The reason why White Walkers exist was finally explained on “Game of Thrones”

Out of all the surprise twists during last night’s Game of Thrones episode, “The Door,” the one we were LEAST expecting has to do with the White Walkers. Spoilers ahead. Oh, so many spoilers.

Let’s cut right to the white walker chase: The White Walkers were created by the Children of the Forest!! Take a few seconds to process that, because there’s so much more on top of that.

Let’s actually go back a little bit, and talk about the Children of the Forest. They’re basically like the ~mythical creatures~ of Westeros; they’re like our unicorns. It’s debated within Westeros if they’re even real, because they haven’t been seen in many, many years, but according to legend they were the first people to inhabit the land. As we learn in “The Door,” this is all true. Once upon a time, they were here first, and they captured one of the First Men to come to Westeros…and turned him into white walker. WHY?

Because as Leaf tells Bran during this episode, they were at war. They needed to defend themselves from men. 

Oh boy.

The dagger that the Children of the Forest use to create the first White Walker — who becomes the Night’s King — was dragonglass. You know dragonglass, right? You know it because it’s one of the TWO things in Westeros that can kill white walkers, the other being Valyrian steel. In the case of the former, it’s what can kill white walkers, and as we learned in “The Door,” it’s also what created them.

HOW is that a THING? ¯_(ツ)_/¯ Kinda weird that something can be created and also destroyed with the same blade, but hey, Game of Thrones loves to mess with our mind.

This isn’t some surprise revelation, and the series has actually been building towards this point for a while. In the Game of Thrones debrief immediately following the episode on HBO, showrunner David Benioff explains that there have been clues pointing towards this revelation for a while, going all the way back to the pilot with the strange geometric spirals we’ve seen throughout the series.

While some of our questions about the Children of the Forest and the White Walkers have been answered, there are still so many more that have not. It’s easy to assume that all of the Children of the Forest have been wiped out now, since that was a pretty bad white walker attack on the tree — and we’ve never seen them anywhere else in Westeros.

Even more pressing. WHAT’S GOING TO HAPPEN NOW WITH THE WHITE WALKERS? They were like a zombie experiment gone bad, and now threaten to wipe out of all mankind in Westeros. Seriously question: Is there enough dragonglass/Valyrian steel to go around?