Game Of Thrones: 10 Things From The TV Show That WON'T Be In The Winds Of Winter
1. Everything With The Night King
In The Show:
Glimpsed for the first time in season 4, the Night King serves as the story’s ultimate big bad, providing a face for the White Walker threat as they gradually march towards the Wall to invade Westeros.
Revealed as the first White Walker, the Night King is depicted as the single unifying power that controls the entirety of their forces, and eventually ends up with a target on his back - for if he falls, they all fall.
His powers only grow as the show goes on, from converting babies to White Walkers with a single icy touch to raising the dead en masse, launching ice spears with tremendous force, and regarding Dragonfire as nothing but a cool breeze.
By the end, it begins to seem as though he’s completely impervious - until he meets Arya Stark, that is. With a single well-aimed Valyrian steel dagger thrust, Arya ends the Night King and the army of the dead once and for all, leaving most viewers asking aloud: “that’s it?”
Why It WON’T Happen In Winds:
As of the end of A Dance With Dragons, precious little is known about the White Walkers, or Others as they’re referred to on the page. What we do know is that the Night’s King is a very different figure in the books.
As opposed to the first of his species, the Night’s King is an infamous figure of whispered legend. The thirteenth commander of the Night’s Watch, he married a female Other and led a reign of tyranny and sacrifices until being brought down by the combined forces of the King-Beyond-the-Wall and the Starks of Winterfell.
It seems unlikely, then, that a single antagonist will suddenly reveal himself in the penultimate book, especially given that a character with a similar name has already been referenced as being long defeated, with a wildly different background.
What’s more, GRRM’s thoughts on the idea of a central, evil foe would suggest that he won’t be going down that path:
“We don’t need any more Dark Lords, we don’t need any more, ‘Here are the good guys, they’re in white, there are the bad guys, they’re in black. And also, they’re really ugly, the bad guys.”
However he chooses to end the threat of the faceless, mysterious Others, then, his storytelling over the course of ASOIAF indicates that it’ll be very different from what we saw in the show.