George R.R. Martin has a reputation for indiscriminately killing his main characters.
The popular conception is that he has this reputation because deaths are random and capricious. But this is not he case. His reputation for unexpected lethality is actually because he uses character death as a way of introducing radical reversals into his plot.
(For an in-depth discussion of reversals, check out 3-Point Plotting by John Rogers, the creator of Leverage. I also discuss it over here, but the short version: It’s the moment when the story you thought you were experiencing becomes a completely different story. It’s when Die Hard stops being a film about a guy trying to fix his marriage problems and becomes a hostage situation; it’s also the point where it’s revealed that Die Hard is a heist and not a hostage-taking.)
Martin has proven to be a master of making you think that he’s telling Story A only to dramatically reveal that Story A is never, ever going to happen. “Ah, this is the story of how Ned Stark saves the kingdom from the forces of corruption and– Oh. I guess not. So it must be the story of how Ned Stark’s son avenges his– Oh. I guess not. Well, then it must be– Ah, never mind.”
What makes this work particularly well is that these moments of reversal — rather than just being random — are completely logical and fully justified. It’s not just the author screaming, “GOTCHA!” It’s brilliant writing.
But the motherfucka is still gonna kill you off.
As another example, consider Tyrion’s trial. Once you realize that the trial is rigged, Tyrion seems doomed. Lots of stuff piles up to make that a virtual certainty (even after Tyrion demands trial by combat)… and then there’s the game changer when Oberyn agrees to be his champion. The narrative impetus appears to be that Oberyn will change the outcome, defeat the Mountain, and Tyrion will walk free. There’s a whole potential plot flowing out of that which makes a lot of sense (House Martell allying with Tyrion, Tyrion vs. Cersei in cutthroat politics, etc.).
And then just as that locomotive is starting to build up some momentum… Martin yanks it away again.
There’s a couple of reasons to do this:
First, by this point in the narrative we’ve all started recognizing the reversals. If Martin doesn’t throw some fake reversals / double reversals into the mix, the reversals themselves will become purely predictable. If he wants to keep you off-balance (which he does, because an audience getting too far ahead of the plot is the absolute death of narrative ninety-nine times out of a hundred) he has to mix it up.
Second, this process has a really significant impact on a lot of different characters and a lot of relationships between characters. And it does have a lasting impact on how events play out.
So there’s both a procedural and a dramatic reason for things to play out like this.
Excellent post. After so many reversals, what story is he telling?
Mostly a story of people dying in horrible and senseless ways before they manage to achieve anything. There’s a reason why I’ve stopped reading the books. You can’t get attached to the characters, because they’ll just be killed off. So you’d have to get attached to the world instead, which is like the only constant in the bloodbath. But why should I feel emotionally invested in a world that crappy?
In the end it seems to be the story of the rise and fall of an authoritarian regime.