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My argument here is that a lot of people see The Princess Bride as kids when their parents show them whereas parents probably aren’t showing their kids Scarface but it seems there’s a case to be made here that The Princess Bride is very American

I need help winning a debate on whether more people have seen Scarface or The Princess Bride

-I think more people have seen Scarface but I’ve only seen The Princess Bride

-I think more people have seen The Princess Bride but I’ve only seen The Princess Bride

-I think more people have seen Scarface but I’ve only seen Scarface

-I think more people have seen The Princess Bride but I’ve only seen Scarface

-I think more people have seen Scarface and I’ve seen both

-I think more people have seen The Princess Bride and I’ve seen both

-I think more people have seen Scarface and I’ve seen neither

-I think more people have seen The Princess Bride and I’ve seen neither

-I’m bald

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I need help winning a debate on whether more people have seen Scarface or The Princess Bride

-I think more people have seen Scarface but I’ve only seen The Princess Bride

-I think more people have seen The Princess Bride but I’ve only seen The Princess Bride

-I think more people have seen Scarface but I’ve only seen Scarface

-I think more people have seen The Princess Bride but I’ve only seen Scarface

-I think more people have seen Scarface and I’ve seen both

-I think more people have seen The Princess Bride and I’ve seen both

-I think more people have seen Scarface and I’ve seen neither

-I think more people have seen The Princess Bride and I’ve seen neither

-I’m bald

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If you’re still accepting requests… Arya and Missandei please and thank you 🩷

the little scribe and the little acolyte

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Songs will come to you in the most perfect, diabolical time and many of them will be by fleetwood mac

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🕷️MANDA🕷️

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Don't you think that Dany's 'marriage' to fire in AGOT had sexual undertones? The fire heat feeling like a lover's breath, she shrugged her clothes off while entering the pyre, her thinking of having sex with Drogo one last time and seeing him in smoke, her milk flowed out from her breasts and then dragons are hatched from eggs who were drinking the same milk. It's like she consummated the marriage and got children.

It's not just her marriage to fire, but also her first mounting of Drogon that has sexual undertones. Although I wouldn't even call it understones - when you listen to the audiobook, the narrator straight up pulls the same voice he does when characters are having sex during these scenes. It's there and it's purposeful. I've talked about it a bit, and I've reblogged some stuff - there's this post analyzing that scene as the bride of fire and I've also mentioned it here that the stallion who mounts the world could very well be Dany because Drogon is the child born from her and Drogo.

She had sensed the truth of it long ago, Dany thought as she took a step closer to the conflagration, but the brazier had not been hot enough. The flames writhed before her like the women who had danced at her wedding, whirling and singing and spinning their yellow and orange and crimson veils, fearsome to behold, yet lovely, so lovely, alive with heat. Dany opened her arms to them, her skin flushed and glowing. This is a wedding, too, she thought.

She imagines the women who danced in provocative ways (and were eventually....sexual partners? raped? mounted? idk, but with other men at the wedding), her skin is "flushed"

And now the flames reached her Drogo, and now they were all around him. His clothing took fire, and for an instant the khal was clad in wisps of floating orange silk and tendrils of curling smoke, grey and greasy. Dany's lips parted and she found herself holding her breath. Part of her wanted to go to him as Ser Jorah had feared, to rush into the flames to beg for his forgiveness and take him inside her one last time, the fire melting the flesh from their bones until they were as one, forever.

Dany took the torch from Aggo's hand and thrust it between the logs. The oil took the fire at once, the brush and dried grass a heartbeat later. Tiny flames went darting up the wood like swift red mice, skating over the oil and leaping from bark to branch to leaf. A rising heat puffed at her face, soft and sudden as a lover's breath...

In the show, she steps into the fire wearing her wedding dress, in the books she strips down before she goes in. She is not someone's "fiery bride" she marries the fire and becomes the bride of fire to become the mother of dragons. she already is the bride of fire - she doesn't need to marry someone else to be the bride of fire, we saw her marriage on the page in the very first book. And in the last book, we see her consummation-

Dizzy, Dany closed her eyes. When she opened them again, she glimpsed the Meereenese beneath her through a haze of tears and dust, pouring up the steps and out into the streets. The lash was still in her hand. She flicked it against Drogon's neck and cried, "Higher!" Her other hand clutched at his scales, her fingers scrabbling for purchase. Drogon's wide black wings beat the air. Dany could feel the heat of him between her thighs. Her heart felt as if it were about to burst. Yes, she thought, yes, now, now, do it, do it, take me, take me, FLY!

