I get a kick out of the wild theories too! A lot of the more intricate and out-there ones are great because they’ve motivated someone to go dig for a ton of details that actually are in the text but I never would have noticed myself. Even if they ultimately go in an “a + b = purple” direction, it’s fun to have someone point out a and b, and then marvel at the creativity that gets them to purple.

I think it’s partly true. There are pockets of resistance to the Boltons throughout the North, but it’s unlikely they were coordinated into one grand conspiracy before Roose summoned them all to Winterfell for Ramsay’s wedding. The North is enormous, and to coordinate by mail they’d have to trust every maester in the region not to be a spy.

My general sense of it is that there’s a Small-to-Middling Northeastern Conspiracy, led by Wyman Manderly and backing Rickon, and a Small-to-Middling Northwestern Conspiracy led by Maege Mormont and backing Jon. (It’s not impossible that some dissident Riverlanders and former members of the BWB have formed their own faction or joined up with the northwestern group, though I’m less sold on that.)

Both groups have the same primary objective of crushing the Boltons. They have diverging secondary objectives and emotional investments - the northwesterners are explicitly nationalist, while the northeasterners really want to make the Boltons and Lannisters pay. Their respective claimants do make sense: honoring the Young Wolf’s will is its own statement of Northern legitimacy for the nationalists, while sticking to conventional succession and declaring for Stannis shows Manderly’s faction looking south. That reflects the broader cultural diversity of the North, in that White Harbor and other towns to the east or south of Winterfell are more Andalized, while the farther-flung rural areas keep to the older way.

That said, I doubt the different factions are opposed to each other or unwilling to work together. I think the different approaches are more reflections of cultural preferences and limited information. Thenortheasterners were loyal to Robb, and the northwesterners are with Stannis now. (He really should lay off the heart trees, though, that crowd doesn’t care enough about him to tolerate disrespect to the old gods.) They mostly care about dealing with the Boltons.

There wasn’t a grand northern conspiracy before, but there sure is now:

The people inside Winterfell are mostly older men on that final hunt, to save food for their families and bring the Boltons down with them. Lord Wyman will put together whatever seems most likely to work, and those of us who are following the show have a pretty good guess what that’ll be.

Hey there, and thank you!

My man Bloodraven! I tend to forget that this is technically a theory rather than explicit canon.

The corn gag seems pretty consistent to me, and IIRC there aren’t other instances where the raven can’t pronounce what it means. I think “corn” usually just means “corn”: tree gods don’t get to experience the pleasure of eating, so he likes doing it while he’s warging. Sometimes he also seems to be alluding to the corn king archetype of a mythic figure who dies and is resurrected in tandem with the transitions of harvest to winter to spring.

(My theory about Mormont’s raven is that it’s actually Bran freaking out at the end of ADWD, partly because the crow has invoked the corn king myth enough times to suggest that he knows what’s coming. But in that chapter of ADWD, the crow is agitated, as if it wants to prevent Jon’s death - less like a world-class metaphysical chessmaster and more like a kid who loves his brother.)

I’m inclined to think not. I’m not actually sure Jon’s identity will be revealed publicly, except maybe in the songs or old Maester Samwell’s histories, but if it is it’ll be set off by Rhaegal or Viserion’s response to Jon and then confirmed by everyone going “ohhh, yeah” about Ned’s cover story. I don’t think that’s the kind of lie Daenerys is destined to slay - while the truth may end up mattering to a lot of people, the lie is only going to matter to Jon, and he has avenues to the truth that are much closer to home than Daenerys.

My prediction as of now (though the prophecies are, wisely, written vaguely enough that there are a lot of potential avenues) is that “slayer of lies” refers specifically to the men who are usurping her destiny: Aegon, who wrongly claims her secular authority as the Targaryen heir, and Stannis, who wrongly holds himself out as TPTWP and the champion of fire.

Hey there!

Oooof, usually I love hearing how right I am, but I wouldn’t mind being talked out of this one….

Whether or not that particular sacrifice would work doesn’t necessarily tell us anything about king’s blood, right, since Monster does not have king’s blood. There is some suggestion throughout the story that blood sacrifice is a source of magical power, but even that is a tough thing to prove.

As for king’s blood in theory, I was going to say that’s just Melisandre either making it up to push Stannis toward that final sacrifice or making one of her many attribution errors. And my instinct is that it sounds silly. But, turns out it’s not just her and her lackeys:

If Maester Aemon believes it, then there’s something to it.

