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Game of Thrones Season 8 |OT| A Song of Icy and Fiery Fandom

Fox Mulder

Member
Are we to believe that the Golden Company, the Iron fleet, and the remaining Lannister’s are going to pose more of a threat than a tsunami of wights, undead giants, ice magic and an undead dragon?

They'll be a threat as Dany's massive army was heavily decimated in the fight.
 

bitbydeath

Member
Why wasn’t it ever mentioned or considered for battle to take out the other generals?

Didn’t they already discover last season that killing one of them takes out a large portion of the undead?
 

Cunth

Fingerlickin' Good!
the most disappointing thing about this battle was the lack of consequences for the principle cast, nobody who survived got maimed

they should be a bloody mess after that, it's not the long night i wanted
i like how jamie and brienne and others were just standing around stabbing people for an hour or so backed up against a wall
 

bitbydeath

Member
And that’s why the NK held them back but everyone keeps whining about it

They only targeted the NK though and didn’t let anyone know about the generals. If they had an army come from behind they could have taken them out or even just send the dragons to burn them.
 

bigedole

Member
I am confident you have nothing to worry about.

Game of Thrones is not a show that likes killing off popular and important characters.

You can no longer trust in this. It was only a show that liked killing off popular and important characters when it was following GRRM's story. That ended with season 6, and it's clearly no longer true for the show since then.
 

Dacon

Banned
The most glaring part of the episode, is Arya teleporting behind the Night King. It just doesn't make any sense for her to manage to sneak right in front of all the wights and white walkers without any of them doing anything about it.
 
No. Jacquen wore Arya’s face as she kept tearing off his masks.

That was for training. The masks are faces of people who died.

The Faceless Men cure the faces of the dead who come to die in their sanctuary, hanging these skins in deep vaults below the temple as masks, which they use to disguise themselves during assassination contracts. However, these are more than simple leather masks. The wearer drinks a tart-flavored potion and their face is cut, causing blood to stream over their features; when the new face is applied, it is moistened by the blood, becoming soft and supple. The magic causes the wearer to look exactly like the original person's appearance, including broken teeth or other injuries. (Though they themselves cannot tell the difference, sensing only their own face and features.) When the face is first applied, the wearer may experience some of the memories of the dead person, and may dream those memories as nightmares.[4]

The Faceless Men also use sorcerous glamors and mummers' tricks to help their disguises. Clothing, taken from the dead and stored in the vaults of the House, can be found to match the disguise.[4]


 
Did you miss a large portion of of the series where Arya is training to become an unseen/unheard silent assassin?


All I saw was she was beaten with a stick and then she left. In this episode she barely Solid Snaked her way out of the library. Am I supposed to buy her sneaking past 500 zombies and their commanders?
The library scene should have been different, at least.
 
It could have been a good episode if some actual characters had died.
At least two or three deaths from a pool of characters like Sam, Sansa, Podrick, Brienne, Davos, Gendry, Varys, Missandei and Grey Worm would have been acceptable. For them ALL to survive makes the undead seem much less threatening. I like Sam a lot as a character, but how the fuck did he survive on the front lines!? lol. For a brief moment, I thought Tyrion and Sansa were going to kill each other somehow, to avoid suffering from the undead, but nothing came of that either. Maybe they'll get re-married now?
I really expected the Night King to win, or at least not be completely defeated in one episode too. Aryas stealth skills didnt seem all that godly when she was moving around in the library, so Im not sure how she got into a position to move on the King the way she did, but whatever. The dagger hand switch was a nice move.
It was also nice to see Theon get redemption.
 

Atrus

Gold Member
They'll be a threat as Dany's massive army was heavily decimated in the fight.

I figure Dany has about 1,000 men left at most vs around 52, 000 for Cersei (22,000 Golden Company, 20,000 Lannister/Kings Guard, and 10,000 Ironborn).

