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.”

Do you think that the Others deliberately times their return at the worst possible moment? I feel that even without dragons a united Westeros would have been able to deal with the Others. Valyria before its doom had 300 dragons the sic on the Rhoynar, and presumably more on the homeland, before they all died. The Free Cities could have also provided help, and I think that they were built after the first Long Night. It feels that petty infighting is what makes the coming winter so dire.

I don’t think the Others have enough of a grasp on the human condition to make that kind of plan.

Rather, the timing has everything to do with GRRM’s love of dramatic irony and his desired levels of tension. If there were dozens of Targaryen dragons in the skies and the realm was united, then it wouldn’t be a very exciting story, would it?

Do you have any theory on how Craster managed to get his deal or whatever it is with the Others? Their usual MO seems to be ‘kill everyone&everything’. So why not Craster&daughters too, why does he get to live? Also strange is that Sam was warned an attack was imminent as the mutiniers took over. So Crasters Keep was save with all the Night’s Watch men there before, but the minute he dies an attack is on the way?Are the Others connected to Craster so they realized he died the moment it happened?

For their own, Unseelie, reasons, the Others are actually not that unwilling to take dominion over destruction, for at least the period of a mortal’s lifespan:

He remembered the hearth tales Old Nan told them. The wildlings were cruel men, she said, slavers and slayers and thieves. They consorted with giants and ghouls, stole girl children in the dead of night, and drank blood from polished horns. And their women lay with the Others in the Long Night to sire terrible half-human children…

“He was a wildling,” Bran said. “They carry off women and sell them to the Others.”

“He gives the boys to the gods. Come the white cold, he does, and of late it comes more often. That’s why he started giving them sheep, even though he has a taste for mutton. Only now the sheep’s gone too. Next it will be dogs, till …“ She lowered her eyes and stroked her belly.“

“The gathering gloom put Bran in mind of another of Old Nan’s stories, the tale of Night’s King. He had been the thirteenth man to lead the Night’s Watch, she said; a warrior who knew no fear. “And that was the fault in him,” she would add, “for all men must know fear.” A woman was his downfall; a woman glimpsed from atop the Wall, with skin as white as the moon and eyes like blue stars. Fearing nothing, he chased her and caught her and loved her, though her skin was cold as ice, and when he gave his seed to her he gave his soul as well.

He brought her back to the Nightfort and proclaimed her a queen and himself her king, and with strange sorceries he bound his Sworn Brothers to his will. For thirteen years they had ruled, Night’s King and his corpse queen, till finally the Stark of Winterfell and Joramun of the wildlings had joined to free the Watch from bondage. After his fall, when it was found he had been sacrificing to the Others, all records of Night’s King had been destroyed, his very name forbidden.“

Where I think most people in the fandom go wrong is they misunderstand the motivation and method of dominion; there are no examples of stable arrangements, formal treaties, or genuinely symbiotic relationships between men and Others. Rather, all the examples we have show such interactions as parasitical and corruptive, spiralling and intensifying at every step until they’ve wrung as many sacrifices as they’re going to get and turn on the person who’s served them.

This is what makes them like the Unseelie: if you lay out milk, throw salt over your shoulders, and stay away from fairy circles, they might not kill you in your bed; but you can do everything right and they might steal your children anyway for some unfathomable, inhuman reason.

Once more, re the White Walkers

Because I am seeing this described entirely incorrectly. It is NOT the case that the White Walkers didn’t harm wildlings – hell, when we see the Army of the Dead described in Sam I, they’re mostly wildlings – only that they didn’t attack them en masse. To quote Tormund:

“They never came in force, if that’s your meaning, but they were with us all the same, nibbling at our edges. We lost more outriders than I care to think about, and it was worth your life to fall behind or wander off. Every nightfall we’d ring our camps with fire. They don’t like fire much, and no mistake. When the snows came, though … snow and sleet and freezing rain, it’s bloody hard to find dry wood or get your kindling lit, and the cold … some nights our fires just seemed to shrivel up and die. Nights like that, you always find some dead come the morning. ‘Less they find you first. The night that Torwynd … my boy, he …’ Tormund turned his face away.

Assuming that your theory that the wildlings left north of The Wall were those who condoned and practiced human sacrifice to the White Walkers, through what sort of mental gymnastics would these wildlings have gone through to justify human sacrifice, given their disgust for incest and cannibalism? It seems to me that human sacrifice rather goes against the rough structure of morals that they otherwise lived by.

For Ygritte’s tribe, and we don’t know which one it is, it’s custom that “women who bed brothers or fathers or clan kin offend the gods, and are cursed with weak and sickly children.” But it’s custom for the ice river clans to practice cannibalism, and as much as Ygritte argues that Craster is more Night’s Watch than wildling, that smacks more than a little of No True Scotsman.

If my theory is right, I would imagine that much of the memory of the original sacrifices has been lost to time, and indeed may have been deliberately erased from oral histories in the same way that the Night’s King was erased from the written records of the Night’s Watch. (Wouldn’t you if your people had done something so heinous that the rest of humanity exiled you behind the Wall?)

If it’s done at all today, it probably follows the model at Craster’s Keep: a largely unspoken and uncertain practice (Craster’s understanding of what makes the cold gods go away is pretty ramshackle – hence the missing sheep) carried out in isolated communities that have always done things this way, out of a vague sense that somehow it wards off ill fortune.