[SPOILERS] "Burn Them All!" theory. (This is a little different than I've seen elsewhere.)

Sorry if this isn't new. I tried to find something about this idea online, because it just came to me today while rewatching the show. I have a hard time believing I'm the first to think this, but occasionally I have an original idea. I've read great ideas elsewhere that have inspired this and are related to this, but nothing exactly like this.

This idea came to me as I watched the funeral of Hoster Tully, in which the Blackfish steps in to set his brother ablaze. That caused me to think about how bodies are disposed of in Westeros. Simultaneously, I happened to have read an idea about Bran possibly watching over his family and them hearing voices. I am not the first to propose that Bran has probably tried to communicate with the Mad King, but interpretations are different than this one.

Here is the basic idea:

1. In "The Faith of the Seven", they actually preserve the bodies of the dead in a manner that I would refer to as mummification.(http://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Faith_of_the_Seven#Funeral_customs).

2. It is well known that the Mad King heard voices in his head and it is also well known that he said to "burn them all" more than once and that as he was dying he said this over and over (not unlike a certain instance in which a door needed to be held and this was repeated over and over).

3. The followers of the "Lord of Light" worship fire/light in a sense, and Malisandre says "fire is the purest death".

4. We know what Bran is capable of in terms of communication through time.

I propose that Bran's ability to communicate through time is imperfect, at best. What he is really trying to do is to get these people to burn their dead so that they cannot be used as meat in the army of the others. The Mad King wasn't burying the Wildfire to destroy Kings Landing. He was preparing so that all of the mummies beneath the city could not rise when the Others arrive. When he says "burn them all" it is either a misinterpretation on his part or the part of his audience. He is actually referring to the dead. In other words, don't preserve them. Burn them.

In the case of the Red Priestesses, Malisandre has made it clear that it is difficult to interpret what she's sees at times. Perhaps her religion has taken this to an extreme, by cleansing the living with fire, when they were really being told to simply burn their dead.

Now, here is the grand implication of all of this. From what I can find, there are ~500,000 living in King's Landing. How many mummies are there in Kings Landing alone (let alone the rest of the south). These aren't rickety skeletons. These are well preserved bodies that are ready to rise up and fight.

Submitted March 31, 2018 at 10:11PM by PhenderMan https://ift.tt/2GrWUic