Bastardbowl

So who else really got their hopes up with the initial battle, but then got really disappointed really fast when it went full fantasy combat?

Now if you were the GM of the GoT campaign, how would you have resolved it instead. It worked great up to the piles and the wall. What could replace that phase?

I'd have had the entire group, on both sides, just shit themselves uncontrollably for the entire rest of the episode.

Like, people would be actually drowning in shit.

As opposed to drowning in zombies like everyone'll be in E10 when the Night's King goes waltzing through that battlefield.

Would have Sansa raped and flayed tbqhwy

>full fantasy

Elaborate. I believe the battle was pretty good, although I had hoped they were going to do a little roller coaster climb to the battle and start it just as the episode ended, to be honest.

>corpses falling in piles
>those piles becoming a tactical feature
>Bolton infantry literally encircling opposition with a shield wall
>John literally drowning in corpses

In an anime battle this would be fine. But this is Game of Thrones. Literally!

Yeah it was badly done.

Plus there was around 300 people or so shown.
Bit lack luster for a battle with 9000 combatants.

>Sansa tells Jon about the Knights of the Vale
>CIA brings friends, even if it takes a few days of waiting to see whether or not they actually show up
>Boltons get intimidated and hole up in Winterfell

>wildlings fashion for Wun Wun makeshift armor, shield, and bludgeon (S4E9 has giants using bows and complex mechanisms to help break a fortified door, meaning giants are intelligent and can use complex tools)
>wildlings send in Wun Wun to completely batter down the gates

>wildlings and Knights of the Vale pour into Winterfell and seize it in an instant
>nearly 0% casualties for Jon's side

Why did they not do this?

ALTERNATIVELY:
>the wildlings bring out Wun Wun's massive, ridiculously long-range bow from S4E9
>they have Wun Wun snipe Ramsay from afar, with Ramsay having absolutely no counter to this

It seems that the entire Bastardbowl could have been avoided by better communication from Sansa and much better usage of Wun Wun, instead of sending the giant in completely unarmored and unarmed.

wasent the infantry charge distance long as hell?

GoT is now nothing but disappointment.

It's disappointment upon disappointment with the occasional little gem in it that tries to tell you that it's worth digging through the bland samey trash to find more such gems but you quickly realize it really isn't.

There is no reward for getting invested in a character as most of the likable ones are dead now.

The stupid ones and Saturday morning cartoon villain ones are still around despite other more entertaining/likable characters having been killed off for far less reason.

Despite being hype as fuck starting it back in the start of season 1 I don't think I shall bother with season 5.

I don't even follow the series but it got me curious.

What happened? Did ramsay die? Did jon die (again)?
Did someone of note die at all?

Ramsey died after the battle and the beyond badass giant , Wun Wun, died. Beyond that no one of import died.

Ramsay was eaten by his own dogs. Before that he murdered Rickon to taunt John (successfully). Wun Wun is dead, as is most of the Wildlings. The only army left standing at Winterfell is the Knights of the Vale.

I swear! When Arya was gutstabbed for stupidity as a cliffhanger and then came back all well again next episode for having laid down for a day and gotten a bandage and soup, I was about ready to put the series creators' heads on spikes atop the walls.

Shit's really gone downhill. Barely holding on for Daeny Sue, and I'm not sure how much further that will be able to go. I had really been hoping for Catelyn to hang Brienne.

>There is no reward for getting invested in a character as most of the likable ones are dead now.

would you rather have all the main characters escape certain death time upon time?

No but I would like some consistency.

Rob does something stupid, dies. Ned does something stupid, dies. No Dick does something stupid, dies. King of the North does something stupid, dies.

Asbestos Dragon Bitch stupids her way across half a continent, survives and rules a kingdom.

Ramsey "I wish I had a moustache to twiddle" Bolton does stupid and it took him ages to finally die.

Lannister Bitch is still alive despite heaping on the stupid faster than she does cheap wine.

Where can one still find quality battles?

