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So why are the dead such a threat?


snow is the man

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4 minutes ago, snow is the man said:

mormonts knives were not dragon glass. 

They looked like dragonglass. When everyone else (except the ones who have flaming swords or Valyrian steel) switched to their smaller dragonglass weapons in the battle on the island, Jorah kept using the same daggers. D&D referred to them as dragonglass.

So… what makes you think they weren't dragonglass?

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5 minutes ago, falcotron said:

They looked like dragonglass. When everyone else (except the ones who have flaming swords or Valyrian steel) switched to their smaller dragonglass weapons in the battle on the island, Jorah kept using the same daggers. D&D referred to them as dragonglass.

So… what makes you think they weren't dragonglass?

They were dragonglass.

Otherwise he'd have been swinging that big sword on his waste.

Jorah went with his dragonglass daggers right out the gates.  The Hound turned to his after the hammer didn't work.  Thormund had a dragonglass axe type weapon.

They clearly were portraying that all the party had either Valyrian steel sword, flaming swords of fire or a dragonglass weapon.

You (not you) had to be trying to miss it intentionally in my opinion.

Nice catch falcontron......where did D&D confirm they were dragonglass?

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1 hour ago, snow is the man said:

mormonts knives were not dragon glass. 

Yes they were.  Look again. 

Specifically when the wight has him by the throat and the black dragonglass dagger is in his right hand.  

Why else, besides using dragonglass knives, would a skilled swordsman not use his sword?

Edit:  ah. @falcotron beat me to it, by like an hour.   Sheesh.  

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2 hours ago, Lord Okra said:

You (not you) had to be trying to miss it intentionally in my opinion.

Nice catch falcontron......where did D&D confirm they were dragonglass?

To be fair, if you don't crank up the brightness, it's way too easy to miss a lot of the subtler details.

But the fact that the only primary weapons that stayed in use with valyrian steel or on fire, should have suggested that the secondaries that were switched to weren't steel.

Especially since we see them loading crates of dragonglass onto the boat at Dragonstone.

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15 minutes ago, snow is the man said:

Also when did they say dragon glass kills the dead? we know they kill WW but I haven't heard them say it kills the dead. In fact in the book it specifically says that it doesn't. 

It appears as though dragonglass has such efficacy in the show-verse, however. At least, that's certainly what I've gotten out of the show.

I'm not sure it's been explicitly stated, but the alternative to "dragonglass is highly effective against the dead, much as it is against the White Walkers themselves" is "everyone except Jon, Beric, and Thoros, was stupid for using dragonglass instead of steel". Also, it was pretty clearly shown that dragonglass works as a one-hit kill against the dead, presumably via disrupting/dispelling/breaking the magics used to reanimate the dead by the White Walkers. For the Show-verse, if not the book-verse.

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3 hours ago, snow is the man said:

uh we see at the fist of the first in the books that one takes a spear in the chest and moves up the spear to kill the man who had thrust the spear. We see these things happen alot in the books and not all of them were recently dead. I don't think benjen went into the army of the dead just hit those that he found outside of the horse that were in small groups. Also they did catch fire pretty easily but took a little bit to die.

To clarify, I meant that in the books the Wights were recently dead when reanimated.  It's been ages since I read the books but I don't remember GRRM ever having described a Wight as just a skeleton with bits of decayed flesh hanging off him here and there as we have seen in the show.

I disagree that we saw the Wights catch fire pretty easily.  Yes, the ones who were stabbed with or ran into Beric's sword caught fire, but when one caught fire we didn't see the fire spread to all the others near him or in contact with him (most notably, one burning Wight tried to save the captured one, was on top of him, but the flames didn't set the tied up Wight on fire).  If a creature is highly flammable, it follows that fire would spread quickly from one to the others if they are crowded together as they were in this scene.

It seems that D&D have deliberately decided to make the Wights less flammable in order for them to be harder to kill.

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Just now, storm.131 said:

To clarify, I meant that in the books the Wights were recently dead when reanimated.  It's been ages since I read the books but I don't remember GRRM ever having described a Wight as just a skeleton with bits of decayed flesh hanging off him here and there as we have seen in the show.

I disagree that we saw the Wights catch fire pretty easily.  Yes, the ones who were stabbed or ran into Beric's sword caught fire, but when one caught fire we didn't see the fire spread to all the others near him or in contact with him (most notably, one burning Wight tried to save the captured one, was on top of him, but the flames didn't spread to the tied up Wight).  If a creature is highly flammable, it follows that fire would spread quickly from one to the others if they are crowded together as they were in this scene.

It seems that D&D have deliberately decided to make the Wights less flammable in order for them to be harder to kill.

No but I think he mentioned one of the animals that was dead had huge chunks missings and was a bit rough looking. That said the wights in the books are made to look more like people then walking skeletons. But I think that the magic in them keeps them from rotting so they wouldn't be walking skeletons like in the show. Also the wight that when lit on fire tried to get on top of the one they caught did that I think it was him trying to kill the tied up wight so they couldn't take it (not sure why they would care if jon and crew did but I think that is what the show runners were going for) Also it did light on fire to some degree but jon put it out before it could really start. I agree though that in the books they are way more flammable. I believe jon described it as going up in flames like old paper

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6 minutes ago, Kytheros said:

It appears as though dragonglass has such efficacy in the show-verse, however. At least, that's certainly what I've gotten out of the show.

