User:The Dragon Demands/Wiki Bio video drafts

Cersei Lannister, daughter of Tywin Lannister, wife of King Robert, mother of King Joffrey and King Tommen. Petty, arrogant, self-pitying, mentally unstable – and now SELF-PROCLAIMED Queen on the Iron Throne. She is in many ways responsible for the civil war that has devastated the Seven Kingdoms, and now she’s set to drag what’s left of them down with her into utter ruin.

Cersei and her twin brother Jaime are the children of Tywin Lannister, ruler of the Westerlands and richest man in the realm. When she was only four years old, her mother died giving birth to her dwarf brother Tyrion, and she always hated him for it. Growing up without a mother, and with her father frequently away at the royal court, she was largely raised by servants – without a parental relationship of her own, in her adult life she would go on to have non-existent parenting skills a result. Unlike her brother Jaime, who was raised to be a knight and lord, Cersei chafed under the restrictions on her social status due to being a woman – meant to marry a powerful lord to secure political alliances and bear his children instead of ruling directly.

Still, as a young girl, Cersei was quite privileged: her father Tywin was Hand of the King to Aerys Targaryen, practically ruling for him, and it was generally assumed that they would eventually cement their alliance by having Tywin’s daughter Cersei marry King Aerys’s eldest son, Crown Prince Rhaegar Targaryen. In her youth, Cersei visited a woods-witch to read her fortune and confirm if she would marry the prince and be queen – but the witch cryptically said that she wouldn’t marry “the prince” but “the king”. Aerys Targaryen soon degenerated into insanity, becoming known as the Mad King, turning Tywin against him, and then the rest of Westeros, in Robert’s Rebellion: Rhaegar was killed in personal combat by Robert Baratheon himself, while Jaime killed the Mad King at the foot of the Iron Throne. To secure the new political state of affairs, Cersei ended up in a marriage-alliance to Robert Baratheon: she didn’t marry “Prince” Rhaegar, but “King” Robert. Cersei became trapped in a loveless and mutually abusive marriage to Robert, as he ate, drank, and whored.

Unknown to all, however, Cersei had a secret incestuous affair with her twin brother Jaime, who fathered all three of her children that she had passed off as Robert’s. She wasn’t ashamed of their relationship given that the Targaryens themselves had wed brother to sister to “keep the bloodline pure” – but like the Targaryens, it probably resulted in the insane psychopathy of their eldest son, Joffrey. Cersei’s utterly indulgent lack of real parenting probably didn’t help either.

Years later, King Robert decided to betroth Joffrey to Ned Stark’s daughter Sansa, to make a political alliance between their powerful families. Young Sansa idolized Cersei – making the mistake of assuming she was a wise and noble queen like in romantic stories, and not essentially a petulant teenager in an adult’s body. However, young Bran Stark stumbled on Cersei and Jaime having sex. Realizing that they would both be executed if Bran told anyone what he saw, Jaime reluctantly shoved him out a tower window (he was crippled instead of dying, but couldn’t remember what happened). This set in motion a chain of events leading to the War of the Five Kings.

Ned Stark stumbled on the truth of Cersei’s incest and that none of her children were Robert’s – but his honor prevented him from seeing Cersei’s children killed. Instead he extended her mercy, telling her to flee Westeros with them while she still could before Robert killed them all. Instead she seduced her cousin Lancel into spiking Robert's wine while he was out hunting, so he was too drunk to defend himself from a wild boar, which mortally wounded him. Cersei was essentially staging a coup to put her own bastard son Joffrey on the throne when Robert's real heir should have been his younger brother Stannis. Ned tried to get the City Watch to arrest them but was betrayed by Littlefinger.

Cersei tried to take power in the capital but events rapidly spiraled out of control due to Joffrey's insanity - on a whim he had Ned Stark publicly executed, when Cersei had wanted to just exile him to the Night's Watch - but Ned's death plunged them into war with the Starks. This left the Lannisters stuck between two fronts, fighting the Baratheons to their south and the Starks to their north. Having proved utterly incapable of controlling Joffrey, Cersei's father Tywin sent Tyrion to the capital as acting Hand of the King to try to rein in the situation. Joffrey continued to vent his frustrations at Robb Stark's ongoing victories in the war by tormenting the captive Sansa Stark. Despite Joffrey's ridiculously sadistic behavior, Cersei remained in denial, doting on him and unable to restrain him. She took no steps to protect Sansa, who once idolized her [Joffrey can be "willful"]. Ironically, Joffrey didn't even particularly respect Cersei [did he fuck other women?]

Eventually Stannis consolidated the Baratheon armies from the south and launched a massive amphibious assault on King's Landing, the Battle of the Blackwater. Cersei lasted out the siege in the safety of the Red Keep while drunkenly berating her own followers. She was prepared to poison herself and her younger son Tommen rather than be tortured by Stannis if he won, but Tywin arrived with the main Lannister army to lift the siege - along with their new allies, the massive Tyrell army. Tywin forged a pact with them that allowed the Lannisters to dominate southern Westeros, by promising a marriage-alliance between Joffrey and Margaery Tyrell. Margaery's arrival in the capital city resulted in Cersei being increasingly marginalized at the royal court - combined with her father Tywin arriving as well to assume his duties as Hand of the King. Neither of them wanted to see Cersei meddling in their political plans.

-Now, Cersei managed to learn of Ned Stark's plans by abusing the trust that his naive 13 year old daughter Sansa put in her as “the queen” - but Cersei soon learned that OUTWITTING A THIRTEEN YEAR OLD, WHO *ALREADY* TRUSTED HER, does not make her particularly cunning. Losing control over Joffrey to Margaery's manipulations, Tywin then commanded that Cersei was be betrothed to Margaery's brother Loras, to further cement their alliance. Cersei was reduced to begging him not to but he rebuffed her.

Cersei's power was left waning, reduced only to Queen Mother and no longer regent, but after the Stark army was destroyed at the massacre of the Red Wedding, she could at least take solace that her son's rule was now secure, and a few weeks later the Lannisters' triumph would be cemented by Joffrey's marriage to Margaery - only for her son to end up poisoned at his own wedding, before her own eyes.

Distraught, Cersei irrationally blamed Tyrion as the culprit, and was determined to see him executed. Margaery then married Cersei’s younger son Tommen, to maintain the Lannister-Tyrel alliance. Although he was condemned, their brother Jaime helped Tyrion escape...only for Tyrion to then return to the Tower of the Hand, and shoot his father dead for his betrayal.

With both Joffrey and her father Tywin gone, this left Cersei as once again the unobstructed regent for her other under-aged son, Tommen - essentially making her ruling queen in all but name. But Cersei is not a skilled ruler liker her father. She stacked the Small Council with sycophants and alienated the Tyrells – who she resented SPECIFICALLY BECAUSE she was dependent on them to help with the debt crisis to the Iron Bank of Braavos. Ironically like her detested late husband Robert, she also started drinking heavily under the pressure.

Frustrated at being so dependent on the Tyrells, she tried to counter-balance them by building up her own new allies: reforming the Faith Militant – military order of the Faith of the Seven, religious fanatics who had grown disgusted at the suffering of the commoners under the war that Cersei herself started. She didn’t understand that this was just trading one problem for another, as while the Faith Militant did help her undermine the Tyrells by arresting Loras and Margaery, they then turned on Cersei HERSELF for her far worse crimes of murdering King Robert, adultery with her cousin Lancel, and incest with her brother Jaime. After the strain of imprisonment wore her down, she was desperate enough to ask to be released back to the custody of the Lannisters – in exchange for confessing to the lesser accusation of adultery, for which the Faith Militant inflicted the humiliating punishment of a walk of shame: forcing her to walk naked through the streets of the capital city from the Great Sept back to the Red Keep.

