Warning: spoiler if you have not watched Episode 3 of Game of Thrones Season 8 – the Long Night.
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For anyone following the final season of Game of Thrones (GoT), the earlier-than-expected exit of the Night King and the Army of the Dead is a big surprise.
In China, this mockery image has been circulating among the GoT fans:
It mimics a typical funeral portrait in China, with the words “Voice and facial expressions are remembered vividly” and the couplet “I have travelled thousands of miles across eight seasons, what the heck am I aiming for?”
Some went a step further to try to explain the Night King through system design. According to this post on WeChat, the decimation of the entire Army of the dead shows the flaw of a centralized system.
Vulnerabilities
Under this design, the White Walkers and the Army of the Dead are terminals, with the Night King being the central server. Therefore, once the Night King is down, the whole system fails.
The centralized system is also the reason why the Undead is acting less agile compared to the humans – their read/write instructions came from the Night King (through his antennae probably) which is a bottleneck where there are so many terminals connected to the server.
Bran knows how to defeat the Army of the Dead and the Whitewalkers by taking down the Night King because he functions pretty much the same way – using himself as a server to control the Ravens.
The bug
While Snow and Dragon Queen tried to fight the night king with computing power (the dragon fire looks like a DDos attack), Arya is a bug or a virus, thus much more effective in taking down the server.
The Night King should not have exposed itself on the front line, rather in a secure server room. And it should have made multiple back-ups of itself, just in case the main server fails.
On the other hand, human fighters at Winterfell, while vulnerable, function as a decentralized system without proper central command. That allowed each node to make its own decisions – thus more agile at the battlefield.
When they are not taken down by the brutal force of the Army of the Dead, they can cause great damage to a centralized system.