edit: stole this, sums it up
Jaime Season 3: I killed Aerys when he threatened to burn down King's Landing
Jaime Episode 2: I will fight for the living
Jaime Episode 5: I never liked the citizens anyway
What I'm noticing with the previous episode is that it was D&D's badly fumbled attempt at human regression. War, violence, rape, plunder...these things all represent the worst humanity has to offer and when we are engulfed by the fog of war, we all regress to base attitudes.
In the case of the characters on
GoT, the message is that when we are afraid, we become reductive and are broken down to our most base instincts. For Dany, it's rage at what was taken from her. She's done many conquests but never one quite so destructive and after so many betrayals and disappointments. For Arya, she's back to that place she was at when Ned Stark was executed, a city too big for one scared little girl to be all alone. For Jaimie, it's the instinctive desire to be back with the woman she came into this world with. For Sandor, it's back to hating his brother. All of these inner conflicts are there within the characters leading up to this most recent episode but until they're there, among the salt and smoke, they don't bubble to the surface from primal realms within each of them.
Even Jon, feeling backed into a corner, is forced to execute one of his own men to stop him from raping a woman in the street, although in his case I feel that this is more Ned's lesson manifesting itself on screen than a base desire to do violence in the heat of conflict; he holds him at arm's length and gives him a moment to regain his senses, but when the soldier tries to attack him, he's forced to run him through. But this one simple act of virtue (defending a woman's honor) is, Jon knows, a pittance in the middle of all that bloodshed and he does the only thing he can do to salvage what remains of his conscience by pulling his men back out of it all. In a well written TV show, this sudden retreat would be questioned by Dany in the next episode. I would certainly expect Martin to have someone in the peanut gallery call Jon on it.
All of these ideas and literary concepts have tremendous merit. But anyone can come up with good ideas if they think long enough about it. It's how you implement them that matters.
Any idiot can say 'this happens and then this happens and then this happens'.
But if that's enough to make you happy, then you don't want someone to actually tell you a story. You just want someone to tell you what happens. But the best works spellbind us and enchant us. They get into our heads and our hearts because we believe in them on some level.
Jon's journey is the hero's journey. When this is all said and done, he will have gone north to the Wall in a naive belief that he is serving the Realms of Men by doing dutiful service. He got there and saw that the Wall was no better than any other place. He sought to make it better and died for it, which is in line with the monomyth and the death of the hero's immature self. Then he was restored and saw the world how it really was and he learned from it. He still made mistakes along the way but he operated from a more enlightened vantage. At the end, if the spoilers are to be believed, he will kill Dany, take the black and return to the Wall and the north, which is akin to the end of the hero's journey when the hero, now much wiser for his experiences, goes back 'home' to share his wisdom with his community and, hopefully, lead them to a brighter day.
ASoIF, I believe, intends to deliver us a very traditional hero's journey with Jon Snow but it is doing so in unexpected ways.
D&D, without Martin's work to go off of, have taken the wrong inspiration from the source. They are more fixated on the shocks, the surprises, the betrayals and double turns. Or maybe it's not them at all. Maybe it's HBO. In fact, I'd almost be more inclined to believe it's a corporate overlord meddling with creative intentions; it wouldn't be the first time. But whoever is at fault here, I don't expect any of them to ever step up and admit it.