The 60 Most Important Deaths on Game of Thrones
By Corey Smith
More than perhaps anything else, Game of Thrones is known for its death scenes. It’s chopped off the heads of main characters, killed people at dinner, burned them alive, slew them on the toilet and much more. Over its run, Game of Thrones has trained its viewers to expect that characters can and will get knocked off at any time, which makes watching any given episode of the show more exciting than it would be otherwise.
Some Game of Thrones deaths are more shocking than others, and some more brutal. But which are the most important? What even makes a character death important? Is it how prominent they were in the narrative? Or how much impact they have on the plot? Or maybe it’s just how much the audience likes them? Maybe it’s a combination of everything.
Those are the questions we’re here to answer. So let’s look at the 50 most important deaths on Game of Thrones, ranked from least to most vital:
60. The Dothraki Khals
We might only be able to name even one of them (I wanna say there was a Khal Moro involved), but Daenerys’ burning of the gathered Dothraki khals at the end of season 6’s “Book of the Stranger” was important on a few levels.
From what we know of their history, Dothraki women do not have a high place in their society. They can be respected as khaleesis, but they don’t make the decisions. If the khaleesis live to become members of the dosh khaleen, they are revered, but their options are very limited. Ordinary Dothraki women also seem to have a limited number of roles they can take up. Dany’s Khal barbecue went a ways toward changing this perception, as she literally burned away many of the old traditions and established a khalasar ruled by a woman. What’s more, that khalasar was bigger than any previously in existence, big enough help her conquer Westeros and willing to make the trip across the poison water.
We may not have known the khals who died, but their deaths paved the way for Daenerys to take back not only Meereen from the slavers but to decimate the Lannisters on the field of battle. They are a vital part of Daenerys’ war machine, and she couldn’t lay claim to the Seven Kingdoms without them.