While nominally free for the moment, her uncle Kevan Lannister and even her formerly loyal lackey Grand Maester Pycelle would never let her wield power again, due to her extreme incompetence. The commoners no longer feared her, and even Tommen caved in to the Faith Militant to keep Margaery safe. Yet Cersei had built up one new ally and personal agent: Qyburn, a former maester expelled from the order for human experimentation (basically a medieval Dr. Frankenstein), who she made her new spymaster. He set about …”reviving” the fatally poisoned Gregor Clegane, turning him into some sort of hulking undead monster, larger and stronger than the original Gregor, to be her personal champion.

Backed into a corner, on the day of her trial by the Faith Militant, Cersei had Qyburn’s agents detonate the wildfire stockpile hidden under the Great Sept by the Mad King years ago – destroying the entire sept, killing hundreds of people including all of the Faith Militant in the city, and the Tyrells, and her uncle Kevan and cousin Lancel, then having Pycelle stabbed to death. In one fell swoop, Cersei bluntly wiped out all of her enemies in the city – and turned most of the rest of Westeros against her, destroying her badly needed alliance with the Tyrells. Unfortunately, Cersei cared so little about how Tommen would react that she paid him no attention – but he was so grief stricken at Margaery’s death, combined with the impossible situation that his mother had put him in so no one would ever think he was a good king, that Tommen committed suicide by walking out a tower window. And thus the last of Cersei’s children was dead.

Like someone fighting to be captain on a sinking ship, Cersei then declared herself queen – despite having no claim on the throne whatsoever. Cersei always wanted power and is now through with the pretense of ruling through her husband or her children. But now with winter here, the crown in astronomical debt to foreign banks, the Lannister armies half-exhausted, and their few remaining allies either collapsing (the Boltons and Freys) or actively turning on them (the Tyrells, the Martells, the Arryns), it doesn’t appear she’d hold on to power for long. The real question is how much damage she’ll be able to do, how many people she’ll kill, before she can be stopped.

Tyrion Lannister, youngest child of Tywin Lannister, scheming twisted dwarf who kept the Lannisters in power in the war up until he betrayed all of them, killing his own father – and he’s actually one of the more well-intentioned characters in the story. Tyrion has done what it took to survive, and now he’s thrown in his lot with Daenerys Targaryen as her new Hand of the Queen – but how will he face off against his hated sister Cersei, who has seized the throne for herself? And what will Tyrion do when he has to face his brother Jaime again, whom he loves, but is caught between his loyalties to him and to Cersei?

Tyrion’s mother Joanna died giving birth to him – his father Tywin had deeply loved Joanna, and whatever warmth he had in him died with her. He always blamed Tyrion for her death; adding insult to injury, in his mind, Tyrion was also born deformed – a stunted dwarf, which in the medieval society of Westeros is seen as either a punishment or a joke from the gods. His sister Cersei also blamed Tyrion for their mother’s death; only his brother Jaime ever treated him with respect as a full member of the family.

When Tyrion was 16, an event happened which would shape his relationship with his father forever. While he was out riding with Jaime, a young woman came running across the road with her clothes torn, chased by two rapers. Jaime rode after the rapers while Tyrion brought the girl, named Tysha [Pronounced “Tie-Shuh”, not “Tish-uh”], back to an inn to comfort her. She thought he was sweet for saving her, and after feasting and getting very drunk, he lost his virginity to her. It was the first time a girl had ever seemed to like him instead of just looking at him with disgust or pity for being a dwarf. He fell so in love that he married her in secret – but a fortnight later, Tywin found out and was insulted that Tyrion would elope with a commoner behind his back, and made Jaime tell the truth: Tysha was really a prostitute. Jaime wanted to do something nice for Tyrion so he hired her and two fake rapers and staged the whole thing, so that Tyrion would get to think his first time with a girl was real and not just paid for – but he never thought that Tyrion would actually MARRY her. Tywin then decided to teach Tyrion a lesson he wouldn’t forget – giving Tysha over to his guards and forcing him to watch as they gang-raped her. He never saw her again. As the years passed after that, Tyrion self-medicated his sorrows and bitterness with extensive drinking and sex with many whores – in part to irritate his father. Stunted in body, Tyrion honed his mind with books and learning – much to Tywin’s chagrin, it was Tyrion who out of his three children inherited their father’s cunning intellect. Tyrion also developed a sharp wit, due to most dwarfs usually being court jesters allowed to say whatever the hell they want.

Years later, Tyrion accompanied the royal visit by King Robert and his sister Queen Cersei to Winterfell, out of intellectual curiosity to visit the Wall on a detour – accompanying Ned Stark’s bastard son Jon Snow who was on his way to join the Night’s Watch. As he was on the Kingsroad returning to the south, however, Tyrion was confronted by Catelyn Stark – who incorrectly accused him of trying to kill her son Bran (though it was actually his brother Jaime who did it). Littlefinger had tricked Catelyn by lying to her that the knife an assassin tried to use against her was Tyrion’s. Catelyn took him to her sister Lysa at the Eyrie, but he publicly demanded a trial by combat, and the sellsword Bronn volunteered to defend him in exchange for reward, and won. Freed, they ran into the barbaric hill tribes, but Tyrion charmed them into joining the Lannister side, by promising them payment in gold and weapons to fight the Eyrie. Tyrion then caught up with his father Tywin’s field army, along with his rag-tag mercenary contingent of hill tribesmen, and they fought the eastern half of the Stark army – only it was just a feint, as Robb Stark sacrificed a small contingent in the east to bring the main bulk of his army west, and destroy the other half of the Lannister army being commanded by Jaime, capturing him in the process.

Events spiraled out of control for the Lannisters after Cersei’s crazed son Joffrey had Ned Stark executed on a whim, now facing a war on two fronts, Baratheons to the south and Starks to the north. Tywin had to stay in the Riverlands to command their remaining forces against Robb, so he sent Tyrion to the capital as acting Hand of the King to try to rein in Cersei and Joffrey. Tyrion brought his sellsword Bronn along with him, and also a camp whore named Shae who he had grown attached to.

Tyrion proved very adept at court politics and started outwitting the other schemers on the Small Council, and Cersei herself, but Joffrey’s wild sadism was impossible to control. Even repeated negative reinforcement by Tyrion was to no avail. Events came to a head when Stannis consolidated the Baratheon forces to the south and launched a massive amphibious assault on King’s Landing. Joffrey fled the city walls in fear, but Tyrion rallied the defense of the city, even coming up with the trick of safely using a stockpile of combustible Wildfire against Stannis’s forces by using it against his fleet in the harbor. But the tide of the battle slowly turned; in the chaos, the Kingsguard Ser Mandon Moore tried to kill Tyrion – acting on the orders of some unknown party. He missed due to Tyrion’s short height but grievously wounded his face; yet before he could finish him off Tyrion’s squire Podrick Payne killed Mandon, saving him. At the last minute, Tywin arrived with the full Lannister army, along with the massive Tyrell army, to destroy Stannis’s forces and end the siege. (By the way guys, in the TV show Tyrion suspects Joffrey ordered Ser Mandon to kill him, but there are a lot more hints in the novels that it was actually Littlefinger – who had already tried to get him killed by framing him to Catelyn, though we’re still not sure).

