Although Ned Stark’s death provides for a large portion of the Game of Thrones storyline, people have been theorising that he never actually died in the first place.
If it sounds ridiculous, it just might be – but The Last Harpy, a YouTube channel dedicated to GoT theories, makes a fair few good points.
It all starts when Ned was sent to the black cells before his execution, a place where the worst of criminals wait out their fate.
Unfortunately, Westeros is a place where being honourable will get you killed faster than raping and pillaging an entire village, and after trying to seek the truth about Cersei and Jaime, he ended up waiting his death out in the cells. Coincidentally, Jaqen H’gar was also there – but we’ll get to that later.
Now, the execution was in plain sight – everyone saw it, and as we all know, Sansa was later forced to look upon her dead father’s head on a spike. You would assume you can’t get much more dead than that.
So how could he have made it out alive? Birds, apparently.
The theory goes that Ned Stark was able to warg into one of the birds that flew above him in the execution scene moments before his death. This stems from the moment before Ned was beheaded, where he is seen muttering to himself.
While it seems unlikely, going on the theory that the ability to warg is genetic, it could be possible – that is, if Ned had stronger warging powers than his son, Bran.
He would have had to be pretty damn good in order to not only warg into a bird, but keep his soul while his physical body was dead in the process. He would then have to find another body to warg into, or he’d forever be a bird.
There’s also another wild theory that Jaqen H’ghar, who was in the black cells the same time Ned was, switched Ned with another person. If you’re thinking ‘that’s not possible’, you could be right – it would seem that, as a Faceless man that prepares faces from newly-dead people, Ned Stark’s face couldn’t have been taken because, quite simply, he wasn’t dead.
But that brings us to the scene where, after seeing Jaqen drink poison, Arya pulls numerous faces off him only to see her own likeness – but a girl was not dead at that point, so is there a way to somehow take someone’s face without killing them?
If he did help Ned out (or, as some people believe.. he is Ned – but that’s a little far-fetched), that could also explain why Jaqen had been so protective of Arya in the first place.
Possible? Or bullshit?
I think we all would like to believe Ned Stark is still alive…