I'm not sure it's been explicitly stated, but the alternative to "dragonglass is highly effective against the dead, much as it is against the White Walkers themselves" is "everyone except Jon, Beric, and Thoros, was stupid for using dragonglass instead of steel". Also, it was pretty clearly shown that dragonglass works as a one-hit kill against the dead, presumably via disrupting/dispelling/breaking the magics used to reanimate the dead by the White Walkers. For the Show-verse, if not the book-verse.

Yes but what about at hardhome when tormound was using a regular sword just like alot of the other wildlings were. That thenn's blade was definetly not dragon glass. They were cutting up the dead left and right with those. I really wish they would mention this stuff in the show since the WW and their dead army are not the same thing

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Just now, snow is the man said:

Yes but what about at hardhome when tormound was using a regular sword just like alot of the other wildlings were. That thenn's blade was definetly not dragon glass. They were cutting up the dead left and right with those. I really wish they would mention this stuff in the show since the WW and their dead army are not the same thing

I think that was just dismembering the dead so that they're less of a threat/slowed down. I don't really remember - it's been a while since I watched Hardhome.

But yeah ... the show's conflated a lot of things.

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7 minutes ago, Kytheros said:

I think that was just dismembering the dead so that they're less of a threat/slowed down. I don't really remember - it's been a while since I watched Hardhome.

But yeah ... the show's conflated a lot of things.

No we see that women at hardhome stabbing them and killing them that way. I don't know it's just stupid. If there were all like that wight in season one that we see jon fight it would make them much more dangerous. which would go to my original point about them not being much of a threat anymore

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53 minutes ago, snow is the man said:

Also when did they say dragon glass kills the dead? we know they kill WW but I haven't heard them say it kills the dead. In fact in the book it specifically says that it doesn't. 

D&D changed that this season.  Probably for expediency as observed with the dagger stab instantly killing the zombear.  

I forgot about Hardhome.  Don't remember her using dragonglass on them at all. 

Theyre definitely not supposed to be useful against the wights because dragonglass is so brittle.  Hitting a bone or any armor would cause it to shatter... like glass.  

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45 minutes ago, snow is the man said:

No we see that women at hardhome stabbing them and killing them that way. I don't know it's just stupid. If there were all like that wight in season one that we see jon fight it would make them much more dangerous. which would go to my original point about them not being much of a threat anymore

That's ... disappointing.

I guess we'll just have to attribute Hardhome to a continuity error. Hopefully, anyways.

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15 hours ago, Kytheros said:

I'm not sure it's been explicitly stated, but the alternative to "dragonglass is highly effective against the dead, much as it is against the White Walkers themselves" is "everyone except Jon, Beric, and Thoros, was stupid for using dragonglass instead of steel".

Exactly.

This definitely contradicts the books (where we saw Sam use dragonglass against a wight and it just shatters on a bone). And it's definitely a deliberate change by D&D, probably not made until they were planning this season, and most likely motivated by them realizing it'll be easier to make cool CGI battle scenes with these rules rather than by any story-internal logic. But none of that means there's a "plot hole" or "bad writing". I think the show hasn't told us anything inconsistent with the show,* or internally implausible (within the limits of "corpses animated by magic" plausibility).

Wights aren't all that tough, but shock and blood loss aren't an issue, so it's hard to kill them with normal weapons. Dragonglass and dragonsteel both seem to disrupt the magic in some way, making them easier to kill. And fire, they're just more flammable than live people. That all sounds reasonable for fantasy magic zombies.

None of the characters knew wights were susceptible to dragonglass before this episode, because nobody had tried it. (This is different from the books, where everyone knows dragonglass is useless against them because of Sam.) Everyone started off with normal steel swords and hammers, and only switched to their dragonglass backup weapons (which they'd presumably brought in case they ran into a Walker) when they saw Jorah's daggers working much better than a steel dagger would. Now they know, so they'll use dragonglass in the future, but they didn't know in time for Hardhome, or the ranging missions.

---

* I think the battle in Hardhome was itself internally inconsistent, so there's no way for anything to be perfectly consistent with Hardhome… But that's not a problem with this episode, it's a problem with Hardhome.

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On 8/26/2017 at 6:17 AM, Mikkel said:

Well it's book-canon - but in the sense of an "in-world" history book. In other words, it's an unreliable source (even if it's probably better than most). It's the same as if Maester Aemon had stated those things, but there are many things Maester Aemon didn't know or understand fully, or even at all.

Yes, I forgot that it was supposed to be a history book written by a maester/maesters.

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On 21/8/2017 at 0:52 PM, the tower of albion said:

What intrigues me is what do they want?

The NK is doing what he was created for: Wiping all humans on Westeros. The fact that he kept enough personality to resent his creators and turn against them was a bug in his programming, but he still follows the main directive...

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  • 1 month later...

Well, taking out White Walkers will take out however many wights they produced, so there's that. I'm thinkin' Jon should invest heavily in obsidian arrows and marksmen, because those WWs aren't really taking cover or darting around much in battle - easy targets.

Second, they should start building some effing dragon armor (and, uh, dragon rider armor), because them mo'fos can crisp a thousand wights at a time, possibly taking out WWs as well.

That dang wight dragon, however, is going to be a problem. Did it really fly as fast as it did during the last episode? That was crazy! Still, Dany has two, and they're bigger, so they should be able to double team him.

Or just send in Arya, who will jump out from behind a flower pot and garrote the Night King and feed his testicles to Cersei. Problem solved.

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  • 1 month later...

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