CotF and the White Walkers

[jbob]

1 hour ago, -Ghost- said:

So why do the Others want to kill the CotF if they created them? 

Did you see the guy getting turned? He didn't look all that happy about it. And you can think of it as like Skynet in Terminator, It gained self awareness or something. Also, it reminds me of the Shoggoths from Lovecraft's At The Mountain of Madness. Shoggoths were created as slaves but the elder things lost control of them.

Personally, I love this idea. Much better than and evil god trying to take over the world thing.

[House Toad]

3 minutes ago, jbob said:

Did you see the guy getting turned? He didn't look all that happy about it. And you can think of it as like Skynet in Terminator, It gained self awareness or something. Also, it reminds me of the Shoggoths from Lovecraft's At The Mountain of Madness. Shoggoths were created as slaves but the elder things lost control of them.

Personally, I love this idea. Much better than and evil god trying to take over the world thing.

Doesn't fully explain their power? They had vision as well as their usual spells? The last hero should have been more heroic, when the children finally offered a peace?

[jbob]

4 minutes ago, House Toad said:

Doesn't fully explain their power? They had vision as well as their usual spells? The last hero should have been more heroic, when the children finally offered a peace?

A hero doesn't mean you can't be scared or feel pain. We don't know if that's the last hero.I like the idea that he is the Night's King and was seduced by a wight sent by a CoTF and the timeline got jumbled up over time.

[ummester]

6 minutes ago, jbob said:

A hero doesn't mean you can't be scared or feel pain. We don't know if that's the last hero.I like the idea that he is the Night's King and was seduced by a wight sent by a CoTF and the timeline got jumbled up over time.

Seduced by a CotF, more like.

It's funny, the whole shoving your sword through the heart thing with Nyssa Nyssa was actually a chick (albeit a little green one) stabbing a dude  

[House Toad]

24 minutes ago, jbob said:

A hero doesn't mean you can't be scared or feel pain. We don't know if that's the last hero.I like the idea that he is the Night's King and was seduced by a wight sent by a CoTF and the timeline got jumbled up over time.

Sorry when responding to you, I was also commenting about the FH. What I was getting at is the WW had vision to mark Bran and see through the void, as well their usual power. their power was swarming a legion of dead to destroy the firstmen. The FH is disregarded upon the children making peace with the firstmen. However did the firstmen have vision like the red priests have explaining certain vision ability, not quite because it is a different vision without the flames as a medium. Although don't humans become Coldhands where the children actually got their spells right? So the WW corruption isn't fully explained and the First hero is kind of void as their explanation?

[VladimirDulud]

The COTF creating the Others - not unlike the "navigators"/ubermensch in Prometheus creating the xenomorphs, I reckon. Question is - who's our Ripley ?

[House Toad]

3 minutes ago, VladimirDulud said:

The COTF creating the Others - not unlike the "navigators"/ubermensch in Prometheus creating the xenomorphs, I reckon. Question is - who's our Ripley ?

Mad hatter down the rabbit hole into the warren would you like a cupper, arggh branache, the past is the future is a paradox? Marked himself giving himself the power. My head hurts checkmate? No way that is going to take way to much detail that I cannot even begin to put in a paragraph. Let me read the book already

[Florina Laufeyson]

1 hour ago, lancerman said:

They created a weapon in desperation. Realized it was a killing machine that couldn't be controlled. Peace happened later. Many years later the WW's grew in numbers and the Long Night happened.

Best I got on that.

 

Yeah pretty much. Leaf seemed to make it kinda clear that her race created the Others in order to fight the First Men. But it went wrong. Horribly wrong. And the Others wanted to take power for themselves. (kinda like the Shoggoths vs the Elder Things in the Lovecraft mythos, only the Others here are far more intelligent.) Leaf and the other Children arent proud of what they did. 

This also explains why they are weak to obsidian. Obsidian is in "the heart" of them. 

All of this reeks of GRRM. The next book will likely explain some of this stuff in more detail (since the show omitted or did not mention so many things about history), but i get the strongest feeling this and the Hodor thing is definitely canon.

[Fredwin]

I was planning on making a post about this very topic, but it already existed.

I really want to know what the others/whitewalker's motivation is now that we may know their origins. Does this revelation mean that the great other really doesn't exist? If he doesn't what is the ultimate goal of the other's? Are they no more than zombie's as well? Do they plan on conquering the world and subjugating the dead just so they can sit around and look at eachother menacingly for all eternity?

Based off what we know of the Nightking's supposed origin story, you'd have to assume that the being he supposedly uh, joined with had a will of her own, right? Especially if they rebelled against the Children's control. You'd also have to assume they obeyed orders for a little while because the Children apparently kept making more. If that's the case there's got to be a reason for it all.

We've seen a human turned as an infant so we have to imagine it's possible for these super natural creatures to grow on their own. They also must have some sort of culture right? To teach the undead babies? Is there a city?

[ummester]

17 minutes ago, VladimirDulud said:

The COTF creating the Others - not unlike the "navigators"/ubermensch in Prometheus creating the xenomorphs, I reckon. Question is - who's our Ripley ?

Well in Promethues it certainly wasn't that conflicted piece of bad characterisation called Shaw. Must have been David? So who is most like David in ASoIaF?

Meh, Jamie is our Ripley. The rest are all going to ascend to team xenomorph.

[IamMe90]

Of course the Great Other doesn't exist. Did you really need tonight's episode to know that?

