Game Of Thrones: Why THAT Death Was A Mistake (& How It'll Be Different In The Books)

6. The Lack of Night King

Straight away, there is one clear and monumental way that George R.R. Martin's story will differ from that being written by D.B. Weiss and David Benioff, which is that, quite simply, the Night King doesn't exist in the world of A Song of Ice and Fire.

The Game of Thrones showrunners introduced us to the Night King in Season 4's Oathbreaker, and made him a huge deal in Hardhome, when he stared down Jon Snow and raised the dead. He was the leader of the White Walkers, inserted into the story to give viewers a 'proper' villain figure to root against, rather than simply the hordes of White Walkers. He grew in power, by getting a dragon, and he even got a semblance of backstory, in that he was a man, turned into the first White Walker by the Children of the Forest. Come Season 7, we'd learned that to win the war, all that needed to happen was for the Night King to be killed. He turned all of the others, so if he dies, they die, which is what happens in The Long Night.

Read More: Game Of Thrones: Is The Night King A Targaryen?

While you can understand why the showrunners felt it necessary to include the Night King, in order to give audiences someone to know and root against, it also somewhat misses the point of them in the books. The Others are a mysterious, magical force. They are literally death. They're "demons made of snow and ice and cold." They don't need a leader for that very reason; they're a force of nature. To defeat them isn't to defeat one supervillain, this isn't taking down a Lord Voldemort or even a Ramsay Bolton, but to simply delay death (all men must die, after all).

The books do tell of the Night's King, a bit of semantics that could be confusing, but for all intents and purposes that doesn't really matter. The Night's King is a legend. He was the 13th Lord Commander of the Night's Watch, he fell in love with a woman "with skin as white as the moon and eyes like blue star." He made himself King and her his Queen, and together they ruled from the Nightfort, making sacrifices to the Others before being defeated by Brandon the Breaker and Joramunn, the King-Beyond-The-Wall. The notion of the Night's King could be revisited in some capacity - there's solid evidence that he was a Stark, and those sacrifices could tie into the Others in a broad sense - but he's not going to turn up in the story's present, and nor is the person we know as the Night King in the show.