King's Landing was alright, until it wasn't.
The Hobbit? That was laughable cgi spam.
Warcraft? I hear they trimmed a third away before release.
Do I have to resort to pre-80s monumental film for my mass combat fix?

I thought the opening cavalry charge and ensuing melee were quite good. The rest of the Fight was a bit meh. Fairly predictable if aesthetically pleasing. Still it's the closest thing to an old-school medieval battle that we're gonna get.

The opening pitch of the battle this episode was good. Chaotic brawling typical of two armies without centralized and compartmentalized leadership mauling the fuck out of each other.

IF you can ignore the obvious tactical mistakes Ramsay made with his sheer overpowering statistical advantages, such as not flanking Davos and the archers with his cavalry, not driving his cavalry right down the wildling's spearless center, and firing arrows into his own men in a melee when 3/4ths of the combatants are his.

Also ignoring the obvious mistakes Jon made, such as not arming Wun Wun, not digging trenches (like they said they would), where the fuck was Ghost? Ghost could have snuck up and mauled the fuck out of Ramsay when he was looking at the battle from the hill.

Sansa should have said the Knights of the Vale were coming, but she didn't because she's categorically a dumb bitch who wallows in self-pity.

The battle could have been much more realistic, but they wanted carnage, and they delivered well on that front. The opening clash was brutal, demonstrating that cavalry charges aren't like pushing a spear into enemy formations, but more of a battering ram.

Then they immediately followed it up with the Knights of the Vale flowing through the testudo formation without even slowing down.

It was a mixed bag of good and bad, but I was entertained.

Brienne lives after that in the 4th book though, it all just happens off-screen (or off page).

The only explanation that makes sense is that Sansa wanted Jon to die along with his men. Those who died were loyal to Jon, not her. She wanted Rickon to die because it sets herself up as Queen in the North.

Sansa is a sociopath who cares for no one but herself. She even goaded Jon the night before, putting more pressure on him than there already was. It was bad for Jon to lose his cool, but he is running out of family. Seeing your little brother die after the first time you've seen him in years is hard.

Sansa? Doesn't fucking care. She doesn't even seem to care about his body being buried in the crypts, only looking towards her revenge against Ramsay.

She is not a Stark, and she is not Queen in the North. She doesn't even care about the North.

Also, if Rickon wasn't a dumb shit, he could have turned towards Ramsay and every time Ramsay shot an arrow he could just stop moving and shift a few feet in a random direction.

Or Jon could have directed him like 'Red Light, Green Light' and just told him to freeze whenever Ramsay fired. It's also silly how ridiculously skilled Ramsay is portrayed as, hitting 100+ yard shots with a longbow in wind, with direct center of mass hits.

Same as that scene when Theon was fleeing through the woods and was captured by those soldiers and Ramsay was landing noscopes at a rate of like an arrow a second by himself.

Both Rickon and Jon were a tad emotional at that point, so making that mistake may make sense. More on Jon's part than Rickon's in my mind. Rickon should have seen this coming a mile away while walking about and have been able to think of something. For Jon is was far more shock.

he didnt even have a tree trunk, like wtf where they thinking.

Maybe have character death mean something instead of the series being the literary equivalent to a shock jock station?

Everyone has different amounts of shit they can get away with. Part of the reason that Cersei is such a stupid bitch sometimes is precisely because she has gotten away with so much stupid shit in her life.

Cersei has barely been holding on mentally for 2 seasons. Her shit blew up big time in King's Landing. And I for one am sick of seeing her dread her trial, get on with it already. Let's see Flea Bottom burn.

There were way more then 300.

You were too good for this series, Ramsay.

I just saw this today. And I've never had such divided opinions:

>Strategy
Pants-on-head retarded fails to describe how utterly thoughtless the tactics and plot twists were past the halfway point. Hiding behind literal piles of bodies, somehow managing to trap the entire opposing army against those piles of dead bodies. Once they had them trapped, they barely moved and very clearly stalled. Deus ex machina Petyr coming to save the day. "We can just wait behind the walls, we won lol! It's not like we'll need more men, or that we'll run out of resources, and that we don't have any more friends in the fucking world." In short, I've never seen such a horrendous mess, and I'm ashamed to see it in such a budgeted show.

