long ask ahead: Since the Others are like jrr Tolkien’s evil Maia in that they don’t create they just twist things and control creatures, could it be that they are created by the great other the way Melkor created orcs from elves? It’d be grrm body horror for that to be the case, human babies twisted by some huge ice slug monster until they are no more and a new, subservient (to the great other) consciousness and new body emerge. this would also give Dans Jon n Tyrion something to go down fighti

My last ask was long and got cut off, was asking about the great other and how it might create the others in a way that fits the whole “opposite of life” and thus can’t create naturally set up the others seem to be alluded to have. I’m not sure if it came through in what I submitted, but I was asking if you think this is the way grrm envisions them? Cause if so to me it’d make sense of what the three amigos will be on a mission for beyond the end of the world: torching the great other.

I don’t think that GRRM is particularly looking to JRR on the White Walkers. To me, the quote that’s the most important from GRRM is that he describes the White Walkers as “Sidhe made of ice, something like that.” If you’re looking for where GRRM’s getitng his inspiration, look to the Unseelie Fae, look to the folklore of the Wild Hunt – an unpredictable, irrational, malicious force that comes thundering down on humanity out of a winter’s night and then vanishes. 

As for creation, I don’t think that’s quite right either. Unlike on the show which has tended to blend the two, GRRM has always been quite clear that the created wights and the White Walkers are not the same thing, that the White Walkers are a non-human species. Moreover, GRRM has said that “the Others can do things with ice that we can’t imagine and make substances of it.” We’ve seen that the White Walkers have a material culture, they make swords and armor out of ice, they probably make other things we ken not of. 

As for what our heroes will find when they travel to the Heart of Winter and encounter the Great Other, I don’t know. No matter whether you travel north or west or east or south, the further away from the center of things you go, the more the map becomes hazy and indistinct, until all that’s left is “Here Be Dragons.”