3 Questions People Still Have About the Night King in 'Game of Thrones'
The Battle of Winterfell has been and gone, and the epic war between the living and the dead turned out to be kind of... well, brief. Fans were surprised when the existential threat which has been been insidiously looming over the show since its very first episode was swiftly dispatched by a surprise stealth attack from Arya Stark. But there are still several unanswered questions when it comes to the White Walkers' mysterious leader, the Night King.
Why was the Night King immune to dragon fire?
The book series that Game of Thrones is based on is entitled A Song of Ice and Fire. And fans of the show have taken that to mean that, eventually, the show's two major supernatural elements, the White Walkers and the dragons (representing ice and fire) will meet. While preparing for battle in "The Long Night," Arya asks Bran if dragon fire will kill a White Walker, to which he replies: "I don't know. Nobody's ever really tried."
Later in the episode, Daenerys rains down dragon fire on the Night King, but it doesn't even melt one of his little icicle horns. Some viewers have taken it to mean that he is one of the original Targaryens, and is therefore immune to dragon fire just like Daenerys. It's entirely possible that the show-runners simply wanted to subvert viewers' expectations and present the Night King as invincible, which certainly adds to the shock value of that twist ending in the Godswood.
What was the significance of all those symbols?
The White Walkers make a brief, terrifying appearance in the opening scene of the very first episode of the show, during which they use body parts to create a symbol in the snow. In the first episode of season eight, "Winterfell," the Night King similarly uses the limbs of the Umber family to create a gruesome work of art at Last Hearth. The spiral is a replica of the circle of trees where the children of the forest originally transformed him from a human into the Night King. Was he simply co-opting their imagery for himself, or sending some kind of message?
Other fans have speculated that the spiral is similar to the three-headed dragon sigil of House Targaryen, which bolsters the theory that before he was turned, the Night King was an ancestor of Jon and Dany. We'll probably never know at this point.
What's the whole deal with winter now?
We've been told, ominously and repeatedly over the last years, that winter is coming. The existential threat posed by the White Walkers has been confirmed by George R.R. Martin himself as a metaphor for climate change. "There is-in a very broad sense-a certain parallel there," he said in an interview with the New York Times. "The people in Westeros are fighting their individual battles over power and status and wealth. And those are so distracting them that they’re ignoring the threat of ‘winter is coming,’ which has the potential to destroy all of them and to destroy their world."
The White Walkers have been presented as the personification of the cold and unyielding darkness of winter. Now that they have been dispatched, will summer soon return to Westeros? Or did the insurgence of wights simply happen to coincide with the onset of winter? It's unlikely that the show will spend any of its remaining time answering these questions, so we'll just have to hope that George R.R. Martin addresses them when The Winds of Winter is eventually published.
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