It’s possible there’s a correlation/causation issue here. There’s a kind of mythic sense to the idea that fire magic is particularly responsive to the blood of the dragon, which is how Maester Aemon is likely to think of kings and possibly what Melisandre senses in the Baratheon line. Or that the idea of “casting long shadows in the world” is less metaphorical than she thinks it is, and shadowbinding is more effective when it’s connected to the life force of someone who has great influence in the world, and she’s wrongly assuming that it’s about “king’s blood” (many kings are influential people so king’s blood might work more often, but that specific title isn’t why it works). Those explanations make more sense to me. Why would R’hllor (R’hllor the personal deity or R’hllor the anthropomorphized representation of fire-related forces of nature) care about Andal inheritance laws? What constitutes a king in Essos, where red priests learn and practice? Khals, ceremonial princes, triarchs, what?

Granted, I don’t know exactly what the sacrifice would necessarily be for, because fire magic resurrections aren’t “only death pays for life,” they are “life force pays for life.” Thoros never used blood magic to resurrect Beric, nor Beric to resurrect Lady Stoneheart. (Not intentionally, anyway, and intent probably does matter for this, otherwise there’s usually power zipping around the atmosphere and never being tapped.) Melisandre does know how to do other spells on her own steam, and the basic theory behind the kiss of life is something that red priests generally seem to know. But Mel, BEING MEL, is almost certainly going to be doing whatever she’s trying to do the hard way.

Mmmm, I’ve never gotten on board with any of the treaty theories.

Even if that were the case, though, the horns were both found in the wrong domains. The Horn of Winter was north of the Wall at the Fist of the First Men, and the Dragonbinder was on the other side of the world.

I don’t see any reason Aemon and Gilly won’t make it to Horn Hill. And, because there’s a pretty good chance Randyll won’t make it out of King’s Landing (CRISPY-FRIED JUSTICE, as far as I’m concerned), they’ll have a nice life there. Sam’s mother and sisters sound like very kind people. And the only thing we’ve heard about Dickon’s personality is that he’s the one who heard about the cruel wager over Brienne and reported it to Randyll. Randyll put a stop to it because military discipline is important to him, but Dickon was only a pre-teen at the time, and a kid that age is more likely to be motivated by right and wrong than by an understanding of unit cohesion. So maybe his awful father hasn’t ruined him just yet and he’ll be decent to his supposed nephew.

As for Monster, I want desperately to be wrong about this, but....Val is the only person at Castle Black who knows that he’s not a prince. I know everyone thinks Melisandre will sacrifice Shireen to wake Azor Ahai, but Stannis seems doomed to go full Agamemnon, and Shireen isn’t tied into Jon’s own decisions in the same way Monster is.

I’ve actually always associated the King Arthur mythos with the Azor Ahai Reborn prophecy? I mean.

Someone who knows more about Arthurian legend than “read The Once And Future King in English class once” probably has a lot more to say than I do about King Arthur and AAR, but the key elements are there, right? Tragic romance, magic sword, time of darkest need, mythic hero-king resurrection. ASOIAF’s interrogation of that so far seems to be, yeah, yeah, we’re holding out for a hero and all, but the best spin even this guy’s biggest fans put on him admits that he murdered his wife in cold blood! Are we really sure we want him back?! (Of course, as is equally possible as in the case of the Night’s King, there could well be a lot of material details we don’t know.)

So that’s how I think the last few books have picked up on Arthurian legend, making it more of a morally dubious thing than a total “haha, the heroes are the villains, gotcha!” But it’s certainly possible? There’s no rule that the narrative can’t do a black versus grey dual interrogation of the archetype.

That would be a really interesting parallel for Daenerys and her fight to dismantle the despicable system which her dragonlord ancestors created. Depending on how much of the story is true/missing, there’s also the outside possibility that they’re distant relatives though the Night’s King. (Old Nan says he was a Stark, so. That’s good enough for me.)

In fairness, though, the Others are a threat to all human life regardless of their origin. The skinchanger origin theory reminds me a lot of the Mountain/Robert Strong. He technically was human at some point, but that has no bearing on the fact that he’s gotta go.

The Deep Ones have so far struck me as a piece of worldbuilding to remind us that there’s never just one singular fight that people have to face, even in the metaphysical realm. The Others are the problem now, something else was the problem while the Others were dormant, some of our characters will see to it that humanity lives to fight another day. And it will have to fight - whether it’s the Deep Ones, or a human somewhere figures out gunpowder, the story isn’t heading for either annihilation or utopia, and the only other option is a world that still has problems.

