Once Robb leaves the west, the Lannisters face no pressure at all. Whatever battlefield successes he gained on the Lannisters' ancestral doorsteps grow more ephemeral every day. And for what? First Robb arrives late to Harrenhal, unable to do anything but mourn dead northern soldiers, presumably slaughtered by Clegane, who's long gone. Apparently Clegane killed an advance raiding party. Then, when given word of his grandfather's death, he takes his army and marches it back somewhat westward, to Riverrun, to attend the funeral.
Robb churlishly accuses Karstark of losing faith in the northern cause, but Karstark is merely pointing out the obvious. Then there's Edmure. Robb's vainglorious uncle clearly messed up by disobeying orders to hold Riverrun, preferring instead to stop Clegane's army at Stone Mill from crossing the rivers of the Trident and heading west. Robb rolls his eyes: he wanted Clegane to come west, so the Mountain, who "doesn't have a strategic thought in his head," would have been lured unsuspecting toward the eastward-marching Stark forces and killed.
News flash, Your Grace: Clegane is not worth much more than that mill. Sansa will still be a hostage. Joffrey will still be in power. The north will still be under threat from both the Lannisters and the invading Ironborn.
Robb will have Clegane's very large head. That's the thinking of a company commander, not a general. Edmure can't be blamed for following his commanding officer's example. In George R. Martin's version, Robb initially heads to Riverrun after crossing the Twins, to break the Lannister siege of his grandfather's castle.
Robb orders bannerman Roose Bolton to march east to Harrenhal and take it from the Lannisters, while he marches west to lay waste to the Westerlands, moving from Oxcross to Ashemark and finally to take the Crag. There, Robb suffers an arrow in the arm and gets, er, comforted by Lady Jeyne Westerling, so much so that the honorable Robb marries her. By substituting the invented character of Lady Talisa for Jeyne, the show misses an opportunity to clarify the war in the West from the perspective of a stakeholder.
Then he marches back to Riverrun for the funeral, upbraiding his uncle Edmure for the debacle at Stone Mill -- which really is a debacle in the books, because the impetuous Edmure blocked Tywin Lannister's move westward, not just Gregor Clegane's. Tywin was trying to get west to stop Robb and break the northern pillage of his lands. Kevan Lannister describes the outcome of the battle as a "catastrophe"; when Tyrion says that Robb is winning the war, no one disagrees.
Not only did the battle establish Robb's reputation as a strong leader, it also destroyed the numerical advantage the Lannisters had held at the outbreak of the war.
Moreover, the liberation of Riverrun resulted in the lords of the Riverlands rallying to Robb's cause, putting him in control of two of the Kingdoms and drastically increasing the total size of his army. The after-effects were therefore quite long-lasting, forcing the Lannisters to fight the Starks on even terms, where before they could have simply ground them down through attrition. With only one field army left to work with, Tywin was put in a precarious position.
With only one large army he was robbed of his ability to maneuver, as he could not move his forces to one location without abandoning another.
Particularly, Robb's northern army was not the only one Tywin had to deal with, as the surviving Baratheon brothers were making their own claims to the throne from further south. This left the Lannisters caught in the middle and fighting a two-front war. Tywin's main army was therefore essentially pinned down in the middle of the kingdom at Harrenhal, unable to launch an attack on Riverrun to the north for fear of attack from Storm's End to the south, and vice versa.
This left the Lannisters scrambling to scrape together a new field army out of green conscripts in their home territories in the Westerlands, biding their time until these new levies could be deployed in the field. The following year, while Brienne transports her prisoner Jaime, they come upon three Tom soldiers. Brienne and Jaime attempts to pass him off as a common thief out of Ashemark , but one of the soldiers recognizes Jaime since he saw him at the Battle of the Whispering Wood.
Several years after the battle, during Daenerys Targaryen's war for Westeros , Jaime credits Robb's tactic with giving him the idea to take Highgarden , while leaving Casterly Rock to be taken by the Unsullied troops. Numbers for the battle are confused due to the misinformation that is flowing between the Stark and Lannister armies.
Robb's army initially consists of 18, troops " The Pointy End ". The Lannister scout inflates this to 20, by miscounting, and Robb confirms this number probably to mislead the Lannisters. So when Tywin destroys the 2, Stark soldiers at the Green Fork, he assumes Robb has 18, men left.
However, after the scout was released, Robb won the allegiance of House Frey , who contributed an unknown number of troops to Robb's cause: in " Baelor ", Theon states that they outnumber the Freys by , thus Lord Walder has presumably 3,, men, which he allocates to Robb's cause, except who stay behind to defend the Twins, increasing Robb's army to 20,, men.
Robb then sends 2, east as a suicidal diversionary attack against Tywin's army, meaning he has at least 18, at Whispering Wood - though this doesn't include local Tully-loyal soldiers who may have rallied to his army.
So by the time Robb reaches Jaime, his army is larger than it initially appears to Tywin. The bulk of Jaime's 30,strong army is besieging Riverrun, so presumably he takes only a small force to reconnoiter the Stark position to the north in the novel, Jaime assumes a small band of loyal Rivermen are attacking, so only takes a modest force to confront them, unaware the bulk of Robb's army is there.
The strength of Jaime's army at the Whispering Wood is therefore impossible to ascertain. Further, in the books, the overall number of Lannister forces that Jaime had deployed around Riverrun was about 12, infantry and 2,, cavalry; the TV series seems to have increased this to 30, in " You Win or You Die ", Tywin clearly states that he is giving Jaime "half" of all Lannister forces when he gives him command of 30, men, which would put their combined total at 60, at the start of the war.
In the A Song of Ice and Fire novels, Robb splits his forces and takes his northern cavalry approximately 5,, men across the Green Fork of the Trident at the Twins and rides south to relieve Riverrun. Like the earthquake tremors of a Dothraki charge, you could hear them coming before you saw them.
Every speech Jon or Davos ever made about the folly of fighting each other is made real in this moment, which turns the mass murder of warfare into an actual geographical feature of the battle. Then it all goes to shit. Snapping under a lifetime of paranoia, pressure, and rage, Daenerys burns the city to the ground. The soldiers run amok. Cersei Lannister dies in the arms of her brother beneath the Red Keep, literally buried by the trappings of power.
Eight seasons of build-up result in a horrorshow that, in terms of both amassing bodies and punching the audience in the face, makes the Red Wedding look like flag football. Director Miguel Saphochnik yes, him again shoots it all in broad daylight, a gobsmackingly bold act of filmmaking that forces you to bear witness to every awful detail of the carnage. Already a subscriber? Log in or link your magazine subscription. Account Profile. Sign Out.
Photo: HBO. Tags: vulture section lede vulture lists game of thrones the battle of the bastards the battle of the blackwater tv hardhome vulture picks game of thrones season 8 More.
Most Viewed Stories.
0コメント