Only because he’s dead. Until he died, he looked like one of the major driving forces of the plot, especially during his sworn rant after the attempted poisoning of Daenerys.
It would be nearly unthinkable to kill of the love interests of main characters in your typical fantasy story, not until the end anywa.
Again, Tywin is a major villain and a major vector of the action. In fact, he seems like the puppetmaster for several other villains. It is very unusual for someone like him not to last until the end.
I think you’re taking a “oh, now that I see how the trick is done, it’s not really all that impressive” approach to this. For someone who came to many of these developments absolutely cold, I was stunned.
Ok Yookeroo, do you have some examples of works that kill off more main characters mid-run? Excluding last stand type stories where everybody dies, like 300 or the Alamo, I can’t think of any. I especially can’t think of any TV shows like that.
Yeah, basically the argument seems to amount to, “Well, how come there are still any main characters still alive?” The problem is that if you kill off all the main characters while you still have several books left in the series, then someone else is going to become the main characters. And, unless everyone dies at the end, some main character will be around for the last few chapters, meaning that it’s impossible to kill off a main character at all.
Ummm…so? He may have “looked like” a major character before he died, but Dany is, and was from the beginning, the character driving the plot. He wasn’t a major character.
Meh. He’s definitely not someone who you dare not get attached to because he might die. That’s the thing that kept getting said over and over.
Well, obviously. I kept hearing how awesome and transgressive this series is and this is one reason why it’s so great. But it really isn’t all that boundary pushing.
No (at least not offhand). I’m not saying GRRM doesn’t do this more than a typical fantasy writer does. But this aspect of the story is very overstated. And overrated. It’s a big sprawling story with lots and lots of characters. Some of them get killed. That two of them are pretty major isn’t usual (and it’s to GRRM’s credit the he’s not afraid to do this). But the fanboys will have you thinking that ANYONE will die. I bet that Tyrion and Arya survive til the climax. So will Bran. And Jon Snow. Jaime too.
And letting them live isn’t wrong. Us readers have invested plenty in these characters. But let’s not get carried away with the idea of “DON’T GET INVESTED IN THE CHARACTER…THEY’LL DIE!!!”. That just sets everyone up for, well, disappointment isn’t quite the right word, but when we see Arya survive long after she should be dead, it makes it pretty obvious that GRRM isn’t exactly being revolutionary.
How do you know she should be dead? And everything’s relative. GRRM wrote the red wedding with the greatest sense of loss and sadness, according to interview, for that loss (not to give too much away) but he wrote it anyway, because he thought it was the best thing for the story.
He’s quite revolutionary in that regard, and I think it makes the story all that much more gripping. And the readers get that much more invested in it, and love it, and that’s the goal of good fiction, it’s to provoke feeling.
Living what she’s been through is quite the longshot. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But is sure isn’t revolutionary. Pretty typical way to treat a protagonist actually.
Great. So?
For feeling a sense of great loss for his characters? For doing what was best for the story? Neither is revolutionary. For killing off such a major character? Unusual, but I wouldn’t call it “revolutionary”.
That’s pretty obvious. Has anyone claimed otherwise?
As long as Robb falls to his knees with his arms raised while crossbow bolts rip through him in slo-mo and his friends are pulled away while trying to get back to him, all will be well for HBO.
In general, it’s pretty uncommon to have prominent characters, not specifically created to die for the effect, to just die because it’s a natural consequence of what they’ve been doing.
There is something revolutionary about the way he writes it, and you can feel it when you read it. But it’s not as though every single thing in the books is unusual.
And pissing and shitting, for some reason. I think the phrase “shook the last drops off” alone appears four or five times in Dance. No one cares, George.
I love all that stuff. It really grounds the story in the physical reality of a pre-industrial world. You can bet if you found yourself in that kind of an environment, then what the food is like, what you’re sleeping on, what your healing scars feel like, and where and how you use the toilet are going to be among the most immediate of your experiences. Myself, I keep thinking, dang, if I were in that world I would be bereft of my eyeglasses, my lipitor, and my C-pap machine. And I’m going to be shitting in a pot stored under the bed … if I’m lucky.