Game of Thrones was the most influential TV show of the 2010s, and the most influential scene may have been the Red Wedding, which came near the end of season 3, in the episode "The Rains of Castamere." In this episode, King in the North Robb Stark traveled with his mother Catelyn, his wife Talisa, and his uncle Edmure to meet Lord Walder Frey at the Twins. Robb was originally supposed to marry one of Lord Walder's daughters, but fell in love with Talisa. Trying to make peace with this important ally, Edmure offers to marry one of Lord Walder's daughters in Robb's place.
At first, Walder Frey seems to accept this substitution, but he's not a man to forget a slight. During the wedding, his men murder the Stark army, stab Talisa in her pregnant belly, stab Robb in the heart, and slit Catelyn's throat. Game of Thrones already killed off one main character when it executed Ned Stark near the end of season 1, but by killing Robb and Catelyn in one fell swoop, the show one-upped itself. The Red Wedding sets a high watermark for realistic daring that other shows have yet to match.
"The Rains of Castamere" aired in 2013. Fans of George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire books already knew it was coming; they'd read the Red Wedding in A Storm of Swords back in 2000, and apparently it was just as traumatizing to read as it was to watch. "In 2000, when the book came out, I got tons of letters from people: ‘I’m so angry with you – I’m never going to read your work again. I threw the book into the fire, then a week later I had to know what happens, so I went out and bought another copy,’" Martin told Rolling Stone. "Some people were so horrified that they said they will not read any more of my work. I understand that."
Obviously, most people didn't feel like that. Martin's books would only get more popular, and the Red Wedding marks the point where Game of Thrones went from being a popular TV show to an outright phenomenon. "The TV Red Wedding is even worse than the book, of course, because [GoT creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss] turned it up to 11 by bringing in Talisa, pregnant with Robb’s child, none of which happened in the book," Martin recalled. "So we get a pregnant woman stabbed repeatedly in the belly."
So the Red Wedding was hard to watch and to read. I imagine it was hard to film, too. And Martin is here to tell us it was hard to write:
"The more I write about a character, the more affection I feel…even for the worst of them. Which doesn’t mean I won’t kill them. Whoever it was who said ‘Kill your darlings’ was referring to his favorite lines in a story, but it’s just as true for characters. The moment the reader begins to believe that a character is protected by the magical cloak of authorial immunity, tension goes out the window. The Red Wedding was tremendously hard to write. I skipped over it until I finished the entirety of A Storm of Swords, then I went back and forced myself to write that chapter. I loved those characters too much. But I knew it had to be done."
And yet, events like the Red Wedding are what stick in the minds of fans as they think back on the most profound, memorable TV (or book) moments they've experienced. William Faulkner was right he said writers had to kill their darlings, and Martin is right that the axiom applies to characters. It's a lesson I still feel too many TV shows haven't taken to heart. But if they want to start, the example is there for them to follow.
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h/t CinemaBlend