Tyrion woke after the battle to find that his father had taken up his position as Hand of the King, ending Tyrion’s acting role, and demoting him to Master of Coin – though this turned out to be an important position given that the Lannisters were now deeply in debt to foreign banks from war expenses. Fearing that the Tyrells wanted to marry Sansa Stark so they could make a future alliance against the Lannisters, Tywin forced Tyrion to marry Sansa first. Though as Tyrion pointed out, he and his father hadn’t agreed over his marriage choices before (with Tysha). Tyrion went through the wedding ceremony but that night was too disgusted to consummate the marriage with his unwilling bride.

Robb and Catelyn Stark were then killed and the Stark army destroyed at the Red Wedding, leaving the Lannisters triumphant, and Joffrey set to marry Margaery Tyrell to secure the peace - but then Joffrey got poisoned at his own wedding, and Cersei impulsively accused Tyrion as the culprit. This led to a show trial run by Tywin, at which even Shae abandoned Tyrion. He asked for trial by combat again, but the crown’s champion was the hulking brute Gregor Clegane, the Mountain That Rides. Even Bronn politely declined to be Tyrion’s champion, partly due to a bribe from Cersei, partly because he seriously doubted he could defeat the Mountain – Tyrion was a bit let down for his own sake, but they parted on good terms. All seeming lost, the ferocious Oberyn Martell, Red Viper of Dorne, then volunteered to be Tyrion’s champion, to get revenge on Gregor for killing his sister years before. In an epic duel, Oberyn managed to outmaneuver Gregor and mortally wound him with a poisoned spear, but then Gregor killed him by crushing his head in, leaving Tyrion condemned. It’s not clear if Tywin was actually going to have Tyrion executed or just exile him to the Night’s Watch (yeah, big difference) but Jaime could not stand this mistreatment of his brother any longer and with Varys helped free him from the dungeon, so he could flee to the Free Cities. But before he left Tyrion returned to the Tower of the Hand…where he found Shae in bed, after having sex with his own father. Tyrion murdered her by strangling her to death in the bed they shared, then confronted Tywin with a crossbow while he was still sitting on the privy. After unwisely taunting Tyrion with one too many insults, Tyrion shot him dead.

….Why did they cut Tysha out as the main reason Tyrion kills him? Okay, guys, in the books, as Jaime is freeing Tyrion he is overcome by guilt and reveals that Tysha wasn’t really a whore, really loved Tyrion and truthfully married him, but Tywin made him lie about it and had his REAL wife gang-raped. Tyrion is so stunned by this betrayal and the years of lying about it that it’s what makes him seek out and kill his father. They kept setting this up in Seasons 1 to 3, it’s the climax of the third book, why would anyone cut that out? Maybe they’re saving it for a later confrontation between Jaime and Tyrion in the final seasons? Even then it makes no sense.

Tyrion gets transported to Pentos, where Varys explains that he and Illyrio were secretly Targaryen loyalists, and have been trying to put Daenerys Targaryen on the throne. Currently in Meereen, she needs the help of capable advisors like Tyrion; also Tyrion is a good replacement to rule over House Lannister for her after Cersei gets deposed, which is a win-win situation. Tyrion embarked on the long journey from Pentos to Meereen, which Daenerys conquered with her dragons.

They traveled to Volantis in the south to take a ship to Meereen, but while there Tyrion got kidnapped by Jorah Mormont – a former spy who ran afoul of Daenerys, but hoped to win back her favor by delivering Tyrion – who finds this pretty ironic given that he was ALREADY heading to Meereen. Jorah tried to take a short-cut through the smoking ruins of Valyria, but they were attacked by stone men afflicted with greyscale. Losing their boat, they were soon captured by slavers, but Tyrion convinced them that they’d get a better price by delivering them to the newly re-opened gladiator arena in Meereen. At the fighting pits, Joran and Tyrion managed to reveal themselves to Daenerys. She made Jorah leave again, but accepted Tyrion’s offer to join her cause.

Daenerys had been reluctant to leave Meereen because of the local Sons of the Harpy insurgency by the local ex-slave-masters, who then made a major attack during the gladiator games; Daenerys’s dragon intervened and she tried to lead it to safety by flying it away, but it panicked and flew all the way back to the Dothraki Sea. Tyrion ended up having to rule over Meereen in her stead until when or if she returned. Varys then arrived and figured out that the Harpies were being supported by an alliance of the slave-masters from Astapor, Yunkai, and Volantis. Using his political acumen Tyrion managed to negotiate a temporary truce with all of them, trying to institute a phased scaling back of slavery; unlike the sometimes naively idealistic Daenerys, Tyrion focuses more on pragmatic realpolitik like in King’s Landing, which yields more practical results. Tyrion succeeded in restoring some semblance of order and prosperity to Meereen – succeeded TOO WELL, causing the slaver-alliance to grow fearful, and decide to attack the city before it could regain too much strength. But then Daenerys returned with her dragon and a massive new Dothraki horde and destroyed the slaver-alliance’s fleet and army. The Greyjoy siblings Theon and Yara then arrived to ally with Daenerys as well, to overthrow their uncle Euron who killed their father. With their combined fleet Daenerys was finally in a position to leave Slaver’s Bay and transport her army to Westeros, traveling along with Tyrion, who she names as her new Hand of the Queen.

But what will Tyrion do when he returns to Westeros? He hates Cersei, but what will Jaime do when he faces him, after Tyrion killed their own father? How will Tyrion react to the fact that Daenerys’s Dornish allies killed his beloved niece Myrcella? Will the Westerlands switch over to his side, given that by every law of the land he should have succeeded to rule of Casterly Rock ahead of his sister Cersei? And whatever happened to Tysha? Where did the showrunners put all the references to Tysha? WHERE IS TYSHA?

Arya Stark

Arya Stark, younger daughter of Ned Stark and Catelyn Tully…or Arry, a refugee boy in the Riverlands? Or Lana the cart-girl in Braavos? Or a blind beggar girl? Or no one at all? The girl originally known as Arya Stark has gone through many assumed identities over the course of the story.

At her home castle Winterfell, young Arya was a tomboy - in comparison to her effeminate and courtly older sister Sansa, thus a bit of an outcast - which led to her being closest with her alleged bastard half-brother, Jon Snow, also an outsider.

When King Robert made a royal visit to Winterfell, it was decided that Sansa would go south to be betrothed to Robert’s son Joffrey, and Arya would also go so, she could prepare to one day marry into one of the other southern courts for a political alliance (as is expected for noble-born girls). Right before they left, the Starks found six orphaned direwolf pups in the snow, sigil of their family, one for each Stark child – Arya named her direwolf “Nymeria”, after the great warrior-queen of the Dornish from a thousand years ago. [Pronounced: "Nigh-MEER-ee-uh", as opposed to "Nih-MER-ee-uh]   Also before they left, Jon gave Arya a gift he had the Winterfell castle-smith forge:  her own sword, a thin rapier so a smaller girl could effectively wield it.  Given that Sansa had her sewing needles, Arya decided she had a “Needle” of her own.

On their way south, when Sansa managed to get her first time alone with Joffrey, he turned out to be an arrogant sadist, and threatened to maim a servant boy for striking Arya…even though Arya had ASKED the boy to practice sparring with her using sticks. Nymeria moved in to defend her from Joffrey and bit him on the arm, before they both ran. Arya realized Nymeria would be punished if the queen found her so she drove her away, and Nymeria has been running wild in the Riverlands ever since. When she was found, the Queen Cersei still pettily wanted SOME punishment, so she ordered that Sansa’s direwolf “Lady” be killed instead. Ned reluctantly carried out the sentence himself so she wouldn’t suffer – while Joffrey had his bodyguard Sandor Clegane run down and kill the servant boy who Arya had befriended.

