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[Spoilers] Ruining "The north remembers" & "Vengeance, Justice, Fire and Blood"


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1 hour ago, NutBurz said:

Would you at least read the thread, please?

 

I mentioned the simplest one where people make decisions in complete isolation, like the many Lord receiving Jon´s emissaries and deciding whether to join their little rebellion or not. I didn´t try to "get it right", because I´m not talking about ideal scenarios where "one player cannot affect the other in the future in any way besides the penalty". I´m talking about real people put in real-life situations that simulate elements of  the perfect games.

You can model all the games you want, those people in the series clearly didn´t have these incentives. She argued that having Ramsey as liege Lord is such an accutely bad outcome that everyone would choose to side with Wildlings and make a huge war effort during winter. Please, please, find a single analogous case to that game in history.

Okay, I see you didn’t bring it up first. My apologies for that. I was skimming the thread quickly and saw the comment and was wondering truly what the point of that was.

I see the context of where you made the comment as a retort.

I now kind of get your argument, somewhat but not completely.

I don’t think you can really argue a simple prisoner dilemma game here. Particularly, when the lords in the North have a long history and loyalty with the Starks (well in the books at least), and are not particularly fond of the Boltons, and  they do have some ability to communicate and coordinate their actions, and having Ramsay as an overlord wouldn’t be a desirable situation for many of them, if anything because of old historical loyalties.

Supposing there are two lords here. It seems to me that the pd game works if the best play for each lord to make is to side with Ramsay, even if the other one does not and rebels against Ramsay. I have hard time seeing that. In other words, I'm not seeing here, "play side with Ramsay, no matter what the other lord does", which is kind of how a single shot pd game works.

And certainly while it might be realistically expected for some houses to stay with the Boltons, whatever the reason, it was a bit of an asspull by the show to have virtually no noble houses supporting the Starks and particularly a big deviation from the books, where it's indicated that the historical ties between the Starks and the people of North run fairly deep.

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@OldGimletEye It's my fault with the game theory - had I known what this would descend into I would have never brought it up. I was referring to the fact that in this scenario everybody working together results in a mutually beneficial outcome, while staying put eliminates the only challenge to Ramsay's rule, which no sane person should consider desirable.

@NutBurz I think you are severely underestimating the ability of the characters in ASoIAF/GOT to communicate. They can and do, send ravens and messengers and they hear about news and rumours happening elsewhere. If anything, this seems to be a lot quicker on the show where characters seem to cover long distances in unlikely short times and hear of things pretty much as they happen. 

But yes, especially given that (an indeterminate amount of ) time has passed since Jon and Sansa started planning thier campaign, the Northern lords would have had time (before Jon and Sansa even showed up) to get in touch with thier neighbours to determine their take on things. They all know each other as well. We have seen the liege lords calling their banners without a major glitch, we have examples of coordination between split up forces during various conflicts, we see the slaver cities coordinating with each other and the sons of the harpy, we know about the RR rebels meeting up and we see political deals conducted at distance by ravens and envoys. We see the Northern lords clearly plotting together in the books and we see Stannis being joined by by Northern forces after communication by raven. None of this took years. So no, the notion that the Northeen lords have the opportunity to communicate and coordinate their response is not ridiculous at all. They are emphatically not making their decision in isolation.

Provisions wise, Jon and Sansa are more or less in a friendly territory, with the houses that joined the  Able  to provide logistical support. More, their army is made up of Northerners and the Wildlings, who are used to much harsher conditions than anything we've seen in the North so far. And I've already explained why this wouldn't be a long siege. 

Who is going to kill Ramsay? Are they aware of some plot to do so? If so, they maybe should have mentioned it. Otherwise, it's just waiting for lightening to strike and an excuse to take no action - let someone else deal with him is hardly worthy of going on about how the North remembers.

They know what the Crown is concerned about because news travels and juicy gossip like the WOS, the Queen being imprisoned by the Faith Militant, the Crown princess being murdered and Dorne Dec!wrong independence or even the Blackfish retaking RR is not exactly the kind of information that would go unnoticed.

As for the Vale, I'm not sure how you can c!aim that the North knows nothing about publicly available news from KL yet is aware of intimate details of a secret deal between LF and the Boltons that even the Vale lords and the Crown are ignorant of. Selective intelligence, much? No one ever brings this up. And even if they somehow knew, why would they not assume that the alliance was over the moment Sandra run away?  What is a lot more plausible is them believing Sandra when she explains that her actual family member is coming to help her, which is how political alliances have worked in Westeros for thousands of years. 

But whatever your take on any of this, one thing is clear - as lampshades by Lyanna Mormont, basically none of the Northern lords remembered. The victory belonged to Jon and Sandra's Vale army with most Northern lords not lifting a finger to help, which makes using the phrase at best meaningless and at worst insulting.

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9 minutes ago, Maid So Fair said:

@OldGimletEye It's my fault with the game theory - had I known what this would descend into I would have never brought it up. I was referring to the fact that in this scenario everybody working together results in a mutually beneficial outcome, while staying put eliminates the only challenge to Ramsay's rule, which no sane person should consider desirable.

