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Why did the wights attack en masse only at The Fist


Mulled Wino

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Obviously the Fist was treacherous per Ghost, but why dont we hear about any other large scale wight attacks?

Kind of. There were apparently 100's of Others approaching the camp where Thistle and Varamyr died. The ice mist was so cold that Varamyrs hand stuck to the floor.

Dunno if that's any help to you.

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Obviously the Fist was treacherous per Ghost, but why dont we hear about any other large scale wight attacks?

The others are smart and were trying to weaken the force at the wall, I would assume the smaller groups are just raiding parties to grow the forces,

But even the attack on sam gilly or the attack on bran at the cave were pretty big no ?

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I think it was because the Fist was the only place north of the Wall where the Night's Watch were gathered en masse themselves. I like to think that the White Walkers consider the Night's Watch a threat because of ancient history and have yet to realize how far the Order has fallen in current times. If that is true, the White Walkers would address any concentrated Night's Watch presence they could.

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The others are smart and were trying to weaken the force at the wall, I would assume the smaller groups are just raiding parties to grow the forces,

But even the attack on sam gilly or the attack on bran at the cave were pretty big no ?

seemed a lot smallee to me. is it onlt because the nw backed themselves into a corner or is there evidence that the fist is special?

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The Others may have wanted to make the Wildlings fuck up the Night's Watch and/or Wall in their attempts to flee south, which almost happened, rather than destroying them outright as soon as they could.

Interesting...This would definitely imply that the Others have a mind for strategy. It could be possible that their plan was to terrorize the Wildlings in order to drive Mance south and clash with the Watch. For the Others, this would mean two birds, one stone. A Watch/Wildling war would garner a lot of corpses so the Others get more forces. Such a fight would also weaken both Wildling and Watch and make them vulnerable and easy targets to just trample over them.

Jon thwarted this by combining Wilding forces with the Watch in the end. Ooops, sorry Others, plan didnt work. At least not the way they wanted.

Now this part of my post veers into Heresy territory, but what if the Others caught wind of Mance's possible finding of the Horn of Jormund? Maybe they banked on Mance actually having the Horn (since the Others themselves couldnt find it) and blowing the Wall down? And that they factored that into their plan to chase the Wildlings southward? Hmmmm.....

As for why attack the Fist, well hurrr..weaken the Watch even further!

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I think it was because the Fist was the only place north of the Wall where the Night's Watch were gathered en masse themselves. I like to think that the White Walkers consider the Night's Watch a threat because of ancient history and have yet to realize how far the Order has fallen in current times. If that is true, the White Walkers would address any concentrated Night's Watch presence they could.

I like this idea :agree:

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I assumed that increasing concentrations of White Walkers just reflect the progress of the season. The closer we get to Winter proper, the more White Walkers.

Feast takes place in late autumn. To my mind, that attack of White Walkers was the zombie equivalent of the first cold snap.

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The Others knew the NW wouldn't know how to fight back, while they knew that the Wildlings would know, and might even be able to defeat the wight army - unlikely yes, but possible.

I don't think they much care about strategy or tactics though. I figure they saw the NW and just kept forcing their meatshield army up the hill. Maybe they care about the NW and it's ancient history with them, but who knows?

It might just be hard for them to control that many of their wights at the same time.

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Interesting...This would definitely imply that the Others have a mind for strategy. It could be possible that their plan was to terrorize the Wildlings in order to drive Mance south and clash with the Watch. For the Others, this would mean two birds, one stone. A Watch/Wildling war would garner a lot of corpses so the Others get more forces. Such a fight would also weaken both Wildling and Watch and make them vulnerable and easy targets to just trample over them.

Jon thwarted this by combining Wilding forces with the Watch in the end. Ooops, sorry Others, plan didnt work. At least not the way they wanted.

Now this part of my post veers into Heresy territory, but what if the Others caught wind of Mance's possible finding of the Horn of Jormund? Maybe they banked on Mance actually having the Horn (since the Others themselves couldnt find it) and blowing the Wall down? And that they factored that into their plan to chase the Wildlings southward? Hmmmm.....

As for why attack the Fist, well hurrr..weaken the Watch even further!

Yeah, that's about what I think too. We can already assume that the Others are intelligent though. They use very elaborate armor and weapons, speak to each Other, laugh at Ser Waymar when he tries to fight them etc.

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So nothing special about the Fist itself?

It was an old ringfort of the First Men... maybe it had many more stashes of obsidian weapons buried there than the one Sam found, and the Others wanted to stop the Night's Watch from discovering them?

But the simplest explanation is that they just saw an easy way of destroying most of the Watch's best troops in a single go.