Arya was irate and unhappy in King’s Landing; unlike Sansa she didn’t idolize Cersei and Joffrey and saw them for what they really were. Eventually her father found her practicing with her sword Needle, but relented that if she was determined to have it she should be trained how to properly use it. So he hired the former First Sword of Braavos, Syrio Forel, to teach her swordsmanship. Also realizing her small size wouldn’t allow her to match grown knights strength for strength, he instead taught her the Braavosi fencing style of “Water Dancing” – using lightning fast movements with a thin rapier to dodge attacks then strike for a kill, gracefully as a cat.

Then her father was betrayed, while she was in the middle of one of her lessons. Syrio faced off against Cersei’s guards while Arya fled – in the process killing a stable-boy who tried to capture her. Arya hid in the city’s slums rather than risk trying to escape (as the Lannisters were watching all the exits) – which meant she was in the crowd gathered in front of the Great Sept when her father was brought there to be condemned, and she saw firsthand as Joffrey flippantly gave the order to behead her father right there on a whim. As he was led through the crowd, however, Ned spotted a loyal old member of the Night’s Watch, Yoren, and pointed out Arya to him – Yoren then grabbed Arya and was determined to lead her back to safety at Winterfell, along his route back to the Wall as a Night’s Watch recruiter. He cut Arya’s hair to pass her off as a boy (given that the Watch doesn’t allow girls); among the rest of Yoren’s batch of recruits was King Robert’s own bastard son, Gendry, who her father Ned had interviewed not long before.

As they were making their way north of the Kingsroad, however, they were attacked by members of the City Watch and Lannister guards looking for Gendry (to kill any rival claimants to the throne). Yoren and most of the recruits were killed in the skirmish; Arya and the survivors were captured and taken to Harrenhal, the great ruined castle in the middle of the Riverlands which was serving as the Lannister’s main army base for their campaign there. Arya inadvertently ended up acting as a chamber servant for Tywin Lannister himself for a time, before his army left.

When the Lannister soldiers attacked Yoren’s recruits, Arya saved the life of one of the prisoners he was taking to the Wall – a mysterious man CALLING himself “Jaqen H’ghar”. It turned out that he was secretly a member of the secretive assassins’ guild from Braavos known as the Faceless Men, who have the power to shapeshift their appearance. He repaid his debt to Arya by killing the guards, allowing her, Gendry, and the baker’s apprentice Hot Pie to escape. Before departing, Jaqen gave Arya a special coin marking her as a friend of the Faceless Men, which she could give to any ship from Braavos in exchange for passage to that city across the Narrow Sea.

They tried their way north to the main Stark army position at Riverrun, but it was slow going through the heart of the war’s devastation. Soon they ran into the partisan group known as the Brotherhood Without Banners, let by some of her father’s former men. She also ran into Sandor Clegane again, of all people, who the Brotherhood captured after he deserted King Joffrey. They gave Sandor a trial by combat for killing the servant boy for Joffrey, but he won, so they let him leave. Arya, meanwhile, they wouldn’t let go immediately, but wanted to ransom her back to her family – because they needed the gold to keep fighting. Hot Pie decided to stay at an inn to be a baker – wisely realizing that anyone who stays on the TV show for more than 4 or 5 seasons will end up dead and he wanted to quit while he was still ahead. Gendry decided to stay with the Brotherhood. Arya, however, slipped away rather than let the Brotherhood ransom her back for money – only for Sandor to capture her. But it turned out that he had had enough of the Lannisters and just wanted to ransom her back to her family like the Brotherhood did so HE could collect the reward, so she stopped resisting him – they headed further north to the Twins, the castle of the Freys where Robb and Catelyn Stark went for a political marriage alliance. But then the Red Wedding happened, and the whole Stark army was killed. Sandor and Arya barely escaped.

Sandor’s only remaining plan was to take Arya east to her last remaining free relative in political power, her mother’s sister Lysa, regent of the Vale. But right before she got there Lysa died (killed by Littlefinger – though she didn’t realize that Sansa was with Littlefinger too, she probably wouldn’t want to be his glorified captive either). As they went back down the mountain road they encountered Brienne of Tarth, who had been tasked with finding Catelyn’s daughters by Jaime Lannister to keep his promise to her mother – neither one trusting the other, Brienne and Sandor got into a brutal fight, ending with Sandor falling over a ledge. Badly injured, Arya leaves him for dead, as payback for killing the servant boy. With nowhere else to go, Arya decided to take up Jaqen’s offer, leaving on a Braavosi ship using the token that Jaqen gave her.

Arriving in Braavos, Arya joined the Faceless Men. She worked her way up as an acolyte cleaning bodies - it turns out their shapeshifter masks are human faces taken from corpses – then practiced having a fake persona as a street vender selling OYSTERS, CLAMS, AND COCKLES. But then she saw one of the men on her kill list, Cersei’s Kingsguard Meryn Trant, arriving on the docks – so she stole a shapeshifter mask to sneak into a brothel to kill him. This angered the Faceless Men for killing her own target for personal reasons without orders; her mis-use of the mask poisoned Arya, blinding her. She was left as a beggar on the streets as punishment for a while, but then got taken back and given one more chance. As time passed, she trained to fight while blind by using her other senses, how to use various poisons, and finally they gave her the antidote to restore her sight.

To track her next target, they sent her to a stage play in Braavos, The Bloody Hand – a very inaccurate adaptation of the real story of the War of the Five Kings, filled with mischaracterizations, plot holes, glaring omissions, invented scenes of Sansa being raped – by Tyrion – and crass, lowbrow humor.

Anyway, it turns out that Arya’s assassination target was the lead actress in the play, who she befriends, and Arya grew uncomfortable with killing a good person who she didn’t think deserved it. Ultimately she saved her life, then ran away and hid, knowing the Faceless Men would punish her for abandoning her mission.

Okay guys, we can kind of tell that either the showrunners abandoned a half-finished subplot at this point, or wrote a totally nonsensical one. Despite being smart enough to hide in a cellar in the previous episode, we then see “Arya” casually walking around in broad daylight, to buy passage on a ship to Westeros…using her right hand three times in a row, even though Arya is left-handed. And okay sometimes people use their off-hand, but this is actress Maisie Williams *BLATANTLY doing a Jaqen impression, walking with her hands behind her back, even smirking the EXACT same way that he does. And then just…waiting around nonchalantly on a bridge, until the Waif attacks her? Stabbing her multiple times in the gut, but surviving? Generally what we think happened is that in the original version, this was going to be a Faceless Man wearing an Arya shapeshifter mask, as a test for the WAIF to see if she would give Arya a quick clean death as ordered or make her suffer – by gut-stabbing her. Then they thought this was too complicated and just haphazardly abandoned it – even *Maisie Williams herself* complained on how implausible it was that Arya could be doing an acrobatic chase scene after being recently stabbed in the gut with only a few stitches holding her together. You’re making the most popular TV show in the world, and you act surprised when people scrutinize it for plot logic?!

