Bran Stark and the Night’s King have a significant connection. The Night’s King marked Bran, and there’s a great theory about a final showdown between the two. But what if Bran is the Night King? According to this theory, it’s possible.
This theory, first proposed by Reddit user turm0il26, suggests that Bran and the Night’s King are one and the same.
Bran is the Night King theory
The theory rests on one important assumption: That Bran will feel the need to go back in time and stop the Night’s King. We already know that he can affect the past. For example, Ned Stark heard Bran’s voice at the Tower of Joy. Bran also caused Hodor to be Hodor.
Bran’s first attempt to stop the Night’s King
Turm0il26 suggests that Bran has attempted thrice to go back in time and prevent the rise of the Night’s King. The first time, Bran went back in time to prepare the Mad King Aerys Targaryen II for the White Walker invasion of King’s Landing.
Bran planted the idea for Wildfire to be placed throughout King’s Landing to be used against the Night’s King — ending him once and for all. But Bran’s whispers through time caused the Mad King to gain his namesake. Bran’s first attempt to stop the Night’s King was a failure.
Bran’s second attempt to stop the Night’s King
Turm0il26 wrote:
The second time, Bran goes even further back in time (as he [continuously] learns his [abilities] he is able do go longer and longer back in time) to try discover how the Others were defeated the first time. He fails again and instead succeeds to become Bran the Builder, building the Wall and securing his birth by building Winterfell and creating the words, ‘There must always be a Stark in Winterfell.’
This ties into the theory that Bran built the Wall, and that Bran is “all of the Bran’s that have ever existed in Westeros.”
Bran’s third attempt to stop the Night’s King, which caused Bran to become the Night’s King
In this theory, Bran’s third attempt to stop the Night’s King is his last. He decides to go all the way back to when the Night’s King was created. We saw this happen in Season 6 of HBO’s “Game of Thrones.”
We know that Bran can warg, and the theory suggests that Bran wargs into the human that becomes the Night’s King to attempt to prevent the event from ever happening in the first place.
However, the Children of the Forrest still make the Night’s King — but this time with Bran warged into the human. The event causes Bran to get “stuck” inside the human that became the Night’s King.
From here Bran gets stuck in the past (exactly as Brynden and Jojen warned him not to) and becomes the Night King. With the combination of the Children’s magic and Bran’s power, he becomes the [villain] instead of the hero he tried to be, resulting in turning against the Children for creating him, and getting stuck behind the magical Wall he later builds as Bran the Builder.
This would mean that Bran is the Night King for thousands and thousands of years as he waits for the current timeline to begin. In that time, he would lose his humanity.
Evidence for the Bran is the Night King theory
The HBO’s “Game of Thrones” has provided some evidence for this. Consider this, from Turm0il26:
You can actually see in the scene where young Bran goes back to the creation of the Night King, that when the Children push the dragonglass into his heart, we see Bran tighten his grip on the veins, just as it is himself experiencing the pain. Also in the end of the flashback, Bran is laying in the exact same position in the cave, as the human pushed up to the tree is.
Bran and the Night King costumes
There’s also similarity in the way Bran and the Night’s King dress.
