A Song Of Ice And Fire

Your post.... Not trying to be mean, but I can barely understand it.

@Vampire But GRRM is talking about what they look like when he compares them to the Sidhe.

He told that to a comic book artist that was trying to draw them.

In function, they are closer to the Shoggoth.

A formerly servant race of boogeymen.

edited 28th Sep '16 11:03:15 AM by MadSkillz

The Sidhe are extra-dimensional beings, beautiful and serene, with Blue-and-Orange Morality, seeing humans with contempt. They are The Fair Folk.

I think the Others are similar because of how Tormund Giantsbane defines them:

They’re never far, you know. They won’t come out by day, not when that old sun’s shining, but don’t think that means they went away. Shadows never go away. Might be you don’t see them, but they’re always clinging to your heels.

I don't thing the show's definition of the Others makes sense so I don't see them as Shoggoth although I think At the Mountains of Madness was an inspiration for the Land of Always Winter. Actually it cannot make sense since their explanation doesn't match the timeline. To me the Others are tied to magic and the realms of the dead...that explains the Wights, and how some of the reanimated wights seem to retain parts of their living personalities.

There's also the influence of Norse Mythology which is also quite Lovecraftian (and it inspired him). The Long Night is Fimbulwinter and you have an Army of the Dead marching alongside fell monsters (Fenris and Jormungadr=Ice Spiders) to bring about an everlasting night and long cold.

My point more often that not, the big bad is evil deity, closet to Sauron or Satan than elderich abomination which is more recient.

But yeah, the other like fairy of old

I think the details are really fudged up but the gist is the same. The Children of the Forest created the Others to fight humans and then the Others for some reason turned on their masters as well.

I also think this lines up with theories that the WW don't really have a morality. They're rebelling biological kill-bots.

@unknown While, yes, Euron is definitely a parallel to those, I think GRRM makes Cthulhu/Eldricht Abomination reference explicit:

I would much rather have the Others be creatures who do have a sense of morality then mindless killing machines.

I said once and I said again: Euron is cthulhu cosplayer that nobody have valour to knock it off with that already.

I dont think it would change things, so far they are killing machine and having a morality would only said "this is why we are kill bots"

That post is very hard to parse, as well. I know you can write better English, so please focus on your posts a bit. It's rude to demand that everyone else spend so much effort reading posts with poor grammar and spelling. It'll take you a minute or less to read and correct your post before clicking "send". It's well worth the effort.

ughhhhh, fine.

Giving WW a sense of morality means nothing because they core concept is "doomsday army who will freeze the world" you could give them personality, but any morality falls flat to that.

Better now?

Hey, are we even sure they are doing what they do because they want to kill mankind? And don't be rude.

Yes, better. Let's stick to that standard. Thank you.

Sure but I don't think that's the type of story that GRRM is telling. The Others are a force of nature rather than individual players.

They're there to give the heroes something fight and unite around or else the series wouldn't have a good conclusion because the Game of Thrones never ends.

This quote I just found says it better than me:

Pretty sure. GRRM calls them out as the real threat. His outline for the series says the Others are coming down south to extinguish everything we call life.

And the show producers seem to agree with that version of the Others:

"we even sure they are doing what they do because they want to kill mankind? And don't be rude."

It matters very little, they bring winter, they resurrect the dead, their action dosent expect as complex , doing anything else with them is like giving inteligence to Dany dragons, it dosent change what they have done.

And im not rude, just annoyed because I thought the post read fine but it wasnt, its....frustrating at times.

"I don’t think we’ve ever been tempted to write dialogue for the Night King. Anything he said would be anticlimactic"

Pretty much, the concept of the others is a elemental evil kind of thing, expecting them to have reason is like ask fire why it burns things, is just non-sense

What are you trying to say?

"I'm" and "it's". You know how to do this.

Come on.

unkowing = Davos

Best Of= Maester Pylos.

You got a good enough grasp of English to deal with the trickier stuff, unknowing. Conjugations and punctuation are the easy part.

Lovecraftian monsters like the Others are fundamentally indifferent to humanity. We are ants to them. They treat humanity much like humanity treats each other and to combat them, humanity must band together. It's simple in that sense.

The others are horrific the less we know about them, and the less we understand them. The show explanation is terrible for that reason and it's obviously not true.

In any case, consider the Doylist purpose of the story. The Night's Watch has manned the Wall for milennia, with many Black Brothers dying, freezing, wasting their lives away. If it turned out it was all for a big misunderstanding than that would render that meaningless and without value.

That point can be made of course, but it needs a certain absurdist approach that ASOIAF lacks.

My impression of the Others is that they really don't seem indifferent to their victims. They really want to kill them.

The way the dead rangers were placed where they'd be discovered and brought in, and how they, upon becoming reanimated, went straight for the Lord Commander of the Night's Watch, indicated the capacity to make and execute plans.

The Others are not mindless machines. They have a goal - to destroy humans (and presumably other sentient beings, eg the Children of the Forest) - and they're pursuing it with at least some degree of tactical - or even strategic - thinking.

In that sense they're not Lovecraftian. Then again, the Cthulhu mythos does also include creatures that do actually care about killing humans, rather than just doing it as part of some other activity, or without even noticing. The Hounds of Tindalos and the Star Vampire, for exaple, seem to decide on a specific target for their hunt; so they don't attack people (entirely) at random. (That doesn't mean the victim will typically have any prior knowledge of the actions that will render them targets to said monsters, though, so to some extent it still is random, or at least unjust.)

