When the Others actually DO something living up to their reputation, I'll care. They haven't done shit in five long ass books. That's bad writing. I have no doubt they'll be OP af eventually but so far they haven't been. Five books of them roflstomping undisciplined wildlings and a horribly outnumbered and unprepared force of Night's Watch doesn't cut it. It's not good writing.
The Other are, quite literally, supposed to be an ominous threat looming in the background. As such, they are by definition not going to be in the foreground. The books are about human characters, their conflicts and their interactions. The Other are made clear to be a massive threat even by what little we do know about them and they are supposed to make a full appearance only much later in the story and then dwarf whatever squabbles there might be amongst the human characters.
Your whole post is like chastising Lovecraft for being vague about Cthulhu, it's a fundamental misunderstanding of what the Other are and how they are supposed to work as a plot device.
If you're saying you need to be spoonfed the connection between "Vast army of zombies lead by a hellspawn that can raise dead to reinforce said army" and "that is a bad thing", sorry, that's on you, not on the author.
If you like the way GRRM does it or not is up to you, but that is not the least bit objective, so saying it's "bad writing" is off the mark.
Give me someone like Randyll Tarly with 5,000 disciplined men and a bunch of scorpions and catapults in a strong position firing a ton of wildfire and I'll pick him over what the Others have shown so far.
If you genuinely think that, it only proves that you don't understand the threat of the Other on a very basic and fundamental level. I don't mean this as an insult.
Just for shits n giggles: You are aware that the Other have no reason whatsoever to enter catapult range or even fight someone holed up in a castle? Their army can just put a couple tens of thousands of troops to stand there for however long it takes, a week or a century, and simply wait for Tarly and his amazing bunch of merry men to be turned into popsicles. The main host of their army would still outnumber all combined armies of Westeros 100:1. And it would grow even larger by the day. All the wildfire that has ever existed would not be enough to defeat that giant army and all said army has to do is encircle cities and castles and then wait for everyone to starve or freeze to death.
What I'm saying is the Others should have been shown as more powerful than they have been shown, telling and not showing is bad writing and telling is 95% of what George has done with them.
Frankly, I just think you need things spelled out to you by the author, cause clearly "This guy is able to raise the dead" and "He brings with him a winter that'll make steel shatter like glass from how fucking cold it is" didn't register.
The consensus in this thread seems to be that the Other are massive threat, hinging on being undefeatable.
So there are two real problems with the Others-how much to humanize them or not, and how big of a threat should they end up being.
I, for one, think not humanzing them at all is the best route. I actually like the idea of those weird wood-creature people creating the Night King as a means to fend of humans as a last ditch effort Wunderwaffe, that horribly backfires and creates a being that has only one goal, which it strives to achieve without hatred or passion. It just does what it was created to do.
Oftentimes, the more a threat like that is explained or humanized, the less frightening it is.
Compare this to, say, Cersei winning the throne. As a court noble, you might accidentally piss her off in a way that she might want to kill you... but you might still somehow pull your ass out of that noose somehow. But when the Night King gets you, that's it. No pleading. No begging. No bargaining chip or bag of money to get you free. There is nothing he wants from you, there is no compassion in him, no remorse when he kills you.
And the fact that he might do so, just because that's his nature, is more scary than him, for instance, just "hating all living things".
Either they are inhuman monsters that must be destroyed and are defeated in the north, meaning they are just a threat to the north in the endthey are inhuman monsters that are defeated in the dead center of Westeros(maybe the Isle of Faces comes in?)-meaning some sort of deus ex machina becomes absolutely necessary for them to not simply steamroll the continent; they have motivations that can be appeased if not understood and are defeated in the north(making them even less significant) or they have motivations that can be appeased and are so at the isle of faces/trident or whatever. Which is quite anti climactic.
The thing is, defeating the Night King will also presumably gets rid of his entire army. Trying to win a (conventional) war against that army is simply not gonna happen.
Given those two options, there could be a way to handle it, I guess. The Night King sweeps down on Westeros, covering as much ground as possible and instead of actively attacking cities and castles, he merely puts siege rings around them to slowly starve and freeze these people to death. His main army, ever growing from picking up commoners not lucky enough to be inside behind citywalls or inside a castle reinforce his army.
The army quickly gains a shitton of ground until it reaches down to King's Landing and beyond.
That would leave the Night King's army stretched out, which makes it somewhat feasible that the protagonists can attack him directly in some way...
I guess that could work, but I agree. If the Night King is stopped anywhere North of the Reach without being ever made a credible threat to King's Landing, it invalidates the entire story. He must be such a massive threat that even those in Dorne shake in piss soaked boots from merely thinking about the whole situation.
Or else, we end up with GoT S8, which was just a massive letdown.
The problem with cersei in the show is she literally should not have lasted as long as she did. The plot made Tyrion, Dany, really all the heroes complete retards for her not to lose and had Qyburn pull new inventions out of his ass just to keep her in the game. This meant that she lasted until the penultimate episode but by then she had fully eclipsed any sense of realism, in not being overthrown.
Every character was either a flanderization of their former self, had some one-note function for the plot or had no function at all.
The Hound just went "CUNT DICK COCK ASSHOLE PEEPEE POOPOO" cause him saying bad words is the height of wit, I guess. He was dragged along for Clegane Bowl... which was a massive letdown afaik.
Dany had pretty much only one function: Win the war then go crazy when she hears the bells and then getting stabbed in a SO SAD moment.
Bran was there to be delcared king ...
for some reason.
Arya was gonna be Stark McNinja and killing the Night King...
for some reason.
Cersei was just there to act as the BBEG that dies in the end.
Jaime's character arc was undone as a shitty WHAT A TWEEST moment and also to be killed off alongside Cersei.
Jon, Varys, Tyrion, Littlefinger, Sansa, Jorah, Grey Worm, that chubby Tarly boy, Melissandre and so on had no real function whatsoever.
These characters were too popular to kill off earlier, but the writers simply had nothing for them to actually do, so they were just sorta dragged along for the ride until they were either killed off to milk their popularity one final time in a shitty shock death or they just farted about in the background until the credits rolled.
It's especially bad with characters like Varys and Tyrion, cause they were supposed to be smart and savvy, but the writers are such braindead morons, they could not come up with even witty dialogue (let alone anything for them to do), so the smartest and most savvy characters suddenly acted like utter morons. Besides Jaime, the most obvious implosion of the character writing.
