With you on hoping for the black box of horror angle, though I'm wondering, given the ever increasing presence of the deep ones, if grrm's prepping us for another possibility, too... I mean, although the unfathomable terror of the Others is pretty damn effective, the one thing that'd top that is if it turns out the upper echelons of the Others weren't just skinchangers and first men altered by the Children. Like, what if the others are the ancestors of our current Stark protagonists?
That would be a really interesting parallel for Daenerys and her fight to dismantle the despicable system which her dragonlord ancestors created. Depending on how much of the story is true/missing, there’s also the outside possibility that they’re distant relatives though the Night’s King. (Old Nan says he was a Stark, so. That’s good enough for me.)
In fairness, though, the Others are a threat to all human life regardless of their origin. The skinchanger origin theory reminds me a lot of the Mountain/Robert Strong. He technically was human at some point, but that has no bearing on the fact that he’s gotta go.
The Deep Ones have so far struck me as a piece of worldbuilding to remind us that there’s never just one singular fight that people have to face, even in the metaphysical realm. The Others are the problem now, something else was the problem while the Others were dormant, some of our characters will see to it that humanity lives to fight another day. And it will have to fight - whether it’s the Deep Ones, or a human somewhere figures out gunpowder, the story isn’t heading for either annihilation or utopia, and the only other option is a world that still has problems.
Not to say that the Old Ones rising wouldn’t be awesome, because it totally would.
Do you have any views of theories on the 13th Lord Commander of the Night's Watch aka the Night's King? Like what do you think his motivations where and who do believe he actually was ?
Thanks for the ask! (Honestly, I started out this draft saying “damn, I can’t believe I don’t have any theories for my favorite of Old Nan’s stories!” and by the time I was done that was no longer true.)
His identity is not particularly mysterious.
“Some might say he was a Bolton,” Old Nan would always end. “Some say Umber, Flint, or Norrey. Some would have you think he was a Woodfoot, from them that ruled Bear Island before the ironmen came. He never was. He was a Stark of Winterfell, the brother of the man who brought him down.” She always pinched him on the nose then, he would never forget it. “He was a Stark of Winterfell, and who can say? Mayhaps his name was Brandon. Mayhaps he slept in this very room.” (ASOS, Bran IV)
Unless we’re talking about a really impressive cover-up here - and in fairness, anything’s possible - it’s unlikely that his name was actually Brandon, since the brother who brought him down was (supposedly) also named Brandon. But substantively Old Nan generally tends to be, well, on the nose.
What he was doing, however, is more ambiguous. It’s almost certainly important, as there are so many layers of unreliability that there has to be something useful in there. The in-universe teller of the story is a fallible human who heard it from another character in-universe who may have remembered it wrong, and then there’s the usual telephone game of folk stories, and we’re told several times in-universe that nothing from the Age of Heroes is really reliable, and then on top of that we (allegedly) have the people contemporary with the Night’s King who actively tried to control the narrative by destroying all records of the Night’s King while continuing to use him as a cautionary tale, ensuring that his expungement from history would itself be remembered. Narrative cover-ups this complicated don’t usually happen for nothing.
The First Men did not have any kind of taboo on human sacrifice - it’s implied in ACOK that wildlings still practice it - so it’s not a moral aversion to the “strange sacrifices” that caused the reaction it did. It was, supposedly, that the sacrifices were to the white walkers. But as far as we’ve seen from Craster, sacrificing to them is a a protection racket that doesn’t actually give a person power of their own. So what kind of magic was happening? Were their wills being bound by their being turned into wights? Were they collaborating willingly (either as the Northerners would see it, or actually willingly) but figured they could throw the Lord Commander under the bus by claiming they’d been compelled? What happened to those sworn brothers, anyway?
Who was the corpse queen? Did she even exist, or was she an after-the-fact invention to deflect blame? (A common role of female characters, as we all know too well.) If she was real, how did she get on that side of the wall? If she’s a wight or a white walker, she shouldn’t have been able to cross the Wall, certainly not during a flirtatious merry chase. So how could he meet this magical creature and bring her to the Nightfort? Did it happen before the Wall was actually finished? Could that have happened during the Long Night? (That’s when the Watch was supposedly founded, but it’s not too much of a stretch to think that the Watch could run through its first twelve commanders during an extended crisis.)
So anyway, here’s my longshot theory: I think he was the person tasked with completing the Wall. He wasn’t sacrificing to the Others, he was sacrificing to the old gods.
[A] bearded man forced a captive down onto his knees before the heart tree. A white-haired woman stepped toward them through a drift of dark red leaves, a bronze sickle in her hand.
“No,” said Bran, “no, don’t,” but they could not hear him, no more than his father had. The woman grabbed the captive by the hair, hooked the sickle round his throat, and slashed. And through the mist of centuries the broken boy could only watch as the man’s feet drummed against the earth … but as his life flowed out of him in a red tide, Brandon Stark could taste the blood. (Bran III, ADWD)
This is the last of Bran’s visions; implicitly, it’s the metaphysical cornerstone of Winterfell. That’s what it took for one castle - a fantastic fairy tale castle, but still, one castle. Blood magic. Even with the help of the giants and/or the Children and/or a mysterious blue-eyed zombie witch, a structure like the Wall takes a lot of juice. Maybe the Night’s King was explicitly asked to do this; maybe he’d grown desperate and gone rogue.
Maybe he was the final sacrifice, his blood used to seal the Wall’s magic.
Of course you’d want to destroy all records of that, and to create the harshest taboo you possibly could - something to the degree of depicting him as an enemy agent. You’d have to. Not as punishment, and not just to protect the Stark brand, but because you absolutely can’t let a blood magic arms race get started. The Wall is one thing, because it will stand for thousands of years to protect millions of people against the terrible cold - and even that is a painful ethical choice to make. It is blood shed for peace from the unthinkable. (It makes sense that you’d find this at Storm’s End as well: the storm god and his monsters are major threats which merit magical protection.) But that is not how anyone else would use it. It would be used for warfare between humans, leading to blood shed in vain.
It certainly supports the Free Folk’s grievances if the rest of the North was about to leave them stranded in enemy territory, a reflection of the blood sacrifice of the few to save the many. And it fits in some of the broader themes of the story: sometimes there’s no good choice, sometimes the least bad choice dooms a person’s name forever. Sometimes we mean well but go too far; sometimes going too far is the only way to go far enough. Some of the structures that hold up our world are built on events that we find unthinkable.
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