Game of Thrones: Most heartbreaking deaths up until season 8
Photo: Helen Sloan/Courtesy of HBO
Game of Thrones is a series known for its body count and breaking fans’ hearts more than a few times over the past seven seasons.
With the eighth and final season of Game of Thrones about to debut, many fans are looking back at the previous seven seasons of the show. So much has happened from the first season to the seventh, and fans have lost many beloved characters along the way. Sadly, it’s likely that they’ll lose more before the series comes to an end, but we can ignore that unwelcome fact for a few more days at least.
Ned Stark’s death was one of the most shocking moments of the series, securing the notion that no one on the show is safe and creating a domino effect that led to everything that followed it. But Ned’s execution was certainly not the last time that the series would break fans’ hearts, and it has continued to do so from the Red Wedding to the Battle of Castle Black and the Battle of the Bastards to all of the casualties that have resulted from Cersei’s actions and the Night King’s onslaught.
While some characters have gotten what was coming to them—ahem, Ramsay and Littlefinger—many of the ones who died during the first seven seasons actually deserved better. So, before we look forward and discover who will be killed during the show’s final season, we’re taking a moment to honor the saddest character deaths that have taken place throughout the series. Westeros has been a bleaker place without some of these characters in it.
But as the Braavosi would say, all men must die. We just wish some of them hadn’t had to.