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The screaming started before I realized what was wrong.
By this point weve all sat together and watched around 50 minutes of wish fulfillment.
Yeah, sure, but its nothing we cant …
Ah, okay.
Thats … yeah, thats … Jesus, alright, thats fucked up.
If these guys move fast, they can …
Suddenly, people in the audience are screaming.
Why are people in the audience screaming?
Oh God, the dead child is awake.
And the final scene in the season-eight premiere reads like a textbook case of that approach.
Child wights also figure prominently in Hardhome, the White Walkers highest-casualty assault on Westerosi humanity to date.
The zombified children use the language of genre and metaphor to drive this point home.
The White Walkers see us as not as people, but as raw material.
What if theyre right?
Once again, its an aspect ofGOThorror that makes the connection between supernatural and human evil clear.
Consider two of the shows biggest battle episodes, Hardhome and The Battle of the Bastards.
Id imagine the Night King and his minions create their dismemberment art projects with a similar effect in mind.
Your existence is cruelly prolonged, but youre as mindless and dangerous as a sword in their hands.
That he deserved better than to be murdered and nailed to the wall is obvious.
I thought too of how Bram Stoker and Stephen King describe vampires inDraculaandSalems Lotrespectively.
Its not just that theyre mean-spirited, bloodthirsty, and possessed of dangerous powers.
Its that theyrewrong, somehow, in a way the humans who encounter them feel in their guts.
Theyre not just scared of the vampires; theyre disgusted by them.
They find them somehow lascivious and obscene in their persistence after death.
The obvious analogue here is, once again, Hardhome.
But hes not done with them yet.
The Night King murdered them.
Then he raised his arms and brought them back, erasing everything they used to be in the process.
