If Ethan was captured instead of Ryon
To me Ethan always felt like he existed to be a "tutorial" character for Rodrik just to teach us the basics of being the lord of House Forrester, as Rodrik would have known about sentinels and other stuff already. I always thought Ethan was a missed opportunity as he was killed in his first episode and could have been a great protagonist. Of course demoting him to be an NPC after Rodrik's return would not have felt right so I think it would have been more interesting if Ethan was captured by the Whitehills at the end of episode 1 rather than Ryon as he could have been a PoV at Highpoint and allow us to learn more about Whitehill history and about Ebbert, Karl and Torrhen rather than in one visit to Highpoint as Rodrik in episode 4. It could also have allowed Ethan to sabotage certain Whitehill plans during the game. You could argue that Ryon could've been a Highpoint PoV but as he is only 7 years old and thought that being unable to find Ethan in Hide and Seek meant he was gone forever it would've been difficult to imagine him sabotaging Whitehill plans. There's also the fact that the Whitehills tried to get Ryon to turn against his family by telling him lies about them and if Ryon was a protagonist then it would have been easy to pick the options that have Ryon ignore the Whitehill lies.
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You are a person after my own heart
. I think this would've been a great idea; I've always thought that there was wasted potential with regards to Ethan. I know there will be some people who will say "well someone had to die, it's game of thrones after all". However those people always (ok well mostly) seem to forget that whenever GRRM killed off a character it was to further the plot. That character had to die for the plot to go down the particular route that he intended.
What was the consequence of Ethan dying really? Why did it have to be death?
To make way for Rodrik to be the new lord?
First of all Rodrik is the eldest and so he is the rightful Lord. Second of all is that, if it was just a case of not wanting to have two POV characters in the same location; they could've like @TheFurryOne has already said, had Ethan become a Whitehill hostage and potential Forester spy.
The only thing I can think of is that they wanted to kill one of the characters in the first episode, to drive home the message that this is GOT. Maybe they wanted to give us another reason to hate the whitehills, they still could've achieved this by taking Ethan hostage, threatening his live if we stepped out of line or even killing Ryon instead. Or both. Maybe that was the whole point, kill a character that could've had so much potential; but didn't live long enough to reach it.
I get the distinct impression that the only reason we have Ryon in the game is because GRRM has so far kept Rickon alive. Rickon at the moment is something of an oddity, a mystery. Why exactly did GRRM even create him, so far he has had no real strong role within the story, what does GRRM have planned for him if anything? It seems that they are keeping Ryon for the same reason, like they haven't quite decided what they should do with him. So they put him in a very similar situation to Rickon. Rickon is taken away from Winterfell by Osha, a wildling woman. Ryon is taken away from Ironrath by Beska. Both woman have learned to survive in a harsh environment and can fend for themselves. Chances are, if the show producers do anything with Rickon in the show; then Telltale will follow suit with something similar.
I seem to have gone a bit off track, sorry; but yeah they could've done so much more with Ethan. I would've liked to have played him as a POV character as the Whitehill's captive. Ethan after all was portrayed to us as more of a thinker than a warrior type. I could well imagine him weighing up the situation and deciding what tactics he wanted to use.