4. Khal Drogo
Drogos death was possibly the most muted on the show, an especially weird fact considering the man could basically kill you with his magnificent eyebrows, never mind his rippling musculature. He was a walking death machine, and he was brought down by a lack of antiseptic before being vegetable-ised by blood magic. Yes, Im sure weve all attempted to be tough on occasion by calling our gnarly cuts barely flesh-wounds, but by challenging his inner Black Knight Drogo came to his ignominious end in one of the most uncomfortable, slow-burning deaths weve been treated to on the show. The awful thing was that it was all so avoidable had he not been showing off for the khalazar. The fact is that nobody expected this to happen to one of the series most ferocious warriors, and that in itself was a shock. Great men are not felled by a lack of iodine, but here Drogo was, falling off his horse and ebbing away in a display of awful weakness. It was pretty grim watching to start with, but then his wife really ramped up the awfulness by attempting to save him with blood magic at the cost of his unborn son and a really unfortunate horse, causing him to go into permanent vegetative state. As that really wasnt part of the plan, she then suffocates him in a tragically emotional moment. So really, while Drogos death isnt the most up-front shocking thing to happen on Game of Thrones, it carries a slow-burn shock which can trump the majority of deaths. From the fact it was a particularly awful, completely out-of-character way to die, combined with the heart-rendingly sad euthanasia scene, this really is marked out as one of the most poignant, dramatic deaths on the show.