Ranking The 20 Deaths of Game of Thrones Season 5
By Ani Bundel
13. Selyse
The forerunner to her husband’s untimely end at the hands of Brienne (and one might say a misplaced faith in the Red God), Selyse’s suicide was the opening salvo in the string of deaths that would come throughout Season 5’s finale episode. With six deaths in 63 minutes, that was approximately one death every ten minutes.
As for Seylse, she wasn’t the most sympathetic character during her three seasons on the show. A woman of serious religious fervor, she treated her daughter Shireen in a cold and heartless way, suggesting that the girl was an abomination who should never have been born. But it turned out that those statements, though cruel, came from a place of self-hatred rather than a lack of maternal instincts. When they set her girl on fire and Shireen started to scream, it was like seeing a woman come out of a trance—too late to say goodbye. Her death was proof that the trance had been shattered forever. She couldn’t return to the solace of faith, and she couldn’t handle the guilt.