Anyway, Arya lures the Waif into a dark cellar, combining her water dancing sword training with her training to fight while blind to defeat her. The Faceless Man seems pleased, and she departed for Westeros – where the Many-Faced God of Death has some tasks for her. Arya used a shapeshifter disguise to infiltrate the Twins: alone in the main hall, she served old Lord Walder Frey a meat pie, then when he asked where his two main sons were, Lothar and Black Walder. Arya politely informed him WHY THERE THEY ARE, BOTH, BAKED IN THAT PIE! ON WHICH THEIR FATHER DAINTILY HATH FED!!! – ironic punishment for his violation of sacred guest right at the Red Wedding. She informs him that she is a Stark, then slits his throat, in the same room where Walder’s sons slit her mother’s throat. But what will Arya do in Season 7, now that she has returned to Westeros? How will she handle all the remaining Freys? Will she even kill the innocent ones, the women and children? What will her reunion be like with her surviving siblings if and when she returns to Winterfell? What will she do with Littlefinger? And whatever happened to her direwolf Nymeria?

Theon Greyjoy

Theon Greyjoy, last son of Balon Greyjoy, raised as a political hostage among the Starks, torn between two worlds, never sure who he was. He made the wrong choice, and suffered terribly for it, horrifically tortured by Ramsay Bolton until he wasn’t even Theon anymore. Theon had to remember his name. Now he has, and he’s back with his sister Yara – but what will they do in the coming struggle for the Iron Throne – and for rule of the Iron Islands, now held by their evil uncle Euron Greyjoy? Who will Theon choose to be in the coming conflict? He has to remember his name.

Nine years before the beginning of the story, Balon Greyjoy declared the independence of the Iron Islands from the mainland, thinking King Robert Baratheon’s hold on the Iron Throne was still weak, after usurping it from the old Targaryen dynasty. He was wrong, and the Greyjoy Rebellion was crushed. Afterwards, Theon was given over as a ward, political hostage, to the Starks, to ensure his father’s continued submission. Theon grew up a bit cocky, proud of his position as heir to the Iron Islands, but an outsider never really fitting in with the Starks. Still he thought of Robb like a brother over time and lived as part of their household. He was almost the seventh Stark child, in a manner of speaking. Theon sort of compensated for how inadequate he felt as a glorified prisoner by excelling at very masculine things like archery, fighting, and having sex with a lot of women. Hey, for all we know he might have unknowingly left one of them with a little something to remember him by – like that ship captain’s daughter from Season 2. There are still ways for him to “further the Greyjoy line”….

But after the War of the Five Kings broke out when King Joffrey had Ned beheaded, Robb Stark was hailed by his men as the new King in the North. Robb sent Theon as his emissary to the Iron Islands to try to recruit his father’s fleet to his side - only to find that his surviving family didn’t think much of him: his bitter old father Balon, and his sister Yara, a female pirate and raider. They thought he was too much a Stark now, not willing to embrace the ironborn way – the iron price – basically that it’s better to take something by prying it from the hands of your dead enemies than it is to gain things through diplomacy.

Balon was faced with two choices: either stay loyal to the Lannisters with their superior resources and expect some minor reward for attacking the North - or - side with the Starks to join them in rebellion, both of them fighting for their mutual independence from the Iron Throne. Balon somehow came up with a third option: declare independence from the Iron Throne under the Lannisters, THEN attack the North because their army was fighting the Lannisters in the south. Words fail to describe how stupid this plan was. Theon tried to point this out but they wouldn’t listen.

Theon’s conscience became terribly conflicted: Balon and the ironborn are all about raiding and glorified stealing, but his surrogate father Ned Stark taught by example to treat people honorably. Ned gave Theon a sense of honor and conscience that the other ironborn lack, but at the same time, he was always an outsider to the Starks, and wanted to truly belong for once, by returning to his original family – yet they were dishonorable pirates whose actions went against what he knew to be right. Desperate for the respect of his biological father Balon, his conscience conflicted, Theon ultimately chose to join them and attack the North, betraying Robb. While the other ironborn were content with harassing the coasts, going after the low-hanging fruit and avoiding the major strongholds, Theon wanted to outdo them all and impress his father, by capturing Winterfell itself. He managed to accomplish this with his single ship crew of only 20 men, using climbing spikes and his intimate knowledge of the castle’s layout from living there, and given that all of its defensive garrison either went south with Robb or got lured out of position.

But HOLDING Winterfell soon proved another matter. The wildling woman Osha helped Bran and Rickon Stark escape, after which Theon’s hold grew increasingly tenuous. He only made matters worse by killing two miller’s boys and burning their corpses, to pass them off as Bran and Rickon – believing that admitting he let them escape would make him look weak, but everyone would think he was ruthless if he said he killed them. This only backfired as it caused the Northerners to hate him even more, and his hold grew strained.

Theon had assumed his father would send reinforcements after he took the castle, but Yara arrived to berate him that they didn’t have the numbers or skill at land warfare to hold Winterfell – out in the middle of the North and nowhere near the sea. Instead of reinforcing the castle, she begged him to retreat back to the Iron Islands with her, for once showing him genuine love and concern that his father never did. Nonetheless, Theon felt that if he retreated from Winterfell in failure he would give up any chance of his father ever respecting him, so he stayed. Meanwhile, Robb Stark in the south got news of his betrayal, and he sent orders for the North’s small home garrisons to besiege Theon’s tiny force at Winterfell. Maester Luwin begged Theon to surrender and join the Night’s Watch as an alternative to execution, but Theon declined – feeling he had gone too far, couldn’t be redeemed to the Greyjoys OR the Starks, and would rather face death with dignity by going out fighting with a sword in hand. Theon’s men, however, had other ideas – Theon wanted an honorable death, much as a Stark would, but the ironborn way isn’t honor – it’s take what you can then flee on your ship when the going gets tough so you can stay alive. Theon’s men knocked him out and handed him over to the Bolton besiegers in exchange for the promise of safe passage.

Unfortunately, Roose Bolton had sent his home garrison under his bastard son Ramsay Snow, a sadistic psychopath. Ramsay rewarded Theon’s men as traitors deserve – by flaying them all alive. Apparently anticipating that his father would soon turn against and later kill Robb at the Red Wedding, Ramsay burned Winterfell - and then spent over a year torturing Theon physically and psychologically in his dungeons, primarily for his own amusement. Among various tortures only alluded to Ramsay cut off some of his fingers, partially flayed him here and there, drove a screw through his foot, and even castrated him. Okay guys, the books do actually say that Ramsay did all of this – even that he castrated Theon – but it explains all of this in broad terms retroactively in the fifth book, after Theon disappeared when he was captured at the end of the second book. The TV show kept outright inventing redundant torture scenes until it got kind of repetitive – and to be honest, it seems like the showrunners just really wanted the actor to win an Emmy for this, and then figured that the perfect formula after making one great torture scene was “do another one!”

Ramsay tortured Theon so badly over time that he made him his personal slave and flippantly renamed him “Reek” (it rhymes with “meek”). Tortured to the point of insanity, what was once Theon Greyjoy was left a broken thing. On top of that his father gave him up for dead given that he had failed and couldn’t further the Greyjoy line anyway. Reek, meanwhile, just gave up because he inwardly felt he deserved his fate given how he had betrayed the Starks and Winterfell, betrayed Ned’s memory and betrayed Robb who had been like a brother to him. He made his choice, and he chose wrong. Theon lost everything that he once defined himself by; crippled too badly to fight, his sexual prowess, even his own name and identity.

Now in the books, Ramsay Bolton then married Sansa’s friend Jeyne Poole, PASSED OFF as Arya Stark, who he proceeds to rape and abuse. Her suffering causes Reek to finally snap back into sanity and reclaim his identity more or less as Theon, and rescue her from the guards by jumping off the castle walls into a snow bank under cover from a blizzard. They then get picked up by Northern partisans and taken to Stannis Baratheon’s camp, where he encounters his sister again.

