Game of Thrones Griping 8: The Battle of the Bastards

By Bob Case Posted Friday Mar 24, 2017

Filed under: Game of Thrones 123 comments

This series analyzes the show, but sometimes references the books as well. If you read it, expect spoilers for both.

And now, the big-ticket ninth-episode extravaganza: the Battle of the Bastards.

I want to focus on this episode in particular because it was absolutely showered in Emmy Awards. It won in nine different categories. Some of these are obviously deserved, like “Outstanding Stunt Coordination for a Drama Series, Limited Series or Movie.” I have no issue with “Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series” – if you ask me, the show has revealed Miguel Sapochnik to be a real talent.

Others I wouldn’t know one way or the other. “Outstanding Sound Mixing for a Comedy or Drama Series”? Sure, why not. “Outstanding Makeup for a Single-Camera Series (Non-Prosthetic)”? Knock yourselves out. But this episode also won “Oustanding Writing for a Drama Series,” meaning that as far as the Emmys are concerned, this was the best-written episode of dramatic television released all year.

The calm before the giant pile of corpses.
The calm before the giant pile of corpses.

The northern portion of this episode starts pretty well, actually. There’s an appropriately tense parlay between the two sides, where Jon throws Ramsay a bit of a curveball by proposing single combat, a proposal apparently calculated to make Ramsay lose face in front of his men. Every so often, the show gives us a glimpse of the much more interesting Jon Snow that could’ve been, and this is one of them. Don’t get attached though, because Jon’s basic competency level is going to go sharply downhill from here.

For example, in the pre-battle planning meeting, Jon has a rather iffy-sounding plan to counter the Bolton cavalry: “We’re digging trenches all along our flanks.” I’m not an expert in medieval tactics, but I could never quite figure out how this was supposed to work. Couldn’t they just go around your trenches, and attack you from a different direction? Or attack you while you’re digging them?

Whatever the logic is, as near as I can tell they never got around to actually digging the things. I looked at all the wide and aerial shots of the battle I could and couldn’t find anything that looked like a trench anywhere. It may be a good thing that they forgot, because later when the Vale knights show up I’m pretty sure they ride right over where the trenches would have been. I know this is not a major plot point, but why spend so much time talking about what tactics you’re going to use when they either don’t make sense, you’re not actually going to use them, or both?

Then Sansa gives Jon a hard time about not asking her advice about Ramsay, even though nothing was preventing her from speaking in the meeting and, when pressed, she admits she doesn’t have any specific advice anyway. The show reminds us again that there’s an entire other army waiting in the wings that Sansa doesn’t want to tell Jon about. To me, Sansa’s decision to withhold this information is one of the most bewildering aspects of this whole situation. Every time they call attention to it just makes the whole thing seem less real.

This show is very dark. I mean that literally. Trying to find screenshots of some of the interior scenes where you can actually see what's happening is surprisingly difficult.
This show is very dark. I mean that literally. Trying to find screenshots of some of the interior scenes where you can actually see what's happening is surprisingly difficult.

Well, the foreplay is over, and now it’s time for the battle – and for Ramsay to start the proceedings by using Rickon Stark as target practice.

I haven’t been sure where to bring this up, so I’m bringing it up here. While watching season six I never understood why no one seemed to notice the significance of Rickon being alive. Remember that as far as the general public knows, Rickon and Bran are both dead. The Warren Commission version of events is that they were killed by Theon when the Ironborn controlled Winterfell.

And yet, on learning of the existence of a living, breathing Rickon, complete with a corroborating direwolf head, no single character ever says anything like “wait, I thought he was supposed to be dead,” or “if Rickon is still alive, doesn’t that open up the possibility that Bran is alive, too?” They’re the only remaining trueborn male children of Ned Stark. For as many times the show has told us that Sansa is the key to the North, you’d think that would be important.

But it never gets brought up. Even Lyanna Mormont, characterized up to this point primarily by her loyalty to the Starks, seems completely uninterested when Jon tells her that Rickon is Ramsay’s prisoner. Both Sansa and Jon know, independently, that Bran is aliveSansa had it from Theon, and Jon learned it during the confrontation with the mutineers at Craster’s Keep.. And yet neither of them mentions to each other or anyone else that they have an additional living brother.

The sight of his brother in mortal peril inspires Jon to pick up one of the biggest idiot balls this show has ever seen. Despite being told the night before that Rickon was in danger, and possibly beyond saving, despite being warned that Ramsay liked to play psychological games with his opponents, despite, in effect, being told that this exact thing or something like it was going to happen, Jon charges off like his family’s sigil is a stone-grey Leroy Jenkins rampant on a white field.

Look, I know Jon’s not supposed to exactly be a genius, but there’s a certain threshold of blockheadedness that I’m not comfortable seeing my protagonists exceed. A human foible here and there can humanize a character, but when a predictable dick move by an opponent who’s famous for his dick moves makes you want to 1v6,000 an entire army, in direct contradiction of the plan you were supposed to follow… well, I can’t maintain the same level of sympathy and engagement with someone like that.

Jon’s brilliant “do everything I was explicitly warned against doing” strategy works out about as well as you’d expect:

I know it LOOKS bad, but at least our outfits are color-coordinated.
I know it LOOKS bad, but at least our outfits are color-coordinated.

I don’t mean to gloss over the impressiveness of the battle scene. Like I said, the direction is generally solid.Even if I do wish that just once they would put the main character in a helmet. Even the Bolton archers are wearing more head protection than Jon is. I’m not asking for full-blown historical recreation here. Just put a helmet on the guy. Before long, the good guys are enclosed on one side by a giant pile of corpses and on the other three sides by a highly disciplined tower-shield-and-pike sorta formation.You can tell they’re highly disciplined because they go “hoo, hoo, hoo” while they do everything.

All seems lost at this point, and there’s an impressively sweaty-palmed sequence where Jon nearly suffocates under a stampede of bodies. Then it’s time for the dramatic turnaround, as the Vale knights crest a nearby hill and plow into the back of Ramsay’s forces, scattering them and winning the battle at a stroke.

Littlefinger owes the advantage of surprise here to his unique reality-bending powers. Much has been made of his “jetpack,” the fandom’s pet explanation for his ability to hop, skip, and jump across the continent in the space of a single episode. While Littlefinger’s jetpack does bother meIt creates the impression that Westeros is roughly the size of Disneyland., it has nothing on his piece de resistance: his ability to park an entire army inside a Bolton castle for half a season without any of the Boltons even noticing.

It was “The Door,” (episode five) when Littlefinger first informed Sansa that the Knights of the Vale were “encamped at Moat Caelin as we speak.” Moat Caelin – the castle that the show has repeatedly reminded us is a vital strategic chokepoint between north and south. Moat Caelin that the Boltons control. We know they control it because we saw them take it – in fact, it was Theon, on Ramsay’s orders, who negotiated the castle’s surrender.

And yet apparently no one in the Bolton camp thinks it strange that thousands of not-Bolton soldiers are staying there. Certainly Ramsay never mentions it, and no one mentions it to him either. Did Littlefinger take the castle? Taking Moat Caelin from the south is supposed to be impossible. It seems like a bit much to have it happen offscreen and be completely unremarked upon. The closest thing to a plausible explanation I could come up with was that the Boltons just abandoned it after going to such lengths to take it. Again, though: vital strategic chokepoint.

That’s not the extent of the Vale knights’ ninja-like abilities, either. Later, Sansa writes a letter to Littlefinger, presumably finally asking for his aid, and he’s able to march the same army through hundreds of miles of Bolton territory undetected. Ramsay seems completely caught off guard when they show up. Did no one see this lot clomping their way up the Kingsroad? Keeping thousands of men and horses fed, watered, and pointed in the same direction is kind of a hassle as I understand it. Surely someone would have noticed.

I don’t think it’s unreasonable to be confused by all this. In past seasons the show has operated on the premise that the commanders of armies try to keep track of where other armies are. Remember they tidy bait-and-switch Robb Stark played on the Lannisters? Or the fact that Jon and Ramsay’s armies each had rough intelligence on the other’s size, composition, and location? Littlefinger, as usual, operates outside these boundaries, and shows up at the head of a column within shouting distance of Winterfell without anyone the wiser until they’re mid-charge.

I don’t know exactly how other people react to this sort of stuff, but for me (and I suspect for others) part of the fun of watching a show like this is trying to predict what happens next. But those sorts of predictions tend to fall flat when there’s no consistency to base a prediction off of. Throughout season six, I had half-suspected that Littlefinger was going to betray Sansa and go over to the Bolton side, partly because I found it implausible that the Boltons actually didn’t realize his army was coming. I assumed that they did know, and had cut some kind of deal.

In any case, I hope I’ve opened you up to the possibility that “Battle of the Bastards” may not have been the best-written television episode of 2016.I know I skipped over all the Daenerys stuff – but in my opinion, if anything it’s worse. I know that stuff like this shouldn’t bother me, that awards shows are two-thirds popularity/name recognition contests. But the writing we get is going to be tied to standards to which we hold it.