And of course this goes back into that one line I used from the post about the Others - that fire represents (among many things) sexual ardor, and this is very true for Dany. The fire is her lover, and through their marriage and consummation she births her dragons, gives flesh to their fire, and becomes their mother. This is also why I don't really think Dany is going to be killed as a Nissa Nissa - she already experienced that-

"A hundred days and a hundred nights he labored on the third blade, and as it glowed white-hot in the sacred fires, he summoned his wife. 'Nissa Nissa,' he said to her, for that was her name, 'bare your breast, and know that I love you best of all that is in this world.' She did this thing, why I cannot say, and Azor Ahai thrust the smoking sword through her living heart. It is said that her cry of anguish and ecstasy left a crack across the face of the moon, but her blood and her soul and her strength and her courage all went into the steel. Such is the tale of the forging of Lightbringer, the Red Sword of Heroes.

Note the cry of ecstasy and the crack on the moon-

She heard a crack, the sound of shattering stone. The platform of wood and brush and grass began to shift and collapse in upon itself. Bits of burning wood slid down at her, and Dany was showered with ash and cinders. And something else came crashing down, bouncing and rolling, to land at her feet; a chunk of curved rock, pale and veined with gold, broken and smoking. The roaring filled the world, yet dimly through the firefall Dany heard women shriek and children cry out in wonder. And there came a second crack, loud and sharp as thunder, and the smoke stirred and whirled around her and the pyre shifted, the logs exploding as the fire touched their secret hearts. She heard the screams of frightened horses, and the voices of the Dothraki raised in shouts of fear and terror, and Ser Jorah calling her name and cursing. No, she wanted to shout to him, no, my good knight, do not fear for me. The fire is mine. I am Daenerys Stormborn, daughter of dragons, bride of dragons, mother of dragons, don't you see? Don't you SEE? With a belch of flame and smoke that reached thirty feet into the sky, the pyre collapsed and came down around her. Unafraid, Dany stepped forward into the firestorm, calling to her children. The third crack was as loud and sharp as the breaking of the world.

Drogon's cracking, after Dany has experienced a "marriage" of ecstasy to her fire, is loud as "the breaking of the world" just as Nissa's cry cracks the moon, just as the dragons cracked the moon in Doreah's story-

"He told me the moon was an egg, Khaleesi," the Lysene girl said. "Once there were two moons in the sky, but one wandered too close to the sun and cracked from the heat. A thousand thousand dragons poured forth, and drank the fire of the sun. That is why dragons breathe flame. One day the other moon will kiss the sun too, and then it will crack and the dragons will return."

And note that the day this all happens, the red comet appears-

When a horselord dies, his horse is slain with him, so he might ride proud into the night lands. The bodies are burned beneath the open sky, and the khal rises on his fiery steed to take his place among the stars. The more fiercely the man burned in life, the brighter his star will shine in the darkness. Jhogo spied it first. "There," he said in a hushed voice. Dany looked and saw it, low in the east. The first star was a comet, burning red. Bloodred; fire red; the dragon's tail. She could not have asked for a stronger sign.

The Dothraki named the comet shierak qiya, the Bleeding Star. The old men muttered that it omened ill, but Daenerys Targaryen had seen it first on the night she had burned Khal Drogo, the night her dragons had awakened. It is the herald of my coming, she told herself as she gazed up into the night sky with wonder in her heart. The gods have sent it to show me the way.

It's almost like a wound in the sky - she cracked the moon and now it bleeds dragons once again.

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Dany and Hrakkar pelt

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I glimpsed my future.

