Always the Artists [book spoilers]

[Clariana]

I liked that scene: showed that the only ones who know about the Others, even if is a little, are the wildings and people beyond the Wall. They're capable of creating symbols and the Southern people still believes they're a myth.

This is a good point and I think the Others' "art work" should be compared to that in Astapor... The purpose is the same, intimidation.

[Weles]

Well genius, what was the impact? What was the reason? It wasn't something that happened in the books, so it seems to me that the impact and reason is something the TV writers made up, if there is one at all beyond doing something "creepy".

Symbols and rituals generally don't make sense to outsiders, neither we nor the characters in the scene are Others. GRRM has probably informed D&D about the Others that we will learn in the remaining books.

[WinterisAlwaysComing]

I LOVED that scene. The line "Always the artists." Intimidation. Turning your enemies's horses into a symbol for anyone else to see. Great.

As to "zombies holding weapons" - only movie I can think of is "Land of the Dead" with John Leguizamo, where zombies just carried whatever they died holding, so a zombie butcher carried around a butcher's knife.

[Darryk]

If they white walkers were attacking they would have sent an enormous force against the wall. In the books they are only herding up all the wildlings so they smash themselves on the wall hence why they attack to the Fist so they can march unopposed all the way to Castle Black.

Is this confirmed somewhere in the books or just speculation? I got that the Others weren't intending to march on the Wall (yet) but I didn't realize they were attacking the Night's watch so as to give the wildlings a clear path to the Wall.

[aFeastForDragons]

Just speculation like 99% of stuff on the forum but to me it makes a lot of sense. Mance wonders why they got all the way from the Frostfangs to the wall without a single attack yet the Night's Watch were attacked and constantly harassed all the way to Castle Black. Anyway this isn't the forum to discuss these things.

It wasn't something that happened in the books, so it seems to me that the impact and reason is something the TV writers made up

Remember D & D know the ending and a lot of the lead up to it so what we may think they wrote themselves is actually something from TWOW or ADOS.

[DarkAndFullOfTurnips]

Is this confirmed somewhere in the books or just speculation? I got that the Others weren't intending to march on the Wall (yet) but I didn't realize they were attacking the Night's watch so as to give the wildlings a clear path to the Wall.

That would be purely speculation. We don't even know the degree of their intelligence in the books to assume that they'd know Mance was going to attack the wall so they assist them somewhat to make a larger wight army from their corpses. Sure, it's plausible, but certainly not confirmed.

[greensleeves]

The fact that the white walkers can take the time to make their art just shows their total tactical superiority over any other force beyond the wall. It definitely makes them more scary, and intriguing.

Wights also seem to be carrying weapons. I have seen many types of Zombies but other than in the Resident Evil series I have never seen one carry a weapon.

Also, I don't consider wights to be 'zombies' at all. They're not infected as we know it. They're more like puppets of the Others. If you've ever watched Stardust think of them more as the voodoo body towards the end.

Zombies didn't start out in Hollywood; the 'dead' were raised and enslaved by Voodoo practitioners in Hati. These enslaved people would have supposedly used tools. Anyways, popular culture has gotten hold of the term, but wights are probably more like that Hatian idea of zombies than most 'zombies' in media today.

[Runaway Penguin]

Just speculation like 99% of stuff on the forum but to me it makes a lot of sense. Mance wonders why they got all the way from the Frostfangs to the wall without a single attack yet the Night's Watch were attacked and constantly harassed all the way to Castle Black. Anyway this isn't the forum to discuss these things.

Or the Others are just few (maybe only the Others who make a ruckus are few? I was toying with the ideas that they are sort of Other equivalent for Qyburn) and simply fixed on target at hand - they might have known that Wildlings may be actually harder to beat - or that they will help breach the wall, they probably won't imagine that Crows may defeat them and then let them in.

[boojam]

Thoughts on the corpse art?

You know I qualify it by saying CGI 'art'.

Tho the first season it seemed it was all done with make up.

The first season creates a confusion that has been propagated the mix up between White Walkers* and Wights.

I don't think in the books GRRM ever refers to White Walkers , it's always 'Others*' who apparently , maybe?, are minions of The Great Other. They are , it seems, entities unto themselves.

