The morning of Game of Thrones’ long-awaited Battle of Winterfell episode, “The Long Night,” Avengers: Endgame directors Joe and Anthony Russo tweeted a fan-made picture of the Night King and Thanos face-to-face, with the hashtag #WeWannaSeeThisFight.
But the truth about the villains, two of the most significant in popular culture this decade and both coming to their biggest, death-filled clashes in one weekend — is that they have no reason to fight each other. Based on what we know about their goals, their fight is essentially the same.
For many seasons of Game of Thrones, the Night King mostly came across as a bastion of pure death. But during “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms,” the episode prior to the big battle, a conversation between Bran Stark and Samwell Tarly added a more terrifying and specific dimension to him. “He wants to erase this world, and I am its memory,” Bran says. “That’s what death is, isn’t it?” Sam replies, “Forgetting… being forgotten. If we forget where we’ve been and what we’ve done, we’re not men anymore, just animals. Your memories don’t come from books; your stories aren’t just stories. If I wanted to erase the world of men, I’d start with you.”
The end is approaching for these characters, so while the theme of memory and reflection on their beginnings is natural, we’re unlikely to see a lasting answer about whether memory truly sticks and means anything in Westeros after the current battles.
Thanos didn’t start out on the same page as the Night King. He initially aimed to wipe out half the universe in order to make resources stretch further. In Avengers: Infinity War, he succeeded. At that point, he hadn’t started to focus on the world’s memory.
After stabbing Tony Stark, he reminds Tony that half of humanity will survive the coming apocalypse, and adds, “I hope they remember you.”
But uncertainty about what lies ahead remains. Both Thanos and the Night King were defeated, their fights against memory snapped and stabbed away.
It may be a long time before villains like them come around again, but time itself is a cycle that allows people to forget and villains like them to rise again and again.