（double slit experiment )

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I MET ANDY WEIR AT COMIC-CON AHHHHH

He was so nice and I got to ask a question in the audiobook panel about the influences of real life biology on the theoretical biology in PHM and when I said I was an evolutionary biologist, all three panelists kind of smiled and nodded and looked excited and it was so cute! He’s one of my all time favorite authors and I could’ve cried. I did tear up when they played the movie trailer in the panel. Comic con was so exhausting but it was so good 🥹

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Sansa

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I’m at SDCC and it’s so funny like yeah I’m gonna spend a bunch of time and money making these costumes so I can wear them to go stand in line and spend money and it’s going to be one of my favorite parts of the year

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I want to know what's in Sansa's haters' water that makes them revere GRRM as a God among mortals when it comes to writing but also believe that the thousands of words he's dedicated to Sansa as a character are actually for nothing and will lead to nothing.

Ya, this is what I've been getting at when people are like "well where she ends up doesn't matter" like are you closing your eyes when you read her chapters? Where she ends up does matter a whole hell of a lot actually, we have several thousand words on how much it matters in fact!!

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Dany and Jhogo comm for @daen7kat

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another reason why I love the idea of prophet Theon: multiple times when people are thinking about how annoying Theon's smiles are, they say it's because it makes it look like he knows some secret. just imagine how much more obnoxious he could be if the Gods were actually telling him some juicy goss.

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the three eyed crow

No, it's not Brynden. It’s Bran.

FIRST -> WHY THE CROW IS NOT BRYNDEN

the short answer is "he literally doesn't even know who the crow is." but let's dig into that.

"Are you the three-eyed crow?" Bran heard himself say. A three-eyed crow should have three eyes. He has only one, and that one red. Bran could feel the eye staring at him, shining like a pool of blood in the torchlight. Where his other eye should have been, a thin white root grew from an empty socket, down his cheek, and into his neck. "A … crow?" The pale lord's voice was dry. His lips moved slowly, as if they had forgotten how to form words. "Once, aye. Black of garb and black of blood." The clothes he wore were rotten and faded, spotted with moss and eaten through with worms, but once they had been black. "I have been many things, Bran. Now I am as you see me, and now you will understand why I could not come to you … except in dreams."

The last greenseer, the singers called him, but in Bran's dreams he was still a three-eyed crow. When Meera Reed had asked him his true name, he made a ghastly sound that might have been a chuckle. "I wore many names when I was quick, but even I once had a mother, and the name she gave me at her breast was Brynden."

He does not know what Bran is referring to even a little bit when Bran refers to him as the three eyed crow. He does use the "flying" metaphor but never once does he make any sort of reference to the three eyed crow - and nor do the singers. Also notable here that Brynden's imagery is often similar but slightly to the left of of the three eyed raven - Brynden has "a thousand eyes and one" instead of three eyes, and he is from raventree hall and associated with ravens more often than crows.

"but visenyas hill" you say, "greenseers don't know what form they appear in when they visit other people, so maybe he just didn't know he appeared as a crow to bran?" excellent point! CHART!

These ^^ are all the beings that appear in greendreams. There's a few interesting things here - firstly, that there seems to be two weirwood trees communicating through dreams, and the second is that the three eyed crow is significantly more active than any of the others. The Three Eyed Crow talks to Bran, teaches Bran, even makes fun of Bran a bit in a jokey manner. The weirwood Bran sees only ever says Bran's name...and the thing is that that adds up with what Brynden has said-

Now I am as you see me, and now you will understand why I could not come to you … except in dreams. I have watched you for a long time, watched you with a thousand eyes and one. I saw your birth, and that of your lord father before you. I saw your first step, heard your first word, was part of your first dream. I was watching when you fell.

WATCHING. And if you look at the chart, who is just watching? It's the old weirwood with the twisted mouth. The crow isn't just "watching" he is actively teaching Bran - often painfully. Brynden doesn't acknowledge that aspect at all. And again - he refers to himself as having "a thousand eyes and one" watching and not with his third eye.

So to sum up

Brynden never refers to his third eye and does not refer to himself as a crow

Brynden says he "watches" Bran, which the weirwood with the twisted mouth does, while the crow is significantly more active in Bran's dreams

The old twisted weirwood does not acknowledge the presence of the crow while Bran is dreaming either

Brynden's mother's sigil is....a weirwood with ravens.

A slight detour!

SECOND -> NOW WHY IS JAIME IN IT?

