screamin

Honestly, if Bronn really ends up getting to rule Highgarden and its huge population of "peasants who do what they're told" (as he remarked approvingly) because of a promise he extorted with a death threat, but was too cowardly to back up by fighting for the side that was to keep that promise, I will be SO pissed. The Queen of Thorns' people deserve better than that craven asshole.

Jon and Dany aren't on the same page in their romantic relationship, which Dany wants to resume and Jon is hanging back from. Jon went against Dany's express order (nearly an ultimatum) to tell Sansa and Arya about his parentage, apparently behind Dany's back. He's not on the same page with that either. And both happened without Sansa causing them. If Dany is as fanatical as Sansa thinks, then Jon put his own life in grave danger by telling the queen about his parentage and superior claim to the throne, and is compounding the danger by letting his relationship with Dany cool, thus letting her think his love is no longer a factor that would keep him from eventually reaching to take the throne. By telling Tyrion there is an alternative monarch available if the queen fucks things up, Sansa's putting potential allies in place to help Jon if he turns out to need them.

Yes...but. It just seems to me that Jon untruthfully telling the North that he HAD to give up his crown to Dany to save the North (thus making himself look better and Dany worse), Jon silently and smugly lapping up Tormund's fluffing of his dragonriding and kingship instead of giving due credit to Dany, Jon giving Sansa a weapon against Dany that she could use at any time she feels Dany is doing something too demanding and dangerous to her and hers - all these things look a lot more like sly Jon than stupid Jon. That he's just accidentally engineering an entire conspiracy to put him on the throne instead of Dany and is totally unaware he's doing it seems too much of a stretch to me. Mind you, I'm fully prepared to find out that I'm wrong, and that every thing I think may be a clever hint to the unexpected revelation of Jon's half-conscious complicity in Dany's fall is just sloppy writing on the part of the showrunners, and their preferred end is that Jon is EXACTLY the purehearted, sweet, innocent, too-stupid-to-live-yet-also-too-stupid-to-die bumbling paragon he currently gives the impression of being. I just think it might be more interesting if he had darker layers.

Regardless if it's true or not that ultimately Jon doesn't get the Iron Throne, a great deal of Dany's arc is powered by the assumption of a number of important characters that Jon would make a better ruler than Dany. I think it would be worse writing if Jon gave that impression to people and fortified the conspiracy against Dany by sheer inept accident instead of some sense of deliberate purpose.

I'm saying that having Jon trip and fall into power he genuinely didn't want at all pretty much by pure accident, by making mistakes that just happened to lead people to believe he'd be better suited for the crown (among them telling the North that Dany made him give up his crown to save the North when she didn't, for example) completely unintentionally - even though the result of telling Sansa about his superior claim to the throne would be quite predictably used against Dany sooner or later - makes Jon look like a naive idiot who shouldn't be trusted with scissors, much less an Iron Throne. That, IMO, would be worse writing than having Jon half-consciously choosing to do things that would make it more likely to have the throne given to him eventually.

I think that Sansa's worried that Dany won't even get that far - that she's riding her army and dragons too recklessly and will give Cersei a chance to best her and get Jon and his Northern army annihilated along with it - thus leaving Sansa in the position to have to go to the Vale and plead for Sweetrobin's alliance to save her and the North from Cersei - at whatever price he chooses to set. In the meantime, what if Dany and Jon have an especially acrimonious ex-lovers' quarrel on their way to KL and Dany decides that having Jon's claim hanging over her head when she no longer has his heart isn't worth the trouble, and she arranges for Jon to have a 'heroic death in battle?'

Jon would've tap-danced and stood idly watching while Ramsey shot Rickon in front of him? Not happening. And if Jon had shown up with superior forces, Ramsey could withdraw into WF, slam the gates behind him and let them besiege him for the next year or two, with Jon's forces at the mercy of LF AND the NK advancing all the while.

