Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead and the Importance of Gut Punches in High Stakes Drama

SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for Game of Thrones through “The Rains of Castamere” (season three, episode nine) as well as through The Walking Dead’s third season.  Nonreader Game of Thrones fans, there won’t be any spoilers for things in the books as I have only read the first one.

Like many fans of the HBO series Game of Thrones who haven’t read the books (or in my case, haven’t read that far), I’m still processing the events of the episode “The Rains of Castamere”, which ended with the brutal murders of Robb Stark, his mother Catelyn, his pregnant wife Talisa and just about everyone else aligned with the Starks at The Twins except for poor Arya.  The Red Wedding is an iconic scene from the book series; this was the scene that motivated show runners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss to want to make the show in the first place.  It is a scene so brutal George RR Martin claims he wrote it last when he was writing the book.  This episode is certainly inspiring similar reactions to those who have been throwing the book at a wall since its original publication in 2000.  This game changing moment has me thinking about a lot of things, in particular another show based on a popular literary source completely botched their “Red Wedding” moment, The Walking Dead.

As much as Game of Thrones fans were looking forward to seeing how they would portray the Red Wedding, fans of The Walking Dead comic series were really looking forward to seeing how they were going to portray the arc Made to Suffer, the eighth volume trade paperback.  It is similar in its game changing brutality (I’ll try to avoid too many explicit details except for those that coincide with the TV show), with several long term characters getting brutally killed as The Governor raids the prison, destroying any sense of sanctuary it had.  For a series as brutal as The Walking Dead, few moments have come close to the ones in those issues and it’s a moment that has shaped the comic ever since.

Unfortunately for those just watching the show, The Walking Dead copped out of that big moment.  They teased that 27 characters would die, but really it was 25 randos, a recurring character who never made much of a blip on the radar and a character everyone hated.  All the other major characters, including The Governor himself, survived a very minor skirmish.  Had they done it right, people would have been posting reaction videos on YouTube and generating as many memes as possible rather than shaking their heads in disappointment.

To be fair, Walking Dead is much less faithful to its source material.  From what I’ve heard from friends who’ve read The Song of Ice and Fire series, though the show has altered things to accommodate the TV medium, the grand story is more or less the same.  You can’t say that with The Walking Dead TV show, which has central characters and major events that never existed in print.  Although some of these new elements don’t work, diverging significantly isn’t necessarily a bad thing: the medium of comics is no stranger to rebooting and altering their story to accommodate different mediums, new writers and changing times.  The key is staying true to the world of your story and making it compelling.

Like Westeros and Essos on Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead is set in a brutal, unforgiving world where a minor mistake can have deadly consequences.  The stakes need to be raised regularly, and that often means killing off major characters.  This comes into conflict with TV, especially really popular shows like The Walking Dead: not wanting to mess with a good thing and maintain a status quo.  Walking Dead has ratings network TV would love to have, so they may want to favor going not going as far as the comics, which cheapens the stakes of the show.

Regardless of people complaining about the Red Wedding to the point of even threatening to never watch the show again, it needed to happen.  The Red Wedding took much of what nonreaders thought was going to happen and threw it away.  Like Ned’s death in season one (and Jaime’s redemption this season), Game of Thrones is subverting our expectations for fantasy stories.  It reinforced the notion that no one is safe and the story can go anywhere.  While it’s horrifying, it’s also exhilarating for a viewer to have no idea where the story is going.  It’s not something that should be on every show, but for shows as high stakes as Walking Dead and Game of Thrones are, the occasional devastating gut punch is a necessary price of admission.