The 60 Most Important Deaths on Game of Thrones

9. Jaime and Cersei Lannister

Jaime and Cersei Lannister may be the two most complex characters on Game of Thrones. Jaime is a knot of contradictions: he’s the noble-hearted knight who killed the Mad King in order to save hundreds of thousands of lives, and the heartless cad who pushed a kid out a window rather than risk exposing his affair with his sister. Cersei is more straightforward — she’s a vicious killer who will stop at nothing to secure her place at the top of the pecking order — but her hard exterior is the result of years of pain and abuse. Jaime and Cersei are hurt down to their core, which is part of the reason they’re drawn to each other.

So these characters were standard-bearers on the show: they were the villains we rooted for and the heroes we wanted to see fall. Their deaths were similarly complicated. Jaime, who had made a genuine effort to break away from Cersei and have a healthier life, turned back to try and help her, dashing all the progress he’d made. And Cersei, who was 100 feet down a hole she had dug for herself, showed genuine fear and regret in the end, maybe even remorse. They died in each other’s arms, unhealed, still broken, but together.

I know some fans were upset with how these two went out, and while I would have liked the show to take some more time exploring how they got the end of the line, I think their death scene had a jagged kind of beauty to it. – Dan

8. Tywin Lannister

Tywin, you magnificent bastard. Tywin catches a lot of justified flak for his less-than-stellar parenting, or that time he arranged to have a few hundred Starks and Stark loyalists murdered at dinner, but he also kept the realm in order. He matched his daughter Cersei to Robert Baratheon and settled the country following Robert’s Rebellion, and did his level best to keep King Joffrey and later King Tommen on the Iron Throne. Alive, Tywin was a force to be reckoned with. Dead, he left a power vacuum that everyone rushed to fill, with chaotic results.

Cersei handing over power to the High Sparrow, Littlefinger and Roose Bolton conspiring in defiance of the Iron Throne…none of it would have happened had Tywin been around to lend his steady hand. With Tywin out of the picture, there was no one around to stop Cersei from going after the Tyrells in earnest, souring what had been a useful alliance. With Tywin out the picture, Daenerys arrived to find a Westeros in chaos, ripe for the picking. Had he lived, things might have been very different.

On a more interpersonal level, by killing Tywin, Tyrion put himself in a position where he had to find shelter elsewhere, setting him up to become Dany’s Hand. And Cersei, emulating her father, eventually ascended to the Iron Throne by picking off her enemies mercilessly, as she thought Tywin would do. There are some similarities between the death of Tywin and the deaths of the Three-Eyed Raven or Jeor Mormont; in all three cases, the mentors had to die before the mentees could really spread their wings. Politically and personally, Tywin’s death had far-reaching consequences.