'Game of Thrones' Season 8: Who is the prince who was promised?

On Sunday, in the middle of a long, murky night of compressed cable signals and poorly calibrated screens, Arya Stark killed the king of the night. His successful stealth attack, which neither the king of the night nor many onlookers (regardless of the blackness of the screen) was preparing to come, was great news for the North, a terrible news for the nihilists and, frankly, a new confused for Game of thrones theorists.

With a dagger in his belly, Arya broke not only the king of the night, but also the widespread expectations for the rest of the season, creating new questions both on the arc of the last three episodes and on the unresolved positions of one of the most important of the series. son: the prophecy of the prince who was promised. Does the rescue of humanity from White Walker's threat make younger sister Stark the prince (ss) by default? If Arya is not the prophetized savior, who is he and what would it mean to be a savior prophesied in a world that suddenly seems devoid of any existential threat? Are there surviving characters able to interpret the Lord's will of light? And if the point of the promised plot is still unresolved at the end of our day, are we to show the observers a shrug or a riot about wasted speculation?

Let's quickly recap what we know about the promised prince, Azor Ahai, with the warning that it is naturally difficult to discern the truth behind a multi-thousand-year-old prophecy whose origins are lost in the world. time. As Melisandre says in A storm of swords, "When the red star blows and the darkness fills, Azor Ahai will be born again in the midst of smoke and salt." Maester Aemon and others cite the same presumed omens of the Prince's arrival: smoke, salt and bleeding star.

Melisandre thinks that the prince is the reincarnation of the legendary hero Azor Ahai, who forged and brandished a burning sword called Lightbringer and used it to drive out the darkness that fell on the world. (In the books, Azor Ahai might be another name for the "Last Hero", an even more blurred figure of Westerosi's legend who would have defeated the White Walkers and ended the long night.) The Prince is supposed to be dead. to oppose the "Other" and deliver the world from "the cold breath of darkness" by winning "a war for life itself." This sounds like someone we know!

Most of these elements also appear in the series, though with fewer references and a little less detail. Gather everything together, and the prophecy seems as clear as a cryptic prophecy: the prince who has been promised will kill the king of the night. If the prince is destined to kill the king of the night, and Arya made kill the king of the night, so the transitive property tells us that Arya is the prince – or rather the princess. As Maester Aemon observes in the books and as Missandei mentions in the series, the word Valyrian of the High usually translates as prince is not gender specific, which means that prince or princess applies.

The prophecy goes until now. Except for the little things of smoke, salt and bloody star. For all we know, the next episode will begin when Bran confides that he has made a trip back in time and will conveniently notice that Arya was born in the middle of all these things, but other than that, Arya is far from being a perfect fit. In 2017, we considered several contenders for Prince Who Was Promised, including Hot Pie, and Arya was not one of them (not that the Redditors did not try). This spring, when we thoroughly examined the qualifications of the main candidates in two separate rooms, the evidence overwhelmingly showed Jon or Dany.

Thus, it seems, Melisandre, who emerged from his phase "Stannis is Azor Ahai", when Stannis was (probably) beheaded by Brienne after a Battle of Winterfell. "Stannis was not the prince who had been promised, but someone must be," says Melisandre in the episode of season 6 "Oathbreaker," just after reviving Jon . Someone & # 39; a, but not necessarily Jon. And in the episode of season 7 "Stormborn", when Dany asks Melisandre if she thinks the prophecy applies to her, Melisandre says, "I think you have a role to play. As in the case of another: the king of the North, Jon Snow. Again, Melisandre forbids saying that one or the other is the subject of the prophecy. Maybe she is just cautious after being burned (so to speak) by her big miss on Stannis, but perhaps she has already identified Arya as the real fateful character, as had been the spectators.

At this point, Mel became a matchmaker. "I did my part," she said after shipping the two Targaryen. "I put ice and fire together." His goal is perhaps simply to create the conditions that led to the disappearance of the king of the night: Arya in the woods of the gods with the dagger. This is Arya who drew Melisandre's persistent gaze at the beginning of "The Long Night" and that's Arya who received the encouraging speech from Mel who listened again to Red Woman's prophecy in the season 3, when she spoke to Arya about "brown eyes, blue eyes, green eyes, eyes that you will close forever" and announced that they would see each other again. In season 7, it seems that Mel knew what was going on. She also knew exactly when to return to Winterfell. And she knew where and when she would die: at Westeros, at the dawn promised by the prophecy.