They also surrounded Waymar Royce, and one engaged in a "duel" with him. They also took sadistic pleasure in killing him.

They're Always Chaotic Evil. More majestic and beautiful then most examples, but still cruel creatures that want to kill everything - and not just sapient things, but everything that lives. Like animals.

Best Of: Ok I get it, I have trouble with english, please stop that.

Mad Skillz: and yet you wrote my name wrong, also if im davos...who the hell is Stannis? Julian? is he going to cut my fingers? because...damn

Also, now that I think about it, Davos sound like the Anti-littlefinger, while both start poor, one get rewarded by his loyalty and good action while the other stab,cheat and lie to get into the top, Davos try to be voice of reason while Littlefinger is toxic as hell,hell if I remenber well, didnt Davos lost all his finger except the little one?

Ninety: thanks, my problem is that I think faster than I write which is issue in spanish, is waaaaay more in english, my better post are short ones but even them I have my bad days.

Anyway let move to the next point:

I feel Other are more elemental force, they are not like Orcs who have free choice and them chose evil, they have personality but it set in their very natures, expect them to have motives is like having dragon to give reason for burning things, is just what they do.

Anyway, I also found this post in a forum about Mel intentions, is quite intersting:

" I think many people are uncomfortable with her mode of utilitarianism, even when they forgive it in other characters. Oddly, I can get my head around pushing an eight year old out of a window, to save my three children and their mother. It is wrong, but I get it. Sacrificing an innocent boy to the flames as a step in generating the power to save the world from the icy apocalypse, is more abstract and sketchy Shadow magic, blood magic, sacrificing people, these are acts that instinctively belong to the realm of deontology. They are wrong period, The very act of them is wrong, regardless of the outcome. It is known."

Maybe that explain why the fandom hate her so much?

edited 28th Sep '16 10:30:31 PM by unknowing

That paragraph right there is the theme of the series. You can forgive Jaime, to a point, for pushing a boy out of the window to save his bastards. Even Ned Stark in ASOIAF comes close when he thinks to himself, "If it came to that some child I didn't know in exchange for all Robb, Arya, Sansa, Bran and Rickon what would I do"...but you can't forgive Mel's idea of Human Sacrifice when fundamentally it's the same thing.

Ultimately civilization, Westeros' civilization, and even our contemporary civilization to some extent is tied to human sacrifice of some sort. Whether its Kings who sacrifice peasants to misery, pain, suffering, command civilians to die in a sack or for foraging...it's all justified in the name of the greater good and public order. In today's world, in the name of American liberty and fighting terrorism you have the sacrifice of many innocent kids in the Middle East by drone strikes. Obama can do good at home, and abroad but he has to fill in a quota of people murdered to pass gay rights and so on. And of course what is slavery, of the king in American and European history, and the one in Slaver's bay, except a giant human sacrifice in the name of prosperity and capitalism.

So I think Melisandre presents a real moral challenge and it's so easy to misunderstand her. After ADWD, you read ACOK and you realize that it isn't Melisandre who is the religious fanatic, it's Maester Creesen who is like a true suicide bomber, trying to kill himself and her. Likewise Davos in ASOS also blames Mel sight unseen with no evidence like a modern jack bauer.

My experience with Warhammer make me much tolerant of Mel antic that many(Let face it, if Robert come from D&D, Renly from Warcraft, Stannis and Mel belong to Warhammer) and is hard to get atach to Jaime and Cersei mistake

But(and I kinda disagree with you here) is less about human sacrifice and more about using other for your own gains(which depent on how you see is kinda sacrifice) that is the diferent from Euron who clearly used everyone around him from Stannis who is consuming himself each day.

Also if you look well, it seen GRMN like to divide his villians in two category:"Ice" who are cruel and indiferent to suffering of others(Twynn,Roose,Littlefinger) and "Fire" who are brutal, impulsive and enjoy inflicting harm(The Montain,Ramsey,Cersei)

the only one who I have a hard time guessing is Euron, he since to be both, maybe he is "Ice" considered his plan to take Dany as his wife

Oh for fuck's sake, man, you were doing a good job at spelling until that post!

Look, English is not my native language, either - I'm Finnish, so my language is even less similar to English than yours - so when I'm communicating in English I put in extra effort to make sure I'm communicating well. That's better than communicating poorly and asking literally everyone else in the conversation - including those who don't speak English as their first language - to put in extra effort to read my posts. Literally everyone in this thread except you seems to care about whether their posts are easy to read.

You've shown that you can write legible English. You choose not to. I get that you think faster than you write - I'm sure that applies to everyone - but the way to remedy that is by going through your post and fixing it before you hit "send".

You know that you can write better than this. I can understand that you want to make sure to have the idea written down before you forget it. Fine, make notes. Just don't post the notes. Go through them and write proper sentences like everyone else.

I hate to divert the conversation off-topic like this but if we don't have this conversation now we'll just end up having it a bunch of times later.

There's no extra credit for posting quickly. No one knows if you spent 0 or 60 or 120 seconds improving your post before you posted it. People will appreciate a well written post much more than they will a rushed and poor one.

edited 29th Sep '16 3:26:51 AM by BestOf