obsessedwithjon

Yep, every time I heard one say earlier in the season that they wanted her to die, I would say, "Trust me. You want her alive."

This is what I have been saying non-stop since the show aired and people started asking about it.

I have been waiting so long for the FTW scene to get hints of what happens next and was utterly disappointed at the lack of any satisfying information there. However, regarding Mel, these posts have listed lot of ideas on why Mel booked it to Castle Black when she did. It's simple. In the show, she tells Stannis she knows he will win because she saw Bolton banners on the ground, but she doesn't see what banners are flying. In the book, she tells Jon that the Lord of Light never shows anything but the truth, but rather that the fallible reader might misunderstand them. (For example, in the book, her vision about the girl on the dying gray horse was accurate, but she wrongly interprets it as Arya.) So when she hears that half of Stannis' men have deserted, she realizes that she misunderstood this vision, that it is not Stannis who defeats the Boltons. She is not fleeing because she would be killed by Stannis' men; there are plenty of men at Castle Black who hate her too. She is on a mission to get back to Jon because finally some of her other visions make sense and she has to serve the Lord of Light in bringing AA (i.e. now Jon) to the throne. Worth noting here too that in the books she has seen the vision of Jon being stabbed with multiple daggers. Who knows what she has seen in the show, but it could easily include this. By this point in the book she has already had hints that Jon = AA but she at first doesn't know how to interpret them. ("All he shows me is Snow" or something close to that.) So basically when she hears about the desertion, which wasn't part of her visions, everything clicks in how she has been interpreting things wrong. She definitely did not kill Shireen for Jon (intentionally, though I suppose it could help unexpectedly if she was misinterpreting the visions that told her to do it). And Jon probably is technically "dead" but that doesn't matter. Lord Beric said in the show that he had actually died all those times and that the Lord of Light brought him back, not that he saved his life. In the books, it is foreshadowed that Jon's body rests in the ice cells or under the wall for a while. It is possible that his body is there for all of season 6, though that seems idiotic. However, I agree with previous posters that there has not been enough foreshadowing in the show to have it mak sense to him warg into Ghost, which would be consistent with him not calling for Ghost (and for Ghost more or less being non-existent in Season 5). In the show, it will have to be Mel that brings him back. Did anyone else feel like the entire purpose of Sam in the last 8 episodes was simply to deliver the line "He always comes back"?

When I saw that I was so excited because I'm pretty new on the forums but I'm pretty sure I was the first one who mentioned the possiblity of picking the lock with it in the forum for the episode when she picked it up.

Regarding why the Wildlings and NW don't use fire to kill the wrights & White Walkers... Someone earlier in the thread mentioned that their fires seemed to die when the White Walkers appeared. I happened to just find the quote about that from the book. "some nights our fires just seemed to shrivel up and die" [when the Others were encroaching] - Tormund answering Jon's questions about the Others as the wildings pass through the Wall.

It's clear Jon thought the bag was still in there -- though not clear whether it was because he saw it in there or because he didn't see anybody take it out. Specifically, there had been some hope earlier in the pages that Wun Wun grabbed it on his way out without telling anyone.

I think Wu Wu is too smart for that. He doesn't speak a lot because he only knows the Old Tongue, but his linguistic abilities are much higher than Hodor's, who can only say his name. I read that warging Hodor is conceptually more like warging an animal than a human.

Screen shot of Dragonglass bag in hut with Jon during White Walker fight described on post #893: http://imgur.com/qjGok49

I think the bag of Dragonglass is still in the hut where they distributed it. I believe you see it behind Jon right before he gets back up from his fall -- after he dropped his sword but grabs the non-VS sword. If you are watching on HBOGo it is at 53:17 (I'm not sure how the timing lines up with whatever format you are watching.) I wasn't even really looking for it but just noticed it when rewatching it. Like most of you, I also was hopeful that Wun Wun grabbed it on his way out but, sad to say, I think it's lost in the hut. I watched that scene three times just now, and I would bet a lot on it being the Dragonglass bag. (Sidenote: I wonder if it was supposed to be foreshadowing that his VS sword would work like Dragonglass because during the scene he always has access to either the Dragonglass or Longclaw.) (If this has been discussed in the past few hours, sorry. I read all the pages earlier and no one had mentions it. There was so much going on. I don't see how anyone would notice it on the first time through.)

Lots of posts about whether Tyrion should have known that Aemon was dead yet and whether Tyrion remembered he's a Targ. I am not typically a show defender but here I actually think the show made the right call by having Tyrion say what was factually true when he said it, relative to the show timeline. The books are so great in part because you have to constantly think about who learned what when and from whom. The fun is in using this information to piece together the truth. That's not part of the show. For example, even many book readers wrongly remember Ned saying Jon is his bastard because that's what everyone else says, let alone expecting show viewers to have picked up on that. I think having Tyrion say something about Aemon being alive would have been too confusing for show viewers who are not used to taking into account that characters believe the knowledge they have access to, which might be different than truth. (Sorry for the late post. I'm in the Pacific Northwest and feel weird watching the show before it's dark, so I wait a couple hours.)

