This white horse holds the key to two major 'Game of Thrones' fan theories
Warning: This article contains spoilers from Game of Thrones season 6, episode 2.
LONDON -- For better or worse, we have to wait a week between each new Game of Thrones episode.
That gives us a full six days to comb through the preceding episode frame-by-frame, in desperate hopes of digging out clues about what's to come next.
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On Tuesday, Reddit user gbinasla shared a lengthy post in the Game of Thrones subreddit about Bran's flashback sequence from episode two.
In particular, the discussion focussed on Lyanna Stark's horse.
In episode two, Bran watches as a young Lyanna Stark -- Ned's sister, who apparently goes on to die in her brother's arms after being kidnapped and raped by Rhaeger Targaryen -- rides into the Winterfell courtyard on a white horse. She is met by a young (and significantly more talkative) Hodor, who it turns out was once called Wylis.
The flashback may have been short, but it's prompted a lot of discussion. The debate centres around the significance of the horse in terms of two theories: R+L=J (essentially, the theory that Jon Snow isn't Ned's bastard but the child of Rhaegar and Lyanna instead) and a new theory about Hodor's backstory (which is jokingly being called W+H=WH).
R+L=J
The first part of the Reddit post essentially reenforces the R+L=J theory by linking Lyanna to mythological character Rhiannon -- a white horse-riding figure who goes off with another man after refusing to marry her betrothed, and whose child ends up disappearing on the night she gives birth to him.
This one may be a bit of a stretch, but who knows? Martin has used mythological references before (the name Cersei is a play on mythological sorceress "Circe," for instance), and it wouldn't be out of character for the show's creators to go into this level of detail.
W+H=WH
The second, longer theory concerns the origins of everyone's favourite stable boy. The OP starts by proposing that Wylis may have been a warg -- and his eventual transformation into the Hodor we know and love could have been the result of too much warg-ing.
Now here's where the horse come in.
If Wylis the stable hand was a warg, wouldn't it make sense for him to warg into the creatures he's most comfortable around? And maybe, more specifically, the creature that gets attention from Lyanna -- a girl he appears (from the flashback sequence, at least) to share a connection with?
Next, the OP starts to theorize about why Wylis may have ended up in his current state.
It sort of makes sense, doesn't it? Game of Thrones is such a densely-packed show that pretty much every moment has some sort of wider significance; the fact that Wylis is mentioned in the flashback implies that his backstory will be revealed at some point this season, and it would make the most sense if that backstory impacted the present-day Bran in some way.
The theory received a positive response on Reddit.
Taking it one step further: Perhaps there's the possibility that the newly trained Bran -- whom we already know can warg into Hodor's mind -- might be able to do something to help his large companion.
A future episode that ends with Hodor saying something other than "Hodor" -- maybe his old name, for instance -- wouldn't just be an interesting twist; it would also serve to show Bran's growing potential as a powerful influencer in the Thrones universe.
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Topics Game Of Thrones