>First half of the battle and cinematography
B-E-A-Utiful.

The intense action which is filmed in long shots where the horses flying past feel like they have an incredible impact. People stumbling about constantly, the camera panning around in a masterful way. 10/10, clearly someone more inspired filming the thing, than writing the horrible mess. For the segment where Jon is unable to get up, and getting buried in the pile of bodies the filming technique really tries to emphasize on his disorientation, and leaves us wondering what at all is actually going on, for a mere few moments that are made to feel painfully long.

I also love how Ramsay seemingly tempted Jon into running across the halfway point, guessing that if he pulled his string after having lulled him halfway into a mistake, he'd go all the way. Which he did. It's honestly a shame Jon's mistake there didn't get him gutted, but oh well, his plot armor was pretty obvious in that battle anyway.

Directors cut of Troy and ultimate cut of Alexander deliver good battles. Troy has inaccurate armor but delivers believable fighting and shield pushing that happened in real life while Alexander only has inaccuracies in what one of the battles looked like.

You expressed my feelings perfectly.

I'd quit the game and find better players.
No, seriously. If every fucking backstory they hand me is literally an attempt to out do the other players in tragedy and special snowflakety i'd have said "fuck all of you." And kicked their asses out of my home. However, they somehow got me to GM by some miracle and now they're stomping around an otherwise solid setting and all i'm hearing is "oh! I'm so unique and have such a tragic backstory!"
"NOOO! I'M the most unique yet tragic person!"
"NO! I AM!"
"NO ME!"
"Oh yeah? Well by the end of this my story will be so tragic you're all gonna cry!"
"Nuh uh!"
Literal garbage.

People complain about the tactics but what they don't understand is that it was intentionally bad to show how Jon and Ramsey suck compared to Sansa's strategic mind and common sense

It's not down to actual strategic mind vs. unstrategic mind. Its literally retarded. I'd honestly expect better planning from an actual retard.

to be fair, I'd say that outside a few notable lords and generals, the majority of medieval combat was likely just 2 forces of men slamming together until the other broke or died.

Not to mention that Ramsay's strategy, which had absolutely no right to net him anything but a miserable defeat actually led him to victory. Shooting your own men to build a wall out of their corpses is not only impossible, it's nonviable in terms of maintaining your superior numbers in a pitched battle.

The only reason Jon won, is due to Petyr's EXTREMELY convenient timing. And he didn't have any kind of Maiar magic to guide him like I'm sure gandalf and his gang had.

Is this bait? This was a pretty accurate depiction of a real battle.

This is bait.

>Lannister Bitch is still alive despite heaping on the stupid faster than she does cheap wine.

Come now, user. Don't talk such nonsense. I'm pretty sure the wine is quite expensive.

You would be hard pressed to find more than two medieval battles where you'd have a side with enough men to make actual corpse piles on the field big enough to be tactically important features. You could have fields of unsure footing from say 40 corpses but thats AFTER a major fight and a side losing that many in one spot has already lost if they're not outright dead.

>testudo formation

They were encircling the Northmen and the Wildlings, and were attacked from behind by heavy knights on horseback. They were rolled up exactly as easily as they would have been in real life.

Thats because she's a woman. Same reason they made whats her face an adult and turned a consensual sex scene into rape and stockholm syndrome. You can't make them out to be bad people as that would be sexist. You can make them stupid as all hell if you want but unless that shit works out relatively well for them you're misogynistic. The show director even said so and even he hates it.

at least 12 inches

Are you sure? It seems smaller....

