Game of Thrones: The importance of the Bran butterfly effect
The Battle of Winterfell has come and gone on Game of Thrones, and Bran didn’t have a very big hand in the results. Or did he?
Social media is saturate with expert military tacticians living in their parents’ basement. The tough part about being the Three-Eyed Raven Bran, however, is you know reality, the reality of everything that has happened and will ever happen. Much like the Avengers: Endgame 14,000,000+ scenarios in which the good guys lose, Bran could have run the odds like a Westerosi Dr. Strange.
Still…many have asked why he didn’t help more. Let’s examine what happens if Bran gets too involved.
The Dothraki surge
Imagine, if you will, a scenario where the troops line up ready to fight for their lives, much in the same way they did in reality. Melisandre lights the sickles and gives everyone singed eyebrows. Just as everyone is about to get fully pumped up and ready to storm the battlefield, a wheelchair rolls out. Bran calmly and monotonously says, “Don’t do this. I’ve seen the result in the future, and you’re about to get snuffed out like cheap incense.”
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Either they look at him, laugh, and charge the field anyway, which results in the same death; or, they listen, don’t charge, and serve as nothing more than the first speed bump when the wight army slams forward out of the darkness. Either way, dead. So why say anything if you’re Bran?
Winter and fire
So we’re past the point of the inevitable chaos in front of the gate. What about the weather stopping dragons from torching the moat? Does it really matter? Melisandre did it anyway. All the weather did was save a few hundred or thousand wights from getting torched in strafing runs.
Now you’re thinking, “They could have started burning earlier and more often!” Sure, that’s possible, but then The Night King could have started the weather earlier as well. If more, literal firepower is used, then The Night King starts flying in dragon sorties and airborne dropping a dozen or so wights at a time into the middle of the castle. Or maybe he just waits to send in his horde until the fire dies out via wind and below freezing temps?
Strategic errors
“Hey Dany, make sure you take off the ground with Drogon and don’t sit there like a moron, letting tons of wights carve his flesh with a million dagger stabs.” Fair, but in an alternate reality, she takes off quickly and gets her face roasted off by the twice baked Viserion, who has a brand new throat-orifice from which blue flames spew.
Then there are the spattering of ideas like dousing the land with wildfire, à la The Last Samurai. Again, the dragon sorties occur, or tunnels get dug, and maybe one of those wights lands directly on Bran or tunnel directly underneath him.
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The point to Bran’s master-plan, or lack thereof, is he knew what had to happen, what sequence of events was necessary, to surprise The Night King and win the war. To quote Starship Troopers: “You disapprove? Well, too bad. We’re in this for the species, boys and girls. It’s simple numbers. They have more. And every day [Bran has] to make decisions that send[s] hundreds of people…to their deaths.”
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