do you have theories about the Others?
BOY HOWDY DO I.
WHO ARE THE OTHERS
Tolkien can say that Aragorn became king and reigned for a hundred years, and he was wise and good. But Tolkien doesn’t ask the question: What was Aragorn’s tax policy? Did he maintain a standing army? What did he do in times of flood and famine? And what about all these orcs? By the end of the war, Sauron is gone but all of the orcs aren’t gone – they’re in the mountains. Did Aragorn pursue a policy of systematic genocide and kill them? Even the little baby orcs, in their little orc cradles? The war that Tolkien wrote about was a war for the fate of civilization and the future of humanity, and that’s become the template. I’m not sure that it’s a good template, though. The Tolkien model led generations of fantasy writers to produce these endless series of dark lords and their evil minions who are all very ugly and wear black clothes. But the vast majority of wars throughout history are not like that.
NOW THIS. IS WHAT I ALWAYS GO BACK TO.
"but rani," you say, "isn't he doing aragorn's tax policies with [insert human character]? why do you focus on this with the Others?"
WELL. because the quote is about THEE dark lord and his evil minions. the entire concept he is criticizing is the idea of a species or a group that you can kill indiscriminately without any moral, ethical, or emotional concerns. He explicitly says that a war fought for the fate of humanity as a template for fantasy isn't a template he prefers (THAT MEANS NO WAR FOR THE DAWN AS THE CLIMAX MY GOD I'M SICK OF IT). So what this means to me is that-
the Others are not going to be a faceless mob intent to destroy humanity whose sentience we are allowed to disregard
the Others will not be dealt with in a manner as easy as "go to x place and use y weapon to destruct"
but let's stick with facts up front!
we know they want babies
we know they steal people in general - not just babies ("the others take you") but all people, any people they can
they thrive in night and cold
they have invaded at least once before
they can be injured with valyrian steel or dragonglass but not regular weapons
they are our only real example of "ice" magic (note that bran & brynden are doing a plant + blood combo magic)
they are not a hivemind - they are individuals, they mock, they laugh, they follow some sort of attack order
they have their own language
they have the ability to communicate with humans
The last few are, imo, kind of downplayed in general discussions especially when it comes to this "well the ending will be much more typical fantasy and they will be able to kill the others in a war for the dawn" sort of takes. because they aren't mindless killing machines and they haven't been since our introduction to them-
The Other said something in a language that Will did not know; his voice was like the cracking of ice on a winter lake, and the words were mocking. Ser Waymar Royce found his fury. “For Robert!” he shouted, and he came up snarling, lifting the frost-covered longsword with both hands and swinging it around in a flat sidearm slash with all his weight behind it. The Other’s parry was almost lazy. When the blades touched, the steel shattered. A scream echoed through the forest night, and the longsword shivered into a hundred brittle pieces, the shards scattering like a rain of needles. Royce went to his knees, shrieking, and covered his eyes. Blood welled between his fingers. The watchers moved forward together, as if some signal had been given. Swords rose and fell, all in a deathly silence. It was cold butchery. The pale blades sliced through ringmail as if it were silk. Will closed his eyes. Far beneath him, he heard their voices and laughter sharp as icicles.
This seems harsh but I'm gonna be real - is it any worse than Sandor laughing about riding Mycah down? Is it any worse than the sack of the Lhazarene village? Or Theon's raiding along the Northern shore? Is it any more unfair than the Red Wedding or even the Purple Wedding, their attack on Will and Gareth and Waymar here?
What it shows is is that the Others have language, have hierarchy, have humor, have emotion, have honor even - because the full party doesn't attack Waymar until after he's clearly been defeated by the Other he is dueling. They let him duel to the death. That is not a mindless horde that cannot be reasoned with! That is an Other that we don't understand but has its own Other culture.
The other thing I want to bring attention to is the stealing bit - we have another culture that regularly engages in stealing folks and thats the wildlings. They do this very explicitly for breeding/population rising. Which is to say - nothing that the Others do makes them ontologically evil. We see humans do exactly what they do, for their own flawed and evil reasons, and I think that's very much on purpose.
WHAT HAVE THE OTHERS DONE SO FAR
A lot of what we know about them is presumptive, but there is evidence for it. One thing is that they likely speak the same language as the Children of the Forest. Here's the bit from Will's chapter again-
The Other said something in a language that Will did not know; his voice was like the cracking of ice on a winter lake, and the words were mocking.
and here's how Bran describes the COTF language-
And they did sing. They sang in True Tongue, so Bran could not understand the words, but their voices were as pure as winter air.
It's very notable to me here that the Last Hero (and Brandon the Builder) had to learn the language of the COTF before defeating the Others. Old Nan tells us that the Last Hero went to the children after their armies had lost against the Others and that it was only then that Men were able to beat them back - but they don't beat them back, really, they just figure out how to cage them up with the giants. Because the Giants are capable of building things that the Others can't get through - we see this famously with the Wall, I imagine we will see it with Winterfell, and we also get this story from Arya-
She remembered a story Old Nan had told once, about a man imprisoned in a dark castle by evil giants. He was very brave and smart and he tricked the giants and escaped . . . but no sooner was he outside the castle than the Others took him, and drank his hot red blood. Now she knew how he must have felt.
So basically...the presumption is that the Last Hero sought out the COTF, learned their language, and built the Wall to keep the Others penned in rather than defeating them outright. The show seems to imply that the COTF, despite making the Others, don't know how to defeat them in any true sense, so if that holds true, again, it makes some sense to me in that it logically tracks with the information we already know. I think that also engages with the "tax policies" stuff as well - the first Brandon has to literally learn the language of his enemy before he is able to defeat them, but also cannot conceive of his enemy as being a People with a Culture and thus cannot truly defeat them, only trap them. Bran the Re-Builder, our Bran, however, will learn their language not to defeat them, not to slaughter them, but to negotiate with them. To actually bring an end to the conflict.