The odds are still tilted in Dany’s favour since she has 2 flying, fire breathing dragons, 1 Uber assassin whose kill list includes Cersei Lannister, and 90% of the characters with plot armor representing the smartest plotters and most capable fighters in Westeros.

The Dragons alone could allow most people to crush the opposition in the open.

This is why the plot will be in for a heap of stupid on par with running Dothraki cavalry straight into an immeasurable wall of undead.

We’ll probably find out that the Golden company can shoot the wings off a fly with ballistas and Arya has ptsd that renders her unable to kill.

In order to rescue our idiot heroes we’ll get a sudden appearance of Dornish fighters, second sons, Vale knights and the greater part of the Dothraki army still in Essos because why not?
 

RedVIper

Banned
Turns out game of thrones is the dark souls 1 of TV shows. The first half is amazing, and then it goes to shit.

The plot makes no sense, the battle was worse than the ones we got previously, I'm not going to go into the tactics because fuck it really, westworld has the same problem, millions of dollars of budget and they can't hire 1 guy who knows something about military? Or do they know and just do wtv looks good on camera? Not sure which is worse. That's not how you use cavalry ffs.

The NK doesn't do battle because he doesn't want to expose himself, makes sense, smart, but then he goes into winterfell when there's still a bunch enemies there, turns out he's just as dumb as the humans, why not sit back eating a snowcone while your huge fucking army kills everyone?

I'm pretty disappointed, the deus ex machina ending is just...huh, why do writers feel the need to put themselves in a position where they need to come up with something that makes zero fucking sense to get out off.

I know it's unlikely the books will ever be finished, by I can only hope they do, and that they're better than this.
 

prag16

Banned
Didn't watch last night's episode yet. But caught a MASSIVE fucking spoiler in the goddamn title of an article that showed up as 'recommended' from the Google app in a notification on my phone. In the TITLE of the fucking article. For fuck's sake.

Still looking forward to watching it tonight, but god damn.
 

Fbh

Member
After watching some of it again I like it less.

Seriously, what was really the point of the entire battle? Of the entire last season of getting everyone together to fight?. Of all the deaths this chapter? What did literally anyone apart from Arya and maybe Bran accomplish ?
If the humans had actually put up a fight and thus forced the Night King to come to the frontlines it would have felt earned. If they had maybe isolated and killed one of the generals and allowed Arya to take his face it would have felt earned, If they had at very least served as some sort of distraction it would have felt earned. But the way things play out it feels like they could have accomplished the exact same thing by falling back and leaving Bran and Arya alone in Winterfel.... with zero casualties.
Seems like the Night King wanted to execute Bran personally no matter what, so had there been no army the final scenario of Bran alone surrounded by White Walkers and facing the Night King would have happened anyway, and Arya would have been able to make her magic naruto ninja assassination anyway since apparently she is good enough that the entire area being swarmed by enemies is hardly an inconvenience

Since the DD's mention that they've known Arya kills the NK for years now. Apparently it was one of GRRM's bulletpoints. This is brought up in the "After the Episode" interviews. I would love to someday see how he handles it and the Others on as a whole in the books.

One day... I am sure... please GRRM?...

Wait... so they had YEARS to think about a scenario in which Arya takes down what they have been building up to be one of the main threats in the show and the best they could come up with was "She makes some anime dash jump out of nowhere and kills him" ????
 
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Can I just get one thing cleared up.

Why does the red woman perish after the battle? Was her magic tied to the elvish snow dude/night king?

Overall it seemed fine. Movie length episode to close a major story arc. Now we can get on to the rest.

Wait... so they had YEARS to think about a scenario in which Arya takes down what they have been building up to be one of the main threats in the show and the best they could come up with was "She makes some anime dash jump out of nowhere and kills him" ????

Doesn't Arya have magical stealth dash powers? She acquired them when she sold her soul to the many faced god dude. Jumping in from a tree branch was her best bet.
 
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Dacon

Banned
Did you miss a large portion of of the series where Arya is training to become an unseen/unheard silent assassin?