[Nymeria_Stark]

1 hour ago, ummester said:

Yes, that is exactly what I get out of it.

Don't forget the last hero had 13 companions and the Nights King was the 13th LC - they were likely one and the same person, perverted by time and legend.

WWs are essentially pact 2 - that failed exactly the same as pact 1. The real threat to Westeros' stability has always been and will always be the invasion of humans from the East.

So are you saying that if Dany does lead her army to Westeros, she'd be the Realm's main threat, and not the White Walker army from the north?

[Florina Laufeyson]

With the Night's King, i feel like it might be the show simplifying the first Other (or Great Other) with the figure of the Night's King. Considering in the books, the Others were already a thing when NK happened. /shrug I feel like the origins of the Others is the canon part, not the NK part.

[Fredwin]

Just now, IamMe90 said:

Of course the Great Other doesn't exist. Did you really need tonight's episode to know that?

Nah, I know that both the great other and the lord of light are meant to not exist. The story isn't about gods. There's got to be the a reason for the sentiment though, like the story behind the myth. 

[IamMe90]

2 minutes ago, Florina Laufeyson said:

With the Night's King, i feel like it might be the show simplifying the first Other (or Great Other) with the figure of the Night's King. Considering in the books, the Others were already a thing when NK happened. /shrug I feel like the origins of the Others is the canon part, not the NK part.

I don't think the NK, in its current show incarnation, is going to part of the books. But I really don't think there's a "great other" type deity figure either. I think that the most likely explanation is something similar to the what we saw tonight - that they were created by the CofF, who lost control of their magic - without a central king/deity type leader figure spearheading the whole thing. 

I do think that the NK did exist at some point in the Westeros timeline though. I just don't think he's in play anymore.

[ummester]

18 minutes ago, Nymeria_Stark said:

So are you saying that if Dany does lead her army to Westeros, she'd be the Realm's main threat, and not the White Walker army from the north?

I think it will play out with 3 sides at the end - dragons from the south, WWs and Starks from the North and pure humans (faith of the 7, maesters etc) surrounding the IT in the middle. The middle will get obliterated, along with much of the ice and fire forces - but it won't be 1 v 1 and we will have a reason to both sympathise with and dislike each faction. It's not going to end with good guys and bad guys - just teams and destruction - it's pagan storytelling, not Christian.

But what I am saying is that the 'Realm' (that human construct) is a threat to Westeros, as humans always have been.

Pact 1 was made with the First men and the First men liked magical trees.

The white walkers were created from a First Man, to try and deter more invading humans, and it ended with a wall separating them all. More the wall, than the WWs, is pact 2 - kind of like  - stop your human advance here, or the magic will be all gone.

For all their power, the WWs didn't save many trees, did they? The humans still cut them down through the Andal invasions and beyond. Quite literally, the humans are behaving like the orcs in this saga - they are mostly dethatched from the ethereal and focused on the material - and I think that is a big part of the storytelling, its GRRMs plan to make us look at ourselves as a species and consider our own modern focus on greed and the material.

[Florina Laufeyson]

15 minutes ago, IamMe90 said:

I don't think the NK, in its current show incarnation, is going to part of the books. But I really don't think there's a "great other" type deity figure either. I think that the most likely explanation is something similar to the what we saw tonight - that they were created by the CofF, who lost control of their magic - without a central king/deity type leader figure spearheading the whole thing. 

I do think that the NK did exist at some point in the Westeros timeline though. I just don't think he's in play anymore.

 

yeah probably. In the books, we are like to get some Other dude leading the lot but he may not be anyone of importance other than being an Other. Im kinda wondering though, if there is a Great Other, is there a hivemind type thing? Ugh i need the next book.

[MarieAntoinette]

I think that the white walker origin story will be similar in the books, probably more detailed, but it will be roughly the same in the books, with the children being responsible for the creation of the WW and then losing control of their creation. This episode actually made me excited for the story again, I'm curious how this will play out in the end. I'm guessing that the save the bigger reveals for the last season, and there will be more backstory.

[Greg B]

Best literary analogy for me is Saberhagen's Berserkers -- self-replicating machines created by one race as a doomsday weapon to wipe out another race with which they were at war. The main substantive difference being that the Others seem to have periods of dormancy and activity that correspond to the seasons. I wonder if the seasons are jacked up because the CoF were trying to get control of their creation?

Quote

The original Berserkers were designed and built as an ultimate weapon, by a race now known only as the Builders, to wipe out their rivals the Red Race, in a war which took place at a time corresponding to Earth's Paleolithic era. The Builders failed to ensure their own immunity from Berserker attack, or they lost those safeguards through an unknown malfunction that changed the Berserker programming, and they were exterminated by their own creation very shortly after the demise of the Red Race. The Berserkers then set out across the galaxy to fulfill their core programmed imperative, which is now, simply, to destroy all life wherever they can find it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berserker_(Saberhagen)

[Bran the Shipper]

I agree that this origin story for the White Walkers is what the book will have.  Now as to their motives, they are magical constructs made to kill the first men.  So that is their goal, it is all they have.  The reason they now seem to be targeting the Children is likely that when the Children made peace with the first men they tried to destroy the weapons they had created.  The white walkers interpreted this as the Children becoming allies to the first men and thus enemies that needed to be destroyed.  Apparently the Children should have been better versed in Asimov's laws before they decided to create some killer robots.