I've been wondering about this too and trust there is a reason. As you probably recall, towards the end of DWD, Jon has to keep Ghost locked away because the skinchanger's boar is bothered by Ghost. Jon continues to keep Ghost locked up despite Mel's warnings. Without the skinchanger and his boar at Castle Black, there is no good reason to have Ghost locked away. Whenever and however Jon has his near death experience this season, Ghost should not be there to save him. So it might be better viewers are used to them being apart this season. To me, the physical distance between Jon and Ghost is important when Jon whispers "Ghost" with what may be his last breath. He is not expecting Ghost to come running to his side but calls out to him anyway. (Yes, I probably know the level of detail of these scenes in the book a little too well. Hence the name.)

I saw it as Realization #1. My brothers are alive! Best news ever! #2. Theon didn't kill my brothers. He's not as bad as I thought. That's good because I have to live with him. #3 (What I said above). Sophie Turner is actually becoming a really good actress, all that practice of not being able to say anything when bad things happen to Sansa and having to convey her emotions somehow.

I also got a little sense of that. Why the hell did I marry this monster if the true heir to Winterfell is alive?

"I pray for a glimpse of Azor Ahai, and R'hllor shows me only Snow." Please please please be that.

All this talk about what Sansa could do with the tool she found, have we considered whether she might use it to pick the lock to get out of her room rather than to attack Ramsay with it?

Someone earlier posted that it is not exactly a corkscrew but a tool specifically for opening wooden barrels. I think it might have been found on top of a barrel, actually. The OP included the term but I can't recall it now.

Before this season, I wouldn't have thought much of it, but the way they suddenly started putting multiple hints in from the first episode of this season, it's strange. The phrase hasn't really been used that much the rest of the series. I truly believe it is intentional. However, it could just be intentional to mess with readers, to add speculation like in the books. The shift to adding gratitous R+L=J hints in this season has been noticeable. The question is why. (PS, my original post, which is 3 pages back by now, was that I think having both Sansa and Gilly desperately plead "Promise me" in the same episdoe, after all the other R+L=J teasers that have suddenly been appearing in this season, was a ridiculously obvious reference to the theory.)

The R+L=J hints are awkwardly obvious now. "Promise me." So a desperate Sansa and a desperate Gilly both use that line in a single episode. Wow/eye-rolling. I bet they thought they were so clever.

Really? I thought that was a feint on his part. I can't stand listening to the writers' commentary because everything they say is so obvious and they just try to make their work seem better than it is. If I was a professor of a film class and they were students who turned that in for an assignment, I would have plenty of red marks all over it with things like "You have to think more deeply about this" and "Your analysis needs to go beyond surface observations." So I admit, I did not listen to the writers' commentary about it.

I also want to follow up my post about the bedding scene being in line with Ramsay's character, that it also reveals Little Finger as a villian complicit in the rape (in the show). He KNEW it was going to be like that. He ARRANGED for Sansa to be put in a position where she's expected to sexually please a monster like Ramsay. Following up on the episode where he feigns not knowing Ramsay's past, it's revealed that he knew exactly what he was doing this whole time, in a way far more calculating than we knew. He got Sansa to trust him to the point where she turned down rescue from Brienne, then delivered her to a pschopathic, torturing rapist to take her virginity as he kissed her goodbye. I don't think it's a conicidence his conversation with Cersei and this scene were in the same episode. Readers likely expected Ramsay to be that cruel, but I for one did not expect Little Finger to be that heartless to Sansa at least. If there was anyone I believed he really cared about, I thought it could be Sansa. (She is the daughter of his one true love after all.) Now we see he will do anything to anyone if it will help him and he thinks he can get away with it. The scene is shocking enough that I don't think that connection is immediately apparent, but it's essential to the larger story, not just in Sansa's arc but in Little Finger's.

I do not actually think the “bedding” scene with Ramsay was all that bad considering it is Ramsay. I was nearly sick when I first saw that Sansa would marry Ramsay, thinking of the wedding night with Jeyne. I’m not even sure Ramsay thinks he treated Sansa particularly badly, considering he’s a psychopath. I can see him thinking “I didn’t cut her or beat her. I was a good husband.” Besides, if Ramsay managed to “play a role” of loving husband for a night or a week, the book readers had to know something like this or worse was still coming. (I don't think that Sansa neccessarily should have expected it though, but neither did Jeyne.) Frankly, I was relieved that this scene was less elaborate or torturous than any direct application of a Jeyne scene. I feel that focusing on Theon’s face instead of a view of the bed, while being able to hear Sansa, was a good compromise. Face it, when the writers decided to have Sansa marry Ramsay, something like this was inevitable. The northerners need to perceive that Ned’s daughter (Jeyne-as-Arya/Sansa) is in need of rescuing for the rest of the plot to move forward. Plus, in the show, so much time has been spent portraying Ramsay as a psychopath, along the lines of Joffrey. Would viewers have expected a wedding night with Joffrey to be a happy affair? It is delusional to think that Ramsay would be better. Recall that in books he left his last wife to starve to death in a tower to take her land! What’s really sickening is that what he did to Sansa is fairly low on his list of psychopathic actions from the book. It’s one thing when it’s with poor forgotten Jeyne, but very different when it’s with beloved Sansa. Keep in mind, though, that in the book when folks at Winterfell see how horrible he is to his wife, they actually believe it is Arya, which is something the readers don’t have to experience in the book as they did in the show. (PS, when reading the Jeyne scenes I was haunted for days, so do understand I take this seriously. Perhaps I just had my time to accept this scene since the engagement was announced in the show because I knew it would happen, if not on the wedding night, then soon. I might also note that I read the books late and with the chapters in a different order, so I read these scenes in the book fairly recently.)