After watching the great video "Alt Shift X: Was Rhaegar the true hero of Game of Thrones?" that was posted up here - which has a brief discussion on whether Jon Snow is actually Lightbringer himself (not a theory I'm going to touch upon here) - it got me thinking about how the show represents magic, and what this might mean for the story in S8.
The show, while having a few fantasy elements, seems to ground itself in realism - with courtly intrigues and personal stories taking top priority, as well as showing gritty and unglamorous violence. Its approach to magic seems much the same, introducing only a few magical elements throughout the entire series and keeping them low key enough so that they don't interfere with the drama (compared to a series where magic is rife and so more or less anything can happen, undermining the dramatic stakes).
GoT has also taken pains to make its magic precedented, as moments where magic proves to be pivotal in the later seasons have already been demonstrated earlier in the show. For example, Dondarrion has been resurrected by R'hllor many times before Jon Snow is, so it doesn't feel as much like Deus Ex Machina. Likewise we've seen undead animals before Viserion is made into a wight, so this too doesn't feel terribly out of place.
Therefore given the show doesn't like to drop in new Deus Ex Machina style magic at pivotal moments, I was trying to think of how existing magic in the show could be worked into remaining unresolved storylines, especially combatting the Night King. I came up with...
What if Jon Snow dies, gets made into a wight, and then someone also tries to resurrect him by way of R'hllor too? This might overturn the Children of the Forest's magic, and or otherwise give him some sort of power to defeat the Night King. It also requires little to no exposition (which is good given the episodes will be tight for time if there's only 6 of them), as we've seen people become a wight in the show, and we've seen people being resurrected - putting those two elements together doesn't take any sort of leap for the audience.
Lastly, getting onto the GRRM quote, he said in an interview with Time magazine concerning R'hllor's resurrection, "[...] poor Beric Dondarrion, who was set up as the foreshadowing of all this, every time he’s a little less Beric. His memories are fading, he’s got all these scars, he’s becoming more and more physically hideous, because he’s not a living human being anymore. His heart isn’t beating, his blood isn’t flowing in his veins, he’s a wight, but a wight animated by fire instead of by ice, now we’re getting back to the whole fire and ice thing." Making someone simultaneously an ice wight and a fire wight seems very much an embodiment of, "He is the prince that was promised, and his is the song of ice and fire."
To me it matches the overall arc of Jon being the reluctant and self-sacrificing hero, and seems like a natural fit to the Azor Ahai prophecy. It's also one of those things that while it would be surprising doesn't feel unprecedented, because all those magical effects have been in the series already - they just haven't been combined in that way. In that regard the audience wouldn't feel cheated or that something had been plucked from thin air.
I'm not sure where this leaves Daenerys, maybe she makes Lightbringer by killing Viserion with something Valyrian Steel, if the old Lightbringer was made by Azor Ahai killing his wife - who knows!
What do you think to Jon Snow being wighted and revived again? What's your own personal theory about how the battle with the Night King might wrap?
Submitted November 28, 2017 at 06:39AM by HungryColquhoun http://ift.tt/2ncOAxG
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