Lemuria posted an interesting video speculating about Jon's motives and future actions in the episode thread: Jon's choice to become Aegon I really like the idea that Jon is subconsciously making choices that further his own 'hints of ambition' as the video says, to eventually be handed the throne. He knows he's handed Sansa a weapon to use against Dany if she ever gives Sansa an order she can't abide, like, say, demanding too much in taxes, or too many men for further war, or ordering Sansa to marry someone she doesn't want to to secure their alliance for her kingdom - which, as queen, she has a perfect right to order Sansa to do. He'd know he's enabled Sansa to say, "Fuck you, you're not the real queen!" and raise the banners of rebellion. He may not realize that Sansa has so little confidence in Dany's command that she thinks they might well be beaten and slaughtered by Cersei if Dany's calling the shots, hence has decided to give the Hand of the Queen the knowledge that there's an alternative monarch available if the Queen fucks things up too badly. Then again, maybe Jon DOES realize it. Sansa saved his ass once by maneuvering behind his back because she didn't have enough confidence in his judgement; why shouldn't he expect her to do it again? And wouldn't it be far better optics and PR for Jon's future reign as king of the Iron Throne if he at first is seen to humbly refuse the kingdom and order his superior claim to be kept a secret, only to HAVE to accept the crown when his Queen shows her unfitness and the Queen's own men beg him to take the throne and save the kingdom? That makes him look a lot better than being another ambitious backstabbing fucker who vows fealty to his queen and then breaks the vow by declaring his own claim to the throne himself. Now I'm wondering if one of the final scenes will be Tyrion - either in public at his trial, or in private afterwards among the main cast members while awaiting his execution - doing a scene like the lawyer did at the end of The Caine Mutiny, (spoiler warning) when he explained that the man on trial who actually carried out the mutiny and his helpers I can imagine Dinklage as Tyrion eloquently pointing out one by one the things Jon said and did to subtly undermine Dany; his saying to the Northern Council that he nobly and self-sacrificially HAD to give up his crown to Dany to save the North when Dany demanded no such thing, his silent smug acceptance of the praise of his prowess and kingship in the victory celebration afterwards instead of crediting Dany for him, and finally his spreading the information about his superior claim among people he KNEW would probably use it sooner or later against the queen. I can also imagine Jon's face slowly crumbling into horror and guilt as he acknowledges that half-consciously he HAS been playing the Game of Thrones himself to a 'successful' conclusion, himself as the crowned victor, and Dany, who he still loves, as the loser. What happens after that? I don't know, maybe Jon rules on with the miserable knowledge that he needs to ALWAYS guard himself against his own venal, unworthy ambition, making him a more humane (if depressed) king of Westeros. Or maybe he melts down the Iron Throne and the remnants of the Seven Kingdoms make an alliance that will last a generation and let everyone heal, with the commoners getting a slightly greater hand in the rule (Gendry as an erstwhile commoner being sympathetic to that goal). The Starks go their separate ways, alive, sadder but wiser. I don't know that I'd call this a 'bittersweet' conclusion, unless you're looking at it from the point of view of the commoners who've been so damaged by the discredited Game of Thrones. Myself, I think I'd prefer the ending of Jon killing Dany's last dragon, and then (having wrecked their own power base in Westeros) the Targaryens reconcile and go off to Nath together to build their own house with a red door and use their remaining men to drive slavers away from the island for the rest of their days. I recognize, however, that's highly unlikely. I do think the 'Caine Mutiny' ending will be a lot more interesting and satisfying than the painful spectacle of Jon bumbling and falling ass-backwards into the Supreme Rule of Westeros despite his best intentions - he didn't mean to, really! It just happened that way! - and then ending on the assumption that such an arrant idiot would be a great king to Westeros ever after.

I really like the idea that Jon is subconsciously making choices that further his own 'hints of ambition' as the video says, to eventually be handed the throne. He knows he's handed Sansa a weapon to use against Dany if she ever gives Sansa an order she can't abide, like, say, demanding too much in taxes, or too many men for further war, or ordering Sansa to marry someone she doesn't want to to secure their alliance for her kingdom - which, as queen, she has a perfect right to order Sansa to do. He'd know he's enabled Sansa to say, "Fuck you, you're not the real queen!" and raise the banners of rebellion. Though, come to think of it, my further thoughts might be better suited to the Spoilers and Spec thread.

Don't see how. This is a dangerous secret. How does knowing it protect his family or benefit them?

Wow. I can totally see that happening with the showrunners' version of St. Tyrion the Martyr; apply one more coat of whitewash to differentiate his character further from dark Book Tyrion before putting the resulting noble statue on his tomb (ie, season 8 DVD case). If Dany dies, Jon can choose to consider Sansa's breaking of her promise as treason to the King; the King he was all along in a strictly legal sense, even while Dany was still alive. Whether Jon would do so and execute his own sister-cousin and be a King kin-slayer is another question. I would say no, but looking back at his execution of Olly (which I still think of as a brutal act which he wasn't strictly entitled to do if he considered himself not belonging to the Watch after the moment of his death), who knows? Your theory would be one way out of the conundrum.