And salt, smoke and the star bleeding? Well, it does not matter. "The prophecy is like a half-trained mule," says Tyrion in A dance with dragons. "It sounds like it might be helpful, but when you trust it, it gives you a head whip." Some prophecies are revealed; others are poorly understood, poorly translated or misinterpreted. As another red priestess, Kinvara, said in season 6, "All is the will of the Lord, but men and women make mistakes." Kinvara may have made a mistake by telling Dany the prophesied figure. And Mel's certainty about Stannis – and Shireen – is another illusion, much like his seemingly smooth skin.

In appearance, this seems unsatisfactory, but it could have been OK. If Melisandre had alluded to the prophecy before succumbing to natural causes, the message might have even been a source of inspiration. Even a "My hurt for smoke and salt, but hey, R'hllor works mysteriously" would have done the trick. This resolution would have always been a source of division, but for some fans, at least, it would have been welcome in the way that Rian Johnson reworked Rey The last Jedi. Not all heroes need the blood of Skywalker, and all Prince (ss) should not be announced by long-awaited signs. Sometimes the savior turns out to be a person. Forget the salt, the smoke and the bloody star; omens matter, but actions and choices matter more.

"We were hoping to somehow avoid what we expected," explained David Benioff in the backstage supplement of the episode. "Jon Snow has always been the hero, the one who was the savior, but that did not seem right to us at the moment." Shouting Jon against an undead dragon might have been a little too far in the other direction. but in principle, this impulse is healthy. we want to be surprised by what's happening on The Thronesand we want history to move away from fantastic tropes like perfect prophecies and idealized leaders. After the years needed to get here, we just do not want to feel like a promise has been broken or that the series avoids an important part of its nature.

It has been painfully apparent for some time that the HBO adaptation does not appreciate the supernatural elements of George R.R. Martin's creation as much as his books. On the one hand, "The Long Night" reminded us that magical and supernatural forces still exert a powerful influence on the fate of this fictional world. The King of the Night performed his usual trick of reviving the dead, and the Lord of Light – via Melisandra and the often resurrected Beric, lit the fire. arakhs, lit the trenches and gave Arya enough time to survive his call with the apostles.

On the other hand, the episode also removed much of this magic, erasing the White Walkers, ridding themselves of Melisandre and Beric, and seemingly heading for a more mundane confrontation between beings who can to be killed by conventional weapons. Without Thoros, Mel and Beric on the board, we miss many card-carrying members of the Red God congregation. It is not likely that Kinvara will come back, so if a vision of Bran or Sam did not stumble on another crucial piece of parchment, the promised treatment of the prince could have ended with a decisive blow.

For the moment – and perhaps forever – the show has left viewers free to retrace and reconcile as they please. Arya's dagger may have been a fragment of the blade of the last hero. Maybe giving up his name and face was the equivalent of Azor Ahai who was sacrificing Nissa Nissa. Or maybe the fulfillment of the prophecy was only a team effort. The Lord of Light resurrected Jon so that he could lure Dany north and bring Beric back to protect Arya. A vision in the fire convinced the Hound to turn north and become the reinforcement of Beric. Arya returned to Winterfell because Jon was still alive. Dany … well, she provided dragons, one of which allowed King Night to cross the Wall. And Melisandre's faith finally did a great deal, with some unfortunate detours.

In the end, the confusing way in which one of the central prophecies of the series was developed will be more important to book readers than to those who have only seen the series. in the really in the long run, this might not be a bad thing. Although Martin hinted that the end that he had planned for A song of ice and fire There is no time to change, and he is sure to pay more attention to the complex tradition that has been preparing for a long time – assuming, of course, that he finishes the books. In December, Martin swore to finish the series. If the promised pages materialize, the prince party will probably take care of itself.

Disclosure: HBO is an initial investor in The ring.