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It sits high above the forest surrounding it. The wights would have been able to see the fires and gauge how many men there were there by the fire light.

It was either a military strategy or it was a lucky coincidence that the Fist was in the path of an army of walking dead.

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It sits high above the forest surrounding it. The wights would have been able to see the fires and gauge how many men there were there by the fire light.

It was either a military strategy or it was a lucky coincidence that the Fist was in the path of an army of walking dead.

I've long wondered if they were gathering their army to go after Rayder's people and the NW was in the way or if they were waiting to see what Rayder was going to do and just happened to run into the NW and decided to take them out while they were there.

I've long felt the latter is more likely - Rayder could have been pinned in the Frostfells and destroyed in one massive attack if they were trying to kill him in one go. I believe Giantsbane makes a comment about how the wights have been unusually rare.

Ultimately, we know so few facts. How many wights can the Others control at any given time? How long can a body remain "wighted"? Is it difficult to control a wight? Do they need to be controlled at all?

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One point to consider is Puddles: After he is killed, the attacks of the wights pretty much ceased. It is possible that he was the only White Walker in th area and coordinated the entire attack. Without him the wights were reduced to "instincts" instead of a military campaign.

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Ultimately, we know so few facts. How many wights can the Others control at any given time? How long can a body remain "wighted"? Is it difficult to control a wight? Do they need to be controlled at all?

Thats really the question of the day isnt it? How intelligent are the Others and how they control the wights. They obviously use a form of magic to make wights but how do they control them? Is it some weird form of skinchanging? Only much more fragmented and numerous? I think they are controlled somehow cuz they seem to know when and where to attack.

The evidence to that seems to be in AGoT. Perhaps the Others planted those rangers in Benjen's party in order to ambush the Watch. They were going directly after Mormont. I believe it was after this that they put Plan B into effect. They were already corralling the Wildlings out of their villages and shit so they may have been all "lets get these wildlings out of here." (since Mance was getting ready to attack the Wall anyway) but after the attempt on Mormont, it became "lets just have the wildlings fuck up the Watch as well. Send more wights. Mwahaha." So im pretty sure the wights are controlled somehow. Maybe like skinchangers/wargs, Others can "see" through the wights, hence why their eyes are ice blue.

I think a future Jon and/or Bran POV will shed some light on this.

EDIT:

One point to consider is Puddles: After he is killed, the attacks of the wights pretty much ceased. It is possible that he was the only White Walker in th area and coordinated the entire attack. Without him the wights were reduced to "instincts" instead of a military campaign.

I am loving the idea of Lord Commander Puddles, kthnxbye.

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One point to consider is Puddles: After he is killed, the attacks of the wights pretty much ceased. It is possible that he was the only White Walker in th area and coordinated the entire attack. Without him the wights were reduced to "instincts" instead of a military campaign.

"Puddles"???

LOL

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So nothing special about the Fist itself?

I do think there's something specific about the Fist itself, but the fact that the men were closely stationed for a prime attack en masse is a good explanation for why it happened the way it did.

First, Ghost behaves very strangely when he gets to the Fist. Ghost is always calm around wights, whereas other animals flip out around them. The opposite seems to happen at the Fist; Jon first tries 3 times to get Ghost to walk up, and all three times Ghost won't come. Ghost comes in a 4th time and gets into the Ringfort and starts going crazy and leaves again. Ghost comes into the Ringfort finally to summon Jon to the stash of dragonglass, but again, Ghost is not shown to stay. I think there's something curious about the place that Ghost senses (some of the ravens do as well, but not the other animals). Some have suggested simply that Ghost was sensing the impending danger of the wight attack, but I disagree somewhat; the direwolves do not separate themselves from their partners when they sense danger, but try to stay near their familiar. Ghost's behavior might suggest that there's something more to the Fist itself.

I think the Ringfort is interesting. Ringforts aren't fortresses or tall walls; they are passive defense systems. They're circular enclosures to delimit cities/ dwelling circles inside. Jon thinks of the Ringfort as a historical battle ground, and there may well have been battles fought there, but a ringfort itself is a seat of political power. The wall itself was a passive defense system to hinder easy theft of livestock and the like from the outside. My guess is that the Fist was some sort of a city with a king in the past that came to some tragic end. So I think it might be an ancient city that suffered some sort of terrible tragedy (I speculate that it involved ice magic/ becoming Others, but this is really crackpot and not a necessary conclusion to the notion that something wiped out this ancient city that might still be percolating there). The other thing I've considered is that it could be a necropolis, like a series of barrows delimiting a city of the dead, which could hold special power as well (as we know, "the bones remember").

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