Dead and frozen - wight happens? (hah)

[Lord Derrick Ümlaut]

After watching this episode, I started wondering why so many wights show signs of extreme decomposition. Since I assume it's freezing non-stop north of the wall, shouldn't more of them be preserved quite perfectly? Some explanations I can think of:

a. The decay doesn't come from decomposition most of the time, but by being nipped at by scavenger animals.

b. resurrection doesn't stop decay (as was suggested somewhere before) and wights have a constant body temperature just below the freezing point, not room temperature, moving around creates friction, warming them just enough that they decompose "naturally".

c. The night king's army is just formed over thousands and thousands of years, with most bodies being ötzied, and the "newer" members are only a small fraction of this army

p.s. also: where were the wightified giants in this episode?

[elder brother jonothor dar]

It looks cool.

The wildlings burn their dead I believe, is this since the Others returned or have they always done it?

NK could have started massing his army by grave digging hence why a lot of them are past their best.

The wights make wights by way of mutilating the living to death for the most part, a lot of them are going to be missing body parts, but that still does not explain why what remains is so decomposed 

[Ser Gareth]

2 hours ago, Lord Derrick Ümlaut said:

After watching this episode, I started wondering why so many wights show signs of extreme decomposition. Since I assume it's freezing non-stop north of the wall, shouldn't more of them be preserved quite perfectly? Some explanations I can think of:

a. The decay doesn't come from decomposition most of the time, but by being nipped at by scavenger animals.

b. resurrection doesn't stop decay (as was suggested somewhere before) and wights have a constant body temperature just below the freezing point, not room temperature, moving around creates friction, warming them just enough that they decompose "naturally".

c. The night king's army is just formed over thousands and thousands of years, with most bodies being ötzied, and the "newer" members are only a small fraction of this army

p.s. also: where were the wightified giants in this episode?

Some of the bodies are very old.  Whilst looking for the horn Mance opened up a load of old graves and those corpses were also re-animated.