A Song Of Ice And Fire

I am in the camp that sees absolutely no reason why the Others need a King. I think you could do it that way, if you wanted to make them a kind of Shadow Archetype for a mortal monarchical system; the Great Other* as true King-beyond-the-Wall. But more fittingly with the way they've been portrayed, I think, is to have them as a hive-mind force of elemental nature. They don't need a central authority because, as much as any individual might have enough intelligence to serve as an Anthropomorphic Personification, when it comes down to it they're frickin' Winter incarnate.

*Calling it "Night's King" is simply conflating it with a historical (if not mythical) character confirmed dead by the author. It's a reasonable adaptation choice for the TV show to make, but even if the books do have a Great Other it will not be "Night's King". For one thing, unless it's meant to be the same Night's Watchman who crowned himself from the Nightfort, the name has no significance beyond Rule of Cool.

Well, I am sure something is leading the Others. Also, we cannot be 100% sure Night's King is dead. I mean, he did have sex with an Other. Think about what that would do to your health.

Wrights aren't alive, nor is Coldhands.

And your argument is quite poor; "I'm sure there's something leading them" is not very convincing. And actually hurts them a bit. Plus, antropomorphism.

Obviously you're entitled to believe whatever you want, but it'd make for a more interesting discussion if you told us why you're so sure they have a leader.

For example, do you think that makes for a better story somehow? Or, does your interpretation of the Others only make sense if they have a leader?

@johnnye- You get at something that's an important point. So I think understandably, when it came out that the White Walker leader in the show is called the Night King, people assumed that the show was indicating that their leader was the "Lord Commander turned evil" guy from the books and that they possibly that this was confirming that element in the books as well (although this was jossed by Martin).

However, the origin story given last season (which I think is likely reflective of the books) makes it quite clear that the show is not presenting the guy as being the same person as the Night's King in the books. Importantly, he was the first White Walker/Other, created by the Children, whereas the Night's King of the books supposedly married a female Other, so the Others existed for some point before he lived.

Although I think it might be a bit of an assumption in the first place that the Night King's story is true. The Others seem to be a One-Gender Race in the show and I don't know if we really have enough evidence either way in the books, but I guess my low fantasy turn of mind might suspect that the Others can't/don't actually mate with people and the Night's King was an evil Lord Commander from House Stark who sought temporal power and maybe did Craster-like human sacrifices.

Edit- But also, the origin story actually sort of goes against the idea of even the show's Night's King being a leader per se. I think when people assumed he was the "Evil Lord Commander Guy", it fed into an interpretation of him having a court and their being "ranks" of Others. The last part may still be true, but the origin story makes it come across more like they are automata that have coordination among themselves.

edited 26th Aug '16 8:23:19 AM by Hodor2

Not that I want to discuss the show here but this fetish over the Night's King and assuming that it has this super-importance as the secret self-revealing text is a good deal of fan-assumptions gone too far.

The Night's King story is about a Lord Commander of the NW. That means that it takes place after the Wall was built, after the Long Night, after Bran the Builder and the birth of the Watch, the Last Hero and so on. So the Night's King does not have any role at the inception of the Others and the Long Night. It's essentially a fable about love and duty, about perversion and trangressing all vows. A Lord Commander breaks all his vows, all earthly taboos and goes seriously rogue. You can compare the attraction the NK has for the female Other to such stories as Bael the Bard and Rhaegar-Lyanna. He's also compared to Stannis (since he literally stays at the Nightfort) who has Melisandre as his Female Other and he's connected with Human Sacrifice, and to Euron Greyjoy who wants to be a God and is also a transgressive and subversive figure in his community. There's nothing truly relevant about him with say, Jon Snow. Yes Jon Snow gets killed as a LC for "breaking his vows" but that's not really the same thing since the mutineers are deliberately seeing themselves in the narrative of "heroes who put down rogue L Cs".

The idea that there's a leader of the Others is flawed, but plausible enough. The idea that this leader be the Night's King is just absurd...why would the Others who are these eldritch ubermensch select a transformed human to be their leader. That guy is little more than a wight. Wouldn't these Others have folks among themselves to be their main man. And in any case, the NK story also falls within Westeros' misogynistic canon of the Femme Fatale Lady Macbeth because you have him falling for a "female Other" (which has simply not been mentioned elsewhere, nor has it even been suggested that the others have gender distinctions).