Yes, because all I remember is her getting beaten by a stick and taking some peoples faces. Even then, why would those so called skills work on the most powerful supernatural creatures in the world? It's stupid.

She would literally have had to have materialized out of nowhere for anyone to not notice and do something about her attack on the Night King.

Can I just get one thing cleared up.

Why does the red woman perish after the battle? Was her magic tied to the elvish snow dude/night king?

No, literally all we got to point to her death was her saying she was gonna die.
 
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Fbh

Member
Why does the red woman perish after the battle? Was her magic tied to the elvish snow dude/night king?

My take was that since she seems to be all about about destiny and the predefined role everyone has, once she fulfilled her own she finally wanted to rest.

Also the writers probably didn't know what to do with her moving forward but needed to close her story somehow


Yes, because all I remember is her getting beaten by a stick and taking some peoples faces. Even then, why would those so called skills work on the most powerful supernatural creatures in the world? It's stupid.

Also this.
Can someone point me towards the episode where we see her train and evolve in a way that make it realistic for her to not only be one of the best fighters in the world but also a stealth god?

All I remember was her having a bad time, getting beaten by sticks, walking around blind for a while and then killing that one other girl and then from one chapter to the other she became the undisputed killing god of westeros
 
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My take was that since she seems to be all about about destiny and the predefined role everyone has, once she fulfilled her own she finally wanted to rest.

Also the writers probably didn't know what to do with her moving forward but needed to close her story somehow

Could it be that she asked too much of the lord of light in one day? She did use her powers on a very large scale, twice. That may have necessitated a sacrifice.
 

Arkage

Banned
I honestly amazed at how many people here thought that the Night King was going to live past this episode. This was a pure win or die situation for all of those in Winterfell. There's no tactical retreat from the Army of the dead. We've already seen with hardholme that they will just swamp you at speed. As for the Dothraki, they're entire purpose as Cavalry was shock and awe. Against the Lannisters, they were devasting against infantry, which was why when seeing them basically get snuffed out when they went up the Night King's army is such a bone-chilling sequence. It conveys firstly how truly deep in number his army is and secondly how formidable they are. Those Dothraki probably just got 10 ranks deep and couldn't get out again before they got swamped. It is when Danys basically sees them get obliterated that she deviates from the plan and flies off on Drogon that things truly start to go wrong.

Many didn't think the NK would show up as there's no actual reason he needed to personally be there in the open. I liked that they made it an all-or-nothing battle, but placing it mid season instead of end-season is dumb as shit, as now we're going to end up with a finale based around more yawnworthy lannister fuckery that's been there done that for 7 seasons now.
 
Many didn't think the NK would show up as there's no actual reason he needed to personally be there in the open. I liked that they made it an all-or-nothing battle, but placing it mid season instead of end-season is dumb as shit, as now we're going to end up with a finale based around more yawnworthy lannister fuckery that's been there done that for 7 seasons now.

Yeah but isn't the 'who will inherit the 7 kingdoms crown' sort of the central point of a series called 'game of thrones'? And besides future battles will be more strategic/interesting. The undead army had no tactic, just wave swarm everything.
 
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Teletraan1

Banned
Yes, because all I remember is her getting beaten by a stick and taking some peoples faces. Even then, why would those so called skills work on the most powerful supernatural creatures in the world? It's stupid.

She would literally have had to have materialized out of nowhere for anyone to not notice and do something about her attack on the Night King.

She is a legit assassin. Even Jon Snow commented on how she snuck up on him in episode 1 of this season. The night king was controlling all of those people in that courtyard. They were essentially standing down because he probably felt like he had won. Even 3ER wasn't going to be able to stop him even if he could see the past and the present, I repeat the past AND the present. I hear that is huge. Arya even being as good as she was still got caught in mid air so it wasn't like she flew in and got a clean kill on him.
 

