George RR Martin Say Game Of Thrones Red Wedding Is Better Than Star Wars

Game of Thrones creator George R.R. Martino has made the bold claim that the infamous “Red Wedding” in his book series-turned-hit TV show is better than any of the shocking death moments in the Star Wars Saga. Martin was doing an interview with The Independent, when he threw down the gauntlet, coming at Star Wars for committing mass murder in a way that affected no one: 

“Star Wars kills more characters than I do!” Martin argued. “In the very first Star Wars movie they blow up the entire planet of Alderaan, which has, like, 20 billion people on it, and they’re all dead. But you know what? Nobody cares. Everybody on Alderaan is dead. Oh, OK. But we don’t know the people on Alderaan. We don’t feel their deaths. It’s just a statistic. If you’re going to write about death, you should feel it.”

That’s one perspective on what Martin arguably did to traumatize millions of Game of Thornes fans with the Red Wedding. The infamous event (in the book “A Storm of Swords” or Season 3 of the HBO series) didn’t just kill off characters the fans had come to love – it murdered characters that fans had become attached to as the primary protagonists of the story. Robb Stark, his mother Catelyn and his pregnant wife Talisa were the clear successors to Ned Stark and the Northern kingdom’s campaign of vengeance against the Lannisters and King’s Landing. However, with the “Red Wedding” Martin pulled a big twist, killing off them all off, including the unborn baby. 

 “In our entertainment, television, film, books, over the centuries as it’s evolved, death is often treated very cavalierly” Martin explains. “Somebody is dead, we’ve got a mystery, and the detective has to figure out who did it. We never consider who the corpse is, or what his life was like…what it’s going to be like without him. If I’m going to write a death scene… I want to make the reader feel it… People felt that death.”

It wasn’t just shock value, either: The Red Wedding was the first big signal flare that Game of Thrones would skip the usual heroic archetypes to examine the stories of unlikely heroes, like a bastard (Jon Snow), an imp (Tyrion Lannister), a wild child (Arya) and a crippled boy (Bran). 

As for the Red Wedding? Martin says the emotional impact and shock of it is exactly what gives it so much indelible value as a story: 

“It’s a horrible chapter, and it upsets people. It makes people angry, it makes people sad. People throw the book against the wall or into the fireplace. When it was on TV, it had the same effect on tens of thousands, if not millions, of people. To my mind, that’s good. We’re talking about death here!”

To be fair, Star Wars is now in the process of retroactively trying to build up the story of Alderaan, its people, and how significant it was in Princess Leia’s life (see: Obi-Wan Kenobi TV series). But Star Wars has also shown that that kind of hindsight retcon doesn’t have nearly the impact The Red Wedding did.