The TV writers changed this so that Sansa Stark inexplicably marries Ramsay Bolton “to make him hers” - MARRIAGE IN WESTEROS DOES NOT WORK LIKE THAT. Were the Lannisters worried about Sansa ‘destroying them from within’ when they forced her to marry Tyrion in Season 3?) And the TV writers repeatedly give the reason for this change in the Blu-ray commentaries as “we wanted Sansa and Theon to have powerful scenes together in Season 5 at Winterfell”.  Well, what about seeing Sansa as a powerful political leader in the Vale?  What exactly did meeting Theon again do for her character arc?

Anyway, in the TV version Theon escapes with Sansa much as he did in the novels by jumping off the castle walls into the snow, the chasing guards are killed by Brienne, but Theon feels he can’t face Jon Snow at the Wall – his only choice now is to go back home to the Iron Islands (we assume he rode to the coast and sold his horse for passage on a fishing ship or something).

Meanwhile in the Iron Islands, however, things are not going well for his father Balon: once the war in the south ended, the Bolton army returned north and drove the ironborn out of all of the weakly defended castles they held along the coast. Their entire invasion amounted to absolutely nothing – and this is the EXACT SCENARIO that Theon warned Balon when he started it. After Balon storms out of an argument with Yara over this, he is confronted by his estranged brother Euron, returning to the isles after many years, who promptly kills his brother.

Theon arrives just as the ironborn are preparing to have a Kingsmoot – historically they’ve had an elective monarchy, and the priests insist on a new election. Yara is surprised and upset at Theon’s return but embraces him after he admits that he really isn’t fit to rule and just came to support her candidacy to be their new queen. When the Kingsmoot is held their uncle Euron makes a surprise appearance to make his own claim for the throne, announcing that he “paid the iron price” by killing their father, and he plans to marry Daenerys Targaryen to use her dragons to conquer all of Westeros. He wins the election, but Yara and Theon flee with most of the Iron Fleet. They then set sail all the way east to Meereen in Slaver’s Bay, to ally with Daenerys instead (where Theon runs into Tyrion Lannister again, who he hadn’t seen since they traded insults back in Season 1). Daenerys’s combined fleet, army, and dragons set sail to return to Westeros.

But what will happen to Theon when he returns? How will the Greyjoy siblings face off against their cunning, crazed uncle Euron? If Daenerys tries to ally with the Starks against the Lannisters in between them, will Jon Snow still seek vengeance against him for betraying Robb, or feel he’s paid his debts after his torture and helping Sansa escape? And I’m serious guys, whatever happened to that ship captain’s daughter from Season 2? Could Theon still end up with an heir to the Greyjoy line? They wouldn’t introduce that unless it would pay off later, I know it…but now freed and relatively sane, what kind of person will Theon choose to be? As opportunistic and cowardly as his father Balon? As selfish and ruthless as his uncle Euron? Or will he live up to the ideals of strength and honor that Ned Stark wanted him to have? Is he a Greyjoy or a Stark? He has to remember his name…

Yara Greyjoy

Yara Greyjoy, the Kraken’s Daughter, female pirate-captain, and hoping to become Queen of the Iron Islands. How will she face off against her crazed, cunning uncle Euron? How will her fleet and new Targaryen allies face off against the even crazier Queen Cersei, tearing the rest of Westeros apart, even now that winter is here?

Yara Greyjoy is the only daughter of Balon Greyjoy, ruler of the Iron Islands. Nine years before the story begins, Balon tried to break away from the rule of mainland Westros and go back to raiding and pillaging the coasts, as the ironborn did back in their glory days of old. But King Robert Baratheon proved too strong, and their rebellion was soon crushed. Two of Yara’s brothers died in the failed rebellion, while her last and younger brother Theon was taken away to Winterfell as a political hostage to ensure her father’s submission.

With all three of his boys either dead or taken away, Balon was left with only Yara, and he basically raised her as a surrogate son. It is rare for women to be warriors among the ironborn, who have a very misogynistic culture based on raiding and piracy – they look down on women who can’t hold their own in battle. Yara came to excel at this, however, even becoming captain of her own ship, commanding men in battle and killing enemies on pirate raids [Insert Balon’s quote that she’s commanded men, killed men, knows who she is]

Side note: Yara’s name is “Asha” in the books:  they never directly said why the TV show renamed her but it’s apparently out of fear viewers would confuse her with “Osha”, the wildling woman from Season 1...even though in the overall book series Asha Greyjoy is a far more important character, actually a POV narrator in later books. Apparently the showrunners just didn’t realize in advance that “Osha” and “Asha” sound similar, and “Osha” just happened to be introduced first. Guys, it’s called “planning ahead more than the one season in front of you” – though George R.R. Martin himself didn’t really mind the name change.

When the War of the Five Kings broke out, after the sadistic King Joffrey had Ned Stark publicly executed, Ned’s son Robb Stark sent Theon back to the Iron Islands as an envoy, to try to forge an alliance so both their factions could aid each other in fighting for independence from the Lannisters and the Iron Throne. When he returned to Pyke island, Theon hadn’t seen Yara in around 10 years since they were both small children, so he didn’t recognize her as his sister. She decided to taunt him by not correcting his mistake, letting him think she was just a commoner girl and letting him feel her up – so she could later tease him about it when she brought him to their father.

Balon then explained to Theon that he rejected the idea of allying with the Starks – even though they would be natural allies, he was still bitter about losing his original rebellion to Ned Stark and Robert Baratheon. NOR did he intend to stay loyal to the Lannisters. Instead he declared his independence from the Iron Throne…then decided to go for the low hanging fruit, attacking the North’s home castles while their army was away in the south fighting. Theon protested that this was absurd in the long run – eventually either the Lannisters would beat the Starks or the Starks would beat the Lannisters, and because Balon had betrayed them BOTH, whoever won would then attack the Iron Islands to get revenge. But Balon would hear none of it, and Theon but was overcome by his desire to be part of his original family again, so he chose to betray Robb and the Starks.

Yara was tasked with capturing Deepwood Motte and raiding the coasts, while Theon was given only one tiny ship to raid fishermen with. Wanting to prove himself, Theon led a daring assault that captured Winterfell from its skeleton defensive garrison with only 20 men, using climbing spikes and his intimate knowledge of the castle.

Theon had assumed his father would send reinforcements after he took the castle, but Yara arrived to berate him that they didn’t have the numbers or skill at land warfare to hold Winterfell – out in the middle of the North and nowhere near the sea. Instead of reinforcing the castle, she begged him to retreat back to the Iron Islands with her. All of her earlier taunting was just a big sister messing around with her little brother; but that melted away as she urged him to return with her, recalling how she remembered him as a baby, a connection he never had with the Starks – showing him the genuine love and concern that their father had never given him. Nonetheless, Theon felt that if he retreated from Winterfell in failure he would give up any chance of his father ever respecting him, so he stayed – knowing that he would fail, but intending to at least rise to the occasion and die fighting with a sword in his hand. That didn’t happen, however, as Theon’s men betrayed him to save themselves, handing him over to the Northern home garrisons that came to besiege Winterfell. Unfortunately, the Bolton forces surrounding Winterfell were led by Lord Roose’s psychotic bastard son Ramsay Snow, who flayed alive all the ironborn despite promising them safe passage, and took Theon hostage. Ramsay proceeded to horrifically torture and mutilate Theon in his dungeons for well over a year afterwards.