GAMETA

Banned
They should've retreated, left Bran to be captured (and used him for some lore ffs), set Winterfell on fire and head south.

After miserable weeks being chased by the others, they'd arrive at King's Landing only to be met by Cersei's army. After some convolution and some deaths, Jaime would kill Cersei (now the Queen Slayer) and take control over the Lannister army.

Arya could then kill Euron using Cersei's face, and hand the fleet to Asha.

The final battle, second round against Death, would then follow.


The white walkers were supposed to be the greatest threat to humanity, this episode was stupid as fuck.
 
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Fbh

Member
They should've retreated, left Bran to be captured (and used him for some lore ffs), set Winterfell on fire and head south.

After miserable weeks being chased by the others, they'd arrive at King's Landing only to be met by Cersei's army. After some convolution and some deaths, Jaime would kill Cersei (now the Queen Slayer) and take control over the Lannister army.

Arya could then kill Euron using Cersei's face, and hand the fleet to Asha.

The final battle, second round against Death, would then follow.


The white walkers were supposed to be the greatest threat to humanity, this episode was stupid as fuck.

-Make everyone except for Arya and Bran leave and march towards Kingslanding or something.

- Arya and Bran take care of the Night King because seriously, take out the entire human army from this chapter, how would it have played out any differently?.

-The North now still has it's massive army which puts them on a more even ground against Cersei

-Profit?
 

prag16

Banned
Yeah but isn't the 'who will inherit the 7 kingdoms crown' sort of the central point of a series called 'game of thrones'? And besides future battles will be more strategic/interesting. The undead army had no tactic, just wave swarm everything.
No, I agree with Arkage. My whole problem with this was that the Whitewalkers have been cast as a profound existential threat since episode one of season one. And the past two seasons Jon Snow has been going on and on about how the petty squabbling over the throne doesn't even matter by comparison. And now in one episode all that's gone, and we get no further lore regarding the Night King, the Whitewalkers, their raison d'etre, why they turned on those forest nymph people or whatever they were in the first place.

And maybe I missed a lot of shit, but why does the Night King need to personally go after Bran and expose himself like that? Because the plot demanded it I guess. None of it makes any damn sense. Now we're gonna get three more episodes of Cersei sneering at whoever's left in the North (somehow hardly anybody important died after all that aside from a very select few) because the Night King has a glass jaw and died like a chump. Sweet.
 
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Nitty_Grimes

Made a crappy phPBB forum once ... once.
The most glaring part of the episode, is Arya teleporting behind the Night King. It just doesn't make any sense for her to manage to sneak right in front of all the wights and white walkers without any of them doing anything about it.

He (NK) stood them all down didn’t he when he got to Brann? They were all just stood there and even in the other parts of Winterfell, the dead were just stood there in kind of a trance?
 

12Goblins

Lil’ Gobbie
God, that was dumb. Overall well made episode with good pacing, but can they not hire good writers?.. Arya coming out of nowhere was the biggest cop out I've ever seen. This episode felt like I was watching DBZ, absolutely retarded
 
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bitbydeath

Member
God, that was dumb. Overall well made episode with good pacing, but can they not hire good writers?.. Arya coming out of nowhere was the biggest cop out I've ever seen. This episode felt like I was watching DBZ, absolutely retarded

What DBZ is oscar worthy compared to this.
This is D&D hitting the fast forward button because they’re done with the show and have been since they ran out of book material.
 

ruvikx

Banned
Did you miss a large portion of of the series where Arya is training to become an unseen/unheard silent assassin?

This might be so, but within the context of the events in the episode it's still jarring. Arya goes from effortlessly & acrobatically (Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon Style) slaying enemies on the Winterfell battlements, literally like a Jedi. She's surrounded by hundreds & doesn't really break a sweat... until she's forced to flee & hide in the library, where far fewer walkers stalk her & pin her down, i.e. Arya's supreme combat skills suddenly disappear & she becomes a child again (except for one moment when she produces a lightening quick stab move on a walker she bumps into). That entire library sequence is a traditional horror scene (Jurassic Park kitchen stuff) basically within a larger battle scene. The Hound comes to her rescue & they barely escape. They're then trapped with Melisandre & Beric dies.

