Fans do not necessarily need any more reasons to be frustrated over Game of Thrones’ Battle for Winterfell, since humanity’s climactic clash with the White Walkers has been a target of viewer ire since it made its on-screen debut. Viewers had an incredibly tough time seeing what was happening, but within that darkness, at least one viewer found yet another reason to be mad.
The ratings for the much-anticipated Game of Thrones episode were high, though frustration was also quite up there too. As this Redditor points out, you can now add a list entry for Jon Snow and others' failure to use the copious amounts of dragonglass from Dragonstone to craft a critical weapon.
The user mentions that despite dragonglass being found in Game of Thrones Season 7, no one thought to make arrowheads of it to use on all the White Walkers, wights, and even Viserion. By all means, there wouldn't seem to be any logical reason why Jon Snow and his allies failed to craft as many arrowheads as possible ahead of the battle. You would think Gendry would have conjured something along those lines up.
Game of Thrones indicated that characters were making weaponry to go to battle against the White Walkers. Why not dragonglass arrowheads? Dragonglass' potency against the White Walkers seemed to come in and out of the conversation in Season 8, after having been established as the go-to substance for the villains' destruction.
It goes without saying this was another missed opportunity for Game of Thrones. That said, the entire subplot with dragonglass seemed to take a back seat as the fantasy series wound down. It went from being the point of Jon Snow’s whole mission to see Daenerys in Season 7 to mostly side-conversation fodder in Season 8, while I'd assumed it was going to be a significant game-changer.
Of course, I also thought that Jon Snow was going to be engaged in fighting the White Walkers through hand-to-hand combat instead of flying on Daenerys’ dragon 99% of the time; not to mention thinking he'd have a big role to play in taking down the Night King. So, expectations and reality definitely diverged during the Battle of Winterfell on Game of Thrones.
Obviously, dragonglass arrowheads would have been more effective against Viserion than Jon Snow merely screaming at the beast, which was a course of action that would have led to Jon being toast had Arya not slain the Night King. As a result, Game of Thrones unleashed a lot of carnage with its much-anticipated episode without Jon being among those lost, but there might have been a lot fewer corpses in general had dragonglass projectiles been part of the plan.
In the end, Game of Thrones did not give fans a lot of payoff with the dragonglass storyline, in my opinion, let alone make it into the effective weapon that arrowheads would have been. If they specifically were not possible to create, Gendry should have expressly explained the reason.
Just imagine if Daenerys and Jon could have flown around with bags of dragonglass attached to the dragons.They could have soared over the White Walkers and rained down a bunch of dragonglass shards on them. Heck, they could have done that even without the arrowheads. To think that Game of Thrones’ characters had enough time to prep before the end, and their efforts ended up not leading to much. Without Melisandre, all would have been lost.
Game of Thrones and the Battle of Winterfell is currently available to stream on HBO. Winter (and spring) premieres will be coming to television, while you wait for the House of the Dragon spinoff.
