#the wildlings

[sunstiana]

In The Snow… ❄️

[scorpiusartistry]

“A warrior princess, he decided, not some willowy creature who sits up in a tower, brushing her hair and waiting for some knight to rescue her.”

Some Val, the wildling.

[jellisdraws]

Their purpose, turned towards war.

Haaaaad to do the Wildlings in the Viltrumite art meme going around.

[eggpilled-maekarcel]

What do you think are the chances that the Others won't be portrayed as these pure evil monsters that need to be stopped but instead will have a sympathetic side.

I understand fandom wanting the Others to be more “humanely" complex, I really do. But I personally don’t think it’s narratively necessary or even interesting to do so. There's absolutely no emotional weight to making the Others "sympathetic" or more human. At least, there's no new themes to be surveyed when exploring this new narrative beat. Do the Others have a history of being systematically oppressed by humans? Not that we know of. Is there a massive power imbalance that heavily favors the humans over them? Not really. If anything, the Others will make easy work of humanity and its our heroes who will have to give everything and more to defeat them. Dany's dragons are certainly not big enough, Jon is struggling to get everyone on the same page, and Bran is a traumatized 9 year old boy with little control over his magic. Humanity's survival stocks are at an all time low at the moment....

Plus, GRRM has already explored these questions in Jon Snow's arc through the wildlings. We also have resolution there. Jon is making a new peace with them. Not only is he bringing them south of the Wall but he is also allowing them to take up posts in the NW (a group they historically warred against). He's allowing them to join Stannis' united realm and become one people with the rest of Westeros. We have a profoundly human conflict where GRRM explores themes of greed and prejudice (e.g., Bowen Marsh and some other members of the NW) measured against deep love and an honor-driven need to save all and any people (i.e., Jon - spoiler: it leads to his death). We have systemic resolution on the horizon plus there's inklings of a promise that the wildlings will be part of the dream of spring through the Gift. Spring, where new life flourishes and grows. If you want a humanized take on the conflict in the North, look no further than Jon Snow's chapters. And I think that's by design - Jon is, after all, the central protagonist in this space.

You wouldn't be able to successfully explore these themes with the Others because it's just too late in the story. GRRM has spent more time avoiding the Others than he has setting them up as characters in this story. I often see the theory that a new pact will need to be forged and the funny thing is that people think Jon will be the one to do it. Nevermind that he already forged a new pact with the wildlings and they start to think of him as their king......It would be quite unsatisfying to repeat this with the Others. We don't know them like we know the wildlings. We don't have a reason to care for their survival, for their children, their villages, or culture. And when it comes to pacts, I assume people are looking to the children of the forest as the blueprint. But the children are established as helpful if not sympathetic figures from the beginning. Bran's later chapters gives life to them and their dying magic. We have reason to care for their survival (the tragedy being that there's so few of them left now) because GRRM sends out one of our two central northern protagonists to them. The children are to Bran what the wildlings are to Jon. So it's a bit useless to use the same formula with the Others since the foundation isn't even there to begin with.

I can't speak for you personally but I think part of why some people want the Others to be sympathetic is because they don't want the typical fantasy battles. They want drama and suspense. Nevermind that I don't think this conflict ends with big battles, but we can have that through our very human protagonists. I assume GRRM is going to explore themes of self-sacrifice, greed, law and lawlessness, etc. on what our human heroes and antagonists do as the conflict unfolds. The Others imo are a vehicle to GRRM exploring what he has admitted to be the all encompassing theme in these books: the human heart in conflict with itself.

I also think it's important to consider that the Others are driven by magical elements that cannot be reasoned with. Do they bring the cold, or does the cold bring them? Either way, I like to think of them as a natural disaster in the same way that we experience tornadoes or tsunamis in the real world. Do you want to reason with a tornado? No. You don't look for morality in them. Instead, when they do happen, you ask yourself: how did the government react? how did systemic racism/classism etc relate to the casualties and response times? how did policy change and who did it? how did communities come together, if at all? We look to the human condition, and that is what GRRM aims to do. These questions are what will be the meat of the conflict against the Others. Not stock fantasy battles but actual human interaction as everything unfolds.

So to your question, I think it's very unlikely that the Others are portrayed as a sympathetic party especially with humanity as the bad guy. Because at the end of the day, the lesson there is just "humans bad". But given ACOK-AFFC with the plights faced by the smallfolk, ASOS and ADWD with Dany's campaign in Essos, and Jon's entire arc starting from ACOK to ADWD, there's nothing new there to discuss. We already know people do bad shit and that brings terrible consequences, so what else is new? Tell me something I don't know.

[thequeenofsastiel]

Man, fuck all these GoT prequels, I want a damn sequel. I want to see how big Drogon gets. I want to know what he did with Daenerys' corpse. If he's capable of changing his sex so that he can lay eggs, and spawns a new age of dragons. I want to know if slavery returns to the Bay of Dragons once the former slavers get wind of the fact that they'll no longer have to fear Daenerys coming after them.

I want to know if the cold in the north diminishes to the point where there's no more snow and everything is green like it was when the Children created White Walkers in the first place. Are cold and snow purely a byproduct of the creation of the White Walkers, and only exist in Westeros? After all, we didn't see anywhere in Essos have anything resembling cold weather. True, nowhere in Essos is as far north as the North in Westeros, but even Braavos, which geographically is about as far north as the boundary between North and South in Westeros, didn't seem to be cold at all by the time Arya left, even though it was snowing in the Vale over two years earlier. Will seasons go away? Will it just be that the cold goes away in places where there is cold, or will the South become uninhabitable because of an increase in heat? Putting that aside, if the cold does go away, how does that affect the population of the North? Will there be a massive influx in population? How will the loss of the cold affect Jon and the Free Folk? After all, Tormund didn't like that it was even slightly less cold south of the wall.

What ended up happening to the Dothraki? Did they stay in Westeros? And if they did, did they have the same attitude about roaming from place to place, sacking cities? How did the population of Westeros deal with that? And what did Arya discover to be west of Westeros?

Idk, I just feel like a continuation of GoT(with better showrunners) would be so interesting.

[misskittysmagicportal]

Matilda Lutz you were great as Red Sonja and all, but I'mma need to remind you that Rose Leslie did her first

[fortunate-hal]

Skinchangers and wargs belonged in Old Nan's stories, not in the world he had lived in all his life. Yet here, in this strange bleak wilderness of rock and ice, it was not hard to believe.

The lands beyond the Wall as depicted in the Finnish special edition of A Clash of Kings illustrated by Petri Hiltunen.

[palominojacoby]

Before Mance, Varamyr Sixskins had been a lord of sorts. He lived alone in a hall of moss and mud and hewn logs that had once been Haggon's, attended by his beasts. A dozen villages did him homage in bread and salt and cider, offering him fruit from their orchards and vegetables from their gardens. His meat he got himself. Whenever he desired a woman he sent his shadowcat to stalk her, and whatever girl he'd cast his eye upon would follow meekly to his bed.