Are the Others that evil?

[Blazfemur]

i thought, more accurately, the bottom layer of the wall was made of those ingredients, let's assume for arguments sake the bottom 20% or so. i thought it was layered and ice took up the majority, was the last great concept to this idea :P

it's all for naught though, because regardless, im starting to believe btb=tlh=tnk. but i also can believe in (this is all theory, mind you), in his transformation from human to other, he finished the wall. simply because it satisfies all theories (for now).

but no, unless btb was an Other i dont think a human built it. i dont. there's too much Other in that construct, to be all human. Perhaps they made it together, and through some sick act for dominance, Others lost it through conquest.

it's all for nothing though without more material, and the same argument (we're both at a standstill for now) lol

[Ser Beefheart]

Personally I think they are just climate change. They aren't 'evil' because nature doesn't have morality it just is. An avalanche that destroys a village or a hurricane that floods a city aren't evil even if they cause a massive amount of death and destruction.

They're obviously based on elves/fairies/hidden folk though and are probably meant to be the unseelie to the COF seelie.

[Giles the Wizard]

Maybe the Others aren't evil, they might just have a completely alien system of morality. From our perspective they're evil, seeing as they kill every living thing they see and turn them into zombie slaves, but perhaps they have their own reason for doing so aside from "Rawr we are evil ice monsters rawr".

While I don't want the Others to just be evil monsters who commit genocide for the evulz, I don't really want them to end up being quite sympathetic, either. They can be misunderstood and more complex, but they should still be a sinister threat to Westeros.

[Gustaf Stark]

Well I don't think they're evil at all, just a different race of "men". There are some evidences to this theory, first of all, GRRM claims he has no truly evil characters (must apply to the Others). Also when I was reading this thread it made me think of something GRRM said in an interview with the Rolling Stone magazine:

"We stopped to see Hadrian's Wall. I stood up there and I tried to imagine what it was like to be a Roman legionary, standing on this wall, looking at these distant hills. It was a very profound feeling. For the Romans at that time, this was the end of civilization; it was the end of the world. We know that there were Scots beyond the hills, but they didn't know that. It could have been any kind of monster. It was the sense of this barrier against dark forces – it planted something in me. But when you write fantasy, everything is bigger and more colorful, so I took the Wall and made it three times as long and 700 feet high, and made it out of ice."

This is why I believe they're not just evil creatures.

[Eldric Storm]

Martin can claim whatever he wants but that doesn't change the fact that Ramsay is incredibly evil. Sorry.

[SerWolfgang]

The Others aren't evil. Well, they're just about as evil to humans as the Andals were to the First Men, and the First Men were to the CotF.

I think they're just like humans, except instead of being made of heat they're made of cold. They have men, women, and children and perhaps even emotions and love, but in a way that's unrecognizable to us. And that they are just invading either to escape a bigger threat up north, or they simply want land and glory from conquest.