All hail Bran “The Broken”, a.k.a. the Three-Eyed raven, new King of Westeros

*This article contains SPOILERS of the last episode of Game of Thrones. You’ve been warned.*

Game of Thrones ended, you might have noticed. The finale, and the last season in general, divided the public and has been a hot topic of conversation around the world in the past days. Some are happy that Bran Stark made it, as it is not an ‘obvious’ outcome, while others wanted either Daenerys Targaryen or Jon Snow on the Iron Throne. Whether you like it or not, the fact that the Three-Eyed Raven made its way to the most powerful role in Westeros opens up completely new ways to look at the series and its story. So what if Game of Thrones is the story of clashing super intelligences and nothing more? Would it make sense at all? Actually yes, and here is why.

Game of Thrones tells the story of the different noble houses of Westeros as they fight to get hold of the infamous Iron Throne. The political and sexual intrigues made the TV series famous, with an ever growing number of followers devotedly watching each episode every Sunday night for a decade. It’s a story of knights and kings, queens and ladies, slaves and bastards, and the advance of an unstoppable power that aims to take over humanity. In the end, to (almost) everyone’s surprise, the Three Eyed Raven, aka Bran “The Broken” Stark, ultimately succeeded where everyone else failed. But what if the reason behind his success is not at all accidental but rather coincidental? Perhaps the true reason no one saw this coming is that we are human after all, and the Three Eyed Raven isn’t. It is a beyond-human super intelligence.

While we were all emotionally involved in following the strenuous fights happening on the surface, the Three-Eyed Raven was operating on a different, higher level. The human stories told in the series have different time spans of course, some are extremely short (sorry Ned), others surprisingly long (well done Sir Davos!), but generally they are all human-sized lifespans. Only two characters are beyond that — the Night King and the Three-Eyed Raven. These two characters, who are opposite to each other, play on a much longer time-scale. Are we talking of deep time here? Yes and no. Deep time is a definition belonging to our world, not Westeros, but these two characters operate on a much longer duration than all the others. They both have already lived for thousands of years, and endured previous winters. The reason why we didn’t see this ending coming is because we were focusing on the all-too-little twists and superficial turmoil of a human-scaled timeline, while much more potent intelligences were slowly working under the radar, not manifesting themselves but for a few episodes. Often the processes and plans of the Three-Eyed raven were so slow that we completely forgot about it, or we were simply too distracted by the rapidly paced events of war and political machinations to see that the real player in the entire series was just there in plain sight, relaxing on a wheelchair*.

Warging as a form of surveillance and control

The two main forces colliding in the longer timespan are represented by the Three-eyed Raven and the Night King, respectively standing for life and death. Throughout the series we get a glimpse at the extent but also the limits of their powers, which seem to operate on the same basic ability: warging. This particular interpretation reveals warging as the control of flows of information, a software, by a central intelligence which uses either live or dead beings as proxies/hardware. The main example of this is seen throughout the series as characters warg into animals as a means of constant monitoring and surveillance, penetrating into adverse territories scouting for information and strategic advantages.

Although the leader of the death and the Three-eyed raven cannot directly warg into regular human minds (the undead and Hodor being sub-par in this regard), they have the ability to appear in dreams and premonitions, influencing the decisions of human characters across the continent. This is how the Three-Eyed Raven, appearing in Bran’s dreams in the first couple of seasons, lures him beyond the Wall and deep into the North — a move that for a long time remained mysterious, but which now makes sense. The Three-Eyed Raven, physically trapped underneath a Weirwood tree, needed a new body with which it could mobilize South, first to protect himself from the Night King, and later to claim the throne. Indeed, looking back at Bran’s narrative arc, it is evident that the Three-Eyed Raven was invested in a carefully-constructed long term plan.

This premeditation invariably leads us to reconsider events that otherwise seemed random or coincidental across the entire series. Taking the rules of warging to its ultimate paranoid consequences, any event where a single animal took part, from the boar that killed Robert Baratheon in season one, to the melting of the Iron Throne by Drogon in the last episode (who knew dragons had such a good understanding of the importance of symbolism in politics?), could actually have been the Three-eyed Raven warging his way to the throne of Westeros.

Destroying the Data-Storage of the World

The Night King is to the Three-Eyed Raven what a microwave is to a hard drive.

