Game of Thrones "The Watchers on the Wall" 6/08/14 S4E9

Advertisements

/channeling my inner John4200

Once again, you are wrong. It's 500 feet tall.






Yes, I know it's 700 feet. That's the joke within the joke!

 

Was the wall built? When and how?

What does the last name Snow mean?

What is "crow"?

Why is Mance north of the wall?

What happened to John Snow's uncle?

Has Sam told the gang about what killed the white walker?

Is Viper really dead?

 

Yes. Some time ago. With snow and Ice.

atmospheric water vapor frozen into ice crystals and falling in light white flakes or lying on the ground as a white layer

It's a dish you never want to eat.

Because the Wall is south of him.

He joined the Night Watch

Yes. or Maybe. probably not.

I'm pretty sure you can get a Viper at a Dodge dealer.

 

Advertisements

I caught up in two days. I missed a few things.

 

wait...I thought you were joking...were these real questions?

if so, I'm happy to answer them...

 

Snow is the regional surname for bastards in the North.

The Crownlands Waters
The North Snow
The Iron Islands Pyke
The Riverlands Rivers
The Vale Stone
The Westerlands Hill
The Reach Flowers
The Stormlands Storm
Dorne Sand

 

Don't forget to explain in detail how the gate works.

 

yes. at least 1,000 years ago. men built it to keep out the White Walkers (I think that was the main reason). But it also cut off the people who lived there from the rest of the world and they are pissed about it.

A bastard cannot take the last name of his father. So he is given a last name that identifies him as a bastard. Each region has a name befitting of its climate or what it's famous for. In the North, you get a last name of Snow. Everyone then knows you're a bastard.

Members of the Night Watch man the castles at the wall to defend the realm from white walkers and wildings. They dress all in black. So they are nicknamed "Crows" cause they look like one.

He is a former member of the Night Watch who didn't want to serve and wanted to be free. He went on a mission in the North and went rogue and declared himself The King Beyond The Wall.

We have no idea and are waiting for him to pop up at some point. He went on a mission (he is a Crow) and was never heard from. His party was all killed and his horse came back bloody to Castle Black.

My guess is that he is the White Walker that took the baby to the StoneHenge thing.

Yes. We don't know if he had more than one of those crystals. We know he left the one he used on the ground by the dead WW.

He's dead, Jim.

 

I love it. So if it's on the outside of the wall, it's a design flaw. If it goes through the wall, where it's not easily accessed for repair, its a design flaw. But apparently the non-flawed way to design it would be to put the entire thing embedded within the ice, where it's not easily accessed for repair.

I sure wish all poorly designed stuff held up for 8000 years like the wall.

 

I can't explain what does not work and clearly poorly designed.

 

How do archers shoot arrows 700 ft up to the top of the wall and actually hit and kill people? How do the climb a 700 ft wall and have any energy left?

 

They don't. We clearly saw one archer fire an arrow and it barely cleared a couple of hundred feet. Only a Giant was able to do it. He shot twice. He missed the first one and killed a crow with the second one.

As for the climb. Well...these are some tough SOBs!

 

The only arrow I recall being shot from the ground to the top of the wall was the giant arrow that the giant shot from the giant bow. So, giants!

Actually, I'm skeptical that an arrow shot from 700 feet up would have enough kinetic energy to penetrate thick hides by the time it got to the ground. Seems to me that friction from the air would slow the arrow to whatever its terminal velocity would be long before that.

 

That would be no problem. Think about it...archers shoot arrows up in an arc. At the top of the arc, they've lost all of their vertical momentum, so they only have their horizontal momentum left. Yes they still have enough power to kill when they come back down to the ground. Wind resistance does no present a problem there.

So if you are firing from the top of the wall, in the worst case (where wind resistance is the limiting factor) the arrow would be going just as fast. In the best case, the arrow shot from the wall would be faster because it wouldn't have lost any momentum to gravity.

And just in case you think the range is the issue, the wall is only 700 feet tall. Archers can easily shoot that far:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_longbow

Edit: and when you say "penetrate thick hides", I assume you are talking about shooting the giants. Just FYI, I believe the arrow that took down that one giant was not from a normal bow, but from a giant mounted crossbow.

 

/also channeling John 4200

Measurements are obviously completely different in the GoT world as compared to our own, most probably due to a design flaw. I don't know how you could have watched the show for all this time and still have missed out on this fact.

/end John4200 post

 

The biggest problem I had with the whole thing was Mance not sending more men up the wall to attack from the south. Why not send 500 men? 1,000? Would have taken Castle Black with sheer numbers. Done. Open the gate and let your other 99,000 through.

 

That could work, especially knowing how few men actually guarded the wall. Remember, Jon talked about how if Mance realized how few crows there actually were, he wouldn't hold back. As far as Mance knows, there are 1000 crows guarding it. So if he sends a bunch of men to the wall, what do they do? Until the giants and mammoths rip off the gate, they can't go through unless the giant lifts the gate. If they do go through, then they are trapped in the tunnel until the giants manage to get the gate open. Until then, they would be sitting ducks for archers to shoot through the gate and kill them while they wait.

 

No, I'm talking about Ygritte and crew. Even if Mance believed Jon that there were 1,000 men at Castle Black it was foolish not to send more people to attack from the other side. Divide and conquer. The way to take Castle Black is from its weak side.

Now we just have to see if it is Stannis or some other Deus Ex Machina that saves Castle Black.

 

I guess I'm confused. If the wildings made it around the wall to the south, why can't everyone do that?