Next week we wrap everything up. Thanks so much to everyone who’s made it this far – just one more to go.

 

Footnotes:

[1] Sansa had it from Theon, and Jon learned it during the confrontation with the mutineers at Craster’s Keep.

[2] Even if I do wish that just once they would put the main character in a helmet. Even the Bolton archers are wearing more head protection than Jon is. I’m not asking for full-blown historical recreation here. Just put a helmet on the guy.

[3] You can tell they’re highly disciplined because they go “hoo, hoo, hoo” while they do everything.

[4] It creates the impression that Westeros is roughly the size of Disneyland.

[5] I know I skipped over all the Daenerys stuff – but in my opinion, if anything it’s worse.



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123 thoughts on “Game of Thrones Griping 8: The Battle of the Bastards

  1. Daemian Lucifer says:

    meaning that as far as the Emmys are concerned, this was the best-written episode of dramatic television released all year.

    Well,that doesnt automatically mean its good,just that the competition was even worse.

    1. Harper says:

      I’m not a huge fan of Mr Robot, but that was nominated in the same category and along with The Americans are certainly better written.
      Hell, UnREAL is probably better written, I’ve heard good things about it

      1. Dev Null says:

        I think Unreal Tournament was better written, and it didn’t have a plot…

        1. FelBlood says:

          Some of the assault mode maps had pretty elaborate backstories. even in the stock version of UT99.

  2. Daemian Lucifer says:

    To me, Sansa's decision to withhold this information is one of the most bewildering aspects of this whole situation.

    To be fair,she doesnt know if the bird reached them in time,or that they would actually listen to her.So she doesnt want to give false hope to jon.Thats reasonable.

    Whats not as reasonable is her not learning anything useful about ramsay while being there,even though she is supposedly more active now.

    1. Thomas says:

      I would have thought telling Jon about a hugely important strategic possibility was more important than ‘getting his hopes up’.

      1. 9guy says:

        Depends; if it didn’t work out and Jon went for a plan dependent on them showing up on schedule, like what happened except on purpose, it would end very badly. On the other hand, Jon and his advisors can probably understand the concept of something that might or might not happen and go with a plan on that basis, like just hanging back and stalling until the army arrives or they get more definitive information.

        1. Confanity says:

          I’m pretty sure I read an article on Slate way back which essentially suggested a feminist reading of a number of events in the show. In this case, the line is that Sansa (correctly!) pegged Jon as being all-too-ready to make a fatal, emotion-driven error, and felt that simply giving him the Vale troops would just be throwing more men into the meat-grinder. Having them attack separately while Ramsay was occupied with Jon felt like the more compelling tactical option.

  3. Darren says:

    I’ve been busting your balls on this series so far, but I agree that Battle of the Bastards is kind of a mess. And you didn’t even mention how Jon puts Davos in charge of the reserve forces, only for Davos to charge them all in and allow the entirety of their army to be surrounded by the Bolton forces. You had one job, Davos! Do you not know what “reserves” means!?

    Having said that, my gut instinct is that a lot of the specific outcomes of this will be very similar when/if it is ever addressed in a book, and it will be interesting to compare the specific differences.

    1. Geebs says:

      Yup. As somebody who hasn’t really agreed with much of what’s been in the series so far – I can’t argue with anything in this instalment.

      The “planning” scene with Sansa and Jon just doesn’t make sense, Rickon is totally wasted (and Ramsay’s trick shot could only have been more ridiculous if he’d somehow ricocheted it off a nearby soldier’s helmet), Jon Snow suddenly acts like a clueless idiot for no reason, the Knights of the Vale are pulled straight from Littlefinger’s bum, and Ramsay’s death scene is stupid.

      The whole sequence wherein Jon’s army gets completely routed and he nearly gets trampled to death does work quite nicely in a “Saving Private Rà­an” sort of way – and in a way that it wouldn’t have without the show having previously established the rules of protagonist fragility.

  4. Daemian Lucifer says:

    The Warren Commission version of events is that they were killed by Theon when the Ironborn controlled Winterfell.

    Theon did confess to ramsay that he did not find the boys,and the boltons were allied to starks at that point.However,Im not so sure if ramsay ever gave this info to his father,or if he passed it on to anyone else.I also think that there was mention of everyone thinking that the two were dead somewhere,but I am not sure on that.Maybe someone with better memory about this whole shebang can clear this up.

    1. guy says:

      Book version is Ramsey knows because he faked their deaths in the first place, but it’s not in his or Theon’s interests to tell anyone.

    2. Amarsir says:

      I think Roose knew. Didn’t he send a secret assassin to infiltrate the Night’s Watch a couple seasons ago?

  5. Daemian Lucifer says:

    Even if I do wish that just once they would put the main character in a helmet. Even the Bolton archers are wearing more head protection than Jon is. I'm not asking for full-blown historical recreation here. Just put a helmet on the guy.

    I know that they do this so that the main character can remain distinct,but couldnt they achieve this by making their helmet distinct?Like something ornate,passed down from one commander of the watch to the next,maybe with a black or white tassel.

    1. 9guy says:

      The real reason is so the audience can see the actor’s very expensive face and their emoting. That’s why characters who do always wear helmets, like Iron Man, have lots of shots of inside the helmet.

      Historically, commanders did wear fancy helmets so their troops could recognize them at a glance.

      1. Amarsir says:

        I’ve heard them referred to as “Ego Shots” because the actors want the masks off for those great scenes. I don’t know how accurate it is, but I did gain a lot of respect for Dredd and it’s star Karl Urban when thye didn’t resort to that.

        1. 9guy says:

          That’s also part of it; actors want people to recognize their faces so they’ll be able to get starring roles and appear on movie posters. B5 had trouble keeping actresses for Narn because they were worried about hurting their career prospects due to being unrecognizable under the heavy makeup.

      2. Vermander says:

        I also read that the fight choreographers for the show actually made a “no more helmets” rule after several people got injured due to poor visibility. The actors and stunt doubles are trying to pull off elaborately choreographed moves rather than protect themselves from real attacks, and most of them aren’t used to doing that with a bucket on their head.

        You’ll notice the Mountain and the Red Viper start out wearing helmets during their fight and almost immediately take them off (I bet the Viper regretted that decision!).

        1. Considering that particular Clegane, do you really think a helmet would have mattered much?

      1. Ninety-Three says:

        Wait, you can embed images in these comments?

        Edit: Huh, seems like I can’t. Is it some kind of Shamus-only privilege?

        1. Daemian Lucifer says:

          Yup.Though I dont know if the other gold commenters can do it as well.

          1. Rutskarn says:

            |
            |
            ——–
            /——-/
            —————-8>>

            1. Syal says:

              ASCII penises don’t count as pictures, Ruts.

      2. Phantos says:

        He’s done it.

        He’s made the greatest response to any comment on his own website.

        Comments are over.

  6. Ilseroth says:

    Despite me having a fairly positive view of the show, I couldn’t get over how dumb the Rickon scene was. Seriously. Jon… C’mon… really? Just stop.

    The ninja knights, you know, I can deal with. People catching each other with surprises happens all the time and Littlefinger has always had magic abilities in the show, so it wasn’t unexpected.

    But Jon traipsing into the bowline of thousands of soldiers to try to save someone who is almost assuredly going to die, ruining the battle plan he made.. I mean I know I am mostly repeating you but I was someone who was barely asking *any* questions and my suspension of disbelief was still defenestrated.

    1. Dev Null says:

      I was kind of hoping they’d have worked in a subtle shot of… I dunno, Jon jumping over a fallen man who has a shark painted on his shield? Because I was laughing so hard at his idiocy I mostly failed to notice how well-done the battle scene might or might not have been. We’d explained away his behaviour on some of the earlier occasions, but Jon has now been cemented in my mind as a stone-cold incompetent idiot who should never under any circumstances be allowed to lead, and I really don’t see how they can recover his character from that.

    2. sarachim says:

      I think this is mostly blaming Jon for not being genre-savvy. We know Rickon’s doomed because good storytelling requires it, but in the real world even the best archers miss sometimes. A broken bowstring or sudden gust of wind would have made Ramsey miss his last shot, at which point Jon could have grabbed Rickon and galloped back to his own side. A small chance, sure, but probably one that I’d take if I saw one of my siblings running for their life and had to make a split-second decision.

      If anything, the thing to complain about is the show continuing to pull its punches so Ramsey can succeed. His plan had a reasonable risk of failure but he’s so sure of success that he doesn’t even seem to be trying very hard, and sure enough, succeed he does. It’s far from the ridiculous thing he’s pulled off, but it’s like he knows he has plot armor.

