No, Bran is not the Night King, now stop with the silly Game of Thrones fan theories
Let’s put this one on ice for good
Of all the wild Game of Thrones fan theories out there (We’re looking at you, “Varys is a merman”), one of this year’s most pervasive has to be the popular idea that Stark sibling and Three-Eyed Raven Bran Stark (Isaac Hempstead-Wright) is actually the Night King.
Apparently based largely on the fact that Bran at one point wears a similar-shaped tunic to the leader of the White Walkers (and may share an ability to have visions of the past and other locations), the theory posits that at some point he’ll warg into the past to try and stop the White Walkers being created in the first place, inadvertently trapping himself in the body of the human who was turned into the Night King by the Children of the Forest.
After that, the theory suggests the newly White-Walkered Bran would begin the Night King’s evil quest due to a weary acceptance of the future’s inevitability, using his warging/greenseeing powers to raise his army of the dead and outwit the living at every turn.
There’s just one problem – Bran himself, actor Isaac Hempstead-Wright, thinks it’s all cobblers.
“I think it’s less that they’re the same person and more that they’re two of the ancient beings of Westeros,” Wright told Vulture.
“The Three-Eyed Raven has been around for God knows how long, and White Walkers have been reported since the beginning of time. As we’ve seen, they were created by the Children of the Forest, so we can’t get much more ancient than that. Perhaps we can think of it as these are two characters with a huge amount of power, but one is a Frankenstein’s monster who is driven by nothing but hatred and violence. Then there’s Bran, who uses his powers for good.
“I want to find out why the Night King is so obsessed with destroying mankind,” he concluded. “We’ll see whether they have any kind of explanations in the next season. Hopefully we’ll find out cool stuff about both of those characters.”
Given that the theory also makes very little sense when you put some thought into it (Why couldn’t the Night King just have his own powers of perception? And if he just did the exact same thing as the Night King would have done anyway, what’s the dramatic impact of having Bran’s mind in there?), we think it’s high time we put this one to bed and focussed on more plausible theories.
Now, HAS anyone seen Varys in the water? Just think about it.
Authors
Huw Fullerton is a Commissioning Editor for Radio Times magazine, covering Entertainment, Comedy and Specialist Drama.
