Hello! I read your Politics of the Seven Kingdoms series, and it’s really great. Do you think that after the Battle of the Weeping Water, Theon Stark may have turned on his Bolton allies to complete his conquest of the North, the Red Kings being sufficiently weakened for him to end the Stark/Bolton wars?

So as I discuss here, it’s not entirely clear quite how the sequence goes. 

What we know is that the Red Kings of the Boltons were the last rivals of the Starks to bend  the knee, we know that Rogar the Huntsman “swore fealty to the King of Winter and sent his sons to Winterfell as hostages, even as the first Andals were crossing the narrow sea in their longships,” we know that “King Theon Stark, known to history as the Hungry Wolf, turned back the greatest of these threats, making common cause with the Boltons to smash the Andal warlord Argos Sevenstar at the Battle of the Weeping Water,” and we know that “after the defeat of the Boltons, the last of their Northern rivals, the greatest threats to the dominion of House Stark came by sea.”

Two of the three pieces of evidence suggests that the Boltons surrendered before or just as the Andals attacked the North, but the third suggests the opposite, as the use of the phrase “common cause” suggests that the Boltons were still independent during that initial battle with Andal invaders. 

There’s a couple different possibilities: one is that Rogar bent the knee to get military support from Theon to defeat Argos Sevenstar. Another, as you suggest, is that Theon turned on Rogar after the battle, taking advantage of their exhaustion. A third is that Theon’s support might have prompted Rogar to bend the knee freely after the battle, seeing the existential threat that the Andals posed.