Game Of Thrones: Why THAT Death Was A Mistake (& How It'll Be Different In The Books)
2. The Scouring Of The Shire
George R.R Martin hasn't given much away when it comes to the ending, but one of the things he's said he hopes it will be is "bittersweet". He in particular evokes Lord of the Rings, with Tolkien a well-known influence upon Martin and A Song of Ice and Fire, with one of the parts of that story he's spoken about in regards to the ending being The Scouring of the Shire.
That comes towards the very end of Return of the King, when the heroes have seemingly won the day. The return to the Shire to find it has been overtaken by Sharkey (formerly Saruman), and the Hobbits must fight some more in order to get it back. Beyond that, it then goes into chronicling what happens to the characters and their endings.
Martin has said he wants something in that kind of spirit, which would mean that the White Walkers have to be defeated just before the end, rather than actually being the end. As he told Rolling Stone, with a specific mention of the scouring, he said his fiction is not "a world where the good guys win and the bad guys lose, and at the end they live happily ever after."
In that sense, what Game of Thrones has done here could fit. The war is over, and yet the fighting has to continue. The issue is that, in terms of ASOIAF, there's probably nothing closer to be the Shire of this story than the North, and Winterfell more specifically. The Starks could be seen as being the Hobbits of the story - they aren't supposed to leave their home, and bad things happen when they do; they go off on a dangerous adventure, are inherently the 'good' guys and so on - but in the show, Winterfell has been almost completely destroyed. The Scouring of the Shire, in this sense, happens at the same time as The Long Night.
Read More: Game Of Thrones Season 8 Breakdown: What 'The Long Night' REALLY Means
That means there probably has to be more to the battle with the Others, and that they might make it beyond Winterfell, whether that's to King's Landing, or some other important location of Westeros lore, such as the Isle of Faces or the Trident. After all, you can't have a scouring of the Shire after the Great War, when the Great War itself scours the Shire. It might not be quite so literal a comparison either - rather it's simply the bittersweet tone - but it likely means something comes after the Others, while they can still be a major part of the endgame itself. Season 8 of Game of Thrones has effectively been split into two: the first three episodes are The Great War, and the final three are 'the last war" for the Iron Throne. I don't think Martin will do anything quite as clean as that, and while the lingering human relationships are what will matter, it probably won't be about the Iron Throne in the end in the same way the show is doing it.