Will Killing NK Really Kill All WW?

[UnmaskedLurker]

Just now, Winds of Winter blow cold said:

WW's  might revert back to human.

Kind of like another type of WW? I mean like a WereWolf? Perhaps -- but still makes no sense to me -- which is why it probably will be done that way on the show but not in the books.

[falcotron]

On 8/23/2017 at 7:49 AM, UnmaskedLurker said:

I don't follow the logic of this assertion. The WW are not like the wights. Each WW seems to have independent thought and is alive in some sense. The wights are just animated corpses. Without the WW that created them around to send out the "signal" that keeps the wights animated and guided with some sort of plan of action  (which seems to be fairly general sometimes and specific other times), the wights have no way to stay animated.

I agree with you completely.

It's certainly not true that this is the universal way things work in Planetos. Killing Leaf didn't kill the Night King, killing Thoros didn't kill Beric, and I doubt anyone would expect killing Qyburn to kill Gregor. It only works with wights because they're corpses animated by magic, so if you remove the magic that animates them, they go back to being corpses. The Walkers were converted from living beings, and seem to have their own agency, so there's even less reason to expect them to be like the wights than there is for Beric.

And even going outside GoT to other stories, it works on Anne Rice vampires or Hammer-movie werewolves because that's a hierarchy of one type of thing; it doesn't work in any stories I can think of with hierarchies of different types of things. For example, in the Star Wars prequels, blowing up the droid control computer instantly shuts down the droids, but I doubt killing the programmer who created all the droid control computers would have any effect. And NK-WW-Wight is more like programmer-computer-droid than like werewolf-werewolf-werewolf.

Also, the only evidence we have at all that it would work is that Beric said it. Beric admitted twice in that same episode that he basically has no idea what he's talking about. And here, he's in an incredibly desperate situation, looking around for a hail-mary solution that might give them some slim chance of survival. Even if, based on his (and our) very limited knowledge, it's pretty unlikely that killing the NK would kill the WWs, it's not impossible, and that small chance is surely better than the no chance at all they have if they don't try anything.

Meanwhile, when Beric suggests killing the NK, Jon's response is "You don't understand", and everyone seems to just accept that. This is very different from when Jon rejects the idea of trying to kill enough of the WWs to take down enough wights to make a break for it. The first time, Jon's reasoning is clear: there's no way they could pull that off without losing their captive wight. That can't be Jon's reasoning the second time time—if they really did kill the entire army of the dead in one fell swoop, there'd be no point in having the captive wight anymore (plus, of course, it wouldn't be a wight anymore in the first place). I have no idea what Jon's actual reasoning is. (What does Beric not understand? Why would Jon know? Why does everyone accept it without explanation?) But that doesn't mean we should assume Jon was just pulling nonsense out of his ass, while Beric guessed the truth.

Finally, the books don't seem to have any similar hierarchy for Others. There's no evidence that there's one special one who created all the rest. It's not "the Night King creates the Others from Craster's sons", it's "the Others create more Others from Craster's sons" (assuming Gilly's sister-niece-aunts are even right in the books). And this would be a pretty weird thing for D&D to invent, unless they think people are really invested in the World of Darkness RPG rules or something—a huge battle scene with magic and mammoths vs. elephants and so on is much more of a huge, unprecedented-scale-for-TV kind of ending to one of their two major plotlines than just a one-on-one duel, and that seems to be pretty important to their thinking as producers.