Game of Thrones Season Finale

Game of Thrones has ended with Daenerys crowd surfacing to the chant of “Mesa”.  Now she’s the mother of both Dragons and thousands of loyal devoted followers and Unsullied warriors.

 And Tyrion Lannister is still the coolest cat ever to walk the Seven Kingdoms.

The novels are so rich and delicious, and the show has been a great companion to the reading. Much has been said about how invested you get into these characters, only to have them shockingly killed off. When they die, it shocks the viewer's minds because we’ve come to rely on a typical arc of a story. There may be some wiggle room, but to have them die the way they do is not only outside of the box, it suggest the box doesn't exist.

I'm all in and love it.  While I was reading, I gasped out loud at these deaths, so I do understand, but I've come to realize that the impact of their death says much about their life. And how  they die, and at who’s hands, has ripple effects even more so had they lived.

There is a great quote that I am going to paraphrase. It goes something like this:

'When you were born you cried and the world rejoiced. Write your characters such that when they die the world cries and you rejoice'

My novel Stray has a death at the end, and when it was being edited the publisher asked me to change this scene and allow the person to live. I objected, and we settled on rewriting a few earlier paragraphs to further highlight that it was as much euthanasia as it was murder. Ironically, the publisher themselves died as they are now out of business and never published the novel. Stray was published on its own, and the character has died thousands of times over in people’s minds.

If we want to complain about the HBO series, it should be Ygritte not being wild enough. She's clearly much too proper.  In the meantime, I certainly bend the knee to George RR Martin.