Game of Thrones creator George R.R Martin explained why the slaughter during the infamous Red Wedding scene hit audiences harder than some of the deaths in Star Wars.
In an interview with The Independent, Martin asserted that the notoriety he has gained in supposedly reveling the deaths of his beloved characters has been blown way out of proportion. "Star Wars kills more characters than I do!" he said. "In the very first Star Wars movie they blow up the entire planet of Alderaan, which has, like, 20 billion people on it, and they’re all dead. But you know what? Nobody cares. Everybody on Alderaan is dead. Oh, OK. But we don’t know the people on Alderaan. We don’t feel their deaths. It’s just a statistic. If you’re going to write about death, you should feel it."
The fact that readers have the chance to bond with the victims of the Red Wedding massacre is what makes their deaths so impactful, Martin explained. "In our entertainment, television, film, books, over the centuries as it’s evolved, death is often treated very cavalierly. Somebody is dead, we’ve got a mystery, and the detective has to figure out who did it. We never consider who the corpse is, or what his life was like...what it’s going to be like without him. If I’m going to write a death scene... I want to make the reader feel it." Martin felt that was accomplished with the Red Wedding. "People felt that death."
When it came to writing A Storm of Swords, the author found himself leaving the Red Wedding chapter for last, unwilling to let go of characters he had been with for almost a decade. "That was such a painful chapter for me to write, losing some characters that I had come to know and love," he recalled. "Nine years I’d been with these characters, and now I was going to kill them horribly! That was difficult."
"It’s a horrible chapter, and it upsets people," Martin concluded. "It makes people angry, it makes people sad. People throw the book against the wall or into the fireplace. When it was on TV, it had the same effect on tens of thousands, if not millions, of people. To my mind, that’s good. We’re talking about death here!"
All eight seasons of Game of Thrones are available to stream now on HBO Max. Spinoff series House of the Dragon is set to air from Aug. 21.
Source: The Independent