Not to say that the Old Ones rising wouldn’t be awesome, because it totally would.

Thanks for the ask! (Honestly, I started out this draft saying “damn, I can’t believe I don’t have any theories for my favorite of Old Nan’s stories!” and by the time I was done that was no longer true.)

His identity is not particularly mysterious.

Unless we’re talking about a really impressive cover-up here - and in fairness, anything’s possible - it’s unlikely that his name was actually Brandon, since the brother who brought him down was (supposedly) also named Brandon. But substantively Old Nan generally tends to be, well, on the nose.

What he was doing, however, is more ambiguous. It’s almost certainly important, as there are so many layers of unreliability that there has to be something useful in there. The in-universe teller of the story is a fallible human who heard it from another character in-universe who may have remembered it wrong, and then there’s the usual telephone game of folk stories, and we’re told several times in-universe that nothing from the Age of Heroes is really reliable, and then on top of that we (allegedly) have the people contemporary with the Night’s King who actively tried to control the narrative by destroying all records of the Night’s King while continuing to use him as a cautionary tale, ensuring that his expungement from history would itself be remembered. Narrative cover-ups this complicated don’t usually happen for nothing.

The First Men did not have any kind of taboo on human sacrifice - it’s implied in ACOK that wildlings still practice it - so it’s not a moral aversion to the “strange sacrifices” that caused the reaction it did. It was, supposedly, that the sacrifices were to the white walkers. But as far as we’ve seen from Craster, sacrificing to them is a a protection racket that doesn’t actually give a person power of their own. So what kind of magic was happening? Were their wills being bound by their being turned into wights? Were they collaborating willingly (either as the Northerners would see it, or actually willingly) but figured they could throw the Lord Commander under the bus by claiming they’d been compelled? What happened to those sworn brothers, anyway?

Who was the corpse queen? Did she even exist, or was she an after-the-fact invention to deflect blame? (A common role of female characters, as we all know too well.) If she was real, how did she get on that side of the wall? If she’s a wight or a white walker, she shouldn’t have been able to cross the Wall, certainly not during a flirtatious merry chase. So how could he meet this magical creature and bring her to the Nightfort? Did it happen before the Wall was actually finished? Could that have happened during the Long Night? (That’s when the Watch was supposedly founded, but it’s not too much of a stretch to think that the Watch could run through its first twelve commanders during an extended crisis.)

So anyway, here’s my longshot theory: I think he was the person tasked with completing the Wall. He wasn’t sacrificing to the Others, he was sacrificing to the old gods.

This is the last of Bran’s visions; implicitly, it’s the metaphysical cornerstone of Winterfell. That’s what it took for one castle - a fantastic fairy tale castle, but still, one castle. Blood magic. Even with the help of the giants and/or the Children and/or a mysterious blue-eyed zombie witch, a structure like the Wall takes a lot of juice. Maybe the Night’s King was explicitly asked to do this; maybe he’d grown desperate and gone rogue.

Maybe he was the final sacrifice, his blood used to seal the Wall’s magic.

Of course you’d want to destroy all records of that, and to create the harshest taboo you possibly could - something to the degree of depicting him as an enemy agent. You’d have to. Not as punishment, and not just to protect the Stark brand, but because you absolutely can’t let a blood magic arms race get started. The Wall is one thing, because it will stand for thousands of years to protect millions of people against the terrible cold - and even that is a painful ethical choice to make. It is blood shed for peace from the unthinkable. (It makes sense that you’d find this at Storm’s End as well: the storm god and his monsters are major threats which merit magical protection.) But that is not how anyone else would use it. It would be used for warfare between humans, leading to blood shed in vain.

It certainly supports the Free Folk’s grievances if the rest of the North was about to leave them stranded in enemy territory, a reflection of the blood sacrifice of the few to save the many. And it fits in some of the broader themes of the story: sometimes there’s no good choice, sometimes the least bad choice dooms a person’s name forever. Sometimes we mean well but go too far; sometimes going too far is the only way to go far enough. Some of the structures  that hold up our world are built on events that we find unthinkable.

It’s certainly possible. Like with the resurrection magic, I think the skinchanger magic is among the least of his problems. I think he’ll be less likely to restrain himself from acting on his bolder and more aggressive instincts - but is that really about the external influence of the wolf? He already has those instincts, though he’s previously been more likely to try and contain them. But his experience in ADWD, months of trying to drag people toward necessary changes culminating in the trauma of being stabbed, is the kind of experience that would change a person without any supernatural interference.

