperienced in any non-martial form of diplomacy, that what Catelyn Stark and all her advisors easily recognized as Lannister threats sent through written by her Stark child under duress, she apparently reads as a totally viable and fairly well-hidden trap, by Sansa, that could have presented a very credible danger of tricking Robb into compliance.
Think that's a stretch? Thinking: Maybe politics isn't exactly Arya's strong suit, but surely she cant be
that absolutely god-awful at it?
She totally is, though.
Remember when the whole thing started? Was because Arya
completely misread the room when Sansa was dealing with her Northern Lords, and began to suspect that Sansa might be starting to feel disloyal towards Jon Snow, the bastard half-brother whom, if we're been honest, she'd always looked down upon and been kind've a bitch to when they were children. How she told Sansa she'd have dealt with the vassal problem, instead: "They can't [
not provide us with troops] if they have no heads!" The girl
sucks at this kind of thing. And, let's face it, nobody seemed to think that her shitty diplo skills were all that out of character for her until Littlefinger started taking advantage of them.
tl;dr Arya's not as smart as you - a number of you - seem to think she is. Getting really good at sneaking around and killing people didn't magically make her any better at everything (or even
almost anything) else.
To talk for a second about Sansa and Arya and you guys having the issue with her threatening to kill Sansa
She told her sister about the lying game. She admitted she can tell when someone is lying or telling the truth. She's intentionally being vague for the sake of making a point to Sansa. That's why she gives Sansa the knife. The ball is in her court now to do whatever she's going to do.
Arya trusts her sister to do the right thing. She's laying it all out on the table now and telling her the whole truth. Maybe Sansa doesn't understand everything fully, but she knows Arya isn't to be fucked with and that there's more going on with her than she's given her credit for. I give LF one more episode. Sansa has her head on her shoulders properly, there's no way she tries to go against Arya.
I read it differently. Consider, order of events:
- Sansa gets freaked out by her sister, decides to go through her stuff, gets
more freaked out by her sister
- Sansa goes to Baelish with the problem, so it's obvious that she has nobody more trustworthy she can turn to
- Baelish: "Nooo!
Surely Arya wouldn't do that!"
- Sansa: "[Reasons that's not necessarily true]"
- Baelish: "And your vassals aren't all
that unreliable."
- Sansa: "[Reasons why they are, pretty compelling argument really]"
- Baelish: "Well, what about Brienne?" (good lead)
- Baelish: "She's supposed to help you as well, right?" (oh shit, right, Brienne's probably gonna be more on Arya's side, 'cause of her knight honor and her principles and their swordswoman-buddy bond, Sansa realizes)
- Sansa: "She is."
- Baelish: "So if
one of you made a move against
the other, she'd stop you, right?"
- Sansa: [troubled]"...she would."
[END SCENE]
[OPEN NEXT WINTERFELL SCENE]
Sansa: "Brienne, here's a dubious reason to make you go very, very far away from me. Please and thank you."
Brienne: "But I'm supposed to be your bodyguard, not your ambassador."
Sansa: "Please leave."
Brienne: "I guess Podrick could sub in for me..."
Sansa: "Fuck that. Get out, take him with you."
Inb4 Sansa makes a play, something goes terribly wrong, Arya realizes she was right about her sister all along, she retaliates, tragedy and chaos ensue, and nobody wins but Baelish.
Or maybe... Bran could be useful, instead?
He rode off just fine with both Bran and Meera when they were running from the wights last season, and I'd assume Bran and Meera together weigh at least as much as Jon.
Maybe it's not the wights that concern him, but rather the cold, in Jon's case? Jon barely made it back to the Wall in time as it was, and he'd left the AotD well behind him.