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Okay so this has been bugging me a lot. Cersei reveals that she's pregnant at the end of season 7. Since there was no modern pregnancy tests and she still seemed certain of it, she must have been at least a couple weeks into it.

After that these things have happened:

  • Jon and company go beyond the wall on a wight-hunt
  • They then travel to Kings Landing to show it off
  • After that they travel back up north to prepare for the war with the Night King
  • They fight the night King
  • They travel south once again, this time with a whole army, to fight Cersei

With the fact in mind that travelling from, say, Winterfell to King's Landing in previous seasons seemed like a great effort that took a long time.

Shouldn't her pregnancy at least show a bit after three of these journeys plus a war and one round trip Winterfell - Beyond the wall?

Edit:

Okay so I've done some calculating on this and this is what I've come up with.
The distance between Winterfell and King's Landing is about 1500miles according to this source
Looking at this map, the distance between Winterfell and the wall is roughly a third compared to the distance to King's Landing, so that makes it 500miles. A horse or cavalry can travel between 30 and 60 miles a day according to this answer on quora
That makes the route from Winterfell to King's Landing at least 30 days by horse under good conditions (counting 50 miles a day here). And in that case the trip to the wall would be 10 days. The average walking pace is about 5km/h or 3.1mph. Walking in this pace everyday for 10 hours straight, would move the army 1500miles in 48 day's. I doubt you'll go faster than that in full armor.
I'll re-use the list from above and add the travel times based o this:

  • Jon and company go beyond the wall on a wight-hunt - 10 days
  • They then travel to Kings Landing to show it off - 10+30 days - The plus 10 is because they are travelling from the wall to King's Landing and not from Winterfell
  • After that they travel back up north to prepare for the war with the Night King - 30 days
  • They fight the night King - 2 days
  • They travel south once again, this time with a whole army, to fight Cersei - 48 days

This totals to 130 days. On top of that we have to count in a couple of week's beacuse Cersei could'nt know from day one that she was pregnant. Let's say 20 days and we're up to 150 days or ~5 months.

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    No canon to back it up for Cersei specifically, but approx. one in five women have some degree of tilted (retroverted) uterus, which causes the "baby bump" to appear much smaller than what most people consider normal. No way to know if this is true for Cersei, and we haven't seen her previous pregnancies either.
    – Geobits
    Commented May 16, 2019 at 18:48
  • 2
    (Out of Universe) They wanted to keep not-really-pregnant theories alive and well until the very end.
    – Geobits
    Commented May 16, 2019 at 20:31
  • When a woman has her 2nd + child she shows earlier and is generally bigger even if the child is smaller than its sibling so being pregnant with child no.4 Cersi should being showing by the time episode 5 begins (which would probably be 3-4 months since conception). Commented May 16, 2019 at 21:06
  • You shouldn’t try and make sense of timelines and distances in the show. The producers don’t and that’s also because GRRM doesn’t in the books themselves.
    – TheLethalCarrot
    Commented May 18, 2019 at 9:39

2 Answers 2

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No. It should not.

You seem to be under the impression pregnancy is quite easily visible after a couple of months. That’s simply not true.

Probably you’ve been looking at an image like this: pregnancy

But that really only shows when the mother is naked and in a very particular position. You’ll often see mums take that pose to take a photo to show how the belly grows.

This image shows a little bit better how it works with actual clothes:

pregnancy with clothes

I can tell you from experience that it is usually hard to tell someone is pregnant before the 4th month and it can be difficult well onto the 5th month with the right clothes.

Now, Cersei always wears what appears to be a heavy ornament which isn’t particularly fit during 8th season so, at that stage and with those clothes, you should not be able to tell she’s pregnant unless the time between the end of 7th season and 8x05 is longer than 3-4 months, which I believe is probably not that long.

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    It’s about 1,500 miles from King’s Landing to Winterfell. If Jaime can travel 30 miles in a day, and an army can march 15 miles in a day, then Jaime getting to Winterfell and the northern armies getting back to King’s Landing took five months. And that’s without all the stuff that happened beforehand, or at Winterfell. She’s got to be well into the third trimester by S8E5.
    – Mike Scott
    Commented May 16, 2019 at 20:20
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    @MikeScott Realistically her baby bump - even if small - should be noticeable in the amount of time it takes for them to travel. But it's TV, so let's sacrifice a bit of traveling time to the speed of plot trope, and let's make her a bit less pregnant-looking for the screen - and, between those two slight adjustments, she's back in the no-visible-pregnancy zone.
    – Misha R
    Commented May 16, 2019 at 20:21
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    @MishaR even for the books GRRM has said on a few occasions not to worry about distances and travel times.
    – TheLethalCarrot
    Commented May 16, 2019 at 20:24
  • 5
    I was going by perceive pace in show as out of universe the whole thing makes no sense. You can’t make an army travel 1500 miles on foot. They’ll need to rest, provisions, places to sleep, water... you can’t just make them walk 15 miles a day for 100 days straight or you won’t have an army once you reach kings landing. If distances were right, Cersei’s son would be married by the time they reach it... Commented May 16, 2019 at 20:32
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    both those images are over simplification and laughable.
    – Skooba
    Commented May 18, 2019 at 13:28
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I think that this is a very difficult question to answer because there is no real track of time in the show. There isn't too many mentions of how long it takes to do anything. Three to four months could have passed, which would mean that the baby bump wouldn't be too visible, but on the other hand, comparing for how long it would take us to take relative voyages for what could be relative distances would, in my best estimation, be this amount of time:

  • Jon and company go beyond the wall on a wight-hunt (~1 month)
  • They then travel to Kings Landing to show it off (~1 week)
  • After that they travel back up north to prepare for the war with the Night King (~2 months)
  • They fight the night King (~1-2 days)
  • They travel south once again, this time with a whole army, to fight Cersei (~2 months)

So relatively speaking, I feel as if it should be at the ~5 month period, which should have it show.

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