The glaring problem with all of these Games of Thrones theories

The clock is ticking, and there's a million different sub-plots still to pay off

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Can Bran travel through time and change the past? Is he in fact the Three-Eyed Raven? Is Tyrion Lannister actually a Targaryen? Is Hodor a horse?

These theories, and many, many more are imaginative, sometimes very compelling, and good on the Game of Thrones fanbase for its diligent theorising, but there’s a problem with all of them: there's only 13 episodes left after this season.

Consider for a second, how many seasons it has taken Bran just to get to the Weirwood tree. How many episodes have been given over to Arya learning how to properly wield a staff. How bite-size the first Tower of Joy flashback was. How slowly the ‘Jorah has greyscale’ sub-plot has been parcelled out, a brief glimpse of a different part of his forearm coming each week. We’re fast approaching the midpoint of the assumed penultimate season, and Jon’s only just got rid of that crappy job on the Night’s Watch.

I’m on board with R+L=J, and potentially the whole Azor Ahai thing, but there just isn’t time for a lot more, at least in the show.

Jon is still yet to crush Ramsay and mount some sort of attack on the White Walkers and Daenerys has still to make it to Westeros. Maybe all of these missions won’t be completed, as is the way of Game of Thrones (and life), but they, along with dozens of other sub-plots and characters in the show, need to paid off properly, and that will take up a substantial number of episodes.

This isn’t to say that Game of Thrones’ eventual climax won’t be exciting and satisfying, but it might not be as plot twist-heavy as expected. I guess this is the downside of having such an engaged, dedicated fanbase in the internet age - as intricate as the plot you’ve created may be, when people have seven whole days to hypothesise in between broadcasts, they’re inevitably always going to be expecting more. Perhaps too much.