Previously on A Blog of Thrones, Catelyn's genius plot blew up entirely predictably in her face. Also, Bronn.
Ser Alliser is chewing everyone out.
"Last night I was told that Gueren is marching five new boys up the kingsroad. One or two may even be worth the price of piss. To make room for them, I have decided to pass eight of you on to the Lord Commander to do with as he will."
To make room for five, he's going to graduate eight, even though he doesn't think any of them deserve it. Is he the Master-at-Arms because it's a job that doesn't involve doing math?
Also, I don't get this. I know that the Night's Watch is hard-pressed for men, but they can't just take rabble. I'm still not exactly sure how they get their food or clothes or weapons, but I do know that those things aren't free. And while I'd be the first to admit that 300 is hardly an accurate depiction of military tactics, the basic fact of the matter is that Leonidas had a point; a unit does have to function together (even if the rest of that film was one-on-one slow-mo gorefests). It makes for nice escapism, but you can't field an army of thieves and whores because they're just as like to butcher each other as the enemy.
Second point: I have no idea how long Jon's been there or exactly how many have been training with him, but I do know that the Night's Watch has lost a grand total of four so far in the series. So if eight are about to graduate to full-on Watch brothers and five more recruits are about to show up, I'm not entirely sure how the Watch has an attrition problem.
"They will call you men of Night's Watch now, but you are bigger fools than the Mummer's Monkey here if you believe that. You are boys still, green and stinking of summer, and when the winter comes you will die like flies."
You know, like that guy who had been in the Watch for forty years and the silent poacher. The guys from the prologue, remember them? They died. One got beheaded by the protagonist and the other was strangled by a zombie. They were a damn sight more experienced than Ser Loon and Stone Head are. I'm supposed to hate Alliser Thorne because he's a drill sergeant nasty, but jerkass has a point and if I link to TvTropes one more time I'll be trope overdosed oh there we go moving on.
The boys celebrate by spraying booze all over each other. They are supposed to be 14ish so, great. Drunkenly celebrating the fact that now you get to live the rest of your live freezing your balls off at the ass end of the world. That seems an entirely appropriate response. Didn't we just have like two chapters about how the Night's Watch was actually really shitty compared to the fairy-tale version Jon apparently grew up listening to?
As the celebration (again: why) goes on, Jon notices that Sam is absent from the feast.
"It's not like him to miss a meal," Pyp said thoughtfully.
No, that's not thoughtfully. Sam is fat. Given that Jon was able to tell just a page ago that Sam was lying when he said nothing was wrong, he should really know better than to characterize Pyp's statement as "thoughtful." And don't pretend that Pyp is disguising his opinion of Sam for Jon's sake; basically everyone else in the Watch so far this chapter has gone and said something to the effect of "Benjen Stark is a knightsicle" knowing full well that Jon thinks he's still alive.
"Sam will remain in training, with the likes of Rast and Cuger and these new boys who are coming up the kingsroad. Gods only know what they'll be like, but you can bet Ser Alliser will send them against him, first chance he gets."
Yes, Jon, and so much the better not just for Sam but for the entire f*cking Night's Watch that Sam get beaten by these sadistic new recruits rather than by the Others. It sucks for Sam that his father was an ass, but the Night's Watch is no more a place for him than Horn Hill was.
Conveniently, though, George has gone and invented these other two categories, builders and stewards, where they send all the useless people.
Again, I was under the impression the Night's Watch was horrifically understaffed to the point where they could only maintain three fortresses. But apparently they've got men to spare, because we can assign folks to empty the Lord Commander's chamberpot and stuff like that.
(Oh, okay, the end of the chapter actually clears up both this point and the one above; one of the things stewards do is hunt and plant and whatnot and keep the Watch fed. So not the entire force - drastically reduced and undermanned force, mind you - fights. ...that means the Watch is in even worse shape, because assuming that their numbers are distributed evenly between the three groups, they actually only have about 330 fighters instead of a thousand.) (Okay, reading ahead a bit, it's not quite that awful. There are 588 votes cast during the election at the end of ASOS, and that's after the Great Ranging and the Battle of the Wall, both of which, presumably, saw overwhelming Ranger casualties but minimal Builder and Steward casualties. That in turn suggests that their fighting force was north of 400 to begin with. Which only begs the question of how many men you need to field one fighting man, but I suspect I'll have to leave that question for another day.)
Jon gets moody and thinks about going back to Winterfell with his brothers. Or rather, his half-brothers.
There was no place for him in Winterfell, no place in King's Landing either. Even his own mother had not had a place for him. The thought of her made him sad. He wondered who she had been, what she had looked like, why his father had left her.
Pity parade. Look, Jon, your father left her - well, okay, let's pretend for a moment that it's not flagrantly obvious who Jon's parents really are, and just go with what Jon knows (nothing). Let's pretend that Jon is actually Ned's son and that his mother was some woman Ned screwed during the war. He left her because he had sworn an oath, Jon, because he had a duty.
That oath, that duty, caused him to have to make some hard choices, and... oh, right, you're not listening. Instead, you're getting your great^x uncle to pull strings for you. Going around the local authority's back? Jon Snow should be hanging out down in the capitol and Ned Stark should be up here on the Wall.
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