Game of Thrones question regarding the Wights/Zombies

[Samtemdo8_v1legacy]

And my question is very blunt becuase its speaks for itself.

Can the Zombies swim? Or straight up walk in water like it was in Curse of the Black Pearl?


Because of it they can, than why is the Wall even a thing if they can go around it by water?

TV Show wise they clearly show that the Wights are no hampered by water if they can pull Tormund in the water:

https://youtu.be/jstUSsF3We4?t=3m7s

And most famously, the wights can pull a dragon out from underwater (they don't show the wights underwater, but how did they manage to put chains on the beast while its underwater?)

I am just saying that there could be other options that the white walkers can take for bypassing the wall and if these zombies can drop from a high cliff and smack themselves on the ground only to stand up again, they can breath in water. Unless breaching through the Wall is more effiecent for undead zombies/skeletons than going around it through water?

 

[Avnger]

I am just saying that there could be other options that the white walkers can take for bypassing the wall and if these zombies can drop from a high cliff and smack themselves on the ground only to stand up again, they can breath in water. Unless breaching through the Wall is more effiecent for undead zombies/skeletons than going around it through water?

If I had to take a guess, the white walkers cannot swim (at least not well enough to go around the wall) and even if the wights could, they don't really have the capacity for planning such a thing. Also, if the white walkers need to go through the wall, it would make sense to throw their cannon-fodder wights at it to make the hole.

 

[KingsGambit_v1legacy]

If you mean as a mechanic to get south of the wall, they can't. If you mean for dramatic effect in localised melee, sure. The crux of the story is that Bran the Builder, descended of the first men and ancestor to House Stark, raised the wall and reinforced it with powerful magics to keep the White Walkers/Others and Night's King out of Westeros. As long as the wall stands, the world of men is safe. The dead cannot cross the wall while it stands.

There were a couple of exceptions. The most notable was the Wight that attacked Mormont in his room at Castle Black, from which Jon Snow saved him. My understanding of the accepted theory is that the Watch brought back a dead body after it had been killed but before it had been raised. Thus it wasn't a Wight when it crossed the magics of the wall.

In the books, there's a horn (I believe it's in the possession of Mance Rayder or Euron Grejoy, one of them (the former still alive in the books). This horn apparently has the ability to bring the wall down, I'm not certain what became of it. In the show, an undead Viserion brought the wall down, opening the way for the Night's King's army.

You can come up with clever ways, like swimming, being airlifted by Viserion, building a boat, but for the purpose of the story the Wall is a barrier as long as it stands. It's for that reason alone that the season 7 ending had the impact it did. Because in the 67th episode, the Wall that had kept the world safe for thousands of years came a' tumblin' down. It is the most significant development in Jon, Dany and Cersei's arcs and that drama cannot exist if the wights could just swim.

 

[Silvanus]

In the books, there's a horn (I believe it's in the possession of Mance Rayder or Euron Grejoy, one of them (the former still alive in the books). This horn apparently has the ability to bring the wall down, I'm not certain what became of it. In the show, an undead Viserion brought the wall down, opening the way for the Night's King's army.

The Horn of Joramun. Mance Rayder sought it in the wildling barrows far north of the Wall, and he threatens that he'll use it to bring the Wall down... but according to Ygritte, he never managed to find it in the barrows, and the threat was a bluff.

The horn that Euron Greyjoy had was a Dragonbinder, but he gave it to Victarion when the Iron Fleet headed to Essos. So Victarion's crew has it now. However, the Dragonbinder will supposedly kill whoever uses it, and that's just what happened to Cragorn (of Victarion's crew) who tested it.

 

[Palindromemordnilap_v1legacy]

Don't think more needs to be added to what KingsGambit said. The Wall is more than just a physical barrier, its magic. Its like how Gandalf could stop the Balrog despite, physically, one being a massive juggernaut of smoke and fire and the other being a tallish old man

 

[Samtemdo8_v1legacy]

Don't think more needs to be added to what KingsGambit said. The Wall is more than just a physical barrier, its magic. Its like how Gandalf could stop the Balrog despite, physically, one being a massive juggernaut of smoke and fire and the other being a tallish old man

But isn't there speculation that the Wall is actually made by the White Walkers themselves, when did Humans in this world worked up the magic to build a massive Ice Wall?

 

[Thaluikhain]

Don't think more needs to be added to what KingsGambit said. The Wall is more than just a physical barrier, its magic. Its like how Gandalf could stop the Balrog despite, physically, one being a massive juggernaut of smoke and fire and the other being a tallish old man

He's also a wizard, not a human, and was not allowed to die.

Makes me wonder if Gandalf the White died, would they send him back as Gandalf the Stripey or something until he did the job?

