Okay. Try to calm down. Take a deep breath now, 1…2…3…. Nope. Doesn’t work.
Unless you live on the planet Mars, all of you on the internet must have heard or seen the promotional poster for Season 6 of Game of Thrones that just dropped last night. Game of Thrones, arguably one of the world’s most watched, pirated and polarizing TV Shows just released a new poster for Season 6.
Have a look at it here.
For the record, this is me after I saw this poster,
So, in case you are a GoT or a ASOIF fanboy, your expression of a loosely hanging jaw with rising elation from within is similar to what I felt when I saw it for the very first time. Yes, that is indeed Jon Snow, our favourite bastard of the popular series (Literal bastards, please. Although, too many candidates for the metaphorical ones as well).
It features the maybe/definitely deceased Jon Snow with blood all over his pretty, dumb face. Oh, and it says April, which means it will not be postponed to a May release as was previously believed but may just be released in mid or late-April.
Now, April is still a long way out, five months almost. In the meantime, we’ll probably have a trailer around early March while book readers like me would hope, hope against hope that George R.R Martin gets off his burger and fries to release his next, ‘The Winds of Winter’ before Season 6. This means that until then, all we have is this promotional poster that says a lot less than we know but probably teases a lot that we want to know.
Considering that the image is deliberately vague, (And the fact that I have no books at hand for further consultation), here are just few possibilities I can gather from this poster,
Jon Snow is dead and not coming back. All this poster teases is how Snow’s limp corpse will be propped up to be crucified by the brothers of the Night’s Watch as his eyes are gouged out by black crows in the cold (It’s gory, isn’t it?). Or maybe, this is just Snow’s posture on top of a funeral pyre just, inverted or something.
Second, Jon Snow was dead but, was raised from the darkness by the Lord of Light’s hottest servant, Lady Melisandre of Asshai. After all, her arrival at the Wall just before Jon’s stabbing (And, completed within a day whereas it actually takes a week, at least) was far too convenient to be just a harbinger of bad news. In any case, Melisandre is way at the bottom in the Character Popularity Indexes this week (Thanks to her child-burning antics). So my lady, bring back Jon Snow and, all will be forgotten. We’ll even take the Lord of Light as the one true God.
Lastly, If you notice the poster, you’ll see Jon has some blood on his face and the bridge of his nose. As far as I can recall, being stabbed in the chest and back didn’t splatter much onto his face when we lost saw him. What does that mean? Jon Snow joins the Others. In the last moments of his life, Jon ‘warged’ into his direwolf Ghost whereas his corpse still fresh in the cold grasp of death was reanimated as a wight or worse, a White Walker. Remember the Night’s King from that thrilling episode at Hardhome? He did take a certain affinity to the young bastard and maybe, this is his reward. The poster just might be the aftermath of a reanimated Jon Snow spanking Brutus Olly to kingdom come.
Or maybe, and this is the most worrying option of them all, there is no meaning attached to this poster at all. Maybe, this is just the producers pulling our legs, as they have often been guilty of. I mean, think about it. The producers have repeatedly held that Jon Snow was dead and that he was not coming back. And yet, there were sightings and rumours very contradictory to that statement. So, either the HBO was guilty of trying to keep the World’s worst kept secret or, they may just be pulling the wool over all our eyes. As a fan, I pray for the former.
Don’t worry too much, folks. It’s still a long way out. Until then, tuck yourselves in and watch Star Wars: Episode VII. Winter is Coming.