      1. Alex Broadhead says:

        Presumably Ramsay wants the first few shots to miss – he wants Jon to make it into range of his archers. And it really doesn’t matter whether _any_ of his shots hit, as he’s going to use his archers to kill them both once Jon is in range. That said, why the flying fruitbat does Rickon run in a straight, predictable path? Any variation in his path makes him impossible to hit at long range due to the travel time for the arrow.

        Also, why does Jon not have a shield?

      2. Daemian Lucifer says:

        The problem isnt that he rushed to save his brother.The problem is that once he reached his corpse,he decided to rush towards ramsay instead of going back to his army.

        1. Dev Null says:

          The problem is that he _didn’t_ rush to save his brother. He rushed to die with him.

          1. Daemian Lucifer says:

            Well yeah,from the outside rational perspective thats what he did.But from his emotional perspective he can at least be forgiven for trying to save his brother.The rest,nope.

      3. Merlin says:

        I think this is mostly blaming Jon for not being genre-savvy. We know Rickon's doomed because good storytelling requires it,

        Honestly, I think good storytelling demands that Rickon not die.

        For one, that’s a ridiculously difficult shot to make. Rickon is literally running for his life, Ramsay is taking a shot at the very edge of bow range, and he’s using a goddanged bow. That kind of distance would be a difficult shot with a rifle, and yet this putz is allowed to screw around for a bit, then deliver a high, arcing shot that still manages to peg Rickon square in the heart at the most dramatic possible moment. Everything about the shot screams “contrived”.

        But more importantly, Ramsay whiffing the shot (ideally with Rickon flipping a double bird as he rides safely away on Jon’s horse) would be a perfect capstone to the unfortunately-theoretical arc of Ramsay paying for his idiocy and self-indulgence. Ever since the Red Wedding, we’ve been reminded that the Boltons are in a tricky position because they’re pathological dickheads, and Ramsay is nothing if not King Dickhead. It isn’t hard to imagine a season in which the Stark’s claims, Sansa’s savvy, Jon’s revival, and the Boltons’ awfulness lead towards a battle where the Starks are only modest tactical underdogs. If Rickon lives, then Ramsay has thrown away his only remaining asset just to make a point, and failed. That becomes the nail in the coffin that leads to a significant desertion by Bolton bannermen, allowing team Stark a victory that is logical specifically because of their virtue and canny, rather than one that happens in spite of it.

        I realize this is kind of pedantic, my point is that we know Rickon’s going to die not because it’s good storytelling, but because it’s cliched storytelling.

        Unrelated: During Jon’s challenge, Ramsay mentions that Jon’s regarded as one of the best swordsmen in Westeros. Where in the heck did that come from? Dude’s a total jobber. He’s better than most of the Night’s Watch rookies back in S1, but those are new recruits that mostly have never held weapons before. From there, he wins a fight that Corrin Halfhand specifically throws, gets wrecked by the “I was the toughest kid on my block” deserter when he returns to Craster’s Keep, and is uniquely equipped to survive at Hardhome not because of his skills but because his weapon doesn’t totally explode like everyone else’s. I don’t think we’ve ever seen him go one-on-one with someone notably skilled, much less come out ahead in the process.

        1. sarachim says:

          Fair enough. I guess what I was getting at was that the show was pretty clearly priming the audience to expect Rickon to die- Sansa practically looked into the camera and promised it would happen, for one thing- and so having him survive would be a pretty sharp turn in the narrative.

          OTOH, GoT used to be famous for making exactly these kinds of sharp turns re: characters dying, which was generally regarded as a strength, so maybe you’re right that having Rickon live would have been the better choice. If you’re willing to kill off main characters as ruthlessly as the secondaries, it seems only fair that once in a while the secondaries should catch the lucky breaks usually reserved for mains.

          Re: Jon’s swordsmanship, I’d buy that he’s famous for being good even if that fame isn’t necessarily justified. The full details of his victories aren’t necessarily widely known, just the basic facts that he’s killed famous people/monsters and survived a couple of desperate battles. Plus, he’s handsome and comes from a well-liked noble family. There’s no, like, Westerosi Swordfighting Moneyball to point out that Jon is slightly-above-average at best.

          EDIT: I’d agree, though, that the way the show introduced the idea that Jon’s a famous swordsman was pretty artless. There’s got to be a more interesting way to do that.

        2. Daemian Lucifer says:

          For one, that's a ridiculously difficult shot to make. Rickon is literally running for his life, Ramsay is taking a shot at the very edge of bow range, and he's using a goddanged bow.

          Dont underestimate bows.A skilled archer can hit a human sized target at a very long range.In an earlier season we had that guy make a really long ranged shot for that funeral pyre.And he boy was running away in a straight line.Granted,hitting him in the heart was a bit too much,but some liberties can be given for the sake of drama.

          1. Merlin says:

            In an earlier season we had that guy make a really long ranged shot for that funeral pyre.

            Yeah, and it bugged me then, too. There’s a reason why the tradition viking funeral is depicted as lighting the boat before pushing it out; this stuff ain’t easy.

            I don’t doubt that Ramsay’s shot is possible, but for context, let’s compare to the Olympics. I think it’s a fair assumption that Olympic archers are more skilled and using better equipment than anything Westeros has to offer. Their targets are 70 meters away, on level ground, stationary, and about 1.2 meters (4 feet) wide. I don’t imagine it’s common to totally airball the target at the games, but the opening round consists of 72 shots, of which a perfect performance nets 720 points. The world record was set at the Rio games in 2016, and it’s 700.

            This, clearly, is really good. But bear that not-quite-perfection (as a high-water mark) and those controlled conditions in mind, then watch the Rickon clip.

            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GriRaV0k1LA

            Check out the establishing shots at 1:09, 1:42, and 2:09. That’s a massive field, one that it takes even the Jon on horseback quite some time to half cover. After 2:09, the switch entirely to close ups, but note that there’s a miss at 2:31 before the hit at 2:40, meaning that by the time he’s hit, Rickon is substantially farther than we last saw. He’s also been running for almost 90 seconds at this point, which means his pace is likely changing as he gets winded. This is a spectacularly unlikely shot, and it’s not aided by the fact that we haven’t established Ramsay as any kind of preternaturally good archer. (Beyond the overarching powers afforded by being the writer’s pet.)

            1. Gethsemani says:

              And modern bows are much, much more accurate and stable then medieval era longbows, not to mention how modern carbon arrows are precision made for consistent behavior and accuracy, whereas every single arrow in medieval times was hand fletched and made from wood, with a handmade iron tip. A medieval archer was no slouch in terms of skill, but his equipment would produce quite a bit of error as it was simply not able to produce consistent precision, owing to the materials and way of manufacture.

              Even if we allow for Rickon being out of shape and traversing uneven ground and assume that there’s some manner of time dilation going on, he’s still been running for something akin to a full minute at full speed when he gets hit. A minute of running over uneven ground should still put you, at least, some 2-300 yards out from the archer, a distance that’s far beyond the 60 (or so) yards at which a medieval bow could sustain a reasonable degree of accuracy.

              The entire thing is poor writing, as has been said here before, which is all the more jarring as the first seasons of GoT were quite grounded in plausibility and consistency.

    3. Ofermod says:

      The Silmarillion also has a “idiot charges army due to brother who’s a prisoner” scene. It’s the opening to the Battle of Unnumbered Tears, where the orcs lop off the hands then feet then head of a prisoner whose brother happens to be stationed right there with orders to wait until a signal is given. His response to seeing the death is to charge straight into the orcs.

      But then again, the Noldor have rather been established by this point as being excessively hot blooded and overly fond of suicidal charges out of despair and fury, so it fits.

      1. Gaius Maximus says:

        At least they managed to scare the crap out of Morgoth.

      2. Syal says:

        The honeypot is one of the oldest tricks in the book, and it still works today.

        But, Westerosi are usually established as being smarter than the normal tricks. The Freys tried that very thing on the Tullys in SoS, and the Tullys just ignored them. For Jon to fall for it now feels cheap.

  7. Daemian Lucifer says:

    and jump across the continent in the space of a single episode.

    If I remember the map correctly,westeros isnt much of a continent.Its the size of england.Still large enough for this to be silly,but not as large as jumping around an actually big land mass.

    1. MarcellusMagnus says:

      Westeros is very much a continent. It’s supposed to be comparable to South America in size, according to GRRM.

      http://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/152339/what-is-the-size-of-westeros

      1. Daemian Lucifer says:

        Ah,that makes more sense.I was misremembering the size of the map.

        1. Joshua says:

          That’s GRRM’s explanation, but it doesn’t seem to make much sense to me. The distances seem way too huge to have such tight strategies and quick communication, but that’s just a layman’s opinion.