Meereen was awful as usual and I couldn't take the battle seriously because a) Sansa STILL didn't tell Jon about the Vale even though she gave up the MUH PRIDE and wrote a letter to Littlefinger, and she knew he'd answer and b) Wun Wun could've won the whole battle himself. Give him a tree trunk to swing and some hastily crafted wooden armor. Given him logs to throw. On of those greatbows. They literally had a fucking superweapon. I haven't even watched half of the episodes because I don't care that much and after this I'm gonna just read summaries. And of course people are gaga over the episode.

The full fantasy combat was awful.
Even worse, we got to see the dragons for like 5 minutes, torching one ship, but then we have to suffer through 20 minutes of kit harrington grunting through an action scene directed by someone who apparently has a boner for Saving Private Ryan Omaha beach scene AND Lord of the rings "armour is paper" at the same time.

>Guy gets stabbed straight through his helmet.
>Cavalry charge without lances
>Lol I've watched so much Braveheart, shoot our own guuuuyyyssss
>Everyone has, for some reason, composite horse archery bows despite just being foot archers.
>Crazy Asian Cinema gimmick tactics "surround them with shiiiieeeellds!"
>Ramsay must be twice as much of an asshole as normal in case someone forgot he's the bad guy.
>For no reason at all Sansa keeps the chance of reinforcements a secret. Jesus fuck, does she think John will be more pissed that she talked to Littlefinger than he'll be that she let him go into battle and get all his guys killed before the Notfrench shows up and saves the day?

And so on and so forth until you throw up in your mouth.

WARNING: All below is spoilers.

Am I the only one who thought it weird that for 4 seasons they took many episodes and ordeals to go from point A to B, but on the last season, people just started using skyrim levels of fast travel?

>Littlefinger appear at molestown just to talk to sansa, heads back.
>Knights of the vale somehow make all the way across lannister infested rivelands and moat caitlin unnoticed to show up just in time for battle despite being called what, 2 days earlier?
>They actually visited several houses all across the north, one in a fucking island, during 1 episode, and it's strongly implied by the rest of the timeline that happened in a couple days
>Daenerys khalasar and her dragon make it to meeren like, a couple days at best after she burns their khals alive.
>A guy is building a fleet of a thousand ships, which should take years, apparently in time to CHASE someone.

They really fucked the timescale.

>Wun Wun
Fuck yes, this. Just gather up some spare shield and make a fucking apron for him, give him a log to wave around, but no, he goes into battle WITH HIS FUCKING HANDS.

HOW does he even have fingers left if his fighting technique consists of reaching for men with swords and picking them up.

Also, what happened to Ramsay's Twenty Good Men?

They weren't a pile of corpses.

It was two hills on the battlefield that people died on.

If you look closely in the scene you can see the dark grass behind the bodies.

Or why didn't he throw men when he waded into the tide of battle? Or horses? Throw either of those at a shield wall and it'll break. He swung around a tree trunk like it was nothing, he could chuck a man at others with enough force to kill everyone involved. He could've done so much damage even unarmed but no, he just fights like a normal - sized soldier.

>They really fucked the timescale.

So bad. I actually LIKE that they're starting to fast forward a bit so that we don't get episodes that are purely just moving pieces on the board before stuff happens. But WHY are they not consistent across plotlines? Like, just fastforward the entire thing a few months now and then, why not, we are adults, we don't need to see everything in real time to understand that it happened.

But noooo, lets just teleport everyone everywhere and just wave a magic wand and make ships appear.

Littlefinger used his little finger to teleport the Vale Knights like he does himself

Wun Wun had a club in hard home

Why the fuck didn't he have one here? Why the fuck didn't he have anything?

Wouldn't a giant smashing huge holes in taht shield wall with a fucking tree be pretty goddamn terrifying? Even more terrifying than getting his hand repeatedly jabbed with spears when he picked them up 3one at a time?

It's fun to see you know so little about medieval combat but still took your time to enlighten us assuming we know even less. You are wrong though, most medieval battles involved some degree of strategy. The most common was the hammer and anvil, using infantry to pin a guy's lines in place, circling with cavalry and slamming them from behind. Pincer movements, and all to the center were also common movements. I doubt you find 1 actual battle report (that was not what an english man wrote about that the french did) in which two sides just slam together thoughtlessly.