Simply put, I included him because he is a constant spector in Bran's dreams. He's also a spector that the crow is aware of! The crow directly tells Bran to "put that dream away" and Bran responds by suppressing the memory of the golden man. But he can't hide from what he knows because later on, after a full book of pretending like he doesn't know who pushed him, Bran hears them talking about Jaime being Joffrey's father, and it immediately resparks his nightmares.

What's interesting to me is that this incident of falling, of being pushed, this forbidden knowledge, it's so tied to Bran's magic. Falling is what jump starts his magic. The mere memory of Jaime restarts it again, before he once again pushes it down. And Jojen's dream of the winged wolf imo ties into this a bit - Jojen mentions that bran still won't fly even after his third eye has opened. Coincidentally, after Bran's third eye opens, he suppresses Jaime successfully. I think part of Bran's problem with connecting to his magic is because he won't name the golden man, and he won't acknowledge his grief over what happened to him.

Also notable is that the same book Jojen says Bran refuses to fly is when Jaime has his first funky magical dream. Most of it is about Jaime himself but there's that little section where Brienne asks what it is they are chasing - she asks if it's a cave lion (haha, Lannister), a direwolf (hmmm), or some bear (bc the pit), and Jaime says it's "doom. only doom." The direwolf being mentioned in his dream is important to me - we know Jaime loves to dissociate and suppress his feelings, and I think the direwolf appearing speaks to his own feelings on what he's done to the Starks he's come into contact with. I think it's also interesting that the next time we see Bran, he is being told that he should not fear the darkness, but the darkness is what Jaime fears in his dream. For both of them, what they fear is the truth being brought into the light. The darkness only brings doom but the darkness is familiar, and so much less terrifying than the light of day.

Is this relevant to who the three eyed crow is? Well, again, I think it's relevant that the three eyed crow tells Bran to forget about Jaime and "put him away" for now. The Three Eyed crow just seems a bit more engaged, a bit more aware of what it is Bran is struggling with.

NOW FOR THE REAL MEAT AND POTATOES -> WHY THE THREE EYED CROW IS BRAN

Well first of all if it's not Brynden there's really only one other person it could be. But let's dig in - first to the other weirwood, the sapling in Jon Snow's dream. He sees (as the chart says) a weirwood that is "no more than a sapling" that is growing as Jon watches, and directly has Bran's face...and three eyes. And while the ravens certainly love to say weird shit, I think it's very notable that they don't start saying his name until ADWD - imo, it's Bran getting stronger, figuring out easier how to communicate.

Later on, Theon has a very similar experience where he sees Bran's face in the weirwood tree in Winterfell, and hears the maester's ravens saying his name and calling for him to go to the weirwood. Both of these in conjuction make me believe that

the weirwood with the twisted mouth is different than the sapling weirwood -> they are not the same person, and potentially not aware of each other

the sapling weirwood is the three eyed crow

the ghost attempting to talk to Theon is not Brynden - this is obvious, because it's Bran, that's directly stated, but Bran is using not just his face in the weirwood but the ravens saying Theon's name to communicate...

And if you look a the chart, this happens with Jon as well!

Bran is trying to reach them both and he's doing it through dreams, the Winterfell weirwood specifically, and the maester's ravens

And following the "suspicious behavior" train of thought, Coldhands himself is incredibly suspicious. "Your monster, Brandon Stark." is so weird and the ravens echoing really brings that point home. Coldhands is directly talking about the three eyed crow....and calls him "bran's monster." But no one else does this. Brynden doesn't. Leif doesn't. It's because the three eyed crow is a monster Bran made, and Bran made himself into a monster.

The one dream that involves the three eyed crow that I haven't talked about yet is Jojen's - the dream of the crow trying to free the winged wolf. I think there's two ways to see this and the first is obvious: it's Bran trying to free himself. I've gone into here and a few other places why I think Bran is time traveling, and I think it's likely this is future, Three Eyed Crown Bran in all his monstrous glory, attempting to free our current, chained to the ground Bran. But even discounting the time travel aspect, I think it also makes a certain sort of sense if it's Bran trying to get himself free - it's right as Bran's third eye first starts creaking open that Jojen gets this dream! The chains are GREY and the Maesters are referred to as “grey rats” and the like due to their robes. And at this time, Bran is no longer dreaming because Maester Luwin is giving him droughts to cause dreamless sleep!