As for why I don't think the Others have a leader...mainly not enough time to develop a new Big Bad on top of Euron and Cersei and the Boltons. I also think it goes against the tradition so far. The Lannisters are still a force even after Tywin got whacked, badly weakened yes but they are still formidable under Kevan and Co. The idea that the bad guys are such chumps that they have one main man who has to be whacked for everyone to be undone is very much the trope the series criticized and parodies.

That's very well put. I don't want to say that the Night's King didn't exist because fantastic elements in the books tend to be true. But as you say, the account seems to be a moralistic tale about both why Lord Commanders of the Watch shouldn't seek power and how you can't trust those women, especially women who look like popsicles. And yeah, while I'm open to the idea that maybe there are female Others in the books but not in the show, I'm on the same page in thinking that there probably aren't and that that particular element of the story is apocryphal.

@Vampire Again, GRRM said that the original Night's king is no more likely to have survived than Lann the Clever so if you think Lann the Clever is coming back alive then there's basically a very low chance.

And for all we know the Others are ruled by a council.

I mean the Show's backstory has numerous problems. The Children of the Forest and the First Men formed a Pact at God's Eye's Isle of Faces, was this before or after they invented the White Walkers? How close or far is this from the Long Night? What we see on the show is obviously a terrible simplification to suit their budget and runtime limitations. Likewise this Night King...

I think the in-universe stories are just variations of Just So Stories and creation myths. Since Westeros doesn't have Judeo-Christian heritage or even the Classical and Norse Myths that preceded it, these stories play a similar function and counterpart. Like, obviously all these stories about Night's Watch rogue LC starting from Night King downwards to real incidents like that Hightower LC who wanted to make the post hereditary are basically there to foreshadow Jon's fate and how the mutineers would see their instance. They'll see Jon as a new Night's King with Val/Melisandre/Fake Arya as his "female Other" but that doesn't make it true, that doesn't make the parallel true no more than John Wilkes Booth was right in seeing himself as Brutus with Lincoln as Caesar.

That's actually one of the things that GRRM's noted he's really interested in. Great people that history has treated really badly.

And I think he wants to go the same route with Jon, Daenerys and Tyrion. I think the idea is that they save humanity but that from other people's point of views and in history's eyes they'll be some of the great villains of their time.

edited 26th Aug '16 4:14:50 PM by MadSkillz

Hence why we have four characters based on Richard III, a judicial reformer and visionary who was beloved by the common people but framed by the nobility, and tarnished forever by the great verse of William Shakespeare (who also lest we forget wrote the most well-written and persistent anti-semitic caricature of all time). Not that Shakespeare had a choice, if he didn't do what he did, he would be whacked just like Christopher Marlowe, tortured and maimed like Thomas Kyd and so on. This was a time of censorship after all.

We already have that with Stannis and Tyrion (who are both Richard Gloucester variations). The overall ethos will be The Greatest Story Never Told What You Are in the Dark.

Of course the joke of being villainized is that it's a triumph in itself, because it ensures that your story does survive. Who knows about Henry Tudor (or Richmond as he's called in Shakespeare's play)? Everyone knows Richard Gloucester got the best lines. The most famous man of the French Revolution is the villain Robespierre, whose enemies gave him an unintentional apotheosis that vastly elevated his influence.

I think there's also a tendency of conscious and unconscious History Repeats in the books, where the past burdens the present of ASOIAF, but this too mirrors real life and history, where across history, you have figures great and small modelling themselves consciously and unconsciously on fictitious and historical predecessors. Henry Tudor for instance invoked King Arthur in his Cult of Personality, Megalexandros was tutored in Homer by Aristotle and Wilkes Booth cited Brutus-Caesar when he killed Lincoln. So you have Stannis invoking Aegon I, Dany likewise doing the same, Robb Stark follows the script of Daeron Young Dragon, Jon Snow following Ned Stark and his actions potentially invoking other stories in the eyes of the mutineers and in the case of Faegon you have Varys and Illyrio mounting a production of Dunk And Egg 2: Electric Boogaloo.

Robespierre would have been remembered no matter what. Mass murderers tend to get remembered. So do those who completely upend the social order of their day. People who do both (and do it in a major European nation at that)? They aren't typically forgotten. Sure, his appearance in counterrevolutionary propaganda helped cement his place, but I don't think there was ever a chance that he was going to be a historical footnote. Like Lenin after him, Robespierre ensured his own place in the history books.

