About your stance on the Others, are you sure its that simple? GRRM has compared them to the Sidhe and I find that very telling. They’re certainly NOT good, but I doubt they’re Tolkein-esque evil. They seem more amoral than outright evil, they’re inhuman and that means their motives could be extremely complex. I don’t think that they’re secretly the good guys, but most info we have on them is apocryphal and biased, and it doesn’t seen like GRRM to just write in albino Nazgul.