Literature at all levels changes so gradually it’s hard sometimes to even see it happening. Like a glacier moving an inch a year, everything seems static and ordinary until you suddenly look up and realize you’re miles away form where you started.
Like eleventy billion other people, I watched “The Battle of Winterfell” episode of Game of Thrones last week, squinting into the pixelated darkness, and really enjoyed it. I’ll go on record as liking the plot twist involving Arya, and not minding at all the sometimes sketchy tactics the living used against the dead, allowing that fighting an army of zombies that’s endlessly replenished from your own casualties and is directed by an ancient being killable only by an extremely rare substance has its challenges.
What struck me more than the technical lighting issues and the surprise way the supernatural villain of the story was dispatched in an 80-minute battle was the way people were disappointed by the lack of main character deaths.
Are You Not Entertained?
If you’re not familiar with the term Plot Armor here’s the thumbnail: It’s when a character is so important to the story their death is impossible, with a resultant loss of drama and tension. You can put Harry Potter in all sorts of sticky situations, after all, but we know he ain’t dyin’ before the final confrontation, and probably not then. Plot Armor has been an unavoidable fact of most fiction for a long time.
But there was a bit of a sea change a few decades ago, as writers working in multiple genres sought ways to upend convention and escape hoary old tropes. George R.R. Martin was one of those writers, and since A Song of Ice and Fire is essentially one extended deconstruction of epic fantasy tropes established in Tolkien’s time and slavishly followed since, one of the things he sought to undermine was Plot Armor. Hence, Ned Stark losing his head just as he should have been gathering his energy to be the protagonist.
This was more shocking back in the 1990s when the series first published, of course; many have followed in Martin’s footsteps, and Plot Armor has decayed, leading us to a point where we’re all surprised and disappointed when major characters in an epic fantasy story survive. The whole trope has been turned on its head. Death isn’t shocking. Survival is.
The ultimate lesson here is this: Know your genre. Know the tropes you’re working with. And think about whether there are any you can play with successfully–but also know which ones work for your story. You don’t have to deconstruct, subvert, or complicate every single convention in your chosen niche, but it can be a glorious success when you hit on a rule you can break to great effect.
Now, if all of these characters survive the entire series, then we riot.