WHAT DO THE OTHERS WANT
NOW THE THING IS. I don't think the Others want total destruction.
Fire is love, fire is passion, fire is sexual ardor and all of these things. Ice is betrayal, ice is revenge, ice is...you know, that kind of cold inhumanity and all that stuff is being played out in the books.
So all these are grist for the mill, it's not something as simple as saying ice is this and fire is that. They're both many things. And one of the most important things is that both of them, ice and fire will kill you dead. So they're both dangerous in their own ways, hate, love, desire, coldness, they can both be deadly.
People usually use that first line to posit that the Others are the opposite of life but...I just don't think that holds true for several reasons. The first being - the dragons aren't unfeeling monsters either! If they are opposites, as in true parallels of each other, I think that implies sentience rather than the lack of it. The dragons are often equally associated with freedom as they are with violence. They aren't loyal creatures but they are loving creatures - we don't have any story of a dragon hurting its own rider, for example, but rather rejecting people attempting to mount them. This is likely to be true of the Others - associated with death but also, probably, something else (perhaps rebirth, similar to freedom?) and while they are brutal (like the dragons!) they have their own morality (again...like the dragons).
SEcondly - I think it's kind of an insane and dumb metaphor to make if the end result is that the flying nukes defeat global warming lmao. I just don't see where that makes any sense, that the Others have to be the enemy of life and are definitely only a stand in for evil and global warming and must be defeated. And this is a really pervasive theory, that regardless of how the Others are defeated, they have to be defeated in Battle.............it just doesn't track to me! This whole series is about, as George directly says, that wars are more complicated than that. This war will be more complicated than that!
So...what is the complication? Let's look at this chart I made-
(one with and without the backyard for legibility & also to cut). GET SIDHE-PILLED. There's a few options I go into here. I'm actually thinking it's probably a combination of a few things-
they want a homeland
they want more of themselves (see: wildling bridal stealing)
they want a change in the weather because their home is dying
You may be thinking "well those still seem pretty evil" and certainly they can be dangerous but not necessarily evil - an example I use with the dragons, being apex predators, also works here. When animals like lions, tigers, bears (oh my), orcas, sharks, whatever come too close to human beings, they tend to brutally kill humans. But why do they come into contact with humans? Because we invaded their homes first! Does the distinction that we encroached on their natural habitats matter to say, a person living in a village built on the edge of a forest, when the tiger is ripping their kids to death? And yet that tiger is not an evil being! Hell, orcas have always been fascinating to me, and they are honestly very similar to the Others, as well as humans - they are intelligent, they move in large family groups, they speak "languages", they are gleeful murderers who kill for sport, they are curious and can get along with humans as surely as they can hunt and kill them!
I think this might be applied to the Others because it is something they have in common with the Aos Si - a fierce protection, one might even call an overkill, of their homes. The ice has been melting for ten years! Who knows if someone accidentally kicked some shit over! I think it's likely that whatever the reason they are invading, there is a reason beyond "wiping out humanity" - otherwise they wouldn't have done it all of a sudden. Something triggered the invasion!
BUT WHAT ABOUT BRYNDEN AND THE CHILDREN
I think they are lying liars who lie. Brynden, first of all, is known for being a shady son of a bitch, I think it's silly to take what he's saying at face value. The Aos Si are difficult to treat with because they play mind games - and as my chart handily points out, the Children have just as much in common with the Fair Folk as the Others. I think they are misleading Bran - this is something the show does seem to confirm but even beyond that there's a lot of red flags.
I'm not saying "children evil, others good" rather I think both are going to act exactly like the Fair Folk which is to say they have their own agenda, they are playing mind games, and all this talk about ~defeating the long night~ is actually a front for getting Bran wedded to the trees so they can do {idk. something!} because they need his, and maybe several others, powers. Some things I think they may be concealing about the Others-
not only that they made the Others (very Frankenstein of them to create monstrous life and then abandon their Creation - and not very "good guy" behavior!!) but also that the Others are capable of some sort of thought
they are aware the Others can never truly be defeated/are otherwise misguiding Bran about the nature of the fight
they broke a pact made with the Others to stay in the Land of Always Winter and set this current Long Night in motion (whether maliciously or accidentally)
some sort of hivemind related to the weirwood also affects the Others' behavior, and the Children are aware that part of the invasion is an attempt to break the hivemind control and live freely (aka the heart of winter controls them, and potentially the dead singers Bran sees were on a quest from the Children/were killed by the Children themselves)
Notice how all of these are things that aren't necessarily evil but have evil consequences. I think all of these are also things that complement Bran's story - his whole story from beginning to end is structured around the Long Night and the Last Hero, therefore their ending has to complement his arc. I think the Others and the Long Night (and the dragons and the Second Dance) are going to cause apocalyptic levels of destruction across WEsteros - but when the solution is "make a pact with the Others" Bran has to be the one in a unique position to understand that making a pact is possible, and that the Others are complex creatures.
If the Others are victims of the hivemind somehow, or the Children caused the Long Night, I think this causes a huge moral crisis in Bran, especially as he himself suffers under the hivemind. But Bran is willing to see past the destruction because he himself has been destructive - not on an apocalyptic level, but to Hodor, someone he loves, someone who depends on Bran as much as Bran depends on him. Hodor, a man with a mind and a way of communicating that is Other but still human. The Pact that Bran will make will only come because Bran has learned not only that the Others can be reasoned with, but because Bran himself identifies with them - with their Otherness, and potentially with the reasons for their invasion.
