Game of Thrones [Potential Book Spoilers]

Well, I might argue that the White Walkers are more or less just a personification of Winter and Mother Nature (if just cruel, cold, and unfeeling) rather than an actual 'I am a Dark Lord. Fear me!' kind of situation.

If anything Mad Queen Cersei would be the 'Dark Lord wearing Dark' that Martin discusses and she's not looking too long for this world in the books.

I'd put it "a Terminator isn't evil. The Terminators are evil."

I thought that the Others and The Night King were obviously symbolic of climate change. That might just be me projecting modern day anxieties onto the narrative. I also interpret dragons as being magical nukes.

Skynet the entity is malevolent. But the individual Terminators are not. I don't even get the sense that they hate humanity or anything. They simply do what they're programmed to do, with no real feelings of their own on the matter (hence why they tend to only kill their designated targets, or people who happen to get in their way).

GRRM said that the Others are a parallel of climate change or the Macedonians while the Greek City-States fight amongst themselves.

Dragons are nuclear weapons according to GRRM. Here's what he said:

D & D kinda get that which is why they're to give reasons as to why Daenerys is reluctant to use them on KL. (Obviously she's going to nuke KL though which will bite her in the ass.)

edited 27th Aug '17 12:17:14 PM by MadSkillz

So last episode was just Kim Jong-un successfully completing a rocket launch, it all makes sense now.

Kim in the North!

More like ISIS getting hands on a nuke.

The Tragedy of Summerhall can be seen as nuclear bomb development gone wrong.

Magic exposure even acts like radiation.

Asshai and Valyria after the Doom is said be a place overrun with mutants, where the fish are blind and deformed, where the animals die quickly once you bring them into the area and the water glows green at night. Plus the fruits that grow there are unhealthy and dangerous to eat.

edited 26th Aug '17 3:29:59 PM by MadSkillz

Sounds like fantasy Chernobyl.

At the moment Chernobyl is one of the most ecologically diverse places in Europe. Mostly because no people live there. They even reintroduced bisons in the area.

The fact that lingering magic works like radiation to make the metaphor even stronger is so good I'm irrationally angry I didn't write it first.

So yeah, I think the Others escape being generic evil. Petty world leaders fighting each other over stupid shit while the world becomes more inhabitable is very real problem.

Gamma Bison?

I am not sure having a metaphor for climate change where man did nothing to cause it is wise. Or at least where man is super indirectly responsible for the problem, and where almost no one knows what actually happened - there's basically just Bran, and he (or we, at least) didn't even get to witness the war between the Children and men.

Plus even if we get that reveal, so much focus is put on the conflicts between the Houses that it is really hard to care at all about what happened millennia ago, or to see it as more important than everything else going on. Also, unlike climate change, current Westerosis could be forgiven for considering that they aren't responsible for the appearance of the White Walkers - because they really aren't.

So, I see the interpretation, but don't really like it if it is supposed to be more than an afterthought.

This isn't a matter of who's responsible for causing it, it's a matter of what it takes to stop it. And in that the metaphor is accurate.

Not really. Or else every alien/monster invasion ever can be seen as a metaphor for climate change. It is widely different when mankind itself caused the catastrophe and when the threat is independent from humanity's actions.

Mass Effect 3 is all about banding together against an enemy who wants to destroy everything. But like here, the people who have to band together had nothing to do with said enemy, and it would have happened in different circumstances. And it's not a metaphor on climate change either.

Not all monster/invasion movies have "the threat could be stopped if everybody banded together but they prefer their petty fights" as their main plot point. And yes, ME 3 could be seen as a metaphor for climate change.

In ASOIF, the fact that the threat quite literally personifies a weather supports the metaphor, too.

The opposite threat our world is facing at the moment. Cold days are actually commonly and wrongly used by skeptics to deny global warming as a whole.