EDIT: Actually, that's sorta what you said, I misread you there.

 

[Palindromemordnilap_v1legacy]

Don't think more needs to be added to what KingsGambit said. The Wall is more than just a physical barrier, its magic. Its like how Gandalf could stop the Balrog despite, physically, one being a massive juggernaut of smoke and fire and the other being a tallish old man

But isn't there speculation that the Wall is actually made by the White Walkers themselves, when did Humans in this world worked up the magic to build a massive Ice Wall?

You had Old Valyria using sorcery to build shit only a few hundred years before the events of the story, why do you think the thousands-of-years-old Wall is out of the question?

 

[Samtemdo8_v1legacy]

Don't think more needs to be added to what KingsGambit said. The Wall is more than just a physical barrier, its magic. Its like how Gandalf could stop the Balrog despite, physically, one being a massive juggernaut of smoke and fire and the other being a tallish old man

But isn't there speculation that the Wall is actually made by the White Walkers themselves, when did Humans in this world worked up the magic to build a massive Ice Wall?

You had Old Valyria using sorcery to build shit only a few hundred years before the events of the story, why do you think the thousands-of-years-old Wall is out of the question?

Well are the Valryians even Human to begin with? They are practically proto High Elves.

 

[Silvanus]

But isn't there speculation that the Wall is actually made by the White Walkers themselves, when did Humans in this world worked up the magic to build a massive Ice Wall?

This wouldn't make any sense. The Wall was built following the Long Night, and is built with spells that specifically prevent the Others and their Wights from passing through-- the door that Samwell encounters beneath the Nightfort allows members of the Night's Watch to pass, but no others.

Humans built it under the direction of Brandon the Builder, who was a builder of legendary prowess (also responsible for Storm's End and other incredible feats of masonry).

Well are the Valryians even Human to begin with?

Yes. The Targaryens and Velaryons are old Valyrian families. They appear throughout the books, and are clearly human.

 

[DrownedAmmet]

In one of the books one of the characters somehow tastes the melting wall and it is said to taste "salty".
It's possible that the wall is simply made of salt water and that it's the salt that prevents the Wights from crossing the wall, and it's the salt water that prevents them from going into the sea
Would make some sense because salt has a long history of being purifying and harmful to ghosts and demons and the like

 

[Baffle]

Makes me wonder if Gandalf the White died, would they send him back as Gandalf the Stripey or something until he did the job?

I reckon they'd give him more and more ridiculous colours until he pulled his finger out and did it right. Gandalf the Cheesy Grin (https://www.dulux.com.au/colour/all-colours#!/colour/dulux_dulux_26827)

 

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

Its High Dark Fantasy. The answer is always Ancient Magics and the forgotten one's were very powerful.

 

[Silvanus]

In one of the books one of the characters somehow tastes the melting wall and it is said to taste "salty".
It's possible that the wall is simply made of salt water and that it's the salt that prevents the Wights from crossing the wall, and it's the salt water that prevents them from going into the sea
Would make some sense because salt has a long history of being purifying and harmful to ghosts and demons and the like

I don't think this is likely; when Cotter Pyke sails to Hardhome, he sends a letter back claiming that there are "dead things in the water". It's usually interpreted as meaning that the Wights (or perhaps other reanimated creatures) are lurking underwater.

 

[Terminal Blue]

I am just saying that there could be other options that the white walkers can take for bypassing the wall and if these zombies can drop from a high cliff and smack themselves on the ground only to stand up again, they can breath in water. Unless breaching through the Wall is more effiecent for undead zombies/skeletons than going around it through water?

So, there are no firm answers, but if I had to guess.

The TV show does the Others (the White Walkers) a bit of a disservice by making them very physical and basically look like some kind of super-zombies. In the books, they're explicitly magical creatures with almost fae-like qualities, and like fae in a lot of fantasy settings they seem to be governed by a lot of rules and superstitions. The wall isn't just a physical barrier, for example, it's also a giant protective ward which weakens the others or keeps them away.

So sure, the wights are just corpses and can definately go underwater. It's mentioned at one point, as Silvanus said. But it may be that the Others themselves can't cross the sea for supernatural reasons.

Well are the Valryians even Human to begin with? They are practically proto High Elves.

The Valyrians are basically a reference to mythic lost civilisations in Earth mythologies, particularly Atlantis, and follows directly on from other fantasy which uses this trope (in particular, Melnibone in the Elric series). They're also A Song of Ice and Fire's equivalent to the Roman Empire or the Classical World, in the sense of having presided over a kind of golden age which is now debased into the world we see in the books.

