On Game of Thrones, resurrection, and coming back wrong

This post originally appeared on WiC in February of 2016. For whatever reason, it seemed pertinent after the events of “Home.”

WARNING: THIS POST HAS SPOILERS APLENTY

A Song of Ice and Fire is fantasy fiction, and so by extension is Game of Thrones. The series has been praised for grounding itself in real-world scenarios, but it still involves dragons, unstoppable ice monsters, and men who are killed and come back from the dead.

It’s that last one that’s been on a lot of people’s minds lately. George R.R. Martin has firmly established that resurrection is possible in his world, with Beric Dondarrion being Exhibit A. Dondarrion, a knight, is sent out by Ned Stark in A Game of Thrones to arrest Gregor Clegane, who’s rampaging through the Riverlands. The next time we see Dondarrion is in A Storm of Swords, where we learn that Clegane killed him. Twice. He was also killed several more times in battle, and dies at the hands of the Hound before our eyes. Each time, he is resurrected through the intervention of Thoros of Myr, who calls upon the Lord of Light to raise his fallen friend.

Resurrection can be a tricky business in fiction. It’s memorable, certainly—seeing a dead man walk is going to get people’s attention, even if he’s made up. It can also provide a way around plot issues. If you kill a character for impact but still want to use that character, resurrection can come in handy.

The problem is that readers, or watchers, can feel cheated if a character they thought was dead comes back. Look no further than what happened to the character of Glenn on this past half-season of The Walking Dead for an example of when fans can feel jerked around by a death—the character was shown being torn apart by zombies in one episode, but turned up several installments later quite alive, and people were displeased with the explanation as to how.

So how does a storyteller pull off a resurrection without making it feel cheap? It’s something George R.R. Martin has thought about, as he revealed in an interview with Bullseye back in 2011:

"I do think that if you’re bringing a character back, that a character has gone through death, that’s a transformative experience… Even back in those days of Wonder Man and all that, I loved the fact that he died, and although I liked the character in later years, I wasn’t so thrilled when he came back because that sort of undid the power of it. Much as I admire Tolkien, I once again always felt like Gandalf should have stayed dead. That was such an incredible sequence in Fellowship of the Ring when he faces the Balrog on the Khazad-dûm and he falls into the gulf, and his last words are, “Fly, you fools.”What power that had, how that grabbed me. And then he comes back as Gandalf the White, and if anything he’s sort of improved. I never liked Gandalf the White as much as Gandalf the Grey, and I never liked him coming back. I think it would have been an even stronger story if Tolkien had left him dead.My characters who come back from death are worse for wear. In some ways, they’re not even the same characters anymore. The body may be moving, but some aspect of the spirit is changed or transformed, and they’ve lost something. One of the characters who has come back repeatedly from death is Beric Dondarrion, The Lightning Lord. Each time he’s revived he loses a little more of himself. He was sent on a mission before his first death. He was sent on a mission to do something, and it’s like, that’s what he’s clinging to. He’s forgetting other things, he’s forgetting who he is, or where he lived. He’s forgotten the woman who he was once supposed to marry. Bits of his humanity are lost every time he comes back from death; he remembers that mission. His flesh is falling away from him, but this one thing, this purpose that he had is part of what’s animating him and bringing him back to death. I think you see echoes of that with some of the other characters who have come back from death."

So Martin uses resurrection, but tries to justify it by making his characters come back different. This is a strategy that has worked before. Consider the example of Buffy the Vampire Slayer—the producers killed the main character in the Season 5 finale but brought her back in the Season 6 premiere. She spent the entirety of the sixth season dealing with the emotional fallout of her resurrection, and the entirety of the seventh with the metaphysical fallout. By and large, people seemed to agree that the show had earned her return.

Martin makes it clear that Beric Dondarrion is out of sorts after his resurrection. Listen to him talk about it in A Storm of Swords:

"Can I dwell on what I scarce remember? I held a castle on the Marches once, and there was a woman I was pledged to marry, but I could not find that castle today, nor tell you the color of that woman’s hair. Who knighted me, old friend? What were my favorite foods? It all fades. Sometimes I think I was born on the bloody grass in that grove of ash, with the taste of fire in my mouth and a hole in my chest. Are you my mother, Thoros?"

And Beric’s problems are nothing to compared to those of Catelyn Stark, who is resurrected as the implacable Lady Stoneheart after being murdered at the Red Wedding. Dondarrion seems to have retained some measure of human feeling, at least, but Stoneheart wants to do nothing but go around the Riverlands killing her enemies. She even turns on Brienne, whose actions seem to be at odds with what Catelyn asked her to do when she was alive but who has a good explanation for her behavior. Stoneheart, however, is not interested in shades of grey. She is all vengeance.

Martin disapproves of resurrection generally, but believes that his use of it is justified by bringing characters back from the dead much changed. Is he right? Stoneheart is a popular character, so fans seem to be on his side. However, I appreciate how HBO’s Game of Thrones has backed away from the resurrections—they’ve included Dondarrion, but there’s no sign of Stoneheart. I think this is for the best—it keeps the world of the show more grounded.

Game of Thrones has also been less inclined to do fake-out deaths. For example, in A Dance with Dragons, Martin leads us to believe that both Mance Rayder and Davos Seaworth have died, only to reveal them alive later—the show cut these events. Again, this is a good thing—the less the show jerks me around regarding death, the happier I’ll be. I think that Martin, by and large, gets away with using resurrections in his books, but cuts it a little close for my liking sometimes.

ANOTHER WARNING: SPOILERS COMING. REALLY.

And Martin may need that room to maneuver very soon, because those who have been following the goings-on behind the scenes of Game of Thrones Season 6 know that there’s another resurrection coming up. Jon Snow, who was murdered at the end of Season 5, is coming back. The evidence, which includes a photograph of actor Kit Harington in costume on set, is pretty insurmountable, so now it’s just a matter of waiting for it to happen.

But considering Martin’s comments above, it’s worth it to ask ourselves: is Jon Snow going to come back different? And if so, how different?

It’s unlikely that Jon will be as far gone as Lady Stoneheart. Melisandre, who is the person best equipped to bring Jon back from the dead (on the show, she even knows about Dondarrion’s resurrection), is at Castle Black when Jon Snow dies, so she’ll probably be on the case quickly. Catelyn Stark was resurrected days after her murder, Dondarrion only moments. Like Dondarrion, we can expect Jon Snow to maintain most of his basic faculties.

But then again, his resurrection has to be earned, and we know how Martin earns his resurrections. Will Jon, like Dondarrion, struggle to remember where he came from? Will he lose the ability to take pleasure in his favorite foods? Some fans have theorized that, freed from his obligations to the Night’s Watch by death, Jon will take up the mantle of Jon Stark, or Jon Targaryen, assuming other theories about his past are true. They see him defeating the Boltons at Winterfell, fighting off the White Walkers, maybe even becoming king! But what if the resurrected Jon, a shade of his living self, doesn’t see the point in these things? Or what if they all come to pass, but Jon is unable to find meaning or pleasure in them?

Frankly, that’s the kind of cruel, ironic twist of the knife I’d expect from an author like George R.R. Martin. Jon Snow is coming back—that much is certain. But it may not work out how we expect.

h/t Reddit