Plus one to everything Bruce astutely said. I'll take a stab as well.
Derived Absurdity wrote:I've not been watching this season, obviously, but I've been hearing about what's happening, and you two are the only people online who don't want to burn the scriptwriters alive, so I'll ask a few questions:
1) Apparently all the White Walkers and the Night King were dispatched easily in one episode. Is that not problematic after building them up as this terrifying cataclysmic Final Boss for almost eight seasons straight? That seems extremely anti-climactic to me to say the least. Also, it doesn't seem like they're a climate change metaphor anymore, since climate change can't be solved that easily.
2) Do we even know what their deal was? What they even wanted? Who was the Night King and what did he want? This might have been answered in the four or so seasons I haven't watched admittedly.
3) Considering that they were basically defeated in a day (or whatever) and Cersei didn't even have to lift a finger to do it, doesn't that justify her original opinion that they were never a big deal in the first place and everyone was being silly for overreacting to them? In fact doesn't that justify the attitude pretty much the whole world in general had, since they never thought they were a big deal and it turns out that they were not, in fact, a big deal?
4) I guess Arya killed the Night King, or something. Why? Wouldn't it have made better sense for Jon do it, since the Night King was part of his story, not hers? Sort of like how Voldemort was Harry Potter's to kill and Darth Vader was Luke's to kill and whatnot. Arya was just some random girl. The Night King wasn't hers to kill, story-wise, it seems to me. Also it seems to reinforce the idea that he was never a big deal if he was able to be killed by some random teenager with a knife, lol.
JAQ!
1. The actual battle lasted one episode but it didn't feel anti-climactic to me. The story about the undead effectively began with the first episode, and the focus of the recent seasons was increasingly towards them. So, overall 70 episodes dealing with the looming threat of the Night King and three for the petty people stuff afterwards - GoT's bread and butter - isn't a bad mix.
The climate change metaphor still fits IMO - it was not solved that easily as it required the unconventional, ground-breaking unity of a large number of disparate groups of people and it also resulted in mass casualties.
2. Their single-minded pursuit is to destroy the world and they want to start with Bran as he is the world's "memory" as the Three Eyed Raven, a position he is made to adopt in season 6. The undead were always envisioned as an evil "force of nature", and in the story they were created originally by the Children of the Forest in a bid to protect themselves against the First Men IIRC (but that back-fired because the undead wanted to kill everything, including their creators). Going back to the metaphor, the undead situation is akin to how climate change can totally fuck us up and take us back to a dead world where we lose all of our progress (aka Bran) if we let it.
3. Well, they were a big deal but Cersei's position was meant to illustrate how myopic people can be even in the face of obvious doom. Just because "good" people were able to save the world doesn't mean the dumb idiots protecting their petty interests were right. Cersei had no idea if the North would be able to stop the undead. She just knew they would die first and that was enough for her. She reasoned that if dragons couldn't stop the army of the undead, there was no way her armies would be able to.
4. Judging by what Bruce said, it looks like the "promised one" prophecy is developed differently in the books. On the show, it is emphasized that the prophecy does not mention the gender of the savior. There was early foreshadowing in S2 that Arya would have a role to play in the battle against the undead, and GoT has always kind of gone against fantasy tropes - characters who appear to be destined for heroic shit end up falling short and characters who appear to be heading towards some kind of classic epic show-down do not get it. Without going into too much detail, let's just say Arya is certainly not a random teenager with a knife and instead someone who earns the kill.