The other idea is that it's Bran attempting to free Jon Snow. We know Bran is attempting to communicate with Jon, as I outlined above, around this time. We know Jon has been ignoring all his wolf dreams, but especially during ACOK. And what is a Targaryen-Stark child but a wolf that can fly? The chains that the crow is trying to break are even Stark grey - Jon is chained down by his belief that he is Ned's Stark bastard, and not Lyanna and Rhaegar's!

I really think it could be either! But the three eyed crow, the crow trying to free the winged wolf, the crow that knows exactly how distracting Jaime is to Bran, the crow who interacts with Bran and teaches him to fly and shows him the North and the Others and Jon's death, rather than just calling his name? The crow that is described by Coldhands as "a friend" and "a monster" both? That's all Bran babeeee.

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weird sex anons aside: where is all the bald dany art? That bitch's hair fucking BURNT and everyone is too cowardly to draw her bald. Wig??? Snatched. Do you hear me? Do you see my vision????????

BALD DANY BALD DANY BALD DANY BALD DANY

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do you have theories about the Others?

BOY HOWDY DO I.

WHO ARE THE OTHERS

Tolkien can say that Aragorn became king and reigned for a hundred years, and he was wise and good. But Tolkien doesn’t ask the question: What was Aragorn’s tax policy? Did he maintain a standing army? What did he do in times of flood and famine? And what about all these orcs? By the end of the war, Sauron is gone but all of the orcs aren’t gone – they’re in the mountains. Did Aragorn pursue a policy of systematic genocide and kill them? Even the little baby orcs, in their little orc cradles? The war that Tolkien wrote about was a war for the fate of civilization and the future of humanity, and that’s become the template. I’m not sure that it’s a good template, though. The Tolkien model led generations of fantasy writers to produce these endless series of dark lords and their evil minions who are all very ugly and wear black clothes. But the vast majority of wars throughout history are not like that.

NOW THIS. IS WHAT I ALWAYS GO BACK TO.

"but rani," you say, "isn't he doing aragorn's tax policies with [insert human character]? why do you focus on this with the Others?"

WELL. because the quote is about THEE dark lord and his evil minions. the entire concept he is criticizing is the idea of a species or a group that you can kill indiscriminately without any moral, ethical, or emotional concerns. He explicitly says that a war fought for the fate of humanity as a template for fantasy isn't a template he prefers (THAT MEANS NO WAR FOR THE DAWN AS THE CLIMAX MY GOD I'M SICK OF IT). So what this means to me is that-

the Others are not going to be a faceless mob intent to destroy humanity whose sentience we are allowed to disregard

the Others will not be dealt with in a manner as easy as "go to x place and use y weapon to destruct"

but let's stick with facts up front!

we know they want babies

we know they steal people in general - not just babies ("the others take you") but all people, any people they can

they thrive in night and cold

they have invaded at least once before

they can be injured with valyrian steel or dragonglass but not regular weapons

they are our only real example of "ice" magic (note that bran & brynden are doing a plant + blood combo magic)

they are not a hivemind - they are individuals, they mock, they laugh, they follow some sort of attack order

they have their own language

they have the ability to communicate with humans

The last few are, imo, kind of downplayed in general discussions especially when it comes to this "well the ending will be much more typical fantasy and they will be able to kill the others in a war for the dawn" sort of takes. because they aren't mindless killing machines and they haven't been since our introduction to them-

The Other said something in a language that Will did not know; his voice was like the cracking of ice on a winter lake, and the words were mocking. Ser Waymar Royce found his fury. “For Robert!” he shouted, and he came up snarling, lifting the frost-covered longsword with both hands and swinging it around in a flat sidearm slash with all his weight behind it. The Other’s parry was almost lazy. When the blades touched, the steel shattered. A scream echoed through the forest night, and the longsword shivered into a hundred brittle pieces, the shards scattering like a rain of needles. Royce went to his knees, shrieking, and covered his eyes. Blood welled between his fingers. The watchers moved forward together, as if some signal had been given. Swords rose and fell, all in a deathly silence. It was cold butchery. The pale blades sliced through ringmail as if it were silk. Will closed his eyes. Far beneath him, he heard their voices and laughter sharp as icicles.

