![]() ![]() Thus we can see that one of the main purposes of our author choosing to dress the Kingsguard in the exact symbolic language of the Others may be to imply their creator, Night’s King, as a dragon king. The picture fits pretty well, doesn’t it? Suddenly the throne room of Kings Landing looks like the Heart of Winter. Night’s King was said to be a man of the Night’s Watch at first, which puts him in black, and of course the very name “Night’s King” implies darkness and shadow. Try to picture the throne room of the Red Keep as the people of Westeros would have seen it for nearly three centuries: a dragon king and queen, dressed in black, surrounded by white shadow knights with armor like ice and snowy cloaks swirling about them. (Old Nan: “it be dragons, boy”)The Other-like Kingsguard was created by the dragon kings and queens to guard the dragon kings and queens, and their dragon-spawn as well. Who created the Kingsguard? Who did the Kingsguard guard, for almost all of their history? Well, let’s go back to the Kingsguard as symbolic proxies for the Others. The clear implication here is that the original Others would have been shadow clones of Night’s King, made from his seed and soul which he gave to Night’s Queen, and this brings us to today’s big question: so who was Night’s King, then? Who was this person from whom the Others were cloned? ![]() I mentioned last time that Melisandre’s shadow beings are actually shadow clones of King Stannis, and that the Others appear to be clones as well, since the six of them that we see in the AGOT prologue are all named as twins to one another. Okay, so let’s say Night’s King fathered the Others with Night’s Queen, who was some sort of magical, ice-transformed woman kind of like Melisandre, but cold. I feel pretty solid about that, and I hope you do too, lest we fall through the ice and drown, only to have our corpses hauled out of the ice lake by the Night King’s mysterious icy chains and turned into an ice dragon. We began our attempt to explore what this means in Origin of the Others: Night’s Queen, where I made the case that Night’s King and Queen were the ones who created the Others during the Long Night and led their invasion of Westeros. The first implication of this seems to be that the Others were created in part as a kind of Kingsuard for some sort of royalty, a King and / or Queen of the Others. In Symbolism of the Others: Kingsguard, we saw how the white knights of the Kingsuard are described with the same language as the white walkers, being white shadows armored in ice and snow and ghostly moonlight and all the rest, and thereby serve as symbolic stand-ins for the Others.
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