A New Villain Has Emerged On 'Game Of Thrones'

Now that the unthinkable has happened and Daenerys lost one of her dragons for good thanks to the Night King', it’s time to start figuring out what this means for Viserion’s future. For starters, is Viserion a wight on Game of Thrones now? Or is he an ice dragon? Is there really any difference? As of now, that distinction is difficult to place since George R. R. Martin wrote a book called The Ice Dragon back in 1980 about a dragon who was gigantic, made entirely of ice, and kind of a good guy.

But in the A Song of Ice and Fire books, the legend of the ice dragon definitely makes it seem like the creature is a dragon-turned-wight. Old Nan, who viewers might remember from Season 1, told Bran a bedtime story about the deadly White Walkers. In addition to her horror tales of giants and the Night King, she spoke of ice dragons. And in one of Jon’s chapters in A Dance with Dragons, the gusts of wind in the north were described as being "cold as the breath of the ice dragon in the tales Old Nan had told when Jon was a boy." So yeah, ice dragons are definitely something Martin had on the brain when writing the Game of Thrones books too. But are the terms wights and ice dragons therefore interchangeable? It certainly appears that way.

In A Storm of Swords, one of the lines states that, "It felt like walking down the gullet of an ice dragon." Now that doesn’t exactly explain what an ice dragon is, but it does make another mention of them, as if they exist in the universe or existed years ago, so ice dragons on Game of Thrones are likely a real thing and they seem to be the dragon equivalent of wights, even though their definition might be different in Martin’s earlier novel The Ice Dragon.

Since they’re associated with cold and ice, though, it seems like ice dragons might be another term for a dragon-turned-wight, which would make Viserion a wight now. The first wight Jon and the others encountered in Sunday’s Game of Thrones episode was what looked like a polar bear-turned-wight. All of the wights (those zombie-like people literally falling apart and decaying) and the White Walkers (the crew that hangs with the Night King and are more magic than mangy) are under the Night King’s control. So since Viserion is likely a wight now, he’s going to do whatever the Night King thinks up.

That could mean allowing the Night King to ride him right through The Wall or, you know, breath ice cold breath instead of fire in order to freeze his victims. We’ve already seen how the Night King’s magic works when he turned one of Crastor’s infant sons into a White Walker in Season 4, so using his powers on a dragon definitely isn’t off the table. Either way, having an official ice dragon wight is going to make for an intense Season 7 battle of fire and ice.