The Others - Tumblr Posts
The only thing that moves here is the light, but it changes everything.
THE OTHERS (2001) dir. Alejandro Amenábar
Oh Luz..
Credits:GGOGGOJI (Twitter)
“What gods?” Jon was remembering that they’d seen no boys in Craster’s Keep, nor men either, save Craster himself. “The cold gods,” she said. “The ones in the night. The white shadows.” “What color are their eyes?” he asked her. “Blue. As bright as blue stars, and as cold.” I just wanted to illustrate how look The Others in my head, so here we goooo
Reyna: I sleep with a sword beside my bed
Thalia: I have a bow and arrow ready in my sleep
Nico: I have an axe under my pillow
Will: I have two guns under my bed
Percy: Weak. Pathetic. All of you
Reyna: and what do you sleep with
Percy, putting on shades: ✨ Annabeth ✨
What do you think are the chances that the Others won't be portrayed as these pure evil monsters that need to be stopped but instead will have a sympathetic side.
I understand fandom wanting the Others to be more “humanely" complex, I really do. But I personally don’t think it’s narratively necessary or even interesting to do so. There's absolutely no emotional weight to making the Others "sympathetic" or more human. At least, there's no new themes to be surveyed when exploring this new narrative beat. Do the Others have a history of being systematically oppressed by humans? Not that we know of. Is there a massive power imbalance that heavily favors the humans over them? Not really. If anything, the Others will make easy work of humanity and its our heroes who will have to give everything and more to defeat them. Dany's dragons are certainly not big enough, Jon is struggling to get everyone on the same page, and Bran is a traumatized 9 year old boy with little control over his magic. Humanity's survival stocks are at an all time low at the moment....
Plus, GRRM has already explored these questions in Jon Snow's arc through the wildlings. We also have resolution there. Jon is making a new peace with them. Not only is he bringing them south of the Wall but he is also allowing them to take up posts in the NW (a group they historically warred against). He's allowing them to join Stannis' united realm and become one people with the rest of Westeros. We have a profoundly human conflict where GRRM explores themes of greed and prejudice (e.g., Bowen Marsh and some other members of the NW) measured against deep love and an honor-driven need to save all and any people (i.e., Jon - spoiler: it leads to his death). We have systemic resolution on the horizon plus there's inklings of a promise that the wildlings will be part of the dream of spring through the Gift. Spring, where new life flourishes and grows. If you want a humanized take on the conflict in the North, look no further than Jon Snow's chapters. And I think that's by design - Jon is, after all, the central protagonist in this space.
You wouldn't be able to successfully explore these themes with the Others because it's just too late in the story. GRRM has spent more time avoiding the Others than he has setting them up as characters in this story. I often see the theory that a new pact will need to be forged and the funny thing is that people think Jon will be the one to do it. Nevermind that he already forged a new pact with the wildlings and they start to think of him as their king......It would be quite unsatisfying to repeat this with the Others. We don't know them like we know the wildlings. We don't have a reason to care for their survival, for their children, their villages, or culture. And when it comes to pacts, I assume people are looking to the children of the forest as the blueprint. But the children are established as helpful if not sympathetic figures from the beginning. Bran's later chapters gives life to them and their dying magic. We have reason to care for their survival (the tragedy being that there's so few of them left now) because GRRM sends out one of our two central northern protagonists to them. The children are to Bran what the wildlings are to Jon. So it's a bit useless to use the same formula with the Others since the foundation isn't even there to begin with.
I can't speak for you personally but I think part of why some people want the Others to be sympathetic is because they don't want the typical fantasy battles. They want drama and suspense. Nevermind that I don't think this conflict ends with big battles, but we can have that through our very human protagonists. I assume GRRM is going to explore themes of self-sacrifice, greed, law and lawlessness, etc. on what our human heroes and antagonists do as the conflict unfolds. The Others imo are a vehicle to GRRM exploring what he has admitted to be the all encompassing theme in these books: the human heart in conflict with itself.
I also think it's important to consider that the Others are driven by magical elements that cannot be reasoned with. Do they bring the cold, or does the cold bring them? Either way, I like to think of them as a natural disaster in the same way that we experience tornadoes or tsunamis in the real world. Do you want to reason with a tornado? No. You don't look for morality in them. Instead, when they do happen, you ask yourself: how did the government react? how did systemic racism/classism etc relate to the casualties and response times? how did policy change and who did it? how did communities come together, if at all? We look to the human condition, and that is what GRRM aims to do. These questions are what will be the meat of the conflict against the Others. Not stock fantasy battles but actual human interaction as everything unfolds.
So to your question, I think it's very unlikely that the Others are portrayed as a sympathetic party especially with humanity as the bad guy. Because at the end of the day, the lesson there is just "humans bad". But given ACOK-AFFC with the plights faced by the smallfolk, ASOS and ADWD with Dany's campaign in Essos, and Jon's entire arc starting from ACOK to ADWD, there's nothing new there to discuss. We already know people do bad shit and that brings terrible consequences, so what else is new? Tell me something I don't know.
Sometimes the world of the living gets mixed up with the world of the dead.
The Others (2001) dir. Alejandro Amenábar
there are four kinds of drivers in this world
1. the regular shmegular driver. cautious and generally kind
2. the kind that drive like they’ve lost half their brain and don’t even notice
3. the kind that drive like they’ve lost half their brain and are convinced YOU stole it
4. the kind that drive like they’ve lost half their brain. a long time ago, actually. and at this point, they can’t be arsed to care
I love this idea, and thank you so much for the first submission! Just imagining the other Amy's trying to get a sense of everything looking around at all of this different world.