Also, Battle of Pavia.

Littlefinger confirmed for wizard. He and sam gonna battle for the ultimate prize: A book full of wizardry.

>The majority of medieval...

Yes, lets make sweeping statements about more than half a millennium that included everything from Vikings to Cannon, that will totally not make you sound like a complete idiot.

The stampede and them shoving each other was pretty realistic though

Little Finger is never late, nor is he early, he arrives precisely when he means to

The problem with the show is that it's becoming more and more of an unironic heroic narrative. I get the feeling in the books that Ramsay would just be killed in the midst of the battle - Nothing directly related to Jon Snow - or he'll flee, a loose end, out of the game for good.

The writers of the show aren't GRR Martin, so they have no real idea what made his work popular in the first place. They have really stupid stuff like Sam stealing Heartseeker, the family sword, and suffering no consequences for it. Are they not aware that his father would have bitchslapped him to death with his cock for that?

Same for Arya. In Book 6, she'll be one of the Faceless Men: It's implied that before you really embrace their philosophy, there's a period of 'acting out' that's accounted for and expected. Sort of like an assassin taking revenge for his family...Then realizing the emptiness of life and returning to the fold with all his issues worked out. But here, Arya is a renegade who is inexplicably not killed by the killer sent after her!

A lot of this shit is just dumb.

>Sansa is a sociopath who cares for no one but herself.

That would be awesome, but as shown by Arya's stabbing and Umber's ambiguous declaration of loyalty, if something on the show looks like it's settiing up something subtle and interesting, it's probably just bad writing.

Pretty much this. The carnage and chaos of battle were great. I loved the sequence of Jon climbing out of the mass of living and dead bodies as if he were drowning in a sea of men. The horse stuff was incredible. But it could have been so much better so easily...
>Have the dragon sequence as the finale to the previous episode; it was totally wasted by being overshadowed by the superior main battle.
>Have Littlefinger's forces show up before the battle. Deus Ex sucks. Jon made enough mistakes to justify almost losing with equal forces. Doesn't affect the plot except to create some cheap 'suspense'.
>Have Jon's force driven back against their own trenches and stakes rather than a literal hill of corpses which pile up for no fucking reason.
>Make Ramsey's forces advance and wrap around the enemy in a vaguely believable fashion instead of that stupid performance-art piece which required the opposing force to just sit there and let themselves be surrounded.
>Give some reason for why Wun-wun didn't have a weapon and wasn't being supported to smash a hole in the shield-wall. Maybe have him get stuck in the eye and go berserk or just killed much earlier.
>Have Jon's force at least try to use some of their magical assets. They have the red woman at least and it seems there should be a few wargs in the wildlings.
>Actually show some of Ramsey's army being less-than-keen to fight for him, or betraying him when it's clear that he is going to lose.
>Can't believe Sansa missed the opportunity to tell Ramsay 'all that will remain of you will be dog-shit'.

This, it's fanfic levels now.

It's both funny and sad that you can see exactly where the fatman's writing stops and D&D's starts

The worst part for me is Danaerys.

All she does is succeed with minimal effort because she has dragons, and over 70% of the scenes in Slaver's Bay that don't involve her are her subordinates talking about how awesome she is and how great a queen she'll make.

I'm only watching this for the Hound and the White Walkers at this point.

>They really fucked the timescale.

Surely it's just that the last couple of episodes covered a lot of time? Everyone did a few weeks of travelling. Littlefinger moved south and then north again with his forces. Jon and Sansa had to visit lots of northern houses. Dothraki had to ride across Essos. Jamie and Brienne travel across westeros and meet at riverrun. Yara and Reek travel around westeros and get to mereen.