If he had been purged early by the Girondins (who tried but were too incompetent to pull it off, or pull anything off really) he would have been one of many minor figures who are forgotten (such as Antoine Barnave and Boilly). If had been assassinated a month or two before his downfall (there was an assassination attempt on Robespierre's life which he survived), he might have best ended up as a portrait by his friend the painter Jacques-Louis David, and even that is no guarantee, since his friend Le Peletier (the first Jacobin to be assassinated, preceding the death of Marat) got the same treatment by David but was totally forgotten (mostly because the portrait was unfinished while his masterpiece of the Death of Marat was finished). Robespierre until the final months of 1794 was not really this larger-than-life figure that the Thermidorians made him. Same with Richard III, thanks to the Tudors, the fairly obscure Duke of Gloucester who had served as an unusually loyal retainer to his brother suddenly becomes this tyrant and the Final Boss of the Wars of the Roses when that was not at all how events were playing out for most of the three decades of the conflict, but that's how it's played out now, as apparent in that sad Shakespeare-As-History Hollow Crown tv show.

I always found Jacques Louis David fascinating. Avant-guarde portraitist, best friend of Robespierre and Marat, future-propagandist of Napoleon, and a man who signed the death warrants of 400 people during the Reign of Terror, and painted people as they were trudged to the guillotine, including some of his victims such as Marie-Antoinette (whose death he signed off on). He was a great painter but one of those individuals who challenge the moral high ground people assign to artists. He signed the death warrant of Alexandre de Beauharnais and the arrest warrant of his wife, Marie Rose Josephe (future Empress Josephine). I wondered how the conversation between him and Napoleon would have gone with David being an unintentional wingman to the Corsican. "David I hope you understand that I can't invite you to the wedding, but you have my gratitude all the same" (in Italian-accented French of course).

I suppose being villainized can be its own kind of intellectual immortality but I think I'd sooner be forgotten than a bunch of people get things wrong about me. I'm no expert on the time period but when I was researching the Protestant Reformation I naturally was reading about a lot of stuff in Europe and eventually I came to the Tudors in England and one "Bloody Mary" Tudor. That's all she's known as here in America, and probably in England, too, because the Protestants won. Far from being some Ivan the Terrible, she was a supremely tragic and sympathetic figure who had to deal with all sorts of hardship. But because she found solace from her wretched life in her faith and tried to keep the Catholic tradition alive, all anybody knows nowadays is "Bloody Mary."

Well a bad reputation can kill you. Take Blackbeard, a man who didn't kill anyone, villainized (mostly by himself to spread a reputation), he surrendered and took a pardon and then murdered by a posse without due process because of his "reputation".

Having said that, if you have a certain romantic imagination, and George RR Martin does, it's cool to be a villain. I mean that's part of being "of the Devil's party though he did not know it" as William Blake said of John Milton. The critic Harold Bloom argued about that in Richard III that since Richard III gets all the cool lines and has this particularly conspiratorial relationship with the audience, we are Rooting for the Empire. In the case of British Literature, since it was the literature of the Empire and a society that saw itself as holding up order of some sorts, it's mandatory to do so because it was a villainous society that saw itself as heroic. I mean a lot of the classic Victorian fiction, like Treasure Island, the heroes are all bland as hell but the Loveable Rogue Long John Silver steals the scenes and our hearts. Likewise, in A Tale of Two Cities, Madame Defarge is the most interesting character, representing Victorian fears of radical feminism and greater leveling and you can't help but sympathize with her when she gets killed by that house servant who knows and keeps her place. I think GRRM took that and ran with it in his views of anti-heroes, as evidenced in his introduction for the Rogues anthology.

Well there's a lot of myths and countermyths about the Tudors and the Reformation. The Reformation painted the Church as excessively evil and itself as pure as snow, and vice versa. On the other hand you have Sir Thomas More who was for a long time presented as a martyr by both catholics and protestants whose reputation is currently being debunked by Wolf Hall, which in turn elevates Thomas Cromwell.

The Borgia were also demonized during the Reformation (actually before them) with Pope Alexander VI painted as the worst Pope, when he was actually a very philanthropic and religiously tolerant Pope (who welcomed refugee Jews into Europe without pressures of conversion) while Martin Luther was just one of the most vicious anti-semites in history.

edited 27th Aug '16 12:01:23 AM by JulianLapostat

From what I have heard, his Antisemitism was something he grew into.