Thorn is surprised by how stable and healthy the plants are, Black Rose is shocked by how nothing sunken underwater, and Rusty is just surprised at everything in general. Then on the outside, Amy is just spazzing out, switching between an adventurous pirate, to an economic maniac, to a robot, and Sonic is just confused as hell and concerned on why his friend is acting like that.
And them being utterly shocked at Amy Rose herself. She's just all of them combined, more empathetic, and more stable. Rusty is the most shocked, seeing this sweet, cheerful girl who is supposed to be who she was a part of.
Luckily she has the other Rose's to comfort and reassure her, learning from what they see from Amy's point of view.
On the outside, Amy resumes back to normal, and she, Sonic and the others are confused on. Amy because she just randomly starting acting odd, Sonic because she's acting like the friends he's met, and the others because what just happened.
I have an idea for you: following the events of Prime and the Paradox Crystal being fixed, Amy and Sonic are hanging out when all of a sudden Rusty, Thorn, and Black try to front(almost like they’re trying to take over). They don’t know what to think of the original universe or Amy’s body(ESPECIALLY RUSTY). Do you like that?
top 20 pre-asoiaf characters as voted by our followers: → #14: the night’s queen (100 votes)
A woman was his downfall; a woman glimpsed from atop the Wall, with skin as white as the moon and eyes like blue stars. Fearing nothing, he chased her and caught her and loved her, though her skin was cold as ice, and when he gave his seed to her he gave his soul as well. He brought her back to the Nightfort and proclaimed her a queen and himself her king, and with strange sorceries he bound his Sworn Brothers to his will.
“What gods?” Jon was remembering that they’d seen no boys in Craster’s Keep, nor men either, save Craster himself. “The cold gods,” she said. “The ones in the night. The white shadows.” “What color are their eyes?” he asked her. “Blue. As bright as blue stars, and as cold.” I just wanted to illustrate how look The Others in my head, so here we goooo
THE OTHERS (2001) dir. Alejandro Amenábar
hi, i’d like to introduce my fic
The anatomy of a young Dark Lord is complicated. That of a mysteriously-alive Obscurial, doubly so. In which Tom Riddle manages to trap himself in his own Horcrux, Harry Potter has a (mostly) cooperative sister and a parasitic magical force that’s trying to kill him, the diary falls into the wrong hands, and Lord Voldemort has a plan.
My current WIP (well, one of my current ones) is Running From My Destiny.
Genre: Drama, with some hints of Suspense and Mystery
Rating: M, for the later books and portraying Death Eaters up close
Where: FFN or AO3!
Update schedule: Saturdays, ~1-2 PM EST
It’s a (hopefully) new spin on a few popular fanfic tropes, the combination of which I’m pretty sure I haven’t stumbled across yet: Harry Potter has a twin sister, and he’s an Obscurial, and Tom Riddle screws up the Diary Horcrux, and gets stuck, awake for fifty years, because a student experimenting with Dark magic can’t possibly go wrong... can it?
Oh, and the sister has nothing to do with the prophecy, so there’s no double Chosen One or WBWL subplot, for better or for worse.
It’s intended to be a plot-driven, full canon divergence/rewrite, exploring magical lore, morality and the path to evil, taking canon too literally and featuring a scarier-than-canon Voldemort, with influences from child psych and attachment theory, and free will. A lot of the first arc will be devoted to the missing scenes in the Riddle-era leading up to Myrtle’s murder, also.
Everyone is sympathetic if you get to know them well enough, but not everyone is good, and that’s okay.
P.S. I also did this mostly-canon character analysis of Tom/Voldemort a few weeks ago. And here’s another one where I mostly complain that he’s a badly written villain and pull character motivations out of nowhere.
First Year related posts and excerpts here.
Second Year related posts and excerpts here.
Third Year related posts and excerpts here.
Fourth Year related posts and excerpts here.
Sometimes I bleed.
The Others | 2001 | dir. Alejandro Amenábar
Some of my favorite Ghost Stories on film.
1) Casper
2) Personal Shopper
3) The Innocents (1961)
4) The Uninvited (1944)
5) Ringu (リング, "Ring")
6) The Haunting (1963)
7) The Stone Tape
8 ) The Shining (1980)
9) The Others (Spanish: Los otros)
10) The Sixth Sense
11) Kuroneko (藪の中の黒猫, "A Black Cat in a Bamboo Grove"; or simply "The Black Cat")
12) The Woman in Black (1989)
13) Any episode of BBC's A Ghost Story for Christmas
14) Kwaidan (怪談, "Ghost Stories")
15) David Lowery's A Ghost Story (Masterpiece.)
16) The Changeling
17) Hasta el viento tiene miedo (known in English as "Even the Wind is Afraid" and "The Wind of Fear")
18) Stir Of Echoes
The Others Bazaar UK June 2024
Could the fall of the wall be a little more… wet?
The wall in asoiaf is made of ice. When it’s hot it is described as “weeping” with melted parts flowing down the ice. Is it possible that when (if) the wall falls in story instead of being like a brick wall caving in it could be more like a Great Flood?
After all the easiest way to make all that ice go away is to let it run away on its own i.e. turn it into a giant wave! “Waking giants from the earth” could be earthquake but think back to the hammer of the waters or the creation of the neck. Both involved enormous amounts of water flooding after an earthquake. Maybe the fall of the wall could be the same, except being a land based tsunami post earthquake. (Meta narratively drawing upon the Great Flood myth GRRM might’ve learned about as a Catholic child)
Then the Others will surf all the way down to the God’s Eye and marry Jon snow at Harrenhal!
or something
I also could be completely wrong. But it’s a fun idea!