HBOWith fans having to wait an entire week until the next episode of Game of Thrones, you’d better believe people are coming up with their own theories about what’s going to happen.
Quite frankly, there are too many to unpick in the short space of just one article, but the main theory doing the rounds recently is one regarding the Night King.
Specifically, the Night King’s whereabouts when the highly-anticipated Battle of Winterfell goes down next week, with many fans believing he won’t be there at all.
I know what you’re thinking: Surely after all this run up, the Night King wouldn’t miss such a climatic event? It just wouldn’t make sense.
Or would it? Reddit user u/qp0n believes it makes perfect sense, saying his absence would actually be a smart move on his behalf and would allow him to build an even bigger Army of the Dead.
How? Well, according to this theory, the Night King will be heading towards his other target, King’s Landing, as his army line up for battle at Winterfell.
With King’s Landing being home to one million people, this will provide the perfect opportunity for the Night King to drastically increase the size of his army and ultimately make him unbeatable. Yikes.
The theory reads, as follows:
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.
HBOThe theory goes on to use Bran’s vision in season four as evidence, whereby he saw a destroyed throne room and a dragon shadow pass over King’s Landing. As the theory points out, all of the other visions Bran saw that day have come true. Except this one.
If this is true, it would mean the shadow Bran saw in the vision was actually the Night King riding Viserion, rather than Daenerys and her dragons.
Well, that’s certainly enough to keep you ticking over until the next episode. But the real question is whether you think it’s true or not…
You can watch season eight of Game of Thrones on HBO or Sky Atlantic now.
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A Broadcast Journalism Masters graduate who went on to achieve an NCTJ level 3 Diploma in Journalism, Lucy has done stints at ITV, BBC Inside Out and Key 103. While working as a journalist for UNILAD, Lucy has reported on breaking news stories while also writing features about mental health, cervical screening awareness, and Little Mix (who she is unapologetically obsessed with).