[Spoilers]. Not trying to defend s8 ,but

[u/Even_Cod5935]

Every civilian hides in the crypts and deads are resurrected there.

I know many call it a dumb decision from the writers

But thinking a bit ,until that moment they saw Night King resurrect RECENT DEADS ,how could they know he could resurrect 200+ years old people too (many of them just bones)?

My grandad was buried in 1997 ,in march we pulled coffin up. There was NOTHING LEFT inside ,not even clothes

[u/Marfy_]

Not all of them are 200 years old

[u/Even_Cod5935 → u/Marfy_]

But shouldn t most of them have dusted away?

[u/Marfy_ → u/Even_Cod5935]

Im not an expert on dead bodies, but we do see a lot of wights that are basically just bones

[u/Even_Cod5935 → u/Marfy_]

Kinda get if they were left outside in the cold like Otzi

[u/TheRealCruelRichard → u/Marfy_]

The youngest corpse in there is Ned and he was bones by the time he made it home

[u/Marfy_ → u/TheRealCruelRichard]

Ned wasnt buried in a cold tomb as soon as he died

[u/TheRealCruelRichard → u/Marfy_]

Does the meat in your fridge last forever?

[u/Marfy_ → u/TheRealCruelRichard]

Bodies get preserved for much longer than this in the right circumstances

[u/SpareStatement3990]

nah, they literally saw older whites when they enacted the dumbass plan to show cersei one. another moot point. season 6 on is awful with a handful of good moments and the fandom needs to accept that.

[u/LeonSKennedy95 → u/SpareStatement3990]

Fun fact, I do not need to accept your opinion as fact. I recall season 5 being a chore and I didn't think that about season 6 or 7.

[u/SpareStatement3990 → u/LeonSKennedy95]

Fun fact, you have shit taste

[u/AngelLuceX]

For me the show ended after The Long Night. After that I can't really relate to anything that happened in the show

[u/QueasyNart]

Because Jon was at the battle of Hardhome, where he WATCHED the Night King do this:
The Night King raises the dead at Hardhome | Game of Thrones

So he's absolutely sure that the NK can raise the recently dead, hundreds of them at once, without needing to touch or even see the bodies. The farthest wight we see stand up is about 50 yards from the NK, so the spell's range is at least that far, but it could be more. When he showed the captured wight to Cersei, he knew he had to keep it short & sweet, so all he said was, "If we don't win this fight, then that is the fate of every person in the world." But when he had more time at his disposal, such as when discussing battle plans with the defenders of Winterfell, he would have gone into specifics, about what the NK can and possibly cannot do.

Jon doesn't know whether or not the NK can raise bodies that are long dead, but he does know that his army includes fully-rotted skeletons, still marching & fighting . . . so Jon should assume that he can, just to be on the safe side.

The only thing that justifies the use of the crypts as a safe haven is that (most of?) the dead are interred inside stone sarcophagi, and if a wooden crate was enough to keep a wight contained, the stone should be ample, even if the NK is able to animate the corpse within. Then again, the crate was specifically built to be a cage--when carving the sarcophagi, preventing escape was not a design consideration. Still, I would say that the crypts as shown are about 90% safe. But realistically, the crypts would have had hundreds more bodies there, and only the nobles would have had sarcophagi. The rest would be in small, simple wooden or clay ossuaries, far easier to break out of (I imagine. I am not a reanimated skeleton).

Using the crypts was stupid not because they miscalculated the risk--how were they to know that the stone would crumble like unfired clay? No, using the crypts was stupid because they had ample, far better alternatives: The armories. The treasury. The better bedrooms. The pantries. All very solidly built, all designed to resist people breaking in, and all with a noticeable lack of any dead people already in them. (And all of them likely more comfortable than the crypts, as well. Certainly warmer.) Among all the possible "secure" areas of the castle, the crypts are at pretty much the highest risk, so the defenders of Winterfell would have had to be blithering idiots to shelter the noncombatants there.

Which, in the end, is why that's precisely what happens. Because D&D decided that filming a surprise horror sequence in their zombie episode, whatever the justification for it might be, was more important than giving anyone in Winterfell a brain in their goddamned head. Come on, everyone. We've got to go hide right in the only place where the wights might get us.

P.S. The "lifetime" of bone varies greatly with the protective container (some coffins are built specifically to allow for relatively swift decomposition), and with the burial environment, with regard to soil pH, temperature, and access to water & oxygen. In especially cold or dry conditions, bone can last for literally thousands of years. In other extreme cases, sometimes it's gone in as little as 10 years.

[u/acamas]

Agreed... people complaining that Tyrion, who literally knows nothing about resurrection magic, 'should have known' that the Night King could resurrect and use ancient skeletons from hundreds of feet away and outside of line of sight to fight are just looking for nipicks to whinge about to desperately try and invalidate the final season because it didn't play out as their romanticized fan fic... nothing more.

[u/AffectionateEast1820]

Immediately no.