10 Mistakes Game Of Thrones Can’t Afford To Repeat In Season 6
2. Nothing Characters Killing Main Characters
There are some times when this made absolutely perfect sense. Roose Bolton and Walder Freys bloody betrayal at the red wedding for example. The poignant scene of loyalty and trust being repaid with savage bloodletting was emotionally resonant and true to the motivations of the characters. It served the plot well.
The showrunners and by extension Martin have played up certain elements to create feelings of dread and unpredictability in previous seasons. Sometimes it is a necessary function of the plot and sometimes it feels like a way to trick the audience.
Oberyn Martell was introduced in grand fashion and put all of Kings Landing on notice. They began a revenge story that promised many cool twists and turns, villains falling with a slow and crushing inevitability. What they did instead was to bring a peripheral character back from obscurity to off him, generating false hope for the imprisoned Tyrion.
This was shocking for its unpredictability. But it was so unpredictable for its pointlessness. We now have daughters avenging fathers avenging sisters here. While this has an air of historical truth to the way things happen, stories are supposed to have more elegant machinations. And in a season where we have dragons and ice zombies, I feel citing realism may be redundant.