I know. And I fucked up by not reading the entire thread more thoroughly.

That said, I still don’t see the logic of nobody in the North supporting the Starks.

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Not nobody. Mormont helped and I'm sure a few small house or people helped. 

the fact is, most houses were not in a position to help as was stated by many of them for various reason. While you might not agree with it, there are good reasons

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5 minutes ago, xjlxking said:

Not nobody. Mormont helped and I'm sure a few small house or people helped. 

Okay Mormont and the 62 men. Who where the others again?

5 minutes ago, xjlxking said:

the fact is, most houses were not in a position to help as was stated by many of them for various reason. While you might not agree with it, there are good reasons

Okay, there were good reasons? Or was the show just doing a bit of an ass pull here?

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7 minutes ago, OldGimletEye said:

Okay Mormont and the 62 men. Who where the others again?

Okay, there were good reasons? Or was the show just doing a bit of an ass pull here?

They did not show houses joining but people could have

yes plenty of valid reason. They have built up nicely that the Boltons + Umbers  would have the biggest army in the north. Not to mention, in the battle of the Bastards, the Karstarks are also present

Before they were chanting KiTN, we see that some agree that they made a mistake, others were scare, and some

lost too many men. Why is it so hard to believe that the north lost too much men with Robb and the remaining might not have the enthusiasm to quickly joins losing battle? All I've heard from naysayers is that the Norh Remembers and that the Northmen are loyal. All I can say is, that's a huge generalization. The Karstarks were betrayed the Starks twice, the boltons have, Umbers, and likely other small houses. Despite having loyalty, it's not set in stone so stop throwing a temper tantrum because people change sides or their loyalty/faith is shaken

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30 minutes ago, xjlxking said:

They did not show houses joining but people could have

yes plenty of valid reason. They have built up nicely that the Boltons + Umbers  would have the biggest army in the north. Not to mention, in the battle of the Bastards, the Karstarks are also present

Before they were chanting KiTN, we see that some agree that they made a mistake, others were scare, and some

lost too many men. Why is it so hard to believe that the north lost too much men with Robb and the remaining might not have the enthusiasm to quickly joins losing battle? All I've heard from naysayers is that the Norh Remembers and that the Northmen are loyal. All I can say is, that's a huge generalization. The Karstarks were betrayed the Starks twice, the boltons have, Umbers, and likely other small houses. Despite having loyalty, it's not set in stone so stop throwing a temper tantrum because people change sides or their loyalty/faith is shaken

And stop trying to pretend that the Starks having virtually no support makes sense here.

Even if the show established the Umbers + Boltons had the biggest army, it doesn't follow that Starks wouldn't haven't gotten additional supporters. Like where were the mountain clans( I know the show deleted them)? And what was show Manderlys excuse again? Oh, he didn't want more Manderlys dying for nothing he says. LOL, okay. And the Glover decides he fucked after all, admitting he did't have a great excuse either, evidently.

But even if the Starks didn't have any support and the show established that plausibly, then in that case it was stupid to use  " The North Remembers" as has been pointed out.

And then of course there is the fact the Vale Army is running around the North and nobody in the North is like, "hey guys what are you doing here?" And that really is the essence of this whole mind boggling stupidity, which was to have the Vale Army ride at the last minute to save Jon's army. 

 

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Their declarations of support for House Stark Snow ring hollow because it's like, what choice do they even have now?

How can House Stark Snow truly trust them on their KitN pledge? It's like they're all House Frey and just back the winner.

I motion we label the Northern Lords in the show "The Late Northern Lords"

The pledges mean next to nothing given what happened.

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11 hours ago, xjlxking said:

They did not show houses joining but people could have

yes plenty of valid reason. They have built up nicely that the Boltons + Umbers  would have the biggest army in the north. Not to mention, in the battle of the Bastards, the Karstarks are also present

Before they were chanting KiTN, we see that some agree that they made a mistake, others were scare, and some

lost too many men. Why is it so hard to believe that the north lost too much men with Robb and the remaining might not have the enthusiasm to quickly joins losing battle? All I've heard from naysayers is that the Norh Remembers and that the Northmen are loyal. All I can say is, that's a huge generalization. The Karstarks were betrayed the Starks twice, the boltons have, Umbers, and likely other small houses. Despite having loyalty, it's not set in stone so stop throwing a temper tantrum because people change sides or their loyalty/faith is shaken

All of this is nearly invalidated by them proclaiming Jon KITN, which means signing up for more fighting and showing a high level of trust in Jon that is clearly meant to parallel Robb. There's also the fact that none of them has an articulate excuse for why they didn't help. It's like Sandra's oh sorry I didn't tell you about the Vale army, I have made a huge mistake. It all rings very hollow. I mean if I didn't know better and didn't realise this was just the show handwaving things I would have assumed they're deliberately trying to drive a wedge between Jon and Sandra and setting him up to fail.

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