He was a fairly reasonable man to start off with on most things. The Luther who put up his Theses probably never dreamed of decrying the Pope as the Antichrist. But by the end, he was very, very extreme on everything.

Well Luther ended up being quite conservative, he sold out the movement during the Peasants War. Thomas Muntzer who didn't compromise died a rebel. Muntzer is mostly forgotten these days but he was a big hero in East Germany, mostly because Friedrich Engels wrote a very good book on him.

Oliver Cromwell was villainized after his death and the return of Charles II and those Restoration cowards who dug up his corpse and hanged him posthumously. He did a lot of bad things in Ireland but also some other good things (bringing Jews back to England and giving them legal status).

I've mentioned this before but one the things which makes Martin's rendition of the Middle Ages troubling for me is that there aren't any Jewish people or equivalent of them in ASOIAF because anti-semitism was everywhere in this time. Edward Longshanks kicked out Jews out of England (a law that admittedly was not entirely enforced but it took rights from them). King Philip le Bel proscribed property from French Jews, The Crusades was heralded by a mass movement that launched the first populist pogrom in Europe and so on. It was a major part of this time. It's no coincidence that many people who are historically demonized such as Pope Alexander VI, Robespierre, Cromwell and even Napoleon to a certain extent, were among the few to make some amount of anti-racist measures. These days Lenin in Russia is considered a foreign agitator and almost nobody there takes pride in the fact that his administration mounted the only anti-racist campaign in Russian history.

edited 27th Aug '16 12:34:57 AM by JulianLapostat

I'm not sure there's any organic way to work something like that in, considering how stuffed the books already are.

Why should they take pride in something that was aimed against Russians? The current administration is better at this than he was.

I am confused at why an anti-racist campaigned is aimed against the majority population.

Lenin was not so much anti-racist as anti-nationalist and as a Russian, he hated his nation the most using the term great-Russian which is what Russians were called as an insult.

Unsurprisingly, a state based on Lenin's questionable views on nationality could not last even after Stalin who understood this issue better moderated it.

Anyway, thanks for the information but I would like to get back on topic. My main interest is anti-racist discourse across history and mainly anti-semitism and attempts to criticize and counter it, and how it's treated in fiction, where generally most works rarely tackle anti-semitism in the Middle Ages, and you even have white-washing occasionally. The video games Assassin's Creed are serial offenders of this.

ASOIAF for all its attempts to deconstruct and criticize the Disneyfied Middle Ages, and admirably so, still falls in the general scheme of things.

edited 27th Aug '16 1:40:58 PM by JulianLapostat

Has anyone asked GRRM why there is no Jews expy in A So Ia F?

It would not be hard to create one.

Why would you need to have an expy of everything? Wouldn't that just be a sort of real world, but with the names changed? And if something is really obviously connected to a particular person or culture from history, there's the pressure of having to be true to it or you end up writing something that's offensive or just generally stupid.

GRRM's system seems to be that he comes up with an idea, draws some elements from a mixture of historical and mythological settings, and basically creates something that has identifiable elements but no direct, exclusive association to any one particular thing.

If you want a group of people that have been driven from their lands and had to sort of spread around I suppose maybe the Andals have elements of that. Or, you know, the Rhoynar, except that they sort of stuck together; but that's just the thing. It wouldn't be very interesting to just take the history of a group and change its name and plant it in.

There are great elements in any culture - I mean, sure, let's take the Jewish people as an example - that make for a good story and you can certainly use stuff like the Diaspora (of the Rhoynar, for instance), and maybe the idea of having a Promised Land that you can't currently access (like the exiled Targaryens, say), or having to pass for another identity or face persecution (which happens in this story to individuals but not really groups, that I can think of). Currently the story has some of those elements with various cultures, but not all of them in one place. What would be the point?

Probably too late to fit it in. Would be interesting in part because I think one of the series' major deficiencies is in terms of giving nuance to religions and cultures.

I'm kind of wary of it though because Martin tends to write more often from the point of view of the abusers than victims, so what we'd probably get would be something like Tywin undertaking pogroms to direct the smallfolk's anger to someone besides himself as well as sympathetic characters like Ned having prejudices as well. Or maybe for Pragmatic Villainy reasons Tywin would offer protection so long as he received a kickback. Probably also the BWB would include the Jewish equivalent under the heading of enemies. I doubt you'd get a POV of someone from that group.

Edit- moving some of this to a new post.

edited 27th Aug '16 2:17:13 PM by Hodor2