And then he got his head chopped off.
Holy shit! Clearly this was a different type of show entirely, and Martin would return to this blood-filled well again and again, brutally killing off major characters at weddings across the continent.
The reason this worked was that, as surprising as it was, it was still realistic and believable. Political machinations and assassinations and open warfare result in people dying, so we can’t be too surprised when it happens to major players. Large portions of Game Of Thrones are inspired by real history, which — spoiler — has a fatality rate of around 100 percent. Look at the War Of The Roses (which several elements of Game Of Thrones are based on.) That little conflict saw dozens of Edwards and Richards die each year, major players each one. A plausible depiction of that kind of conflict has to have major characters die. It’d look ridiculous without it.
And now one question. Answer it as quickly as you can. On Game Of Thrones, who was the last major protagonist to die?
The uh … hmmm. Is it Hodor? It’s Hodor, isn’t it? Is that major enough? He was certainly a big character. Not really major though, and it was quite a while ago.
Let’s talk about the second immutable rule of fiction at work here.
Traditional Stories Can’t Kill Off Major Characters
The whole point of a story is to read about interesting people doing interesting things. It’s more satisfying if we know something about the people doing amazing things — we don’t want to hear that some chump elf dropped the One Ring in Mt. Doom, because his army fought its way there and he was just the closest one to the precipice. We want to read about Sam and Frodo doing it, because we’d followed those characters and their discussions about potatoes for a long time. If we’d followed the chump elf for a thousand pages, that might be different. He’d be our hero, and we’d know a lot more about him, and we’d delight in seeing how he had finally become the chump he was always destined to become.
One big side-effect of this law is that if we follow a character for hundreds of pages, they will fairly predictably go on to do interesting things. It’s essentially a corollary to Chekhov’s Gun; if a character is introduced in the first act, they’ll have to do something by the third act. Readers pick up on this too; we know when characters are important and can often even predict what they’ll do long before they do it. The coward will become brave, the hero and romantic interest will kiss, the guy with a chainsaw for an arm will be killed with his own chainsaw. And when that hasn’t happened yet, no matter what dire situations our heroes find themselves in, we don’t feel like they’re in real peril. It’s called plot armor, and it’s the reason people found it so surprising when Ned Stark died. He was our hero! He had to do … something. Right?