Some people like to suck the tension out of a dramatic movie/TV show/whatever by offering up a classic argument that goes a little something like this: “Well, they can’t kill So-And-So. He’s the main character.” While annoying in its unwillingness to suspend disbelief, it’s a solid point. It’s hard to move a plot forward without someone there to drive it. In fact, that’s apparently the only thing keeping George R.R. Martin from just killing off everybody in his Song Of Ice And Fire books.
According to Uproxx, the hard-working writer (who rarely takes time away from his books to do other things) recently suggested to a live audience that he’s about to become a lot more indiscriminate when it comes to deciding who he should kill. For those who only know his stories from Game Of Thrones, the books are structured so that each chapter is devoted to a different point-of-view character, and apparently Martin felt that he couldn’t kill off certain characters because it would leave their story threads dangling. Now that more and more Westerosi are going to be meeting up as the series winds down, though, he has discovered that he has “a lot more flexibility for killing people.”
The implication there is that characters who once seemed un-killable for plot reasons will be getting big targets on their backs as soon as they’re in the same room as other seemingly un-killable characters. Nobody is safe unless they never, ever spend any amount of time with another person. Now, if we drag this out to its logical conclusion, it means that every single one of Martin’s characters could be dead by the end of the series, since they’ll no longer be of any use. They’ll just start dropping until Samwell Tarly is the only one left, and he’ll finally take his rightful place upon the Iron Throne.