And we have no idea whether the magical or weird properties of Valyrians are a feature of all Valyrians, or only of the dragonlords (the ruling class of Valyria itself, of which the Targaryens are the only family remaining) or a little bit of both.

From what we know, nobility in Valyria seems to have been tied to ownership of dragons, and since the Valyrians used magic to control their dragons it makes sense that those families which rose to nobility would tend to be the most magically gifted. I mean, there are several families of Valyrian ancestry, and we are never given any indication that they're anything other than mundane. It would also explain why the practice of incest was supposedly common among the Valyrian nobility even before the doom.

 

[bastardofmelbourne]

It probably has some connection to the trait displayed by undead in old folk stories, where they couldn't cross bodies of running water. From a practical perspective, many of the wights are decayed nearly down to a skeleton and they would probably be dismembered by a strong tide.

I don't actually like how the show handled the White Walkers getting past the Wall, because it turned Jon and Daenaerys from "world's last hope" to "those two idiots who fucked up and gave the White Walkers a zombie dragon that they could break down the Wall with, thus dooming the world."

I would have preferred it if they'd used the magic horn aspect from the books. Keep the zombie dragon, just don't make him the means by which the wall collapses. That would even give a much better justification for the beyond-the-wall mission; they have to try and recover the horn before the White Walkers can use it.

The way the writers handled it, season 7 looks like a comedy of errors on the part of the heroes. Everything they try to do goes wrong, their efforts just result in meaningless losses or else actively backfire and give the villains exactly what they want, and at the end of it Cersei isn't even convinced that she needs to help them fight off the zombies. She's just planning to betray them with her fancy new mercenary army that she paid for with money she doesn't have.

(Seriously, she pays off her first massive debt by looting the Tyrells. Let's assume that a) the Tyrells had that much money lying around in the form of easily-looted gold bars, and b) that she manages to get it back to the city. Now she's paid back her first colossal loan, using a one-off gimmick that she can't reproduce because there's no-one else who has nearly as much money as the Tyrells, and the Iron Bank decides...to loan her more money. How do they think she's gonna pay that back?!)

Well are the Valryians even Human to begin with? They are practically proto High Elves.

They're human-ish. They had some innate ability to speak with dragons, and dragons had a direct connection to the existence of magic. People got all excited when Daenaerys' dragons were born because all their old magic spells started working again, though it's not clear if the dragons made the magic come back or if the magic was what brought back the dragons.

The point is, the dragons are magic, the Valyrians could talk to them on an almost telepathic basis, and the most recent descendant of the Valyrians - albeit one diluted by a few centuries of marrying Westerosi nobles - is Daenaerys, who is canonically fireproof.

So in some sense, the Valyrians are magic, though they're otherwise identical to humans, so you'd call them...I don't know...the genetic byproduct of a culture that fucked around with reality-altering forces for thousands of years.

 

[Samtemdo8_v1legacy]

So in the end, the answer is no, the Wight's can't walk underwater like in Curse of the Black Pearl?

But what about the White Walkers making an Ice Bridge around the wall?

I still believe it was the White Walkers who made the Wall and Bran the Builder was a made up legend to cover the real builders of the Wall.

 

[bastardofmelbourne]

But what about the White Walkers making an Ice Bridge around the wall?

Spoiler: Here is your answer

I still believe it was the White Walkers who made the Wall and Bran the Builder was a made up legend to cover the real builders of the Wall.

Nah. It doesn't make any sense for the White Walkers to build the wall when all the wall really does is keep out White Walkers (and the wildlings, by accident.) I mean, it can't be that the White Walkers built the wall to defend themselves from humans, because humans can cross the wall whenever they want. It's only wights going south that get shafted.

In the books, there's a little more hinted about this, because in the books the origins of the White Walkers are very different and have a lot to do with old myths about fairies, back when fairies were creepy eldritch fucks that abducted your children and not butterfly-winged Thumbelinas.

Basically, in the show, the Children of the Forest - who are the only fairy/elf/weird woodland humanoid race shown - made the White Walkers in a necromantic ritual to try and drive away the humans who were encroaching on their lands from the south. But they lost control of them, got rendered nearly extinct, and then the White Walkers started their cycle of seasonal zombie apocalypses, which prompted the humans and remaining Children to build the Wall to keep them out.

In the books, the Children of the Forest are more like the seelie [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classifications_of_fairies] ("good") fairies of Celtic folklore, who are associated with summer and growth, and the White Walkers are the unseelie ("bad") fairies, who are associated with winter and death. So they're really two factions of the same race. When the humans started settling Westeros, they first fought with and later made peace with the Children of the Forest, but the White Walkers took advantage of (or caused) Westeros' long winters to try and exterminate the human immigrants with successive zombie apocalypses. The Children of the Forest helped out the humans by teaching them how to build the Wall, which kept the White Walkers stuck in the very north end of the continent. In return, the gracious humans forgot all about the Children, the White Walkers, and the old peace pact, and later drove the race to extinction by cutting down too many weirwood trees. This is because George R. R. Martin believes that humans are fundamentally bastards.

