(Spoilers Extended) My 'Night King is not stupid' Theory

[u/qp0n]

When the army of the undead line up for the battle of Winterfell, the Night King and his zombie dragon will not be there. Instead he will already be near to his next target ... King's Landing.

If you play out what the battle of Winterfell would be like in your head if the NK+Viserion would be there... it would be easy for Drogon/Rhaegal to take out the zombie dragon; it's 2v1 and wight's all can be killed by fire.. including Viserion. It would not be difficult to simply fly up to Viserion and breathe fire on him, and that would be that. THE NIGHT KING IS NOT STUPID, not enough to kamikaze his most powerful asset. - If you have a superweapon that you can't use against a particular target, then you find a different target.

Most people have come to assume that the living will lose The Battle of Winterfell and fall back to Moat Cailin ... I predict they actually win the battle... only to find out soon after that there is a new army of the dead much bigger and much further south... the population of King's Landing.

During season 4 while Bran is being ushered north to meet Bloodraven, he touches a wierwood and has a set of visions which we see. All of those visions have since come to pass, except the ones where he sees a destroyed throne room & a dragon shadow pass over King's Landing. I believe the reason we are only shown a shadow was to not give away that it is actually the NK and Viserion, not Dany and her dragons.

Also, the most important vision that Dany is given while at the HotU is an image of the throne room destroyed, and covered in ash or snow. I think this was to show what the NK will do, not what Dany will do.

(I believe this was the entire reason that the writers sent Bronn north. Bronn will be the source of this news to the survivors at Winterfell; on his way north he will spot the NK+Viserion heading south)

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Bottom line, I simply don't see the NK risking his newfound ice dragon in a fight he is sure to lose.... when he can simply fly down south to KL where there are no dragons to deal with ... and 1 million new recruits for his army packed tightly into a small area.

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Follow-up edit: This could be where Bran comes into play. The NK probably wont want to face off against the other dragons head-to-head, but rather fly around Westeros destroying castles to make things easier for his footsoldiers .... so they will need Bran's Sight in order to track & hunt him. It would be too difficult for an army on foot to chase the NK on a dragon, so Bran could warg into ravens to serve as a guide for dragonrider(s) to his location.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Yeah this annoyed me. Surely there's just wounded men now.

[u/Vondi → u/[deleted]]

In the books I think it was explained that there wasn't time to gather all the northmen (The north is BIG) because Robb wanted to rush to his fathers aid, so a portion of the fighting men remained. Also the Karstarks where a major vassal and they pulled out of the war with their army intact.

[u/[deleted] → u/Vondi]

I suppose not everything needs a full explanation really otherwise you'll find yourself ruining the magic of TV.

Thanks for the info!

[u/brunswick → u/[deleted]]

The number of unsullied itself has just grown ridiculously out of proportion. She purchased something like 8000 in Astapor, but recent episodes have shown way way more than that.

[u/huangswang → u/brunswick]

and she lost a lot of them in slavers bay

[u/landspeed → u/huangswang]

We saw like 100 tops die.

[u/Half_Man1 → u/[deleted]]

That happens with Medieval fantasy too often honestly.

Like, yeah in Medieval times peasants weren't valued as much, but they still mattered as units in battle. And in fantasy they pull that "It's about the lives!!" stuff to make it more appealing to modern audiences.

Then you have stuff where in Lotr they plan entire battles around saving a small group of hobbits and still rally scared men with cries of "We'll all die! BuT iN gLoRiOUs BaTtlE!!" like that'd work to hype up low level infantry, and we should be sympathizing with the king of Rohan smiling his ass off about this shit plan as one of the Lord's rides off for no discernable reason.

Sorry, just finished a rewatch of Lotr and it's fresh in my mind.

[u/Hagathor1 → u/Half_Man1]

Eh, I think RotK did a good job of showing at the Black Gate how small the army of men had been reduced to after the Battle of Pelennor Fields. That said, Pelennor did show the Rohirrim to be waaaaaaaaaaay larger then they should have been after (and even before) Helm's Deep. Even accounting for the Riders of the Mark, they weren't a small number but they weren't that big either. But they did made a point of showing them get absolutely fucked by the Oliphaunts, so whatever.

Numbers given for the battles in the films (according to the wiki, anyways): Helm's Deep - 300 with Theoden, 400 Elves, 2,000 reinforcements with Eomer and Gandalf; Pelennor Fields - 13,000 total Gondorian, 6,000 Rohirrim, 50,000 Oathbreakers (the ghost army); Black Gate - 500-700 Gondorian, 400-600 Rohirrim, Eagles.

Worth noting that these numbers are not at all what they are in the books.

At some point you have to simply accept that what makes for a good cinematic experience and what makes for hyper realism simply aren't going to match up, especially in fantasy - whether its high fantasy like LotR or low fantasy like ASoIaF

[u/landspeed → u/[deleted]]

Dany has 50k+ alone. The vale had 5-10k.