You Win Or You Die: Ranking the 99 Game of Thrones Deaths

Image credit: HBO/Helen Sloan

Ros and Dontos

Having left the shadows of Winterfell to try her trade elsewhere, Ros ends up a pawn to one of Game of Thrones’ most powerful players. She takes a job at Littlefinger’s House of Pancakes, but learns to her detriment that flipping flapjacks for this guy isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. She recognizes Littlefinger for what he is—a scheming, conniving manipulator, the same way everyone else sees him. And like everyone else, Ros puts her trust in him regardless, although she’s more cautious than most.

Throughout her time on the show, Ros allies herself with Varys. She helps to hide Shae and Tyrion’s secret affair, and she keeps a cautionary eye on Littlefinger’s interest in Sansa as well. Ros proves herself to be a shrewd woman, but her sharp mind isn’t enough to save her. Intelligence is an asset for any Thrones character, but oftentimes power wins out.

Such is the case with Ros. She couldn’t talk her way out of a session with King Joffrey, who used his time not to bed her, but to string her up and use her for target practice. It would seem that Littlefinger arranged this little tête-à-tête. His little birds paid off, and he learned that Ros wasn’t as loyal to Team Baelish as the T-shirts he’d had printed up would suggest. She was, as he tells Varys during one of their many rap battles, a “bad investment.”

Ros was a character not in the books–in her place, the character who was in the books but had himself reduced down to just his purpose in the books–to give Sansa the necklace from Olenna. Alas poor Dontos, we hardly knew ye on screen. But though they may have had opposite experiences from page to screen, both are straightforward example of how characters tend to die once their purpose to the narrative has been fulfilled.