          Reading around, it says it’s something like 1500 miles between King’s Landing and Winterfell, and the King’s entourage made the trip in about a month of time on horseback and carriages. That’s about 50 miles per day, and just doing a quick Google search indicates that a long distance journey would average about 20-30 miles per day on horseback. One assumes that the King’s entourage is not doing a breakneck speed that’s beating down the horse for 30 days straight. Nor would an army be able to travel even near that fast with infantry and supply wagons that need constant replenishing. It seems like you would also need thousands of lords/ladies to subdivide the ruling of the amount of land that’s just a little bit shorter than the distance between France and Turkey.

          In reality, it seems like a war that spanned that far over the continent would simply be sending the troops with what you hoped was a competent leader and wishes for good luck. Strategies that involve surprise armies showing up at key moments, backstabbing that required extensive communication, pincer attacks, etc. would be ludicrous.

          1. Syal says:

            I don’t know about horses carrying stuff, but assuming a steady walking pace of one mile per fifteen minutes, it’s an average of 12.5 hours of travel per day. I certainly wouldn’t want to do it but it doesn’t strike me as obviously unreasonable for a king who’s still an army leader at heart.

            But I’ve always pictured Westeros as England sized. It doesn’t need to be bigger than that.

            …now I have to remember how far ravens have been flying. Have we had one go from the Wall to King’s Landing?

            1. Alex says:

              “…now I have to remember how far ravens have been flying. Have we had one go from the Wall to King's Landing?”

              Didn’t they send ravens all over the place, warning that everyone needed to close ranks against the White Walkers?

            2. Joshua says:

              “But I've always pictured Westeros as England sized. It doesn't need to be bigger than that.”

              To be fair, I think this is a problem inherent to almost any fantasy setting out there. The authors design a whole world, but try to make it interact with itself in the same way that a region like England or Western Europe does. The Earth is actually very, very large, and thus attempting to make a Fantasy world that’s the same size as ours (even in the medieval period) would require the author to come up with thousands of cities and hundreds of countries/nationalities.

      2. Retsam says:

        Huh… that seems incredibly wrong to me. The size and position of the islands, the number of cities, the number of rivers… all of it feels right with a Britain-sized land-mass, and very wrong with a South American-sized one.

        Maybe it’s just my perception that’s wrong; but having the distance from Winterfell to King’s Landing being roughly equivalent to the distance from Moscow to Paris just feels wrong to me.

  8. MarcellusMagnus says:

    To me, Sansa's decision to withhold this information is one of the most bewildering aspects of this whole situation. Every time they call attention to it just makes the whole thing seem less real.

    To me, Sansa’s behaviour:
    – going from “Ramsay has our brother, we have save him, jeez, Jon!” to “Rickon is a lost cause, jeez, Jon!” in a few episodes
    – withholding all information about the Vale army
    seemed like an obvious sign that she was manipulating Jon. All of it makes a lot more sense if you assume she is trying to retake Winterfell on her own terms, getting all the credit (after Jon so predictably botches the job with his insufficient army) and eroding Jon’s Wildling powerbase (leaving her as the best person for the North to rally around).

    But then the show never followed up on that, either. She turns down the Lord’s chamber when Jon offers it to her, and no one speaks up in her favor when Jon is proclaimed KINGINDANORF.

    So yeah, that was the point where I’ve completely given up trying to understand just where in the seven hells the show was trying to go with Sansa’s storyline…

  9. newplan says:

    That's not the extent of the Vale knights' ninja-like abilities, either. Later, Sansa writes a letter to Littlefinger, presumably finally asking for his aid, and he's able to march the same army through hundreds of miles of Bolton territory undetected.

    Never mind the ninja-like abilities of the Vale knights’ army – how about the Harry Potter owl-like abilities of the raven that Sansa sent to Littlefinger?

    “Hedwig, find Littlefinger – he’s somewhere on a continent the size of Europe”.

    1. MarcellusMagnus says:

      Sansa knew Littlefinger was at Moat Cailin, so she just needed to have a Moat Cailin-bound raven at hand (without anyone questioning it, I guess).

      That’s how raven post is supposed to work, by the way: each bird is “trained” to home in on a specific destination when released from any spot in Westeros. Once you’ve “spent” that bird, you need to have it (or another one) sent back to you via carriage.

      1. newplan says:

        That's how raven post is supposed to work, by the way: each bird is “trained” to home in on a specific destination when released from any spot in Westeros.

        Yeah, that bothers me about the books. There aren’t any carts arriving at the wall with ravens. Practically speaking a full raven network is likely impossible to manage and keep running. They’d have to use hub and spoke.

        Sansa knew Littlefinger was at Moat Cailin

        How though? My memory is hazy but did Littlefinger mention to Sansa in their meeting in Mole’s Town that he’d be there? If not she must have gotten a letter by raven – which has the same problem since she was moving all over the north. If he did mention that he’d be there then why was he going there unless it was to invade the north. Just a mess of plot holes.

        1. Daemian Lucifer says:

          There are regular supply and recruit carts coming to the wall,so its reasonable to assume that ravens are counted as supply.

          Also,its possible to have a raven trained to fly between two hubs.Hence why ravens are usually reserved for mail between two cities only,and why its usually just the nobles that use them.

        2. MarcellusMagnus says:

          How though? My memory is hazy but did Littlefinger mention to Sansa in their meeting in Mole's Town that he'd be there?

          Yeah, he explicitly told her he had the knights of the Vale camped there.

          As for the “what was he doing there?” part – earlier in the season, he got Lord Sweetrobin’s approval to take the army to help Sansa – as in “prevent the Boltons from recapturing her after her escape”. Of course, he neglected to tell the boy how he would accomplish that, or what the political repercussions could be – but then that’s not unusual of him…

    2. guy says:

      Westeros ravens are extra-intelligent and can do stuff like that. It’s implied to be connected to skinshifters and Treenet.

  10. Mr Compassionate says:

    Me and my family were overtly exasperated by Jon and the army running in like idiots after all that talk of defensive tactics. This is why I dislike the standard “honest good straightforward guy” protagonist. The villain sets a trap and Hunk Squatthrust runs right into it.

    Partly this is because intelligence is considered a trait for deceptive, manipulative and evil people so a classic good guy is the opposite. A brash, direct and innocent strongman driven by raw emotion and personal strength, it’s easy to lose track of exactly how many protagonists fit that description. Is being driven by mindless reaction like an animal really indicative of true virtue? It’s so rare you see a show where the hero is prized for their cunning.

    1. Daemian Lucifer says:

      They need to take a note from Pratchett’s carrot.He may seem dumb due to all of his honesty,but carrot is not someone youd want to provoke or try to deceive.

      1. Coming_Second says:

        In why capitalisation is important news: This reads rather like you’re praising Terry Pratchett’s penis.

        1. Daemian Lucifer says:

          What if I am?

          I thought a bit about fixing the capitalization in that instance after I posted it,but I decided not to specifically because of the ambiguity.

    2. Matt Downie says:

      Generally in Game of Thrones, the honest straightforward guys aren’t rewarded for it. Ned and Robb tried to be honorable, to do the right thing, and they wound up dead at the hands of people who were more focused on winning.

      For whatever reason, lately this has stopped happening. The good guys do dumb things and suffer no lasting consequences. Stabbed by an assassin? You can shake it off with the help of basic first-aid treatment. Charge an entire army single-handed? You’ll win. Dead? You can come back to life.

      1. Vermander says:

        I think the idea that “being good and honorable will only get you killed,” is one of the biggest misconceptions about the series (the books more so than the show). Characters who act bravely or honorably in the story aren’t always rewarded, but if anything that makes their actions more heroic. And not every brave or honorable character is punished for their actions. Sam, Brienne, and Davos have all taken risks to help other people they’re still alive at this point.

        I don’t think Martin is a nihilist or a cynic. He’s not trying to say that being good is pointless, he’s saying that it’s really hard. And sometimes characters who believe they’re making “hard choices for the greater good,” like Stannis, Varys, or even Dany can be deeply misguided.

        On the other hand, cruel, treacherous, sadistic, and selfish characters usually see their actions come back to haunt them. The Freys are widely despised and seem to be dropping like flies, the Boltons are about to be routed in the Battle of Ice, and the Lannisters are on the verge of collapse. All of the people who betrayed or murdered the Starks will probably wind up worse off.

        1. Joshua says:

          I’ve always agreed with this. It’s more like “Doing good doesn’t necessarily give you guaranteed plot armor”, not “Doing good will get you killed”.

          Ned tried to do the honorable thing- he was killed.

          Joffrey (and many others) did many despicable things -they were killed, horribly.

          Tyrion (and some others like Daenerys) tried to be pragmatic and balance being good and ruthless -it doesn’t always work.

          It’s like Martin is saying that there’s no one way to rule that will automatically work for all instances.

        2. Grampy_bone says:

          Maybe, maybe not. Read some of GRRM’s older works and you see he has a real grudge against heroes in general and warfare as a positive solution to conflict.

      2. boz says:

        Ned and Robb tried to be honorable, to do the right thing, and they wound up dead at the hands of people who were more focused on winning.