Tormund's a Northerner, with no problem talking up Jon's dragonriding prowess and kingship in front of Dany. Yes, he's a wildling with no sense of tact and no allegiance to any monarch who doesn't win his own kingdom by wildling combat, but he's cheered a lot by others at the party. Not to mention Jon himself looks smug at the compliment and stays silent instead of turning to give gentlemanly credit to the woman who taught him to ride, who sits to one side feeling obviously devalued and ignored. (I still wish that there were some ambitious part of Jon that subconsciously was doing this sort of thing on purpose to maneuver closer to power. A conflicted schemer can be interesting - an man who does this sort of assholish thing over and over out of sheer obliviousness is just a schmuck). By the time Jon tells Sansa about the secret of his parentage, the whole 'in love' thing has already taken a serious hit. Jon has issues about continuing to have sex with his aunt. Dany's not going to stop being his aunt, and Jon is showing no particular disposition to get past that fact (like, say, checking with some maester about how permissable it is with dispensation to marry one's aunt). Dany has issues about Jon's claim to her throne that's supposedly better than her own. Jon is more popular among the Westerosi she's met than she is; if he decides to announce his claim, that popularity and his possession of a penis can make a fight of it among sexist Westerosi - AND she's given him one of her own dragons. Dany ALSO has issues with Jon's reluctance to resume their romance. It's not just about not getting laid regularly that's the problem - the best assurance she has that Jon won't turn against her and make his own claim to the throne is that Jon loves her and wouldn't do that to her. Make their relationship into a celibate, impossible one? That assurance is gone. And it goes both ways. WE know Jon wouldn't break fealty to Dany once he's given it. Sansa and Arya know it too. But they don't know Dany that well. They don't know whether she's honorable enough to refrain from ridding herself of a potential threat to her queenship like Jon and his claim are, even in the bitter aftermath of a love affair dissolving into cold angry suspicion.

I really don't think it was strategically a good idea for Dany to split her army in half and have her half outstrip the other half by hundreds of miles - since ships travel much faster than men on foot do. It weakens her forces and leaves them more vulnerable. The entire country between the North and KL hasn't been formally conquered by her; she doesn't know whether her land forces may run into local opposition they haven't been expecting and fall further behind, even if they manage to quash them and keep going...and that's before you put the unknown location of Euron's fleet in the equation.

But the Vale in supporting Sansa and helping kill Ramsey is in already in open rebellion against Cersei. The Vale has food, men and wealth - the North might be able to cobble an alliance of independents together against Cersei.

If Dany falls in battle to Cersei because she's running recklessly on furious reaction instead of cool, calm calculation, then Jon is likely to die in the same battle supporting the queen he swore to - along with whatever fighting men the North has left. Sansa may feel that "waiting till Cersei's defeated' will lead to that instead.

The North is now in greater danger of falling under the control of Cersei Lannister at the end of this last episode than it did before the start, with the latest dragon death and the naval defeat - and that had nothing to do with anything Sansa did. I think it's reasonable for Sansa to worry that Dany will snatch defeat from the jaws of victory for all of them at this point.

Honestly, I think she really meant what she said when she said she was worried that the men in her family don't fare well in the south. Presumably Jon told her that Dany knew that he was the true heir to the Iron Throne - but Dany's totally all right with that as long as he doesn't want the throne, really! I don't think Sansa would believe that any more than Dany believed that Sansa would be indifferent to the news that Jon was the heir. A person with a better title and claim to the throne than the actual monarch is always in some danger. I'm wondering about Sansa giving the news to Jaime and Brienne about the death of the dragon and Missandei. People on the episode thread had said that her smile was 'gloating' about the prospect of Cersei being burnt by dragonfire - but that was a possibility as soon as Dany set out for KL. Honestly, hearing that another dragon is dead and a battle lost before Dany even got to KL? I think to her, it's become a distinct possibility that Dany's going to lose the war and she's smiling bitterly about how fucked they ALL are now and she frickin' warned them, dammit...

Saying, "We covered that already," would have been a perfectly factual observation as well if it were true. She didn't make it.