Next? We don't see it, but suddenly all the thousands of walkers between Arya & the Night King pose no problem (unlike that handful in the library...) & she produces a Rey Last Jedi "drop weapon & grab with opposite hand" attack move.



That's just one of the many issues in the episode.
 

MastAndo

Member
He (NK) stood them all down didn’t he when he got to Brann? They were all just stood there and even in the other parts of Winterfell, the dead were just stood there in kind of a trance?
The one white walker reacts to the gust of wind that Arya causes when she runs (or jumps?) by them, which to me would indicate some level of awareness and not a complete zombie trance.

I really wish some explanation of the end sequence would make me not hate it so much, but I haven't heard one yet. Yes, I understand that Arya has trained all these years and has become a super stealthy assassin of the highest ability, but these are highly formidable supernatural forces here that are suddenly minimized to dopey, inept villains solely to create a nice, neat ending to the battle.

Arya's supreme combat skills suddenly disappear & she becomes a child again (except for one moment when she produces a lightening quick stab move on a walker she bumps into).
On the "Inside the Episode", the creators of the show explained that as being the result of her hitting her head, and losing her bearings a bit and thus losing her combat abilities. Basically, they wanted to have her regress to the more childlike, pre-ninja Arya for this scene.
 
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Cunth

Fingerlickin' Good!
Yeah that Arya horror scene made zero sense. Everyone I talked to at work today was pissed at this episode
 

Kadayi

Banned
Many didn't think the NK would show up as there's no actual reason he needed to personally be there in the open. I liked that they made it an all-or-nothing battle, but placing it mid-season instead of end-season is dumb as shit, as now we're going to end up with a finale based around more yawn-worthy lannister fuckery that's been there done that for 7 seasons now.

Many were wrong then. NK made it his personal ambition to kill the last 3-eyed Raven himself in the Door episode, no real reason to think he'd do otherwise this time around for the current 3-eyed Raven. Bran even says 'He's coming for me' and the fact that the NK has gone after all the 3-eyed Ravens before him.

The one white walker reacts to the gust of wind that Arya causes when she runs (or jumps?) by them, which to me would indicate some level of awareness and not a complete zombie trance.

I really wish some explanation of the end sequence would make me not hate it so much, but I haven't heard one yet. Yes, I understand that Arya has trained all these years and has become a super stealthy assassin of the highest ability, but these are highly formidable supernatural forces here that are suddenly minimized to dopey, inept villains solely to create a nice, neat ending to the battle.

Pretty sure she's coming down from the trees because they're in the Gods wood (there's more than the one tree there). She waited until the NK was on his own before striking.

Yeah that Arya horror scene made zero sense. Everyone I talked to at work today was pissed at this episode

But don't you work in a brewery? :unsure:

Why does the red woman perish after the battle? Was her magic tied to the elvish snow dude/night king?

No need for spoilers, we are in the spoiler thread. My view is that using magic on that level irrevocably drained her. Magic always has a cost.
 
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MastAndo

Member
Pretty sure she's coming down from the trees because they're in the Gods wood (there's more than the one tree there). She waited until the NK was on his own before striking.
That would make more sense, but I think the fact that right before she strikes, they show a White Walker's hair blow in the wind and had him look to the side as if something went past him is a strong indication that she just quickly ran/jumped through (somehow).
 
One cool detail that I actually noticed is that if you watch the ride of the rohirrim and the dothraki charge scenes back to back you can actually hear Benny Hill music in the latter.
 

Kadayi

Banned
That would make more sense, but I think the fact that right before she strikes, they show a White Walker's hair blow in the wind and had him look to the side as if something went past him is a strong indication that she just quickly ran/jumped through (somehow).

Movement from above.
 
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