        There is a slight quirk in that though. Neither Ned nor Robb died because of doing an honorable thing. Ned confessed to a crime he did not commit and Robb broke a promise with his allies.

    3. Joshua says:

      I really, really dislike the famed Idiot Ball. It’s the lazy screenwriter’s go-to method of creating drama when they don’t want to think too hard. They want their protagonist to be outsmarted, but don’t want to take the time to come up with anything smart. So, the villain comes up with an average intelligence plan and the protagonist’s intelligence is lowered enough to fall for it.

      Similar examples to the Jon Snow one above would be Harry Potter falling for Voldemort’s obvious trap in The Order of the Phoenix. Everyone tells him he’s being an idiot and it’s obviously a trap, but “You don’t get IT, Sirius is in TROUBLE!!!!!”.

      Plus, Buffy Summers falling for the same trap *twice* at the end of the final season despite being told by people close to her that it’s a trap (well, she intends to fall for it a second time, but is overruled. The writers then twist reality to make her nonsensical hypothesis correct, but that’s another story)

      Over-used plot devices.

      1. Syal says:

        Since I just saw yesterday they’re remaking Death Note, I’ll mention my most hated Idiot Ball moment is when Mello, who’s very first move is to become a crime boss, kidnap influential people off the street, and murder his rival’s crew out of jealousy, is killed because he’s not willing to undress a woman all the way.

  11. Harper says:

    To be fair to Jon, his whole army shares his complete incompetence. Infantry aren’t really capable of encircling an enemy force without help from cavalry, so Jon’s army had to be sitting on their asses while Bolton men slowly marched around them and pushed them inward.
    The idea to build trenches to counter cavalry IS a good idea, and it was used by Stannis when he marched on Storm’s End to lure Renly away from most of his host. He modified the battlefield heavily and with Renly’s general incompetence he could have very well succeeded if the shadow baby hadn’t killed his brother first.
    Instead we get no trenches and the cavalry on both sides are wasted in a frontal charge.

    1. 9guy says:

      Infantry aren't really capable of encircling an enemy force without help from cavalry

      Hannibal managed to get a superior force encircled on three sides at Cannae before his cav came in to seal off the fourth. First definitive tactical use of a pincer movement; it’s referenced as a hypothetical in the Art Of War but advised against.

      Of course, Ramsey is no Hannibal and Hannibal had to get sneaky to pull it off.

      1. Harper says:

        That was dependent on a whole host of factors and like you said, Hannibal needed his cavalry to complete the encirclement. Ramsay threw away his cavalry and just did it with his infantry.

        1. Grampy_bone says:

          This whole battle scene is really perplexing. The writers seem like they were trying to do Cannae (I recall hearing statements to that effect) but clearly have no understanding of what happened there.

          At Cannae, Hannibal had the weaker force but encircled the stronger one, destroying it. Here Jon has the weaker army but he gets encircled, and then magically gets saved by teleporting Vale knights. He should have lost.

          The writers failed at historical references. They also fail at drama and fail at creating compelling characters. Jon seems like an incompetent boob from start to finish who needs his sister to bail him out, not some kind of heroic general to rally the kingdoms around. Ramsay is oddly put in the “hero” position of being the superior general AND has the superior army, but still loses because the script needs him too. Pathetic. And there was NO REASON for it.

          They could have done this properly, referenced Cannae, and made us think Jon was a competent leader and a match for Ramsay. Just have him meet with the Vale knights ahead of time, put them on the flanks, put the wilding infantry in the middle next to him, and put the northmen on the wings. Then in the battle, it seems like the wildings are dying and the army is breaking, so Ramsay charges full forward, but the vale knights break around his flanks and start pushing them inward. Jon rallys the wildings to keep fighting, meets Ramsay in the middle for an epic one-on-one showdown, while his army gets encircled and crushed by the weaker force.

          Drama. Heroism. Courage. Would have worked great.

          But then that wouldn’t have given the writers a chance to lecture the audience “Listen to women you dumb men!” So Jon is a dunce, Ramsay is invincible until he isn’t, and turncoat Sansa gets to save the day by telling men what to do.

      2. Brian Quirt says:

        To be fair, Hannibal managed this by putting a thin screen of his worst troops in the centre, and his best troops on the flank, and the ‘encirclement’ was more a matter of the Romans pushing back his centre and thus getting surrounded by his flanking force than anything else. Also, of course, the Roman (Republican) army had shitty cavalry pretty much every time.

      3. jawlz says:

        The Athenians at Marathon used a pincer movement to defeat a Persian force that significantly outnumbered them (there is debate as to whether or not the maneuver/formation was intentional, but it regardless played out very clearly as a pincer movement). And Marathon predates Cannae by over 200 years.

        1. Harper says:

          And just like Cannae, it wasn’t a complete encirclement as the Boltons managed to do with only infantry

        2. guy says:

          That’s why I said “definitive”; last I heard the records on that battle were sufficiently ambiguous that historians aren’t entirely sure it counts as one.

          1. jawlz says:

            I don’t believe there’s any dispute that it played out as a pincer/double-envelopment – the normal 8-deep strong Athenian flanks beat back the Persian flanks, while the Persian center initially beat back the weakened (4-deep strong) but widened Athenian center before the Athenian center solidified as the Persian flanks fell back. The Persians ended up surrounded by Athenian hoplites on 3 sides, with the sea on the 4th (much like how we see the Bolton army on three sides, with the [ridiculous] mountain of bodies on the 4th).

            The only dispute among historians is whether or not the maneuver (the Athenian center initially falling back before solidifying again) was intentional, and to some extent that’s due the the different ways one can translate Herodotus’ Greek. But the initial formation of a weaker/wider center and stronger flanks (which was quite deliberate on Miltiades part) and the way it played out aren’t at all ambiguous.

            I don’t mean to take anything away from Hannibal, but I also think that many people stretch things quite a lot to credit him with inventing or first using the tactic. It had been (intentionally or not) used before, and Hannibal – as quite learned himself – likely would have been aware of that.

  12. Warclam says:

    Disciplined pikemen are owls? I had no idea.

  13. guy says:

    Trenches make a flanking cavalry charge much more difficult. At the very least, riding around them is time-consuming, and if the rest of the terrain is favorable may cut off the flat ground entirely. If the trenches are concealed, a big cavalry charge may actually fall into them, crippling or killing a ton of horses. They also reduce how much of the army is exposed to a charge, so it takes fewer spearmen to cover everywhere.

    1. Harper says:

      Yeah that’s the one thing that makes sense in this episode, which is why it doesn’t actually happen.
      The biggest complaint about realism in the battle is how all those Wildlings and soldiers just start piling up on top of each other, which is a thing that only happens when you have a big number of soldiers attacking a single bottleneck position

      1. Brian Quirt says:

        An excellent example of this is the Battle of the Golden Spurs, where a French force of knights failed completely against Dutch peasants in trenches armed with pikes.

      2. Sabrdance (MatthewH) says:

        Oh yes that annoys me. Building a pile of bodies that high on flat ground makes no sense. None of the accounts I’ve read of late medieval and early renaissance battles have bodies piled that high. Reading accounts of Pavia, they mentioned some of the pike formations getting blasted during a charge so that the bodies were stacked 3 high, and that was a renaissance battle that involved cannons.

        Against an entrenched position, like a breach, it could happen. But if you can just go around the sides, you would

    2. Jabrwock says:

      My thoughts exactly. It doesn’t stop the cavalry, it limits what they can do. Trenches on the flanks just prevents the cavalry from flanking and charging into your side/rear during the battle. It’s not a big thing, but at least he handwaves away why Bolton doesn’t just encircle him with cavalry, which is what you generally do if you have a very mobile arm of your army.

      Doesn’t make the rest of the battle make sense, but within the context of “what about his cavalry” it seemed to at least make an attempt to address it.

  14. 9guy says:

    That Sansa bit about the council strikes me as being one of my Bad Feminism pet peeves: female characters need to be independent and respected, so we’ll show that in a context that makes no sense for that character. Sansa has no military training or experience; the only reason for her to even be at the war council is if they are planning to recognize her as Queen In The North and thus in charge overall. In which case what should actually happen is that everyone does their planning and then presents the plan for her approval, and she probably just approves it because they know what they’re doing. Though she’d still have grounds to chew Jon out for skipping that step; it undermines her authority.

    In the world where everyone conviently ignores the fact that she’s the legal heir, there is no reason for anyone to think she has anything to contribute to tactical planning and she’s only invited as a spectator.

  15. Vermander says:

    The battle may have been visually impressive, but, I've read many well-written articles on why almost none of the tactics used by either side made any sense, and in some cases were almost physically impossible. Jon deciding to throw his life away and get a bunch of other people killed is the most obvious, but there are lots of other examples.

