season 5 deviations... don't make sense.

[Gustavo Fringed Sleeves]

3 hours ago, thehandwipes said:

Fuck, that does happen, doesn't it? 

Ah, well, you write a series as big as ASOIAF some stuff will just slip your notice.  He even makes a point of how high the snowdrifts are a few paragraphs earlier.  "She was lost before she had gone ten yards....  Elsewise the village was gone. She was alone in a white world of snow and silence, plowing through snowdrifts as high as her thighs."  And when the party showed up there's no mention of how their horses managed to walk through such high snow for days without either breaking a leg or freezing to death.  Damn. 

Fro the record, I don't think that Stannis is trapped, he chose his ground as best as he could.  Its better than sitting outside the walls of Winterfell in a blizzard.  But that doesn't explain how Tycho and Co managed to rather casually make such a suicidal trip on magic horses.

None of this makes Ramsay's 20 Good Men anything other than a cheap plot contrivance that only serves to do fan service to Ramsay and make Stannis look evil and incompetent.

Edit: and Stannis in the books is camped a couple days outside of Winterfell.  In the show, apparently, he's camped all the way up on Long Lake, which is considerably further away.  Although, in the show, it seems to be about a days march from Winterfell.

You can always explain them like they do: everything will be explained in the future!

But seriously. That the "20 good men" could make the ride (maybe they managed to get horses like those the Northern Clans use) in 3 days is not the implausible part. It's just that everything surrounding their mission reads like a farce. Murphy's Law, "A Series of Unfortunate Events", "Wrong" by Depeche Mode, are some of the things that spring to my mind when I think about Satannis' downfall, with 20 Good Men™ as the culprits.