Okay, so y’all can stop blaming Bran for “ruining everything.” Yes, Bran put his hand in the cookie jar, which resulted in the Night King branding him and coming to the weirwood cavern, which is a very normal, human action. Most people would want to see learn any extra information, when they have repeatedly been tempted with images of their dead family, and been given no warning about potential danger of compromising the safety of themselves and others. So yes, Bran is responsible for that, and it’s nothing anybody in his position wouldn’t do. He will probably feel guilty about it for a long time, but please keep it in the context of what information he had at the time.
Okay, so the Night King is coming with an army of undead Wights. What is the logical thing to do: get the fuck out. Bran has the ability to control Hodor–and yes this has all sort of ethical complications, since Hodor cannot consent to or protest against such a thing, and it is reductive to his character–but it’s what Bran has been doing for some time, and everybody present seems to accept it. Having Bran conscious and fully mentally present is clearly something that will be helpful in any escape plan, especially since Hodor’s cooperation is essential in Bran’s escape, since nobody’s trained Summer to pull a sled (which might have been smart.) I believe if Bran had been present mentally, and had mind-warged into Hodor, he and the others would have escaped, Hodor and Summer would have survived.
But that’s not how it went down. Why? The three-eyed raven. He insisted that Bran enter a vision, which Bran has not been trained to exit on his own. Is it a critically important vision that will teach Bran how to defeat White Walkers, or about his own origins? No. Does it really have any importance to his “education”? No. Basically, all it does it 1. Ensure Bran will not be mentally present to assist with any escape, and 2. set up Bran near Hodor in the past, so that adolescent Hodor could possibly hear echoes of Meera’s voice. Once again, there is no reason for Bran to be in vision, other than to make his escape more difficult and to make Hodor vulnerable. And this situation was set up by the Three-Eyed Raven. Or by HBO, more accurately.
Bran hesitates to warg into Hodor’s mind while in his vision. He seems uncertain whether there will be any difficulties, and the Three-Eyed Raven prompts him to go ahead and warg into Hodor’s mind anyways. This of course leads to making adolescent Hodor vulnerable. I’m not even going to go into the inconsistencies in the show and how little this makes sense, but just that the Three-Eyed Raven prompted Bran to go forward, seemingly unconcerned with any consequences. All of this to make bran “become him.” How this makes Bran become his is not shown at all.
The situation with Hodor was totally engineered. Whether D&D meant to make the Three-Eyed Raven a manipulative ass-hole, or they just couldn’t find a decent excuse for their storytelling, I don’t know. Either way, it felt extremely disrespectful to Hodor’s character, as it stripped him of any agency in the moments of his death (I’m pretty sure he was still being mind-warged) which is especially horrible to do to a disabled character.
But Bran was just as much of a pawn as Hodor was. He didn’t know what was going on. Yes, he made a mistake, but he did what he was told, and watched his protector get hurt. He will wake up to realize Hodor is dead, and have to make sense of it. But it isn’t all his fault and he didn’t “ruin everything.”
Did Bloodraven know what Bran was doing? Bran tries to get his attention before entering the vision alone, and Bloodraven doesn’t stir. Yet he’s immediately aware and ready to tell Bran the consequences of what Bran has done after. They’ve clearly discussed the Night King before as Bran knows his name, yet somehow Bloodraven witheld the information about how the Night King can actually see them and that his mark will mean their deaths. I’m not sure whether to put it down to bad writing, bad editing or something else.
Bloodraven then immediately pulls Bran into a vision of the Winterfell courtyard of the time when Wylis suffered his attack and became mentally retarded. Is Bloodraven doing this so the ‘ink’ of the past will not be changed (as in, Wylis not becoming a retard) ? He urges Bran to warg into Hodor whilst still connected to the weirwood vision of the young Wylis. So is the point of this to fulfill what happened in the past, and it’s imperative to do it right now before the walkers come in and kill them? Wouldn’t the Raven just have Bran multitasking entering visions viewing Wylis whilst warging Hodor on an earlier day when they didn’t have a clock ticking over their heads?
Did the Raven know what was going to happen, and let Bran make that mistake? (you will fly, you won’t be an old man in a tree). It seems likely since he pulled Bran into that vision to show him that this moment in time is the reason Wylis became retarded, he instructs Bran to carry out what needed to be done to make sure the past stayed the same. It had already happened to Wylis, and now Bran is finding out the reason as to why, but he had to witness it happen at this moment in time as Hodor was actually ‘holding the door’ against the wights with Bran’s assistance…
It’s really confusing, D&D and HBO have failed to actually give a proper explanation to what occurred. What was Bloodraven’s goal all along, what did Bran need to ‘gain’ that he had lost? Why did he join the Children after abandoning the Watch and become part of the weirwood? HBO says Bloodraven quickly transferred his knowledge to Bran before the walkers showed up, so is Bran also somewhat responsible for other events that have already happened in the series? In the book it seems that Bloodraven is being deceptive and has an agenda, maybe even working with the walkers. Bloodraven in the show seems to be hiding things from Bran as well, it seems that way but it might be bad writing and I’m looking too much into it. It just seems that the Raven was contacting Bran since Season 1 merely to get him to fill his boots and he dies shortly into their training together. Maybe he was pro-Walker all along and Bran fucked his plans by getting touched. Lord knows at this point.
Weirwoods are considered sacred to the followers of the old gods. The children of the forest are said to have carved faces in the weirwoods during the Dawn Age, before the coming of the First Men across the narrow sea. It is said that through the faces the old gods watch over the followers and bear witness to important events. The greenseers of the children of the forest can see through the eyes of weirwoods. Since trees have no sense of time, the greenseer can see into the past or present when looking through the eyes of a tree.
A piece of art in honor of Game of Thrones CRUSHING it at the Emmy’s, shattering The West Wing’s record for most Emmy’s in a single year! Also, yesterday was the first day of fall so we all know what that means….WINTER IS COMING
Weirwoods are considered sacred to the followers of the old gods. The children of the forest are said to have carved faces in the weirwoods during the Dawn Age, before the coming of the First Men across the narrow sea. It is said that through the faces the old gods watch over the followers and bear witness to important events. The greenseers of the children of the forest can see through the eyes of weirwoods. Since trees have no sense of time, the greenseer can see into the past or present when looking through the eyes of a tree. [requested by eliaofdorne]
GOT + Weirwood♕ The center of the grove an ancient weirwood brooded over a small pool where the waters were black and cold. “The heart tree,” Ned called it. The weirwood’s bark was white as bone, its leaves dark red, like a thousand bloodstained hands. A face had been carved in the trunk of the great tree, its features long and melancholy, the deep-cut eyes red with dried sap and strangely watchful. They were old, those eyes; older than Winterfell itself. They had seen Brandon the Builder set the first stone, if the tales were true; they had watched the castle’s granite walls rise around them. It was said that the children of the forest had carved the faces in the trees during the dawn centuries before the coming of the First Men across the narrow sea.
An oak may live three hundred years, a redwood tree three thousand. A weirwood will live forever if left undisturbed. To them seasons pass in the flutter of a moth’s wing, and past, present, and future are one.
The caves were timeless, vast, silent. They were home to more than three score living singers and the bones of thousands dead, and extended far below the hollow hill. “Men should not go wandering in this place,” Leaf warned them. “The river you hear is swift and black, and flows down and down to a sunless sea. And there are passages that go even deeper, bottomless pits and sudden shafts, forgotten ways that lead to the very center of the earth. Even my people have not explored them all, and we have lived here for a thousand thousand of your man-years.” ― Bran III, A Dance with Dragons.