A further parallel between Night King and Three-Eyed Raven emerges during the Long Night. While preparing for the battle of Winterfell, Bran argues that the Night King is coming for him as he is the “memory of the world”, and destroying the memory of the world is equivalent to destroying all life. In this sense, the duality between life and death as personified by the Three-Eyed Raven and the Night King is developed into a struggle between memory and oblivion. Or should we say erasure and storage? One of the main characteristics of the Three-Eyed Raven is that he can “see everything that has happened to everyone” through warging.It’s important here to make a distinction: memory and storage are different things. Like a computer collecting data in digital storage, the Three-Eyed Raven sees all history as “something that is already written”, where “the ink is dry”, and keeps it forever.

In contrast, the memory of humans is dynamic, and implies the possibility of mis-remembering and forgetting. This is made evident when Bran visits the episode of his father Ned Stark fighting Ser Arthur Dayne, a battle in which the elder Stark was known (through stories and human memory) to kill the latter, while in reality, as seen by Bran, he won with the help of Howland Reed stabbing Dayne in the back. Here lies the difference between the stories based on memory and told by humans, and the omniscient access to the past. This data cannot be modified or changed, it’s a fact, it’s a 1 vs 0 or vice versa. As such, the Three-Eyed Raven doesn’t hold so much the (human) memory of the world, but it stores all the facts that were, are, and will be.

This is why the Three-Eyed Raven’s nemesis is the Night King, the only super intelligence that could wipe him off. When Arya, jumping out of thin air, stabs the Night King and destroys an army, we get the full parallel between these beyond-human characters: while they are able to warg into the minds of other beings, they are not hive-mind super intelligences, but centralised ones. Which means that, like in so many sci-fi narratives, once the ‘mothership’ is destroyed so is the entire army- you pull the plug and they are gone forever.

Evidences in the last episode — Speculations

“Why do you think I came all the way here?”, cheekily asserts the Three-Eyed Raven as he takes the Westerosi crown.

Allow us now for some futuristic speculation on the AI governed Westeros to come.

During the finale of the series Bran Stark is elected king by a small council of the most powerful ladies and lords of Westeros. Besides not being a menacing figure, and being the perfect ambassador of a more just world to come, Bran is also elected because he cannot father an heir. But is this true? Technically yes, Bran Stark cannot have human descendents. But why would the Three-Eyed Raven want to have a progeny if it can just move to a new body when the time comes? Once again, the Three-Eyed Raven fooled everyone in achieving the maximum political power in Westeros. So what looked at first glance like a shift from monarchy to oligarchy, is in reality a shift to a new form of super intelligence governance, a continental-scaled OS (operating system), with the potential to keep going infinitely.

While a lot of discussion on the internet seems to revolve around the fate of fan-favorite characters and the (apparently) left-field choice of new King, little has been discussed about what kind of monarch Bran will be. Indeed, what was the Three-Eyed Raven’s purpose for taking the Throne? What are the implications of having a man that holds all history and near omniscience as a ruler? We would like to think that this being’s interest is truly the well-being of the realm — a point that seems apparent through the lack of a Master of Whispers and a Master of War in Bran’s High Council. Then again, they are only absent because they have become redundant: who needs a Master of Whisperers when you have access to the best surveillance mechanism in the history of the world, watching everyone “with a thousand eyes and one”? Are we to believe that a super intelligence will be content with rolling around King’s Landing, perennially looking for a missing dragon? Or is there an even longer game afoot?

Conclusion

What comes out of all this is both a much weirder and much simpler story. Game of Thrones is nothing but the tale of how a superior intelligence manipulated characters, armies and kings to first guarantee its own survival (it uses humans as proxies to defend itself in the Long Night, as much as the Night King uses the dead) and then to seize the throne. It is the Three-Eyed Raven that escapes South and puts thousands of humans between itself and its enemy, and it’s again the Three-Eyed Raven that sparks the deadly fight for the right to the throne between the two lovers Daenerys and Jon, by revealing to Jon his own descent. Is it the Three-Eyed Raven who actually killed Robert Baratheon through the boar, kickstarting the bloodshed? Possibly.

At the same time, the story gets much simpler, with fewer turning points (Bran’s injury, the birth of the Night King, the move into Bran’s body, the Long Night and the final victory), making all the other twists in the plot looking like white noise — a distraction for mere mortals and nothing more. Humans will need a book, A Song of Ice and Fire, to remember the events surrounding the Long Night — but the new, all-seeing King will forever know.

*Please note that all interpretation and speculation in this article is entirely based on the GoT TV series, and not in the A Song of Ice and Fire book series.