Only inconsistent bit is where it seems Arya's plot was only a couple of days in the same shows, but I don't think that really matters because she isn't connected to the other characters. If Littlefinger had gone south and come back in the time it took Jon and Sansa to march directly to winterfell it would be different (and even then possibly justified by littlefinger having good horses while Jon had to move a mostly-infantry force through snow).

>Yara and Reek travel around westeros and get to mereen.


That's not a few weeks, that's like half a year

Please see
The writers CAN'T make her fail or seem less. She's a "pioneer for women everywhere." If they tried to write her as anything less they'd burn the script and fire the writers then hired new ones who understand the lay of the land. The director even states multiple times he's not "allowed" to deviate from this and how he hates that. But anything for a paycheck, right...?

While you make a good point, that doesn't make her character any less unsufferable

> that square coastline on Westeros

Map-bounded continents. Not even once.

Eh, looks like they travelled about three times the distance the other characters did. That doesn't seem inconceivable with good ships. Or maybe the Mereen plot is currently a few weeks ahead of the north at the moment.

Yeah, a single ship.

They've got the entirety of the iron fleet (200 ships) with them

Wun Wun took levels as a monk?

They didn't say how much time passed and they didn't really need to desu

>GoT Fans
>Arguing about realism
Not

Even

Once

They might not have the tools or materials to spare for Wun Wun armor but I agree he should've had a big fucking log. That spear wall was bullshit too I don't see how he couldn't have ripped through it. Why not just grab the spears and start poking.

>Getting that near to Valyria

That's it user, you don't get to steer the ship anymore.

it's a shame they killed off wunwun, he could've stopped the white walkers with valarian steel boots with dragonglass sticking out of them.

Wait, so having not read the books, is Jon less of a Mary Sue in them?

Tbh, I think most people complaining that characters are Mary Sues ignore where they suffer consequences (not super well-written ones, but best example being Dany, who is pretty much canon shit af at governing anything, and who has lost a lot because of it - she just personally doesn't care, cuz dragon people are crazy, I guess, so ppl tend not to talk about that) but like, Jon Snow literally just magic'd his way through a fucking literal wall of death, chased a bunch of horsemen on foot, and blocked three arrows from near-point blank range, after being LITERALLY resurrected, which is all a lil more .... heroic than I expected from a show where "all men must die". Like fucker shoulda died a lot in this episode alone, let alone this show.

Showfag here, what's wrong with Valyria?

A Magical apocalypse happen there, no one that gets near it either by land or sea returns.

Magical Pompeii

Bookfag here, read the books.

Unless you're Euron Crowseye. Then you can do fucking anything.

God damn right, that valyrian steel armor most be pimping as fuck.

You're not my real dad

Neat.

Him doing whatever he does next is now the thing I'm most excited for in the books. What kind of nightmarish apocalypse does he have planned for Old Town.

My guess is that it will be a mini valyrian right across the bay. Or he will be calling the original builders of the dark foundations beneath the Hightower.

White walkers is lame

They should be wight walkers

I actually think he's going to sacrifice both the fleets in an attempt to ascend to godhood.

Consider
>collecting priests like some sort of pokemon
>uses ironic punishment on them (Red priest burned with fire, Aeron chained in water, warlocks forced to eat their own, I don't know about the septons)
>one of his men mentions that the reason the gods are pleased is because they've been fed due to all the fighting
>Aeron's dreams

Don't forget all the symbolism about him making other people pray when he comes around. Both people shitting their pants at his pirate fleet, and his little brother begging to not get raped.

Also, realize that the religions with the most magical power are the ones that kill people the most.

Y'know, watching that battle, I thought
>Yang Wen-Li would've let the Bolton's surround him with their pike and shield, then pulled back over the wall of corpses, flank the pikemen, and win the battle without the magical teleporting sky knights of Arryn.

I realize Sansa was basically playing the long game so that she could take over the North as the trueborn daughter of Eddard Stark and deny Jon Snow the seat of Winterfell, but it felt really fucking contrived when Baelish just showed up on his horse with knights out the ass.