(Interestingly, this seelie/unseelie distinction is also where fantasy RPGs got the idea of light elves and dark elves. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%B6kk%C3%A1lfar_and_Lj%C3%B3s%C3%A1lfar] The more you knoooowwww)

 

[Palindromemordnilap_v1legacy]

So in the end, the answer is no, the Wight's can't walk underwater like in Curse of the Black Pearl?

But what about the White Walkers making an Ice Bridge around the wall?

Again, like we said, the Wall is not just a physical barrier. Theres old and powerful magics in it and I highly doubt they can be circumvented by just taking a slight detour. Mostly because if they could, the White Walkers would have already done it

I still believe it was the White Walkers who made the Wall and Bran the Builder was a made up legend to cover the real builders of the Wall.

Why though? Why would they want to build a big ol' wall like that? And you argue that it can't have been the humans of the time since you didn't think they had that kind of "architecture-mancy"...but neither do the White Walkers. When have we ever seen them build anything let alone a big magic wall?

 

[Silvanus]

Basically, in the show, the Children of the Forest - who are the only fairy/elf/weird woodland humanoid race shown - made the White Walkers in a necromantic ritual to try and drive away the humans who were encroaching on their lands from the south. But they lost control of them, got rendered nearly extinct, and then the White Walkers started their cycle of seasonal zombie apocalypses, which prompted the humans and remaining Children to build the Wall to keep them out.

In the books, the Children of the Forest are more like the seelie [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classifications_of_fairies] ("good") fairies of Celtic folklore, who are associated with summer and growth, and the White Walkers are the unseelie ("bad") fairies, who are associated with winter and death. So they're really two factions of the same race.

This is theory; it's not been established what the origin of the Others is (if any is even eventually given). I severely doubt they are factions of the same species.

When the humans started settling Westeros, they first fought with and later made peace with the Children of the Forest, but the White Walkers took advantage of (or caused) Westeros' long winters to try and exterminate the human immigrants with successive zombie apocalypses. The Children of the Forest helped out the humans by teaching them how to build the Wall, which kept the White Walkers stuck in the very north end of the continent. In return, the gracious humans forgot all about the Children, the White Walkers, and the old peace pact, and later drove the race to extinction by cutting down too many weirwood trees. This is because George R. R. Martin believes that humans are fundamentally bastards.

This isn't correct; there has only been one major incursion by the Others in Westeros before (that we know of), during the Long Night (approximately 8300 years before the events of ASOIAF), though this event supposedly lasted for a generation.

There was one possible later incursion, in the time of Joramun and the Night's King, but only one possible Other was involved, and even that is uncertain.

They're human-ish. They had some innate ability to speak with dragons, and dragons had a direct connection to the existence of magic. People got all excited when Daenaerys' dragons were born because all their old magic spells started working again, though it's not clear if the dragons made the magic come back or if the magic was what brought back the dragons.

The nature of the connection between the Targaryens and the dragons is not certain, and could be nothing greater than a propensity for dragonlore and dragon husbandry.

One thing is for certain, though: there is definitely nothing innate to Valyrians in general that allows them to speak to dragons, or even to help them interact. The events of the Dance of the Dragons (the Targaryen civil war, not the book) make this abundantly clear.

Targaryens believed that only those of Targaryen family heritage would make suitable dragonriders, and thus allowed commoners to attempt to mount a dragon (in an effort to find suitable dragonriders during the war). The idea was that if they succeeded, there must be distant Targaryen blood in there somewhere.

They had... mixed success, to say the least, and there's no evidence that the connection truly existed, or whether it was Targaryen overconfidence in their own family mythology. Either way, plenty of people attempted-- Valyrians all-- and most failed miserably.

They are purely humans, and nothing more.

The point is, the dragons are magic, the Valyrians could talk to them on an almost telepathic basis, and the most recent descendant of the Valyrians - albeit one diluted by a few centuries of marrying Westerosi nobles - is Daenaerys, who is canonically fireproof.

This is also highly questionable. George R. R. Martin has stated [http://web.archive.org/web/20000615222300/http://www.eventhorizon.com/sfzine/chats/transcripts/031899.html] that the event in which Daenerys walked into the dragonfire was "unique, magical, wondrous"-- and that she probably wouldn't be able to do so again.