(Spoilers AGOT) The most subtly heartbreaking thing in the books in my opinion is that..

(Mods, I'm not going to put the entire post under spoiler tags. For people reading this, consider it all Spoilers All and you should stop reading now if applicable.)

Because when you have a set of books that's like 7,000 pages long and over the entire course of that series only two characters are mentioned as being entities whose names must not be spoken, it is quite reasonable to assume that those characters are related, both for Checkov's and Occam's reasons.

Ah, but for that argument to hold water, you must still assume Bran is related to the Night's King. Even is we assume the Night's King and the Great Other are related (which they probably are), if Bran and the King share the same name only because they are Starks and lots of Starks are called Brandon (and this happened in the story before—I doubt there's any connection between Brandon the Shipwright and Bran), then you can't make the Bran → Night's King → Great Other connection because the Bran → Night's King link is missing.

"LOL EVERYONE SAYS THAT"

Not what I said. What I said is that you're basing your argument on what you personally think would make a good story, because there isn't any foreshadowing or anything in the books to suggest Bloodraven is working with the Others. Most of what you pointed out is circumstantial evidence—they support what you're saying; however, if it turns out you're wrong, then it simply meant you misinterpreted the evidence. I don't think that would make a good story, so I'm less willing to accept circumstantial evidence.

"the literary value/consistency of that theory is not an argument in favor of the theory"

Not what I said, again. I'm saying that GRRM has used both ironic and non-ironic twists in his writing, so you cannot predict that Bran's story will have an ironic twist. We say the sun rises every morning because it has done so countless of times in the past. But if the sun only rises randomly every day, can you say it will rise tomorrow?

"well the show..." (a potential divergence which is neither evidence of one thing or the other until both the show and the books have finished)

Let's get something out of the way. The only reason we can even talk about the Night's King is because the show confirmed it's a significant character. If we are to disregard the show, we have no reason to believe the Night's King is anything more than a mythical character that doesn't even exist. Or that he was just a random dude who fell in love with an ice dudette but otherwise has no connection to the Great Other.

So unless you have more substantial arguments otherwise, I'll leave it with that.

Yes, you forgot to explain the role of the Children of the Forest. The books explicitly tell us they fought against the Others, so why are they working with Bloodraven? I can think of three options:

  1. They are being tricked by him.

  2. They changed sides.

  3. They are loyal only to themselves and have manipulating both humans and Others since the Age of Heroes.

It goes without saying that whichever one you pick, the burden of proof will be on you to justify it. As far as I know, the CotF are working with Bloodraven to defeat the Others and they need Bran's help for that.

/r/asoiaf Thread