This is probably why we haven’t had any major characters on the show die in a while now. They all have a role to play in the final season of the show.
Ok, so what? What’s the problem? You want Bran to die or something? Well, yes, but there’s more.
Game Of Thrones Combines Both These Type Of Stories
In Game Of Thrones, everything south of the wall can be airily summed up as “humans fucking each other over.” It’s a realistic political story, which generally follows the first law discussed above. Using examples from history, Martin was able to create beloved characters and hated villains and kill them off more or less whenever he wanted, because that’s what happens in a “humans fucking each other over” story.
North of the wall, we have a very different kind of story, something a lot closer to a traditional fantasy epic, in this case the “humans fighting ice-zombies” trope that lies at the core of 90 percent of the stories you’ve ever been told. It’s no coincidence that this story never blended in too much with the story south of the wall. Characters from each side didn’t cross back and forth or interact much with each other at all. Every now and then someone might send a raven to the other story, and the other story would read it and laugh and throw the raven in the garbage. (Is that how the ravens worked? I don’t think we’ve ever seen the details.) And this story north of the wall is following those rules of fiction which apply to traditional stories. Characters can die, but not the main ones; we need those around to deliver the ultimate blow at the end of the story to make that ultimate blow actually feel meaningful.
Now the two stories are merging, and suddenly it’s clear that all the vulnerable people in the gritty political back-stabaganza we had come to love and fear for, are actually heroes in an epic fantasy, immune to death until the very last pages. Think of all the improbable nonsense we’ve had to sit through this season. Jaime getting tackled off a horse instead of incinerated. Theon escaping death for the twentieth goddamned time. Arya and Sansa overcoming Littlefinger’s schemes with hilarious ease. And most damningly, seven named characters marching into the wilderness on the dumbest mission ever conceived, running into impossible, overwhelming danger, and six of them walking out. This is not the same show we started watching; Ned Stark would have died a dozen times over on that mission, and lost several thousand sons in the process.
You can argue that maybe this would all be better if Martin had written the details himself, that’d he’d gloss over or write around the improbabilities we’d seen this season. But the fundamental conflict between these two stories would still be there. We have important, previously very vulnerable characters who now for narrative reasons cannot die. No matter how well it’s done, everything about that type of story is going to feel at least a bit weird.
I’ll still watch the last season, though. So will you. What other socially acceptable venue do we have for watching aunt sex?
Chris Bucholz is a Cracked columnist and plans to die in the first act of whatever story he’s in. As the author of the amazing novels, Freeze/Thaw and Severance he thinks you should definitely go buy both of those now. Join him on Facebook or Twitter.
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