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This 'Game of Thrones' theory about Jaime and the Night King seems very convincing

Speculative spoilers ahead!

This 'Game of Thrones' theory about Jaime and the Night King seems very convincing
14 February 2018

Every so often, we remember that it’s going to be another year and a bit until Game Of Thrones comes back, and when it does, it’s for only six episodes. God, that’s a long wait. God, that’s not many episodes. God, a lot of stuff is going to have to happen.

But what? What will happen? How will it end? Who’ll live? Who’ll die? How will they die? Will Danaerys and Jon find out they’re in an aunt-nephew sexual relationship? Will they care? Will Brienne and Tormund have giant babies? How giant? Will Sam give credit where it’s due to Gilly for working out the truth about Jon’s lineage? Will Cleganebowl happen? Will Jaime have to kill Cersei? Will more people turn out to be secretly related to one another? Will Theon save his sister? Will his willy grow back? How will the zombie dragon get on with the living dragons, because, like, are they still brothers? Will Mastodon show up again? SO MANY QUESTIONS.

One person on Reddit (it’s always a person on Reddit) has a theory as to what’ll happen with the Night King and the army of the dead.

“Jaime will convince at least a contingent, if not the entire Lannister Army to join him in going north. The combined armies will go north and fight the army of the dead, defeating it but at great cost. However, the Night King and his dragon will not be there. Why? They flew south to destroy King’s Landing, [the Night King] trading his army of 100,000 for the 1,000,000 in King’s Landing… including Cersei.”

Whoa. Could happen. A few times in Thrones, a small army has been essentially sacrificed in order to achieve victory elsewhere. It’s a diversionary tactic - send a contingent to start a ruckus in location X, so your enemies flock there to kill ‘em, and while that’s going on, send your real army to take over location Y. It’s kind of a bastard way to treat your own soldiers, sending a group of them to near-certain death, but that’s leadership for you.

Robb Stark - remember Robb? Poor, doomed Robb - used it as a tactic way back in season one, episode nine. It’s how the Stark forces won the Battle of Whispering Wood and caught Jaime Lannister. Jaime, in turn, used the same tactic several years later in season seven, episode three, to take Highgarden.

So, the army of the dead splits up. Half of them stay up north, drawing Jaime and his army to them, where a massive fuck-off battle takes place and eventually all the reanimated dead people are killed, or re-killed. But, at the same time, a relatively unguarded King’s Landing is attacked by the other half of them, and everyone there is zombified.

Yeah. Then you’ve got the drama of Jaime thinking he’s won, followed by the agony of realising what’s happened, and then the heartbreaking messed-upness of him having to kill a wight version of Cersei. Gnarly. 

Pluuuuus…

Remember when there was that flashback to Cersei being given a prophecy as a child by Maggy the mad witch?

She predicted that Cersei would outlive all her children, which went on to come true. In the books, she continued:

“And when your tears have drowned you, the valonqar shall wrap his hands about your pale white throat and choke the life from you.”

(Valonquar means little brother, and Cersei’s hatred of Tyrion is suggested to have come from this and her certainty that he would kill her, but her twin brother/lover Jaime is slightly younger than her so would also count, leading to the popular fan theory that the show will end with Jaime killing Cersei.)

Maybe… maybe it wasn’t “pale white throat”, but “pale wight throat”? Hang on though, no, because you couldn’t choke the life from a wight - they’re already dead, and choking them wouldn’t do anything. Forget that bit.

Why can’t Cersei and Jaime find a happy medium somewhere and just enjoy a nice sibling relationship? They seem determined to go far in one direction or the other, either having penetrative intercourse or committing a murder. The healthy mid-point - friendly bickering with someone you know has your back - seems completely beyond them. The Lannisters could definitely benefit from a family WhatsApp group, but that’s hard to do with ravens.

More things people reckon might happen in season eight include:

  • Danaerys gets pregnant with Jon’s baby, possibly leading Sam to keep his knowledge about Jon’s parents a secret
  • Gendry is legitimised as Robert Baratheon’s son
  • Jaime ends up becoming Lord Commander at the wall
  • Tyrion, Bronn and the Hound all survive, with Tyrion awarding Bronn the Twins and retiring to make wine, assisted by the Hound
  • All the dragons die, but in the closing seconds of the show we see that one of them has laid an egg…

In short, nobody really knows anything. One idea that keeps coming up is that, at the end, we’ll see Sam writing it all down, as it turns out that everything we’ve seen and heard has come from his book. While there’s definitely something appealing about it (and it seemed to be teased in some of Sam’s scenes with Jim Broadbent last season), there’s also something kind of incredibly cheesy about it. Especially, as some have theorised, if it’s an older version of Sam played by George R.R. Martin, and the last shot of the show is him closing his book, A Song Of Ice And Fire.

Is that good? Or is it awful?