Game of Thrones (I'll use that name as it's a lot quicker to type) is very much about a world of grey morality. In the earlier books/seasons, it would be easy to essentially say Starks = Good, Lannisters = Bad. But of course it's a lot more complex than that. The Starks are really just one faction among many. We stick with them, and there's a hope in the series that they'll eventually return to claim Winterfell, but so much else is going on that we can't really use them as our basis for "who to root for."
Likewise, the Lannisters can't be written off as pure evil. For one thing, Tyrion is one of the story's most likable heroes (give or take a strangling.) But while Joffrey was an irredeemable piece of shit, we've learned to understand the actions of even the more villainous characters. Jaime's worst act (besides all the incest) was the attempted murder of Bran - definitely a bad thing to do, but an act done solely to protect his sister and children. Tywin and Cersei are more villainous and cruel, but they are also products of their environments - Tywin deeply worried that his family will fall as it threatened to do when his father was in charge, and Cersei mistaking thoughtless cruelty for cunning, but all in the interest of keeping her children safe.
We have plenty of examples of evil people, though they usually have some sort of understandable motivation. And we often see "good" characters in opposed positions. After all, the Battle of the Blackwater was essentially a fight between two villains, but we had Tyrion on one side and Davos on the other - neither of which we ever want to see come to any serious harm. Consider, for example, that until she hears from Barristan, Daenerys only knows Ned Stark as a ruthless killer - poetically casting him as being as cold as his homeland, when we, of course, remember Ned as a paragon of honor and virtue.
Game of Thrones is a fantasy series, but it's one in which the monsters - the threats to our heroes - are typically human. There's plenty of evil that humans are capable of to have a sufficient amount of drama. But that doesn't mean that actual monsters don't exist. In fact, the very first thing we see in the entire series (both book and show) is a group of Night's Watch rangers killed by wights and an Other/White Walker.
While there are multiple magical fantasy elements, two stand out as the most important. The first book and first season end with the birth of three dragons - the first in perhaps a century (I don't remember the timeline that precisely.) The dragons lend legitimacy to Daenerys, even though she has about as much control over them as a trio of wild beasts (who can fly and breathe fire.) They're too animalistic to really be thought of as heroes or villains. They are dangerous creatures that will probably prove extremely important to the future of Daenery's storyline.
But I'm not going to talk about dragons. It's the White Walkers that this post is about. (I'll use the show's nomenclature just because "Others" can easily be confused with other (see?) uses of the word.)
George R. R. Martin has waved away the rumors that started with the show naming their White Walker leader "The Night's King." The Night's King is a figure of legend - the 13th Lord Commander of the Night's Watch, who fell in love with a woman who sounds like a White Walker and then became an evil tyrant, using the Night's Watch as his personal army.
The show has revealed that, at least in infancy, the White Walkers can convert humans to be like them - we see the "White King" as I'll call him (oh shit, that's the main antagonist of my own story... um... "Walker King?" That's better.) Uh... we see the Walker King do so to one of Craster's babies. What are we to infer from this?
The thing is, we know next to nothing about the White Walkers. They aren't undead themselves (or at least not in the same way,) but they can raise the dead as mindless soldiers to fight for them. They seem to be made of some kind of magical ice that shatters when struck with an obsidian or Valyrian Steel blade (we can presume that dragon fire also does the trick.) They have weapons made of a special kind of ice that is far tougher than steel, and can go right through a conventional sword (we'll call it Ice-9.)
But what are they? And what, ultimately, do they want? Westeros was previously home to other kinds of creatures. The Children of the Forest were sort of elf-like beings, and the giants are, well, giants. These beings seem tied to the Old Gods (the Children probably taught humanity about the Old Gods - who are also a bit of a mystery, and far less broken-down than, say, the Seven.)
Ok, enough build up, let's get to my thesis. We've spent so much time in a world where you can't be certain where everyone falls on the moral spectrum. So what if we're somehow wrong about the White Walkers?
Now, clearly that's a lot to swallow. The White Walkers kill people and then raise them, forcing their mindless bodies to fight their own loved ones - to fight for the very army that they fought against. There's very little more terrifying than becoming what you already feared. The White Walkers violate their victims' freedom in the most fundamental way. One of the recurring themes of the story has been the way that people have their freedom and will taken away - through sexual violence, slavery, or torture (Theon/"Reek.") But what the White Walkers do goes beyond all of that.
Here's the thing, though. The Blackwater taught us that villains do not always fight heroes.
The Faith of R'hollor - the "Lord of Light" worshipped by Red Priests like Melisandre and Thoros of Myr - is, from what I gather, a kind of Manichaean religion. It is dualistic, with the Lord of Light on one side and the Great Other on the opposite side, representing evil. In this gnostic worldview, the physical world is evil (Melisandre says the only hell is the one they're living in already.) The "Great Other" sounds a hell of a lot like it could be related to the Others (aka White Walkers.) And it works particularly well given the way that R'hollor is associated with fire and heat, whereas the Others are associated with ice and coldness.
Plus it kind of ties into the whole "Song of Ice and Fire" name for the whole series.
The thing is, R'hollor seems... well it's hard to really think of him as totally good. Admittedly, there's a good chance (hinted strongly in the books) that much of the evil done in R'hollor's name is really coming from Melisandre's imprecise guessing at her Lord's will. Thoros, for example, seems way more benevolent, and his resurrection of Beric Dondarion seems a lot more in the vein of Lazarus than zombie necromancer. But still, even Beric's resurrections have a disturbing and less clearly benevolent side effect - the fact that Beric feels less himself each time, with his old personality fading away. And Melisandre's headlining miraculous act was a terrifying assassin made of pure shadow. Oh, and she really likes to burn people to death.
If the Great Other is really affiliated with the White Walkers, the evil of R'hollor almost seems like it should be balanced by some redeeming quality among them.
Consider this: there is a lot of power in the Old Gods, though it's a subtle power. The faith of the Old Gods has deep ties to nature, with a lot of the magic of the North having a clear connection with the natural (physical, see where I'm going with this?) world.
The faith of R'hollor abhors the physical world in favor of the spiritual one (if we're going by its probable real-life gnostic inspiration,) but that would put it in opposition not only to the White Walkers and their Wights (all physical, no spirit, we assume,) but also to the earthy, druidic faith of the Old Gods.
It's possible, then, that the White Walkers represent a kind of extreme defense of the physical world. Humanity drove the nature spirits, like the Children of the Forest, out of their former lands. Perhaps the White Walkers' goal is to "liberate" Westeros.
Certainly a stretch. While I'm reasonably confident about the dualistic reflection between R'hollor and the White Walkers, it's hard to imagine them as anything other than pure evil - at least from a human perspective. But then again, that's how we've always defined evil, so it applies.
And don't get me started on how the people in the Iron Islands worship Cthulhu. (Seriously, they do.)
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