On the other hand, he’s been experiencing some degree of elision with Ghost for some time.

And that pattern could mean a couple of different things. Maybe it shows that he’s already close enough to Ghost that he won’t have to change too much to adapt. Or maybe it shows the strength of the current he is about to abruptly stop swimming against.

But yes, I think you’re right that we are about to see a different Jon, more fearless, less inhibited. I think that Ghost will howl.

That’s a tough one to answer because, you know, is he still Jon at that point? Because then it’s not so much resurrection as it is transformation, and we don’t have any data to go on with a human -> white walker transformation, if it’s even possible. IMO wights are not people in the way that the humans whose bodies and memories they use are people, but that’s not really an equivalent comparison because Others do, as a species, seem to have the intelligence that might allow for individuality, and wights don’t.

IMO the closest possibility to this scenario is that he comes back and people at the wall assume he is an Other (or, at least, decide to behave as if he’s one of them, because they already don’t like him). This would mirror the cloud of suspicion that he dealt with when he came back from his undercover mission with Mance, and be a Wall-proportionate examination of humanity’s tendency to shoot ourselves in the foot by alienating each other.

Hey there! Thanks for the question.

Asha's perspective is definitely a lot more pragmatic than the suicidally stupid/insane Greyjoy tradition. I don’t know if she’s exactly pro-Stark, but at least she’s smart enough to know that being overtly anti-Stark is a dead end. That’s an interesting comparison to draw to Jon and Arya, actually. Certainly Arya would try to emulate her. And the ironborn are like the wildlings in a lot of ways, so Jon would at least know how to deal with her.

I think her current plan is to use Theon’s survival as pretext to call another kingsmoot. This time around, Victarion is on the other end of the world and can’t split the anti-Euron vote. (Of course, he could come back and play the same card, but there’s good odds that he’ll die on his mission, or at least not think of the legal loophole.) She can either run herself, or put Theon forth as her puppet.

I’m going to talk a little bit about one of the released TWOW chapters, so it’s under the cut in case you’re avoiding spoilers altogether.

SUCH an exciting question!

I think shit is going to go sideways before Jon’s resurrection, or possibly before he’s even done bleeding out. When Jon leaves the Shieldhall, Ser Patrek has attacked Wun Wun, Wun Wun is hulking out, “Northmen, free folk, and queen’s men” are coming out into the yard with swords in hand, which is agitating Wun Wun even further - and then Wick and Marsh, honors graduates of the Joffrey Baratheon School for Strategic Geniuses, attack Jon.

So here’s the situation: Stannis’ men think that their king is dead and so are definitely having a crisis of authority and probably having a crisis of faith. The Watch is split into two factions, neither of whom have anyone with the authority to get them to cool it. The Free Folk probably don’t have any particular investment in Jon himself, but they’ll be completely right to assume that the attack on him is the opening of hostilities against them, and they have no reason not to take Castle Black for themselves. And then you have the angry giant, who has gotten attached to Jon.

As if all that wasn’t bad enough, it only takes one of these people to think to unleash Ghost. Who isn’t just Ghost anymore.

I don’t see any outcome for this other than full-on pandemonium. Who or what ever is going to bring him back - presumably Mel but who knows - isn’t going to be able to get to his body for some time. Insofar as anyone can “win” in this situation, I think the wildlings are likely to take over Castle Black: they still have their numbers, but the NW’s discipline has gone out the window, so they have the advantage.

So moving from the near-guaranteed to the possible, I think there’s a sizable window for Jon-as-Ghost to wreck the traitors. As satisfying as that sounds, I’m not sure. The mutineers are weak and scared and not much more. And on top of that, Jon is a powerful warg, but not a particularly disciplined one, so I don’t know if he’s going to limit the attack to people who deserve it. Perhaps it’ll look like a kind of parallel to the panic he sees in Wun Wun, actually.

From there things get really difficult to predict, because Jon is going to be different. I don’t really see him going full-on dark side because…honestly, that sounds kind of cheap, compared to the strength of his storyline so far. But he’ll be changed by the trauma of the attack, the painful truths he’s going to learn about his own identity during his journey to the underworld, and whatever magical effect resurrection may or may not have in and of itself - and Jon is a dangerous guy at the best of times. And on top of that, you have the difficulty of, how does one raise an army against the undead, while for all intents and purposes being one of them? There’s a lot of fantastic possibilities, most of which I’m sure I haven’t thought of yet.

Well, and Ramsay Bolton is a dead freak walking. I’m pretty sure about that.