"He wants to erase this world, and I am its memory."
--Bran Stark, Game of Thrones (season eight, episode two)
Characters with serpentine hearts can serve as mirrors that affirm the complexity of human life, and few works of entertainment highlight this with the clarity of Game of Thrones. However, not every character in the show is particularly multi-faceted. In The Long Night, viewers finally see the Night King and his forces attack Winterfell, yet many have complained about the fact that he is ultimately killed without any final revelations about his past or objectives. His relative lack of motivation and complexity, especially when held up next to villains like Cersei Lannister or Ramsey Bolton (or Daenerys Targaryen, for that matter), has received intense criticism.
What many overlook is that simplicity can itself be deep in the right contexts. Indeed, a character can be deep without having an extensive backstory or complicated internal conflict, though such characters must usually be archetypes that are handled in very precise ways. Sometimes certain people forget that a simple idea or trait can still be powerful in its own right. It is when a character is expected to be more that some forget this fact.
Without the subversion of expectations, there would be no innovation in modern entertainment. This does not mean that all expectation subversion is clever or necessary, but the fact that a show known for its unconventional storytelling and subversion of expectations thwarted even more expectations is hardly surprising. Nevertheless, it is not as if nothing about the Night King's worldview or intentions came to light before his death. The Night King's motives, though somewhat simplistic, were clearly explained, at least in part, prior to the episode in which he died.
The Night King was anticipated by some to be a pseudo-Lovecraftian figure whose concerns, in a sense, transcend ordinary human affairs, with sheer coldness being his disposition towards humanity. Indeed, this is the version of the Night King that was realized in the show--to a certain extent. Though his motives are still somewhat unexplored in that there was never a large focus on them, miscellaneous pieces of dialogue from the past few seasons indicate that the Night King is a rogue weapon of sorts, originally created by the Children of the Forest to destroy the First Men.
After being transformed from a human into the Night King as we see him, he attempted to do exactly what he was made for: annihilate humanity. Turning on his creators, he commenced the first "Long Night," though he was eventually repelled for a time. His powers of necromancy allowed him to reanimate corpses for use as soldiers in an undead army. He sought to plunge the world into a perpetual night, its inhabitants brought into his legions after being claimed by death.
Some may wish that the Night King's personification of death involved something of a deeper characterization (myself being among them), but he is not a poorly written character. If the writers only wanted him to be the embodiment of death, hoping to overcome all life and subsume every formerly living creature into his army, then he was portrayed without error. The Night King was never (as far as the evidence suggests) intended to be anything other than a representation of death in the form of a tangible antagonist.
The most successful of simple villains are almost inevitably the ones that embody some thematic force, and the Night King is no different. Comparative simplicity does not mean that a villain poses no threat or that he or she is without justification for being included in the narrative. If every villain is nothing but a metaphorical character, then the metaphors become generic and the tropes shallow--but Game of Thrones has already provided numerous villains that do not fall into this category. The Night King served his purpose within the the overarching story, and the fact that he was unexpectedly killed by Arya without ever saying a word does not automatically cheapen his existence.
No comments:
Post a Comment