    Why did they leave Davos, a foreign sailor with little martial training and no experience leading an army on land in charge of the reserves? Why did they leave the cover of the woods which might give the wildings some advantage? Why did no one give poor Wun Wun a weapon, or even a shield? How did slow-moving heavy infantry with heavy tower shields manage to encircle them so quickly? Why wasn't Wun Wun able to break through the enemy lines? Just chuck a couple of corpses into them. Or better yet, a big rock.

    One that bothered me the most was Ramsey throwing away his own cavalry so he could do the “villain fires arrows into his own men,” thing from Braveheart. Heavy cavalry are your most expensive, least expendable troops. You normally use them in flanking attacks, to protect your own flanks, or to run down routing enemies.

    Equipping and training even a single rider and his warhorse is incredibly expensive and time consuming, which is why heavy horse would consist mainly of nobles, their relatives, and their well-paid retainers. This is true even in the North, which doesn't have a strong tradition of knighthood. So not only did he waste his most valuable and least replaceable troops, he also probably killed off a good portion of his most powerful supporters, including most of his equivalent of an “officer corps.”

    1. Matt Downie says:

      As a Total War player I was annoyed by the way the tactics worked. Let’s all stand here in a tight mob doing nothing much while their guys march around to encircle us!

      Other people I’ve spoken to aren’t so bothered by that. For them it really conveyed the feeling of being in a desperate battle, so covered with mud you can barely tell friend from foe.

    2. Guile says:

      >Why did they leave Davos, a foreign sailor with little martial training and no experience leading an army on land in charge of the reserves?

      Star power, I guess. It might have been interesting to have Sansa in nominal control of the reserves, on the grounds that the reserves are hopefully not needed and they could use the Queen Of The North as a morale boost.

    3. DeathbyDysentery says:

      Very much THIS.

      I realize that this is a show based around its narrative and not on faithful recreations of medieval warfare, but the battle scene really managed to push all my buttons. It wasn’t that it was just ‘unrealistic’, but also that it was constructed in a way that made it seem like that writers were attempting to make it seem legitimately historically convincing. For me, nothing was more annoying than watching the most cartoonishly ridiculous battle imaginable being set to dramatic ‘horror and tragedy’ music, and it’s made worse when it’s followed by a director’s commentary blurb where they talk about how they did research into historical battles for “authenticity”. I readily accept historical inaccuracy when it is clearly not a priority, but when they seem to congratulate themselves so much for it, it really gets hard not to nitpick.

      Anyway, I’m just gonna rant about some specific grievances for the rest of this post. Sorry if it’s tiresome:

      The whole battle seems to be written in a very commonly-held ‘Hollywood-esque’ mindset that makes two assumptions:

      1) Everyone in war will fight to the death without exception.

      and

      2) Combat in medieval times was basically just as much of a deadly, stressful meatgrinder as it was in WWII or the Civil War.

      These assumptions are kind of related because they are both incorrect for the same reason: in a situation like this one, where most of the fighting is done in hand-to-hand, it’s not actually that easy to kill hundreds or thousands of people who are actively trying to kill you back. This is not a commentary on how effective a steel sword is against a human neck (although heavy armor was pretty effective back then) as much as it is on how humans act as part of a group.

      Let’s make a hypothetical example: We are a unit of a hundred foot-soldiers with melee weapons who are about to fight another, similarly-sized group with melee weapons head-on in battle. Let’s assume that we outclass them entirely, and will certainly defeat them without any casualties at all, and that both groups arrange themselves in a formation consisting of ten rows of ten soldiers each.

      When the battle starts, both of our groups run up to each other and start fighting. We are so good at fighting, that we kill the entire front row in short order. After that we start attacking the soldiers who were standing behind them, continuing unopposed. At what point, do you suppose, would the soldiers in the back decide that they don’t want to walk into certain death? Is it after they see ten men die? Twenty? Thirty? Let’s then assume (as Hollywood almost always does) that our enemy considers this war to be very HIGH STAKES(tm) and that losing it would mean the destruction of the Earth/The Shire/New York City. That means that they REALLY wouldn’t want to run away, right? But if their force is losing decisively, then standing and fighting won’t save their precious [whatever] because they’re going to lose anyway, and they know it. Next, let’s say that they probably have a commander or a leader, and that that guy (if he’s competent) probably has the bigger picture in mind and wants to conserve his forces so that they can fight again. Finally, let’s remind ourselves that since both forces are infantry and they both have comparable armaments, they both have pretty much the same running speed, so even if our commander foolishly ordered us to break formation and chase them down, there’s no way we’d catch all one hundred of them.

      All of this adds up to the enemy force routing, retreating, re-positioning, or otherwise disengaging LONG before we manage to carve through every single one of them. It’s simply a matter of soldiers valuing their own lives and commanders valuing their armies. Hollywood battles (like this one) ignore these basic facts of human psychology and instead depict armies which grind into each other until one or the other doesn’t exist anymore. When soldiers at the front die, people behind them simply step on top of them and keep fighting. Hundreds or thousands of people die on pretty much the same spot, because the battle lines don’t shift or move (this is actually one of the rare instances where MOUNTAINS OF BODIES form because of this irrational behavior, but I’ll get to that in a little bit).

      The big thing to focus on is the fact that it takes a long while for one force of melee combatants to chew through another. Because of this, as demonstrated above, psychology will cause the forces to disengage from each other before one or both is annihilated. There are pretty much only two ways to actually achieve total annihilation, and one of them is to completely surround the enemy so that they cannot disengage even if they wanted to. The thing with this is that surrounding an entire army is next to impossible because commanders would pretty much always act to prevent themselves from being surrounded.

      One of the rare examples is Cannae, where Hannibal completely surrounded a Roman army, but this was achieved through clever manipulation of how Roman infantry operated. It was a sneaky, brilliant move that only could have worked once. In the BotB, Ramsay achieves a complete surround by… just doing it. He just orders his phalanx of hopilites (which he has, because hopilites are too cool for Ramsay not to have, I guess) to surround his enemy’s army, and they achieve this feat by virtue of the fact that nobody in Jon’s army wanted to move so as not to get surrounded, nor did any of them even want to attack the hopilites that were moving out of position to get around them. Also, the entire army was already conveniently clumped up into a tiny little circle the size of a small house. This is an example of how the writers probably though they were being clever by bringing up “Real Military Tactics” when in reality it’s basically just an asspull. From my point of view, Ramsay ‘cleverly’ surrounding his enemies in this way is just as egregious as Kai Leng going invulnerable and regenerating his shields.

      Anyway, the second way to totally annihilate an enemy force is to have powerful technology. Remember that the thing which made it so hard was the time it took to hack through hundreds of guys with a sword. But if you lined up a hundred soldiers in front of artillery and automatic firearms, they could all be dead before they decided to run away. This is the crucial difference between wars in modern history and previous ones: armies gained the ability to completely destroy each other very quickly. Even muskets and early rifles had a little of this kind of power when deployed en-mass. If you consider the hypothetical we brought up earlier and replace the weapons with more modern ones, then the results are entirely different. Not only are the weapons ranged (which makes retreat less likely to succeed), but they kill much more quickly, meaning there is less time to escape or consider escape. An artillery weapon might even wipe out all one hundred soldiers in a single instant, if they were close enough together.

      I suspect that Hollywood battle writing is preoccupied with more modern modes of warfare based around these more deadly weapons. Contemporary viewers naturally have more knowledge of and interest in recent wars, after all. This is why soldiers in these movie battles often just march forward and die, because a lot of firearm-based combat is based around men doing just that. I remember that the creator commentary segment on the battle mentioned accounts from the American Civil War as evidence for bodies literally piling up into hills during a battle. This is because, during the Civil War, combat consisted of soldiers lining up into long formations and firing at each other until one side or another was too broken to keep fighting. This meant that, in large battles, many people would die standing in the same spot. But the idea of a similar situation developing between armies fighting with swords is patently ridiculous. Melee lines naturally push each other against space, for one, so corpses would not pile up in one place, but beyond that, think of the basic mechanics of such a pile growing to the size presented in the show. For every corpse on the pile, not only did a swordsman have to decide to climb the pile, but an enemy soldier also had to decide to climb up too and kill him. At what point does a pile become big enough that soldiers decide they have better things to do in the middle of a battle besides climbing on corpses? I guess it’s suggested that the constant arrow fire created the hill, but archers were never really that deadly – if they were, then we wouldn’t have developed muskets or rifles. And even if they were that deadly, the question remains: How many friends do you have to see charge up a pile of corpses and die to arrow fire before you decide to not do the same thing?