Then Wights show up at Castle Black , like The Others (to use GRRM's term) they have blue eyes.

Odd thing , it was Sam who noticed the corpses they recover have not decayed.

Yet S2E10 we see Wights (is a Zombie horse a Wight?) many of whom are partly decayed, that is inconsistent, but effective visually.

If burning them the only way to kill them? What if you cut off one's head?

Even in the books George has not given us any details on just what the Others mission is, except to Sauron-like , Take Over.

(*Another oddity, because of a confusion of a name with another TV show. Maybe HBO enforced and not D and D.

Like the Asha - Yara thing, I guess there is a fraction of the TV audience who are that stupid, or are in bad need of an Audiologist!)

[boojam]

Zombies didn't start out in Hollywood; the 'dead' were raised and enslaved by Voodoo practitioners in Hati. These enslaved people would have supposedly used tools. Anyways, popular culture has gotten hold of the term, but wights are probably more like that Hatian idea of zombies than most 'zombies' in media today.

Actually transfered from West African tenets of Vodou.

The 1930's and 1940's stuck to Haitian zombies, probably the best Zombie films were made then.

I don't think (not sure) in George A. Romero's seminal film Night of the Living Dead they are ever called zombies, just dead people contamination by some unknown agent , a virus?, which is never explained.

Actually Hollywood Zombies lay dormant for a little while after Romero.. then!, in typical popular culture style there is a totally tiresome proliferation , so much so, one begins to believe there is a vast audience of zombies out there with the brain power of a flea.

[Tadco26]

Remember D & D know the ending and a lot of the lead up to it so what we may think they wrote themselves is actually something from TWOW or ADOS.

Maybe, but they also know that Sam never got surrounded by white walkers alone and then survived, but it didn't stop them from writing the scene. Even if the symbols some how do come up in future books it doesn't change the fact that they didn't come up in any of the books to date. So we can't just assume that they are important to the book story line because the show added them.

[Clariana]

Just speculation like 99% of stuff on the forum but to me it makes a lot of sense. Mance wonders why they got all the way from the Frostfangs to the wall without a single attack yet the Night's Watch were attacked and constantly harassed all the way to Castle Black. Anyway this isn't the forum to discuss these things.

Remember D & D know the ending and a lot of the lead up to it so what we may think they wrote themselves is actually something from TWOW or ADOS.

Plus the Nightwatch had discovered that Dragon Glass trove... "Let's make sure that knowledge does not get beyond the wall."

[Rebekah]

I think it's pretty clear that the symbols have some meaning for the Others even if we don't see it right away. Any historian or archeologist will tell you that you can come across symbology and ritualistic behavior when studying past cultures and not understand it at first but that never, ever means it has no real meaning. What I wonder is if this is an extrapolation of the White Walker concept, in order to drive home the fact that they are actually intelligent or are D&D acting on some other information gleaned from Martin?

If these symbols are in some way representative of a relationship between the White Walkers and Melisandre's Great Other then they'd be very important to White Walker culture but not something that the NW, who has had no contact or even belief in the White Walkers up until very recently, would know about. But more information may be available in Sam's books, or via Bran's ability to view the past through the Weirwood Westerosi Historical Archive.

Either way it is definitely interesting and it serves in the show to serperate the White Walkers from the concept of mindless, evil dead things who want to kill everyone. We may not know much about the Others but it is obviously far more complicated than that.

[aFeastForDragons]

I just realised after Puddles the White Walker we won't see another one until the end of Season 6 at the earliest. Thats only if they are including the opening chapters of TWOW and they contain white walkers. Thats not going to go down to well with the non book readers.

[DarkAndFullOfTurnips]

I just realised after Puddles the White Walker we won't see another one until the end of Season 6 at the earliest. Thats only if they are including the opening chapters of TWOW and they contain white walkers. Thats not going to go down to well with the non book readers.

Will we not get Sam the Slayer? I assumed they would fit it in after he saves Gilly from one. It's also not like we see them in the books much and that worked ok.

[Walsingham]

I was glad to see this thread, because I had a real problem with the 'Always the artists' line from Mormont.

