Anyone who’s read “A Song of Ice and Fire” and/or watched its televised spin-off Game of Thrones knows that series author George R.R. Martin is notoriously cold and callous when it comes to killing off characters. No one is safe — in fact, Martin recently confirmed that he’s prepared to wield his hammer of death against any one of your favorites as he writes the final two ASoIF books.
(No spoilers ahead.)
According to BuzzFeed, Martin told an audience at London’s Freemason’s Hall that, at this point in his writing, many characters have no longer become a necessary tool for storytelling:
“I have a large number of important characters who I switch between to tell the entirety of the story, and that limits who I can kill.
Sometimes there’s only one character who’s my eye in a particular location, and if I kill that character everything going on in that particular subplot is going to be lost.
The way my books are structured, everyone was together, then they all went their separate ways and the story deltas out like that, and now it’s getting to the point where the story is beginning to delta back in, and the viewpoint characters are occasionally meeting up with each other now and being in the same point at the same time, which gives me a lot more flexibility for killing people.”
That is some calculating Tywin Lannister shit right there.
Image via Getty.
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