This seems harsh but I'm gonna be real - is it any worse than Sandor laughing about riding Mycah down? Is it any worse than the sack of the Lhazarene village? Or Theon's raiding along the Northern shore? Is it any more unfair than the Red Wedding or even the Purple Wedding, their attack on Will and Gareth and Waymar here?

What it shows is is that the Others have language, have hierarchy, have humor, have emotion, have honor even - because the full party doesn't attack Waymar until after he's clearly been defeated by the Other he is dueling. They let him duel to the death. That is not a mindless horde that cannot be reasoned with! That is an Other that we don't understand but has its own Other culture.

The other thing I want to bring attention to is the stealing bit - we have another culture that regularly engages in stealing folks and thats the wildlings. They do this very explicitly for breeding/population rising. Which is to say - nothing that the Others do makes them ontologically evil. We see humans do exactly what they do, for their own flawed and evil reasons, and I think that's very much on purpose.

WHAT HAVE THE OTHERS DONE SO FAR

A lot of what we know about them is presumptive, but there is evidence for it. One thing is that they likely speak the same language as the Children of the Forest. Here's the bit from Will's chapter again-

The Other said something in a language that Will did not know; his voice was like the cracking of ice on a winter lake, and the words were mocking.

and here's how Bran describes the COTF language-

And they did sing. They sang in True Tongue, so Bran could not understand the words, but their voices were as pure as winter air.

It's very notable to me here that the Last Hero (and Brandon the Builder) had to learn the language of the COTF before defeating the Others. Old Nan tells us that the Last Hero went to the children after their armies had lost against the Others and that it was only then that Men were able to beat them back - but they don't beat them back, really, they just figure out how to cage them up with the giants. Because the Giants are capable of building things that the Others can't get through - we see this famously with the Wall, I imagine we will see it with Winterfell, and we also get this story from Arya-

She remembered a story Old Nan had told once, about a man imprisoned in a dark castle by evil giants. He was very brave and smart and he tricked the giants and escaped . . . but no sooner was he outside the castle than the Others took him, and drank his hot red blood. Now she knew how he must have felt.

So basically...the presumption is that the Last Hero sought out the COTF, learned their language, and built the Wall to keep the Others penned in rather than defeating them outright. The show seems to imply that the COTF, despite making the Others, don't know how to defeat them in any true sense, so if that holds true, again, it makes some sense to me in that it logically tracks with the information we already know. I think that also engages with the "tax policies" stuff as well - the first Brandon has to literally learn the language of his enemy before he is able to defeat them, but also cannot conceive of his enemy as being a People with a Culture and thus cannot truly defeat them, only trap them. Bran the Re-Builder, our Bran, however, will learn their language not to defeat them, not to slaughter them, but to negotiate with them. To actually bring an end to the conflict.

WHAT DO THE OTHERS WANT

NOW THE THING IS. I don't think the Others want total destruction.

Fire is love, fire is passion, fire is sexual ardor and all of these things. Ice is betrayal, ice is revenge, ice is...you know, that kind of cold inhumanity and all that stuff is being played out in the books.

So all these are grist for the mill, it's not something as simple as saying ice is this and fire is that. They're both many things. And one of the most important things is that both of them, ice and fire will kill you dead. So they're both dangerous in their own ways, hate, love, desire, coldness, they can both be deadly.

People usually use that first line to posit that the Others are the opposite of life but...I just don't think that holds true for several reasons. The first being - the dragons aren't unfeeling monsters either! If they are opposites, as in true parallels of each other, I think that implies sentience rather than the lack of it. The dragons are often equally associated with freedom as they are with violence. They aren't loyal creatures but they are loving creatures - we don't have any story of a dragon hurting its own rider, for example, but rather rejecting people attempting to mount them. This is likely to be true of the Others - associated with death but also, probably, something else (perhaps rebirth, similar to freedom?) and while they are brutal (like the dragons!) they have their own morality (again...like the dragons).

