“Game of Thrones” creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have admitted they downplayed the story’s magical side, fearful of alienating viewers who came to “Game of Thrones” because it was a real drama, not a fantasy. Some have pinpointed this attitude as reflecting the bare minimum detail given to the White Walkers, the creation of the Night King as a singular big bad to overcome, and the army of the dead’s swift defeat with another cliche: kill the leader and all the drones keel over, “Phantom Menace” style.
While it’s easy to blame Benioff and Weiss, I have to ask: does even George R. R. Martin know how to finish the White Walkers’ story? The “Song of Ice and Fire” books remain infamously incomplete. “The Winds of Winter” still hasn’t blown into bookstores 13 years and counting since “A Dance With Dragons.”
The Others (the more common name in the books for the White Walkers) debut in the prologue to “A Game of Thrones,” cornering and killing three men of the Night’s Watch in an icy forest. Making this scene the very first chapter, and the repeated reminder in the first book that winter is coming, suggests the Others are the pivotal threat; they’re expanding south once more and humanity better watch out.
Five books and 3000+ pages later, the Others have appeared across maybe three dozen pages and almost nothing has been revealed. What knowledge there is comes from the POV characters’ observations of them. Unlike the silent White Walkers, the Others have a language, but one that’s incomprehensible to humans (their words sound like crackling ice). Their armor is made of ice and reflects light, thus the Others have a constantly shifting appearance based on their surroundings. They can be killed by obsidian/dragonglass and, perhaps, Valyrian steel.
If Martin has an origin for the Others, I’d say it’s probably the show one. There’s been some clear hints that the Others are transformed humans; the wildling Craster trades his newborn sons to them for safety, and the show explicitly says this is so the Night King can make the babies into new White Walkers. Plus, with how little the Children of the Forest factor into “Game of Thrones,” I can’t imagine Benioff and Weiss giving them such a pivotal role in the series’ mythology unless they heard it from Martin’s mouth.
But even if Martin does have a beginning figured out for the Others, he doesn’t seem to have an ending. I think it’s plausible that he hasn’t even figured out how to avoid the pitfalls the show fell into: how to keep the Others inhuman but not just ice Orcs, how to avoid a “heroes team up to fight the big bad” ending, etc.
The Night King has no clothes, for neither Martin nor Benioff & Weiss were able to knit the proper suit for these winds of winter.
