The Game of Thrones Book of the Dead

(Image credit: Helen Sloan/courtesy of HBO)

last updated 25 August 2017

It's all too easy to forget that most of the characters who have appeared on Game of Thrones are dead. But we shouldn't!

To aid in your remembering, here's an abridged illustrated guide to (almost) every character who gave up the ghost for our fun. They're listed in alphabetical order (with sections organized in order of relative deadness).

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The show had long since drawn certain equivalences between Cersei and Lady Olenna, her most formidable enemy. Jaime described Olenna to Randyll Tarly as a broken woman hellbent on revenge — a description notable for how easily it could apply to either woman. Olenna herself makes the comparison plain as she downs the poison Jaime pours her. "She's a monster, you know that," she tells him. She says she failed to imagine the things Cersei was capable of, but that won't quite wash. "War is war," she said to Sansa once, "but killing a man at a wedding? What sort of monster would do such a thing?"

It's fitting, I guess, that Grand Maester Pycelle died in Cersei's trap. Here he is, faux-feebly counseling Ros about dealing with kings after Joffrey's ascent. "They're complicated men," he says, "but I know how to serve them." He could not say the same of queens, it turns out. (No need to feel for him, though; Pycelle's fate was sealed the minute he called Joffrey a "capable young man" with a "strong military mind".)

Randyll Tarly forced Sam to become a member of the Night's Watch so that his brother Dickon could inherit. Having sworn allegiance to both Olenna and Cersei, he chooses the latter when Jaime forces the issue. Randyll's xenophobia wins over his loyalty to Olenna, whom he knew since he was a child. He defends that choice to the end. Dickon Tarly spent his life amiably reminding people what his name was. He didn't like killing the men he knew on the battlefield. He died as he lived, his father's accessory.

Cersei almost poisoned him during the Battle of the Blackwater, so his chances always felt slim. In her final showdown with Tywin (when Cersei refused to marry Loras and confessed to incest) she told him she'd never leave her last son. "Margaery will dig her claws in," she told Tywin, "you will dig your claws in, and you will fight over him like beasts until you rip him apart. I will burn our house to the ground before I let that happen." Cersei ended up doing all that to him herself.

Jaqen once asked Arya whether "a girl" was ready "to give up her ears, her nose, her tongue, her hopes and dreams, her loves and hates, all that makes a girl who she is." He knew she wasn't. "A girl is not ready to become no one," he said. "But she's ready to become someone else." Let's hope Jon's ready to become someone else too, because it seems like every arrow in the show is pointing in that direction, but so far, there have been no real signs of it in his comportment or appearance. And he needs to change, because after all the catastrophic mistakes he made last season, it's getting harder to swallow these accidental victories.

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Lili Loofbourow is the culture critic at TheWeek.com. She's also a special correspondent for the Los Angeles Review of Books and an editor for Beyond Criticism, a Bloomsbury Academic series dedicated to formally experimental criticism. Her writing has appeared in a variety of venues including The Guardian, Salon, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, and Slate.

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