Then…well, then the Iron Islands storyline got put “on hold” for a while after Season 2 ended, and didn’t really pick up again until Season 6, pretty much ignoring it for three years. Okay viewers, in the books, the Kingsmoot storyline is a major subplot that starts right after Tywin Lannister dies, so if the TV show stayed accurate to that it would have happened in Season 5. Heck, that’s really Yara’s main storyline from the books, her earlier stuff from book/season 2 was just setup – it’s even the point when Yara becomes a POV narrator for her own chapters. But there were fears that the show might only run for seven seasons around this time so they went into “crunch mode” in Season 5, burning through two books in one season by condensing a lot and cutting the ironborn entirely. So after all that setup in Season 2, Yara only has one or two brief placeholder scenes in Seasons 3 and 4, then was entirely absent from Season 5. Thankfully they then got renewed through Season 8, so they could slow down and bring back Yara and the Iron Islands subplot, just pushed back to Season 6.

When the war in the south ended after the Red Wedding, the Boltons brought their army back home to the North, driving out weakly held ironborn positions such as at Moat Cailin. When Yara receives news that Deepwood Motte has been retaken, their last captured stronghold in the North, she gets upset with her father over his short-sightedness. Yara is seemingly the only ironborn leader with a basic grasp of military AND political strategy, realizing that if they push the mainlanders too far, it will be just like how their previous rebellion was crushed, all over again: Balon charged ahead into rebellion without any actual “plan” then got surprised when it turned against him.

But then Balon’s estranged brother Euron Greyjoy returned to the islands in the middle of a storm and killed him, by throwing him off a rope bridge. For all their bickering (and her rare status as a female ironborn warrior) Balon surprisingly still expected Yara to be his heir, but after his death the priests of the Drowned God insisted on the ironborn tradition of the Kingsmoot – they’ve historically had an elective monarchy, where all the ship captains get to vote. Yara is a ship captain and child of the last king so she COULD run, but the ironborn had never been ruled by a woman before so she faced an uphill battle. Theon meanwhile managed to escape the Boltons and make his way back to her on the Iron Islands. She was upset that he didn’t take her advice to flee Winterfell in the first place and feared he was just there to make a rival claim in the Kingsmoot ahead of her as Balon’s last son, but he tearfully admitted that he wasn’t fit to lead and was just there to support her claim to rule the ironborn, and the siblings were reconciled. At the Kingsmoot itself, Yara gives her stump speech explaining her platform: if she is queen, they’ll stop wasting men and ships harassing the mainland to seize castles they can’t possibly hold for long, but instead they’ll quit while they’re ahead, reconsolidate their position, and build up their fleets to protect their independent rule over their home islands.

But then their uncle Euron shows up and blinds the ironborn with implausible and empty promises about how they’re going to “make the Iron Islands great again”, swaying the fickle voters away from their first female candidate (…the book this storyline happened in was written in 2005). As Euron is ceremonially crowned, Yara and Theon flee with most of the Iron Fleet, and head to Meereen to get their ahead of their uncle’s forces.

Side Note: In Season 6 we saw Yara going off to have sex with another woman in Volantis; we actually asked George R.R. Martin about this directly and he confirmed to the wiki that she isn’t bisexual or even “experimenting” in the books, so we’re not entirely sure why the TV show made that change – we hope they didn’t just assume “she’s masculine therefore she must be gay” (one of the directors in Season 3 casually called Brienne “a lesbian” just because she isn’t effeminate - that wasn’t nice). But maybe it was because she’s actually very sexually adventurous in the novels, but with men. Hey, the reason we asked Martin in the first place is because we kind of wondered if it was implied and we just didn’t pick up on it. It doesn’t really contradict anything though: the Faith of the Seven on the mainland considers female homosexuality to be sinful, but we actually have *no idea* what the attitude of ironborn culture is about it, so fine.

Yara and Theon’s ironborn fleet finally reach Meereen, and make an alliance with Daenerys Targaryen to take back their respective thrones when they return to Westeros. By the way if you notice the flirting going on there…Daenerys actually *is* bisexual in the novels, it just doesn’t come up that often; Yara was the change in this. Thus the combined Targaryen/Unsullied/Dothraki/Greyjoy fleet departs Meereen to return and invade Westeros. But Cersei is so crazy she might burn down the realm rather than let anyone else rule it, and Yara’s uncle Euron is the most feared pirate across the world’s oceans for good reason; the real challenges are yet to come. 7.

Lyanna Mormont

In Season 6 we met Lyanna Mormont, the young new leader of House Mormont of Bear Island. Like her mother Maege Mormont, Lyanna’s a she-bear, raised to be a warrior and political leader as much as any man. The Mormonts are one of the main vassals of the Starks, and Lady Lyanna was shaped by their unique history and identity.

House Mormont rules over Bear Island, located NORTH of “the North”, off the northwest coast of mainland Westeros, in the Bay of Ice. This puts it in the back end of nowhere: not near any of the centers of civilization or major shipping lanes, pretty much the far northwest corner of the entire known world. On top of being isolated, Bear Island is overall a cold, harsh, and poor place; it remains heavily forested because its lands aren’t suitable for farming, and as the name implies, the untouched forests are therefore home to a fairly sizable population of bears. The actual island is so hardscrabble that their main source of food is from the surrounding waters: the men spend long days on fishing boats to eke out a living, to feed their families back at home. The wilderness of the island does have a rugged beauty to it, but it’s a hard place to actually live, and a hard place breeds a hard people. House Mormont’s sigil is a black bear in a green forest, and their defiant House motto is “Here We Stand”.

Bear Island may be isolated from the major shipping lanes and far from the major cities of Westeros, but being an island located off the west coast makes it a VERY easy target for sea-going raiders. Farther east on the mainland, House Umber is famous for holding the lands located closest to the Wall at Last Hearth – and thus they’ve developed a tradition of being great warriors, constantly needing to fight off wildling raiders who manage to climb over it. But what happens when you don’t even have the Wall to stop raiders? Only water – which is a highway to anyone who can slap together a rowing boat. The Umbers might think they have it tough, but the Mormonts have always had to fight off sea raids from both the wildlings AND the ironborn. To their north, wildlings can cross over the Bay of Ice easily enough on humble fishing ships over from the Frozen Shore – and because they’re on the west coast, ironborn raiding ships have constantly harassed them from their south.

The inhabitants of Bear Island are thus always in danger of seeing a raiding ship appear suddenly on the horizon. The added problem is that all of the men-folk are AWAY from the island on fishing boats all day, leaving only the women behind to defend their homes and children against lightening raids from the sea. It is because of this that the people of Bear Island train their daughters to be warriors just as much as their sons, and raise their girls fully expecting them to be military and political leaders (which isn’t typical for mainlanders in the North).

In ancient times, the ironborn fleets periodically captured Bear Island, and control over it see-sawed back and forth between them and the Stark kings over the centuries. The Starks secured control over it for the last time when the King in the North beat the king of the Iron Islands in a wrestling match to settle the matter, after which the Starks awarded rule to the Mormonts. The Mormonts remained very loyal and devoted followers of the Starks ever since: Lyanna Mormont was even directly named after Ned Stark’s younger sister, Lyanna Stark.

Like the Umbers, fighting off constant raids from the wildlings and the ironborn resulted in the Mormonts having very strong martial traditions – Lyanna Mormont WAS NOT making an empty boast when she said that even though she only had 62 remaining warriors, each one of them was worth TEN mainlanders (also, they only had 62 left BY THAT POINT because so many had been massacred at the Red Wedding). Their family has produced several great warriors like Lord Commander Jeor Mormont, and his son Jorah – who won fame when King Robert crushed the Greyjoy Rebellion, and who even once beat Jaime Lannister in a tournament.