And again, there is a massive difference between having people band against something they caused, and having them band against an outside threat. ME 3 is not about global warming because the Reapers would arrive no matter what. No one alive at the time (well, almost, and those aren't concerned by the "banding together" part) had anything to do with it. If climate change is evoked in Mass Effect, it is through the Drells or the Krogans and what happened to their home worlds. Those are much more interesting and on-point than any parallel drawn with the Reaper storyline.

And let's not even go into proving the responsibilities, as in ASOIAF you have one kid who is aware of mankind's (indirect) involvement without any sort of proof - and him not being believed would actually make perfect sense - while in our world you have a truckload of sound scientific evidence that is ignored for no logical reason whatsoever.

But isn't the Night King one of the First Men? I could have sworn Bran saw that right before they had to flee the Others and the undead. I'm not sure that man isn't responsible for the long night.

This is really just being nit-picky. It's extreme climate change either way. It doesn't matter that it's cold rather than heat.

The Others are a threat that humans did cause though.

That's not really true. It's not just one guy. It's the NW, wildlings and a few others.

No one besides Stannis even thinks to take them seriously.

You could definitely see the NW as the climate scientists giving increasingly dire warnings that mostly everyone ignores because they're too busy jockeying for power.

edited 27th Aug '17 12:47:17 AM by MadSkillz

@Julep Here's the author making the comparison since you seem to be adamant about this:

The problem is not about believing that the threat exists, it is about who caused it. No one but Bran knows that humanity had anything to do with the creation of the White Walkers, and even he only got the word of the 3ER that humans were killing Children of the Forest. So far, it is absolutely logical to think that mankind had nothing to do with the appearance of the WW, whether you believe the threat or not.

"Weather goes warmer and colder over time without outside influence" is also a common point used by climatoskeptics. They say "yes, it goes warmer, but it's just how it's supposed to be". Which completely negates human influence, and makes it impossible to reach a form of unity on how to deal with the issue.

If you remove the role of mankind in the catastrophe, or at least the acknowledgement of such a role, your comparison loses its meaning. Just like a post-apo world where mankind had nothing to do with the apocalypse loses a lot of its meaning. The ability of humanity to cause destruction and chaos is not a side note, it is central to the problem, and in ASOIAF it is ignored.

Hence why I think that it is a bad metaphor for climate change. I don't deny it is one, just that it is not good and that it misses the point.

"What caused it" only matters in real life because it is tied to our ability to stop it. If it was a natural occurrence, then there's nothing we could do about it.

In ASOIAF, no such link exist. Who created the Others is mostly irrelevant to whether mankind can stop it. However, the "we should be uniting against this common threat" aspect remain, and this is the important point. The question of "can we do anything about it" exists too, in another form, but that's a secondary matter.

I do not deny that "working together" is an important part of the metaphor and that it is tackled in ASOIAF. I just think that "admitting responsibility" is another important part of the metaphor and it is almost absent considering only Bran knows about mankind's role in the birth of the WW (and it is second-hand knowledge too- we don't know what caused the war between the Children and the First Men).

I personally think that you cannot have a satisfying metaphor about global warming if you ignore that second part. Because as long as some influential people deny their involvement, there can be no "working together". The conflict cannot be solved, no matter how dire the situation.

Plus I have to say that the skeptics actually have a point in GOT. Unless shown proof of their existence, there is no reason to believe the WW are real. Unlike global warming where everyone has access to the proof, and some purposefully decide to ignore it and to remain in denial - not the case in GOT. On the contrary, everyone who saw the wights so far has immediately decided to take action against them. No one has seen one and said "nope, obviously fake news".

edited 27th Aug '17 5:41:13 AM by Julep

They had proof, but Tyrion being a petty asshole led to it being lost simply because he didn't like the guy presenting it.

Leaks for next episode:

Cersei will ultimately ignore the White Walkers when presented proof in the hope they kill off or cripple her enemies so there you go, ignoring the threat for political gain..

The proof rotted on the way.