From the books I always got the impression that to most people, the Others have almost become mythical. Most people barely believe in them. This is reinforced several times in the show. People dismiss warnings about them. The Starks dismiss Old Nan's tales.

The NW are not most people, but while they may realise that there is something cold and horrible North of the wall, they don't know much about it. Tarly has to go off and hunt through dusty books for knowledge about them that has been lost, and he doesn't find much. You would expect some sort of folk memory of the terrifying enemy to the North that their entire order was founded to keep out?

Specifically, the NW don't seem to have any folk memory that the Others are vulnerable to dragonglass, even though previous generations of the night watch knew it so well that they buried caches of dragonglass weapons at strategic locations. Now, how such a staggeringly important piece of information could be forgotten is odd - but thats actually a pretty common theme in all of the books - nobody remembers anything about dragons either for example.

But the problem is the rather resigned way that Mormont says 'Always the artists'. He's seen this before? So many times that it has become tiresome? It seemed during the wight attack at Castle Black that that was the first time Mormont have ever seen a wight, and until this ranging, its not clear that he's ever seen an actual White walker before, much less the mutilated corpse art they sometimes leave in the snow.

Anybody else? Is it just me? Have I missed something?

[Nezzer]

I was glad to see this thread, because I had a real problem with the 'Always the artists' line from Mormont.

From the books I always got the impression that to most people, the Others have almost become mythical. Most people barely believe in them. This is reinforced several times in the show. People dismiss warnings about them. The Starks dismiss Old Nan's tales.

The NW are not most people, but while they may realise that there is something cold and horrible North of the wall, they don't know much about it. Tarly has to go off and hunt through dusty books for knowledge about them that has been lost, and he doesn't find much. You would expect some sort of folk memory of the terrifying enemy to the North that their entire order was founded to keep out?

Specifically, the NW don't seem to have any folk memory that the Others are vulnerable to dragonglass, even though previous generations of the night watch knew it so well that they buried caches of dragonglass weapons at strategic locations. Now, how such a staggeringly important piece of information could be forgotten is odd - but thats actually a pretty common theme in all of the books - nobody remembers anything about dragons either for example.

But the problem is the rather resigned way that Mormont says 'Always the artists'. He's seen this before? So many times that it has become tiresome? It seemed during the wight attack at Castle Black that that was the first time Mormont have ever seen a wight, and until this ranging, its not clear that he's ever seen an actual White walker before, much less the mutilated corpse art they sometimes leave in the snow.

Anybody else? Is it just me? Have I missed something?

Mormont? It was Mance who said that line, and yes, he must have seen that many times before.

[Joyful Union]

Maybe, but they also know that Sam never got surrounded by white walkers alone and then survived, but it didn't stop them from writing the scene. Even if the symbols some how do come up in future books it doesn't change the fact that they didn't come up in any of the books to date. So we can't just assume that they are important to the book story line because the show added them.

Yes, but there is precedence for that situation and in the books, with how they let Gared (book) and Will (show) escape. Maybe they want to strike fear into there human enemies maybe they feel it's dishonorable to not give humanity a fighting chance. The symbols may never turn up in the books, but they do indicate to a greater degree that the WW/Others are more than mindless killing machines, which hasnt really been brought up in the books yet.

[Tadco26]

There is nothing to suggest that they "let" Gared go, he was with the horses and fled, presumably on horse back. The show had the White Walker "let" Will go which was almost as silly, though you could at least imagine that maybe some how he fled to the horses or something. A stretch, but not quite as far as the one Sam's situation asks us to make.

Some people have speculated that they were let go as a warning, but in Sam's case that makes zero sense considering Sam saw them after the 3 horns, which means they had already been spotted at the Fist of First Men, and the wight tries to kill Sam in the very next episode when he is argueably even less threatening.

[TheDarkOne]

It's actually easy to understand.

By giving a certain amount of artistic flair to their "work," the viewer knows easily when someone has been killed by the Others, versus a normal conflict leading to loss of life.

I wouldn't be surprised if they sprinkle their "work" through different scenes as a way to keep them in people's mind. It's probably also fun for the writers to think of new "art."

I doubt highly there is anything as complicated here as some are thinking.