Do you remember these scenes during which the Night King discussed his plan and motivations with his lieutenants? Me neither. The undead menace in the story is meant to be a monolithic, inscrutable force. The psychology, scheming, alliances and treasons are for the humans, so the existential threat they face does not need any complexity (even the origin story of the Night King is superfluous in my book) nor elaborate motivations. You are welcomed to speculate, but "Why?" is not a pertinent question when it comes to the Night King. The guy who sees things says "He will come for me" and the Night King does just that and that's upon this that the dramaturgy is built. I guess you could say it's a kind of McGuffin. Wanting to know why the Night King does what he does is a bit like wanting to see the secret nuclear plans in that suitcase to know if it's really worth chasing around for a whole movie.
I'm glad you brought up the origin story of the night king, because his very existence is contradictory with this point. Combine his origin with his deal with
Craster for male babies and you see he's not a force of nature, clearly he's capable of interacting and making alliances, and he was at one point a man. The story, multiple times, pointed toward his machinations. No, it didn't show
scheming, but it showed us enough to elaborate he was capable of doing more than mindlessly killing humans--as said, he SPARED humans who gave him what he wanted . Hell, Szli, the ONLY reason he seemed to have been created was to give the undead a reason to go after Bran
. Him existing was changing the undead from a force of nature into something wit
h specific motivations. And yes, to make that feel good you need to explain at least the basics why for actions that seem unfathomable and stupid. If you wanted a force of nature, a mindless zombie horde would have been the vehicle; even if you needed your Mcguffin to kill them all, he didn't need his origin, his connections, and his machinations (To create more Walkers) explained. But the NK was there to add a human element, an intelligence to the "force of nature", to specifically STOP it from being a force of nature and explain its odd behavior.
Until the writers got lazy and decided to make him a "
force of nature" again when they realized they needed him to act like a retard to get their episode to work. (I swear, whenever anyone uses existential threat or force of nature arguments, its almost always to try and explain bad writing. True forces of nature don't leave people confused, people understand random disasters--what they don't understand is trying to straddle both those worlds and making something act with intelligence when you want a personal antagonistic relationship for a character in one scene (Jon Snow) and then want random, story advancing events in the next scene.)
Do you remember these scenes where the Night King dodged dragon fire and narrowly escaped death when dueling Jon? Me neither. The tiger was never in any danger on his way to the goat. The storytelling made us think several times that he was, only to show he wasn't (He fell! Oh that did nothing... He'll get incinerated by dragon fire! Oh that did nothing... Jon will duel him! Oh he easily avoided the fight... Maybe Theon? Yeah, nope.... and then you conclude with Arya's 'yes, nope, yes').
Hey Szli, remember that time we got absolute confirmation Valyrian Steel could kill White Walkers?
How about that time we got confirmation Dragon Glass could too? You know the shit EVERY soldier there was armed with?
Guess what he was killed by Szli? Oh yeah...
the same weapon we saw kill White Walkers. Kind of makes pretty silly to say the tiger was never in any danger of the goat, when literally every goat was armed armed with material that could kill the tige
r literally on contact.
So no, we KNEW the tiger was in real danger. We had
CONFIRMATION the tiger was in danger when he died with exactly the material his kind was telegraphed to die with. What we DID NOT know was whether
dragon fire could be a danger, because Bran literally said "no one has ever tried"...But we DID KNOW the Night King could be killed. And the important thing is HE knew that too. Remember, the contradiction here is you used the White Walkers vulnerability as a REASON why they hung back and did nothing but look like a metal band...Except here you're claiming invulnerability is the reason big boy did not give a fuck. You're contradicting yourself (And contradicting the lore in the show) to try and explain lazy, lazy writing.
Do you remember these scenes where the fine people of Essos believed in what was coming their way and planned counter-measures? Me neither. What happened in Essos though was the first few steps of the 'de-high-fantasiation' of the dragons (damn they eat a lot and don't give a damn about who or what they eat, damn they get badly injured when they land in the middle of a bunch of random guys with bows and spears). Once in Westeros, was there any battle involving dragons where one did not end up killed or injured? Bronn shot a ballista at one during the attack of the convoy, the Night King sniped one during the northern escapade, they got toyed with during the defense of Winterfell and now one got shot down like a clay pigeon. In the land of fairy-tales, dragons are supreme beings and prophecies get realized. In the land of Game of Thrones, dragons kinda suck and prophecies have a pretty poor conversion rate. That's the point.
First, lets be clear here. Have you ever seen an actual balista fire, Szlia? I hate to tell you this, but siege engines on ships were not often used on other ships, because even hitting the broadside of a BOAT with them was
extremely difficult. So lets slow your roll with the "de-high fantasy", the biggest fantasy in that scene was the
medieval rail guns, okay? Lets not pretend science and modernity overcame fantasy here...Fantasy overcame fantasy. (And no, "internal logic" doesn't work here for saying those rail guns were symbolic of "science" in the show. Because in every other scene the shows internal logic matches real world physics for weaponry except when magical forces are at work. They actually go to great lengths to ensure various bits of accuracy. Those siege weapons were well outside the show's normal logic.)
Second, "de-high-Fantasy" and your example of a dragon dying is
literally to the high fantasy ice demon...Come
on. Bron Injured a dragon, yes. After that dragon took out
an entire army. And he was only able to do it because it was the first time Dany had even seen anything capable of reaching her dragons, and he got 2 free shots off on the thing. We saw a SINGLE shot land, and it didn't even knock the dragon out for more than an hour, despite hitting it dead on. Do you remember seeing those siege weapons upgraded?
Yeah, I didn't either. They kind of just magically became better, good enough to go from annoying a dragon, to punching right through one, off screen. Lazy, lazy, lazy writing.
Mrs. Haus
showed me a few tidbits of spoilerish info she had seen from a source which had a reasonable track record of accuracy. Before this season it would have been laughably preposterous that they would end the series that way. After these last few episodes I suddenly feel I owe this random internet source a deep felt apology. And now look forward more to watching the internet and fanbase explode than the actual conclusion episodes.