Same with Daenerys last episode, Theon this episode, and Brienne and Jaime during the Riverrun plot. Everyone can just magically teleport themselves all over the fucking world now that it's in the hands of Hollywood screenwriters.

>I don't know about the septons
Cut in seven pieces.

But you have to remember that Aeron is a self-deluded zealot with a little brain damage from back the Greyjoy's Rebellion. He is likely to unleash some magical catastrophe as a weapon against the Redwyne and Hightower fleets. But godhood not likely.

I did a shitty map of my own. Looks like Littlefinger did do some pretty fast travelling between episodes 4 and 5 if we assume each episode is happening more-or-less simultaneously for everyone. He didn't have to move especially fast to get his troops though; they were at Moat Cailin, not that far from Winterfell.

Likewise Yara does go a bit speedy going from the Iron Islands to Volantis; in roughly the time it takes Brienne to go from the wall to Riverrun and the Dothraki to get to Mereen, she covers about three times the distance.

>deny Jon Snow the seat of Winterfell

The sad part is that Jon wouldn't willing take it or betray her for it.

Yeah, that's why I said attempt.

I think he'll fuck it up because he's insane and wake up the great other/bring down the wall/ drown half of Westeros by mistake

>setting has some magic stuff
>that means none of the usual rules apply and any old derpery goes
>lol im smart xD

Sad.

I think its more reasonable to believe that Vale army sail from gulltown or the northern vale across the three sisters and disembarked behind Moat Cailin.

Except the director interview after the episode explicitly described the encirclement as an homagea specific moment in the Carthaginian War where the Carthaginian encirclement of the roman armies resulted in the annhilation of the roman troops down to the last man.

It was, by all comparison, a testudo formation.

>HBO:GO bruh

The only thing that really griped me outside of the giant mountains of dead bodies which I got over pretty quick, was how come Jon couldn't arrange to get any fucking spears? No stakes placed to deter a heavy cavalry charged after being taunted about it, but no spears for your untrained wildling group is pretty silly.

The lack of reaction to a fucking giant and not having a "Giant fucks everyone up" part is sad, also how did Davos get so far up so quickly without realizing they'd been in encircled? Why didnt he push up the archers to fire at the resting company that were going to advance? The actual battle tactics beyond that I get, the Romans did something similar to Boudica where they crushed the Britons against those wagons didnt they? That part was fine, but if Davos didn't sprint up the field he could have just smashed into the rear of that pike wall and opened a hole for Jon and Co. to escape.

Concerning the Knights of the Vale, the only hting I can think of is Sansa had requested Littlefinger's help way earlier when it became apparent Jon wasn't going to get the proper support they needed. What's more bizarre is where were the Boltons at Moat Cailin? Wouldn't he be aware of the Vale's attack/declaration of war? I can understand a forced march to help, it didn't look like that many cavalry in the grand scheme but it was really stupid that it wasn't conveyed that Ramsay NEEDED to push the attack because of the Knights of the Vale situation, or that nobody mentioned the declaration of war/loss of Moat Cailin.

Just earlier in S5 when Arya sees Mace Tyrell and his guards arrive in Braavos from King's Landing, he said the voyage was like 2-3 weeks iirc. Which means that distance is like 18 weeks or so. So yeah, a long ass time.

> Wait, so having not read the books, is Jon less of a Mary Sue in them?
Yes.

The show talks about it in the episode where Tyrion and Jorah are boating through the ruins.

Basically, Valyria was founded around 14 volcanoes, from which they harvested their Valyrian steel from the deep caves and mined riches making them the most powerful citystate.

Then one day, ALL of the 14 volcanoes erupted at once and buttfucked Valyria back into the stone age. They still continuously and spontaneously erupt to this day, 400 years later. The sea around Valyria is feared by sailors as great bubbling of sulfur from the underwater volcanoes can randomly blow a fishing boat up, or a steady release of sulfur gas can suffocate an entire crew which misnavigates the surrounding water.