During the first five seasons of Game of Thrones, spoiling yourself wasn’t exactly hard. Picking up one of George R.R. Martin’s novels or checking Wikipedia would do the trick if you were curious how a certain cliffhanger would be resolved, but now that the HBO series has moved past those books, we have no idea about what will happen in Westeros next.

If recent reports are to be believed, the final two seasons of Game of Thrones will be quite a bit shorter, so showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss will no doubt want to squeeze a lot of story in. Plus, with the fates of many fan-favourite characters on the line, you just know that there will be a lot of things people end up loving AND hating about what’s to come.

That’s actually pretty exciting, and with the season six premiere right around the corner, we’ve now decided to take a look at some of the most shocking and controversial places Game of Thrones could go from here. Looking both at how season five concluded and what we know about the next batch of episodes, there’s a good chance many of these will happen!

But hold…

Ned-Stark-Spoiler-WarningWhile this post is speculative in nature there will be hints to other plotlines as yet unexplored in the books, which may or may not be used in the next season.

10. Dead Means Dead For Jon Snow

Jon Snow

Ever since the season five finale of Game of Thrones, we’ve all been wondering how on Earth Jon Snow will be brought back from the dead. However, what if he just…stays dead?

While David Benioff and D.B. Weiss are well aware of George R.R. Martin’s plans for his series of novels, bringing Jon back now feels a little cheap and almost a way of pandering to fans after the outcry which followed the decision to kill him off in such a sudden and brutal way.

Of course, if Martin’s plans has always been to have Jon return, there’s nothing that can be done about that, but leaving this fan-favourite hero dead and gone would in many ways be much more shocking and opens the door to a lot of other interesting storytelling possibilities.