Given how much they hate the wildlings, the Mormonts are great supporters of the Night’s Watch – most of the rest of Westeros sees the Wall as a glorified penal colony, except for Houses from the North that still respect their mission to defend against wildling attacks. Jeor Mormont ruled as Lord of Bear Island, but in his later years VOLUNTARILY joined the Night’s Watch, and rose to become its Lord Commander. This made his son Jorah the new head of House Mormont, but he married a woman from a rich southern court, who was very expensive to support, and eventually he got desperate enough for money that he sold two poachers he caught on his lands to foreign slavers. This is a terrible crime in Westeros, so when he was found out he escaped justice by fleeing to the Free Cities. Having abdicated his position, this left his father Jeor’s sister, Maege Mormont, as the new head of their House.

By the time of the War of the Five Kings, Maege was a grizzled older woman, but a fierce and stubborn warrior in her own right, always wearing full chainmail. She’s one of Robb Stark’s main lieutenants in the novels during his military campaign, and has a lot more on-screen presence in the books, but the TV show streamlined much of the internal Northern politics with Robb’s dozen or so major commanders – Maege actually does appear in the TV show during Season 1, in Robb Stark’s camp, but basically as a background cameo as she has no speaking lines. The actress didn’t return for Season 2 and she just faded out of the story without explanation – though Season 6 retroactively just said that she died at some point in the war off-screen (though Maege is actually still alive in the novels).

After Maege’s death in the TV version, her daughter Lyanna Mormont then inherited rule of Bear Island, at the age of only ten. But because the Mormonts actively raise their children to be warriors as soon as they can lift a mace, and to be decisive leaders against outside threats, regardless of whether their children are boys or girls, young Lyanna Mormont more than capably stepped up to fill the role. Despite her age, Lyanna proves to be an effective, intelligent, and responsible leader: with a stable balance between not being too proud and headstrong to consult her own advisors (unlike the insane and arrogant King Joffrey), but at the same time, not OVERLY reliant on her advisors after she has already made a firm decision (unlike the weak-willed young King Tommen).

In the TV version, after first hearing of Lyanna when she sends her stern letter to Stannis in Season 5, she actually debuts on-screen in Season 6 when Jon Snow and Sansa Stark come to Bear Island trying to rally the Northern bannermen against the Boltons. She then accompanied her few troops on their campaign and was at the parley before the Battle of the Bastards, and after they won later hailed Jon Snow as the new King in the North.

Now some background: in the books, Maege actually has FIVE daughters, and Lyanna is the YOUNGEST. The eldest was Dacey Mormont, one of Robb Stark’s personal bodyguards, but she got killed at the Red Wedding. The next eldest is Alysane Mormont, a mother of two and also a warrior, and she joins the fight against the Boltons in the fifth novel. Now that scene in Season 5 of Lyanna Mormont’s letter to Stannis is actually taken straight from the books: Stannis sends letters asking the Northern Houses to swear him fealty and rejoin the fight against the Lannisters & Boltons, but 10 year old Lyanna sends back the defiant reply:  “Bear Island knows no king but the King in the North, whose name is STARK”. Lyanna IS the one who does that in the books, but Jon Snow is confused because she’s the youngest of Maege’s four surviving daughters. Apparently they left her as acting ruler. Anyway, the TV show streamlined all of this so that Maege just died off-screen in the war at some point, and Lyanna is her only daughter, making her OFFICIALLY the new head of the House, sort of condensing together the book versions of Lyanna and her sister Alysane into one character

Now this brings up sort of a weird point. Even in the novels…we have NO IDEA who Lyanna Mormont’s father is. Her mother Maege was BORN a Mormont, Lyanna took her mother’s surname. That’s rare but not unheard of in Westeros – noblewomen sometimes retain their maiden name if they marry beneath their station and their husband is from a lesser House; and on top of that, their children might take their mother’s family name if it’s more prestigious than their father’s. Basically, if a Lannister woman marries a man from a lesser vassal like House Clegane, she might keep her maiden name, and her children might even use the surname “Lannister” instead of “Clegane” – it’s kind of up to personal choice. But a curious point from the novels is that Maege’s own second daughter Alysane has two children, and within the story itself, it’s explicitly said that no one knows who their father is – and when people ask, Alysane bluntly claims that they were “fathered by a bear”. NOR are her two children considered bastards – they also use the surname “Mormont”. So it’s sort of implied that maybe Maege did the same thing, and that within the story, it’s possible that no one knows who the father of her five daughters is. This has led to a lot of fan debate but with no resolution. It’s POSSIBLE that Maege’s daughters are all bastards and she has no husband, and could get away with calling them “Mormont” anyway that due to Bear Island being so isolated. But her eldest child Dacey is 15 years older than her youngest Lyanna: five daughters spread out across 15 years isn’t just the product of a one night stand or something. So it seems more probable that maybe Maege just married a commoner or minor landed lord beneath her station – but we still really don’t know who Lyanna Mormont’s father is…Or maybe her father really was a bear…

Some behind the scenes notes: Actress Bella Ramsey was roundly praised for her turn as Lyanna Mormont in Season 6, but it’s actually the first time she’s had an acting role in anything – and it’s notoriously difficult to find good child actors. Also, she doesn’t use her natural speaking voice – she has to adopt the Northern England accent that the show uses for all Northmen and wildlings (it’s sort of a “First Men accent”, not like the Andals from the south). But again, she totally nailed the Northern England accent to the point you can’t tell it isn’t her natural speaking voice. Also because she’s you know, TWELVE, she couldn’t watch the TV series to prepare for the role (due to all the sex and violence), but they did show her clips from prior seasons specifically relevant to her and the Mormonts, particularly the scene of Stannis getting the letter back from Lyanna).

End note: Lyanna Mormont is actually the first recurring female political leader of a noble House in Westeros to have any speaking lines (the vassal Houses, not the Great Houses, like Daenerys Targaryen) – and only the SECOND to talk. Her mother Maege didn’t have speaking lines in Season 1 then vanished, then Anya Waynwood appeared in the Vale in Season 4, but only for one episode. Thus Lyanna is the second female leader of one of the noble Houses with speaking lines, first to be recurring. And this is six years into the show. In the books, female rulers of the vassal Houses are actually not uncommon – at LEAST ONE in each of the Seven Kingdoms at this time, and around a THIRD of the Northern Houses at this point, due to so many men getting killed at the Red Wedding. And they’re not just cutting them for time from the TV show: they’ve been ACTIVELY gender-swapping female political leaders into male characters, without explanation. This started in Season 4 with characters like Larra Blackmont from Dorne and House Stokeworth, then in Seasons 5 and 6 they also changed the head of House Cerwyn to a man: it’s LADY Jonelle Cerwyn in the books, but they changed it to the male Cley Cerwyn in the TV show. And Lyanna even has a scene with Cerwyn in the Season 6 finale – based on the books, this would have been TWO female political leaders discussing strategy, passing the Bechdel Test. We officially don’t know why the showrunners are doing this gender-swapping: it doesn’t “take time” to “explain” how women are political leaders, you present it without comment because it isn’t unusual to them. Lawyer shows don’t need to drop the narrative for 10 minutes to explain how something as implausible as a female lawyer could appear, it’s normal – so the idea that it would “take too long to explain” is rubbish. And the showrunners never really said they added in Lyanna Mormont to show her as a competent female political leader – they said they thought it would be funny to have Jon Snow get talked down to by a little girl. So while we’re happy to finally get a recurring female political leader...we’re also worried they’re just using this to distract us from how many other female political leaders they cut out for no reason.