SEcondly - I think it's kind of an insane and dumb metaphor to make if the end result is that the flying nukes defeat global warming lmao. I just don't see where that makes any sense, that the Others have to be the enemy of life and are definitely only a stand in for evil and global warming and must be defeated. And this is a really pervasive theory, that regardless of how the Others are defeated, they have to be defeated in Battle.............it just doesn't track to me! This whole series is about, as George directly says, that wars are more complicated than that. This war will be more complicated than that!

So...what is the complication? Let's look at this chart I made-

(one with and without the backyard for legibility & also to cut). GET SIDHE-PILLED. There's a few options I go into here. I'm actually thinking it's probably a combination of a few things-

they want a homeland

they want more of themselves (see: wildling bridal stealing)

they want a change in the weather because their home is dying

You may be thinking "well those still seem pretty evil" and certainly they can be dangerous but not necessarily evil - an example I use with the dragons, being apex predators, also works here. When animals like lions, tigers, bears (oh my), orcas, sharks, whatever come too close to human beings, they tend to brutally kill humans. But why do they come into contact with humans? Because we invaded their homes first! Does the distinction that we encroached on their natural habitats matter to say, a person living in a village built on the edge of a forest, when the tiger is ripping their kids to death? And yet that tiger is not an evil being! Hell, orcas have always been fascinating to me, and they are honestly very similar to the Others, as well as humans - they are intelligent, they move in large family groups, they speak "languages", they are gleeful murderers who kill for sport, they are curious and can get along with humans as surely as they can hunt and kill them!

I think this might be applied to the Others because it is something they have in common with the Aos Si - a fierce protection, one might even call an overkill, of their homes. The ice has been melting for ten years! Who knows if someone accidentally kicked some shit over! I think it's likely that whatever the reason they are invading, there is a reason beyond "wiping out humanity" - otherwise they wouldn't have done it all of a sudden. Something triggered the invasion!

BUT WHAT ABOUT BRYNDEN AND THE CHILDREN

I think they are lying liars who lie. Brynden, first of all, is known for being a shady son of a bitch, I think it's silly to take what he's saying at face value. The Aos Si are difficult to treat with because they play mind games - and as my chart handily points out, the Children have just as much in common with the Fair Folk as the Others. I think they are misleading Bran - this is something the show does seem to confirm but even beyond that there's a lot of red flags.

I'm not saying "children evil, others good" rather I think both are going to act exactly like the Fair Folk which is to say they have their own agenda, they are playing mind games, and all this talk about ~defeating the long night~ is actually a front for getting Bran wedded to the trees so they can do {idk. something!} because they need his, and maybe several others, powers. Some things I think they may be concealing about the Others-

not only that they made the Others (very Frankenstein of them to create monstrous life and then abandon their Creation - and not very "good guy" behavior!!) but also that the Others are capable of some sort of thought

they are aware the Others can never truly be defeated/are otherwise misguiding Bran about the nature of the fight

they broke a pact made with the Others to stay in the Land of Always Winter and set this current Long Night in motion (whether maliciously or accidentally)

some sort of hivemind related to the weirwood also affects the Others' behavior, and the Children are aware that part of the invasion is an attempt to break the hivemind control and live freely (aka the heart of winter controls them, and potentially the dead singers Bran sees were on a quest from the Children/were killed by the Children themselves)

Notice how all of these are things that aren't necessarily evil but have evil consequences. I think all of these are also things that complement Bran's story - his whole story from beginning to end is structured around the Long Night and the Last Hero, therefore their ending has to complement his arc. I think the Others and the Long Night (and the dragons and the Second Dance) are going to cause apocalyptic levels of destruction across WEsteros - but when the solution is "make a pact with the Others" Bran has to be the one in a unique position to understand that making a pact is possible, and that the Others are complex creatures.

If the Others are victims of the hivemind somehow, or the Children caused the Long Night, I think this causes a huge moral crisis in Bran, especially as he himself suffers under the hivemind. But Bran is willing to see past the destruction because he himself has been destructive - not on an apocalyptic level, but to Hodor, someone he loves, someone who depends on Bran as much as Bran depends on him. Hodor, a man with a mind and a way of communicating that is Other but still human. The Pact that Bran will make will only come because Bran has learned not only that the Others can be reasoned with, but because Bran himself identifies with them - with their Otherness, and potentially with the reasons for their invasion.