      And of course, there’s the standard Hollywood nonsense that I won’t get too far into. The named characters have plot armor despite being in terrible situations, which is fine. The battle is essentially a chaotic mess of soldiers engaging in very deadly one-on-one combats, which is expected. The day is saved by a cavalry army which miraculously went unnoticed by everyone involved, which is standard. The big disappointment is just that they clearly went through the trouble of looking up stuff like Cannae and the Civil War and yet seemed to gain no real understanding of how battles were actually fought, and if they did gain any understanding, they clearly swept it under the rug in favor of Hollywood tactics. But if that is the case, then why include these “”””realistic”””””” tactics at all? Why go full fantasy, anyway, if your show is supposed to be ‘dark’ and ‘gritty’ and ‘realistic’?

      1. Andy_Panthro says:

        A couple of additional thoughts:

        1. Even if this unlikely scenario comes to pass, and you are stuck in between a pile of bodies and armoured men with big spears…. surely there’s a point on each side, where the spearmen and the bodies meet, which would be vulnerable to attack? (or at least a point at which there’s the possibility of making a gap, and therefore making a run for it rather than being crushed to death)

        2. I feel like the show (haven’t read the books) doesn’t explain well enough what the relative strengths are of the various factions. We’re told that Jon doesn’t have the resources for a siege, but (until the Knights of the Vale arrive anyway), nothing about this episode suggested he had the forces to in any way challenge Ramsey in open battle either. Even without tactical blundering, he looks completely outmatched. (I suppose most of this is a budget issue, since having hundreds of extras is very expensive, especially if you want them decked out in appropriate armour and stuff).

        1. Vermander says:

          This battle most likely won’t happen at all in the books. Its equivalent is the “Battle on the Ice” between the armies of Stannis and Roose, both of whom are still very much alive. It’s looking like Stannis is probably going to win through a series of betrayals on the Bolton side and a clever trap involving a frozen lake. The burning of Shireen looks like it will happen much later, possibly during a fight with the White Walkers.

          A major difference between the show and the books is that few, if any of the Northern Houses actually support the Boltons, and some or all of their alleged Northern allies seem poised to turn on them once the battle begins. The Bolton’s only real allies are a contingent of Freys, who make up about half of their forces.

          Jon, Davos, the wildings, and the knights of the Vale almost certainly won’t be present for the fight with the Boltons, though they probably will be on hand to fight the White Walkers later on.

          1. Andy_Panthro says:

            I really wish they hadn’t started making this show until all the books were finished…

            An adaptation is always going to change things (sometimes for the better), but it sounds like the show is going to be quite different in a lot of ways, and not necessarily in a good way.

            I also feel like they’re racing towards the finish line, because I’m sure I read they were only doing seven episodes for the final two seasons. All that slow build from early episodes, with the in-depth characterisations and political machinations seems to get thrown out of the window.

      2. Joshua says:

        Fun fact: Look up Hollywood Tactics on TV Tropes, and you’ll see the article picture is from our very own Shamus Young.

      3. Syal says:

        Agree with most of what you’re saying.

        I suspect that Hollywood battle writing is preoccupied with more modern modes of warfare based around these more deadly weapons.

        I think it’s just about wanting a climactic showdown. You can have one giant battle with everything on the line, or you can have an unending series of skirmishes with very small stakes in each confrontation. One is exciting to watch, the other can be a chore.

        archers were never really that deadly ““ if they were, then we wouldn't have developed muskets or rifles.

        We developed muskets and rifles because proper archers are kind of a bitch to train, while basic rifle competency can be learned in an afternoon.

        1. DeathbyDysentery says:

          You’re absolutely right about the reasons armies switched over to guns, and I probably oversimplified my point about the archers. What I meant to say was that bows and similar armaments, while deadly, were always support weapons and could very rarely be relied upon to neutralize an enemy force by themselves. A lot of this has to do with the fact that bowmen fire in an arcing pattern, whereas gunmen fire directly at the enemy; a line of gunmen can eventually stop an enemy force in its tracks, whereas a line of archers would have more of a ‘softening’ effect. Guns can control a relatively narrow area with authority, whereas arrows can tax and harry a somewhat wider area.

          So when I say that the bows weren’t ‘that powerful’, what I mean is that arrow fire isn’t reliable enough to create a mountain of corpses. The battle scene seemed to suggest that the archers were acting like a musket line or a machine gun by killing everyone who entered the area where the hill formed. The body count itself isn’t unnecessarily unbelievable, but the bodies should be distributed more widely and randomly. This is what I mean when I say they have a preoccupation with more modern battles: the idea of ranged weaponry as being a deadly, reliable buzzsaw which can stack up bodies like cordwood is relatively recent. Even if arrow coverage of that small space was that dense, the armor and shields of the people moving through it would have saved a good amount of them if they were actively trying to protect themselves.

          As for the first point, while I agree that a completely realistic portrayal of warfare (which would probably end with one commander or the other giving up and going home) would make for bad television, I do think that there is some middle ground to be found. The Total War series of games isn’t faithfully realistic by any means, but it at least demonstrates some understanding of how soldiers would react and how commanders would think in ancient and medieval warfare. Those games have big, climactic battles where one force or the other ends up effectively destroyed, and they do it without being so cartoonish.

          1. ehlijen says:

            I’m not sure what the arcing shot has to do with stopping power. At shorter ranges, bows can fire quite straight and faster than muskets.

            I believe the reason archers, and early firearms, didn’t decide battle is endurance: Arrows are quite big and heavy compared to bullets and powder, and take more effort to make than bullets (though not the powder). In addition, muzzle loading, crossbow winding and arrow knocking take quite a bit of physical effort, meaning the shooter will tire out.

            When breech loaders turned up, marksmen could finally carry a ranged weapon that fired quickly enough to keep an enemy at bay and used light enough ammunition that they could do so for more than a few volleys before they ran dry.

            The ‘mountain of corpses’ still wouldn’t have happened. That requires the enemy to actually have fresh victims keep climbing on the previous corpses, which one wouldn’t do if it’s at all avoidable (corpses don’t make for stable footing, I believe?).

            1. TheJungerLudendorff says:

              I think the “stopping power” he referred to would be more of a psychological effect.

              Archers usually fire in an arc, which means the arrows get distributed across the enemy unit. Which means that every man in the unit is under fire. The logical response to that is to run towards the archers and make them stop shooting you. But regardless of what you do, the whole unit will likely be under attack while you do it.

              Meanwhile, riflemen fire in a more-or-less straight line. This means that all firepower gets concentrated on the first couple of lines of men on whatever side of the unit is getting shot. So most of the unit is not (yet) being attacked, and the guys who are getting shot are getting absolutely hammered. Add to that the massive amount of noise that a gun makes, and the result is quite intimidating for the people under fire.

              So if you want to stop them firing, you need to run straight towards these riflemen. This means that the guys at the front need to willingly expose themselves to all that firepower and noise, while the guys behind them know that while they might be pretty safe NOW, if those guys in front of them fall it’s their turn in the meatgrinder.

              So while an archer volley puts the whole unit in an “under fire” mode with limited damage, a rifle volley will put a part of the unit in a “getting murderized” mindset with heavy damage, while the rest of the unit is waiting for their turn into battle and hoping it wont come (it’s often said that the wait before a battle is worse than the battle itsself, which is a similar effect). So riflemen tend to be a lot more intimidating in general, which means that people are far less willing to run at them, causing a kind of “stopping” effect.

              At least, thats how I read it :)

              1. Syal says:

                Although rifles themselves took hundreds of years to become accurate enough to fire in a straight line; the Hollow Square formation was used because early muskets weren’t accurate enough to reliably hit a thin line of men standing shoulder to shoulder, they usually fired in arcs and hoped to hit the middle ranks.

                Then you get to modern days, where you still get a series of low-stakes unending skirmishes because the reaction to facing weapons that can kill hundreds as easily as tens is ‘we should only ever gather in groups of ten’.

                1. TheJungerLudendorff says:

                  I thought that early muskets were more of a morale breaker than an actual killing device.
                  Since they were probably relatively expensive to produce, had bugger all in terms of rate of fire, and had a nasty habit of exploding. And they didn’t even have the penetrative power of many bows.

                  But they produced a lot of noise and smoke, which was probably quite disconcerting for the people on the receiving end.

      4. TheJungerLudendorff says:

        To add on your point about modern warfare: Even in modern combat, with all it’s lethal weaponry, most people would not die. For one, we developed tactics and equipment to ensure they survive, since both the soldiers and the commanders would very much like them to stay in one piece.

        For another, if a group of people are getting hammered, they would probably try to retreat before they get killed. And while ranged weaponry might make that harder, it also let’s them hit their enemies back to give them time to retreat.

        And if they can’t retreat, they would probably surrender. Even in the meatgrinders of WW1, people usually inflicted more losses by taking people prisoners than by killing them. For one, it’s easier than killing them to the last man, and as you pointed out, few people are willing to fight to the last man.

        And even if they fought to the last man, a lot of people would get incapacitated to injuries, but not necessarily die.