You think Danaerys would have hesitated to say "We covered that already, were you napping?" to Sansa, if they HAD covered the issue of wounded men before Sansa brought it up? She didn't, though. She questioned Sansa more closely about the issues she brought up, instead of pointing out that they'd already gone over this. Since she was happy to insult Sansa and cast suspicions of treason on her when Sansa didn't immediately have an estimate regarding how much time soldiers need to recover from a major battle, I'd say it wasn't politeness that kept Danaerys from saying "We covered that already, were you napping?" to Sansa; it was the fact that no, they hadn't covered it. A human being can walk with a flesh wound in their leg for quite some way as well. But the person will be in pain and their endurance lessened, the flesh wound will likely be aggravated by this treatment, its healing will be delayed, and the longer a wound stays open, the greater the danger of infection and sepsis (no small issue in an antibiotic-free world). I really doubt that most armies would certify a human with a wound right through his leg as 'combat-ready' even if he was capable of walking on it. Besides, didn't someone on this thread say that Jon specifically said he wouldn't ride Rhaegal because he was wounded? I didn't hear that bit of dialogue myself, so I'm not really sure of it. But if it's so and Rhaegal is unrideable, then no, he's NOT combat ready. A rider is needed to direct the dragon away from danger and toward vulnerable areas to attack.

IA. Maybe she did believe at one time that she was pregnant, but quite possibly she's now discovered that she's actually terminally ill and wants to make sure she dies on the throne and everything gets destroyed before she's forced from it, like Rebecca in that Du Maurier novel.

If Sansa's only motive was 'to get rid of' Dany ASAP, she would never have brought up any reason to delay the moment Dany marches away from WF with her army. She did bring it up, because Northmen, including her own doofus brother, are marching away with her. If they're marching away exhausted and wounded, chances are that a lot fewer are going to eventually march home again than they would if they were marching in good shape...and the commander who chooses to march them in that condition is likelier not to win her battle. "Exhaustion" is not an easily objectively judged condition, true, but 'wounded' is. Wounds are quite visible, countable and qualifiable. We saw numbers of surviving soldiers covered in the meeting. We didn't see anyone discuss the condition of the survivors. If you're saying that the condition of the wounded soldiers was covered and Sansa just missed it, someone could have simply told her when she brought it up, "We mentioned that already, were you napping?" No one did. Instead the Queen delved into specifics of Sansa's remark, as if no one HAD brought it up. And we later saw the queen flying with her wounded child later, underlining that the concern about going wounded to battle is a real problem. Great GIF use, though.

I know, right?! Besides what I mentioned earlier regarding his false implication that Dany had made him give up his crown to save the North and his silent smiling acceptance of being praised as dragonrider and hailed as a king by Tormund and his followers in front of Dany without giving her credit, there's also his spreading of the news to his sisters that they're not in fact his sisters. Sansa's reaction is predictable enough in the light of her mutual distrust with Dany that it also makes me wonder if it's another half-conscious sabotage of Dany by Jon. Maybe GRRM has Jon come back from the dead darker and more ruthless, and that's GRRM's endpoint that the showrunners are half-assedly hinting at - but Show Jon is just coming off as innocently clueless in fanning the flames of the North's desire to have him as king. It would be interesting if Jon had an ambitious dark side he doesn't fully acknowledge even to himself. But to have him stumble into power because he's just too dumb to avoid it is just annoying.

I said nothing of the kind. You pooh-poohed the idea that Sansa could possibly be saying anything truthful in her report on the men's condition. I only pointed out that even Dany's dragon is severely wounded, which lends credibility to Sansa's report that many MEN are. As I said, I didn't claim that Sansa made a report about the dragons, so I didn't change the argument. If even the nearly-invulnerable dragon is seriously wounded by the attacks of wights, is it really a far-fetched assumption that many men are, too? I'm sure there are many men with lesser flesh wounds who could be in fighting shape with a few days to heal and make up for the blood they lost. Mmmyes, that WAS the sales talk of the slavemaster marketing his slaves as the nearly invulnerable, unfeeling robots he wants them to be thought of, to justify their high price. Regardless of whether it's true or not that their brutal training made them indifferent to exhaustion and being wounded, the fact is that they ARE flesh-and-blood humans and ought to be treated that way, both out of humaneness and out of simple practicality - they ARE vulnerable to disease and exhaustion like any human is; mistreat them too much and you will be out another experienced soldier. Not to mention that what supposedlly applies to the Unsullied does not apply to the Dothraki or the Northern soldiers, whether discussing exhaustion or wounds.

That would be weighing the odds in favor of Cersei, probably his least favored candidate on the board. If they'd got both dragons, it would be pretty much game over for Jon's side. Though since they've been writing everyone as having been hit with the Idiot Stick, I suppose it's possible.

If Varys is a traitor simply for communicating with Sansa against the Queen's wishes, then so is Jon, for telling Sansa something critical that Dany had specifically ordered him to keep to himself. It has to be something more specific done directly against her. Maybe nikma's right about it being poison, but seems to me Varys would remember it didn't work against Dany the first time it was tried way back in the first seasons. He might go for the more direct approach, the way Kevan was killed in the books.