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What exactly do blue eyes mean on Game of Thrones? We’ve seen them in White Walkers, but do they also exist in wights? What do they tell us about the reanimated person or creature?
Here’s what we know.
This post has major spoilers for Season 7 Episode 6, so don’t read on unless you’ve seen the episode.
Both wights and White Walkers have blue eyes, although it appears that White Walkers’ eyes may be a brighter, more brilliant blue. (But that’s not 100 percent for certain.)
Blue eyes mean they are animated and controlled by ice magic. Wights have no independent thought, they are simply reanimated corpses. All the Night King has to do is raise his arms and corpses will be reanimated and do his bidding. In fact, a corpse doesn’t even necessarily have to be within eyesight of a Walker to be animated, as we saw when two dead Night’s Watch men were taken south of the wall earlier in the series.
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But when the Children of the Forest created the very first White Walker (whom we believe to be the Night King), his eyes immediately turned blue. They used some dark kind of ice magic to turn him so he’d do their bidding, by stabbing his heart with dragonglass. But unlike wights, the Night King did not die when his creator, Leaf, was killed.
Instead, he lives on to create more creatures that do his bidding. It appears that the White Walkers have at least some intelligence, thought, and independence, unlike the wights. And they are created differently. The Night King puts his hand on a baby’s face and turns it, and that baby continues to grow. This is completely different from wights, who never grow once they’re turned and don’t have to be touched to be turned.
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And now we’ve seen a dragon turned into a “White Walker” type or a wight too.
Awesome moment … #icedragon #GamesOfThrones #blueeye #GOT #Winteriscoming #winterwithdragon
But when it happened, the Night King touched the dragon’s face —just like he touched the baby’s face. That’s why it seems like this may be different than simply reanimating a corpse, since he actually touched Viserion when he raised the dragon back to “life.”
But Viserion was dead, unlike the babies, so in that there is a difference between how the babies are changed vs. the dragon.
Is it possible that the dragon is somewhere in between? Not a wight, but not quite a White Walker, he lies somewhere in the middle?
Let us know what you think in the comments below.