Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin discusses the depiction of death in entertainment, saying it should actually be difficult for audiences. Beginning in 1996 with A Game of Thrones, Martin's ultra-popular and successful A Song of Ice and Fire fantasy series has had five installments so far, the most recent being A Dance With Dragons in 2011. The final two books, The Winds of Winter and A Dream of Spring, are still forthcoming.
In the meantime, HBO's equally popular adaptation, Game of Thrones, premiered in 2011 and finished airing in 2019. The franchise is now set to expand on the small screen with the prequel series, House of the Dragon, set to premiere on August 21. Based on Martin's 2018 novel Fire & Blood, the series is set 200 years before the events of Game of Thrones and chronicles the beginning of the end for House Targaryen, including the civil war known as the "Dance of Dragons." Martin serves as a creator and executive producer on House of the Dragon, which is part of the author's lucrative 5-year deal to develop 6 Game of Thrones spinoff series for HBO.
During a new interview with The Independent, the Song of Ice and Fire scribe discussed his personal philosophy on death in entertainment. Martin believes that death in books, movies, and TV shows should be difficult for both an author to write and for audiences to experience, using the notorious Red Wedding as an example. “It’s a horrible chapter, and it upsets people. It makes people angry, it makes people sad," Martin says, which he believes should be the desired effect when death is depicted. Read his full quote below:
It’s a horrible chapter, and it upsets people. 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!
We all in our real lives have experienced death. Your parents die. Your best friend dies. Sometimes, in a really tragic situation, your children die or your wife or husband dies. It’s terrible. It affects you. It makes you angry, it makes you sad. 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, particularly for major characters, I want to make the reader feel it. That’s what the Red Wedding, I think, successfully accomplished. People felt that death.
Perhaps no other contemporary author is more renowned for unexpectedly killing off beloved main characters in such dramatic and brutal fashions. During the interview, Martin discusses how he believes death is often trivialized in entertainment and "treated very cavalierly." Murder mysteries are one major culprit according to Martin, though he also cites A New Hope as a major offender for blowing up the entire planet of Alderaan. However, those deaths have little to no impact on the audience since, at that current time in the Star Wars saga, they had not been acquainted with any actual people on Alderaan. "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," Martin said.
Martin is absolutely right to call out the disionate depiction of death in entertainment. The topic is, of course, a very serious one that nearly everyone has experienced and been affected by in some profound way. Thus, death should be treated with equal gravitas in forms of entertainment, especially drama. Game of Thrones' treatment of death is one of the many reasons the books and show are such an unbridled success, and perhaps other writers should heed Martin's advice if they wish to create a similar cultural phenomenon.
Source: The Independent