        1. Daemian Lucifer says:

          Actually,modern warfare does lead to more casualties.First,its due to the modern combat training.Most people simply dont want to kill other people,so usually in combat they try to just get the enemy to back off,or to wound them,rather than to kill them.This is the reason why most people did not fire their weapons during the world wars,and from those that did,mostly missed.

          However,what modern military training did,was to introduce rapid response firing at human simulacra,leading to soldiers firing their weapons at the enemy before their brains can even consciously register what they are shooting at.

          Couple that with the extreme ranges of modern weaponry where you cant even see what you are shooting at,and modern warfare does become much deadlier than before.

          1. TheJungerLudendorff says:

            True. It’s still a far cry from a 95% death though. And once you get into protracted engagements (especially at longer ranges), you’d probably still get a lot of the same dynamics you had on the battlefield of ye olden times.

            Though I’m not even sure if we have enough data for how modern war would work on these large scale battlefields. Most of the wars happening nowadays are either guerilla-style operations against a superior force, or that superior force beating the tar out of their weaker , demoralized opponents. Besides Korea I can’t think of any big, recent wars between modern, roughly equal armies.

    4. Alex Broadhead says:

      One that bothered me the most was Ramsey throwing away his own cavalry so he could do the “villain fires arrows into his own men,” thing from Braveheart.

      This. Well, and the fact that the impact on the morale of his remaining troops should be immediate and severe: your commander just pointlessly killed off his most valuable troops and, in all probability, your immediate liege lord in plain sight of everyone. To the extent that you know his plans, they are insane and unlikely to work better than much simpler plans, and now you’ve seen that he’s perfectly happy killing off whole complements of your comrades – what’s stopping him from sacrificing you too? This is a recipe for mutiny and/or fragging.

    5. Harper says:

      Narrative-wise, having a pitched battle with a thousand man army made up of mostly undisciplined Wildling against an army of at least six thousand disciplined soldiers makes no sense.
      Ok, so the showrunners decide to throw out Stannis and give his entire arc to the Starks, but then they don’t even bother giving Jon and Sansa the Northern support he had in the books and show Jon is barely competent on the field.
      So wouldn’t it make more sense for Jon and Sansa( who have lived in Winterfell their whole lives and know it better than the Boltons) to lead their Wildling force( who are better equipped as raiders and infiltrators than rank and file soldiers) into Winterfell and sneak into the castle, rather than engage the Boltons directly?
      Well, yes, but apparently the writers thought the title “Battle of the Bastards” too good to pass up…

    6. Kavonde says:

      This is the comment thread I was waiting to see. I *hated* the Battle of the Bastards’ blatant Hollywood tactics. I suck at Total War games, but even I’d know that heavy infantry is for melee and cavalry is for flanking, not the other freaking way around.

  16. Coming_Second says:

    I'm not an expert in medieval tactics, but I could never quite figure out how this was supposed to work. Couldn't they just go around your trenches, and attack you from a different direction? Or attack you while you're digging them?

    Depends on the terrain. If you’re between two heavily wooded areas, or in a mountain pass, for instance, digging trenches or setting up stakes will be very effective against cavalry because no, they won’t be able to go around. As for attacking whilst the enemy is digging them – surprise attacks were a thing in medieval times, but generally armies take a long while to muster. If you don’t water your horses and feed your soldiers after marching them however many miles, they aren’t going to be much use however you deploy them. Also remember that medieval generals were operating mostly in the dark with only the vaguest idea what the enemy was up to, and once an attack was launched it was extremely difficult to communicate with its leader. So conservative tactics and waiting until everything was completely clear and ready was usually the name of the game.

    The Hundred Years War had many examples of effective trench use, if you’re interested in it. I’ll bore off now.

    1. Matt Downie says:

      Also, flanks are uniquely vulnerable. If their cavalry can go all the way around your trenches to attack you from behind, then your guys at the back can just turn around and they’re once again charging a solid line of infantry head-on. (Unless your lines are thin and you’re already under attack from the front.)

  17. Matt Downie says:

    I wonder if we’re supposed to assume that the Boltons handed Moat Caelin over to Littlefinger on purpose? After all, he gave them Sansa. They probably considered him an ally.

    1. Syal says:

      Or he might have bought the troops there, like he did with Janos Slynt.

    2. Alex Broadhead says:

      It seems possible that the Boltons did abandon it, though to abandon it completely seems foolish in a way that Roose was not. Their enemies were in the North, and their ‘friends’ the Freys and Lannisters controlled the Riverlands, so they didn’t really need to defend it.

      One would assume that a skeleton staff of engineers would’ve been left to do repairs and send off a raven if, e.g. a huge force from the Vale appeared and laid siege…

  18. Shen says:

    What, no comment on the fact that Ramsay’s super clever villain battle tactics relied entirely on a ridiculous corpse pile that has absolutely no right to exist? Who the hell was climbing on top of that thing to die once it got beyond chest height?

  19. Syal says:

    where Jon throws Ramsay a bit of a curveball by proposing single combat

    One thing I like about the books is there’s a lot of single-combat challenges that get turned down. Pretty much any time an army thinks they’re outmatched, they’ll offer a single combat challenge, which is met with “no, that’s too risky” by the superior force.

    1. Vermander says:

      The Blackfish’s rejection of Jamie’s challenge during their parlay was one of my favorite scenes in the books.

  20. Cinebeast says:

    Man, this episode won for writing? In the same year that Steven Universe dropped “The Answer,” “Hit the Diamond” and “Mr. Greg?”

    For shame, Emmys. For shame.

  21. Jenx says:

    To be fair to the show….actually fuck it, the show doesn’t deserve fairness at this point.

    My point is this – maybe the Vale knights are riding Dothraki horses. Why? Because apparently Dothraki horses are near-invisible and silent stealth machines, because I still have no clue how else Danny could have been completely blindsided by a giant horde of them when she was at those grasslands at the end of last season (that was when that happened, right? Things kind of blur at some point), not to mention she was previously on top of a cliff with a rather clear view of the entire plains in front of her.

    1. Alex Broadhead says:

      Teleportation: Not just for the Dornish anymore!

  22. Phantos says:

    …there's a certain threshold of blockheadedness that I'm not comfortable seeing my protagonists exceed. A human foible here and there can humanize a character, but when a predictable dick move by an opponent who's famous for his dick moves makes you want to 1v6,000 an entire army, in direct contradiction of the plan you were supposed to follow… well, I can't maintain the same level of sympathy and engagement with someone like that.

    It’s especially bad when a story expects me to think a stupid character or stupid action is actually smart. Or brave or badass or something.

    Like if it’s not even making a point of the character doing something stupid. If the story is stupid and the writer is stupid and THINKS the audience will be stupid enough to be impressed.

    Which says a lot about the Emmys.

    1. Vermander says:

      Killing off Rickon (not to mention Osha and even poor Shaggydog) like that seemed pretty gratuitous and was clearly done to trim the cast and number of plotlines. Plus it means we’ll never get to see Davos’ adventures on unicorn cannibal island.

      That said, I think it would have made Jon seem braver, and more sympathetic, if he had somehow found the resolve to stand his ground, even when he was forced to watch his little brother die, knowing it would save hundreds more lives.

      1. Sabrdance (MatthewH) says:

        A Bridge too Far did this magnificently with the solder running out to bring back a supply canister. Half the soldiers back at the house are telling him to turn around, the snipers will get him, and then he gets the canister, and he’s running back, and everyone is shouting “Run laddie, Run!” And he’s almost to the bridge that marks safety.

        *Crack*

        “Christ, they got him!”

        And we go back to see the body laying in the dirt at the foot of the bridge, the canister broken open, and filled with replacement hats.

        It’s a great scene. GOT should have ripped it off entirely.

        1. guy says:

          To be fair to the guy, when you’re up against snipers you need a lot of extra hats for the old sniper check trick.

  23. Mako says:

    “I know I skipped over all the Daenerys stuff ““ but in my opinion, if anything it's worse.”
    And that is precisely the reason we’d love to read you take those bits apart.

    1. SPCTRE says:

      Seconded.

  24. Lalaland says:

    The magic reinforcements just took me out of the battle altogether and I’d been enjoying it enough that I’d missed the lack of trenches altogether. An entire cavalry regiment up someones sleeve though and the total lack of anger or rage from John that this incredible advantage had been kept secret is just incredible.

    The fact of it being a TV show feels ever more apparent as “things just happen” to give us the dramatic moment, emblematic for me in wasting Brienne for most of season 5 staring for a candle only to turn away at just the wrong moment, so bloody cheap.

    1. guy says:

      That sounds like something the showrunners could have fixed so easily; Sansa tells Jon about the Vale knights, then they later get a report that they’ve been bogged down somehow, then they arrive suddenly and unexpectedly, and in the post-battle conversation their commander explains the cunning plan by which he left a tiny portion of his army behind to ride around a lot and use a bunch of extra cookfires and snuck the rest of his army around the blocking force in the dead of night. That is how you do the sudden surprise reinforcements thing.

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