: Re: Disposable Characters I've never seen or read Game of Thrones but I hear that the author is in the habit of killing characters off quite frequently. I have no idea what these particular characters

@Odierno164

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+1 Secespitus; I have little to add but to talk on writing mechanics.

Game of Thrones is a saga, a long-format story with many main characters so the writers (7, led by George RR Martin) have plenty of time to develop characters they intend to kill, and (like real life) keep bringing more of them into the story, with overlapping arcs that can span years.

Obviously it is hard to equate film length with book length, but a typical novel of 100,000 words can be covered in 2 hours, and GoT is about 55 hours long (I just googled, it may be longer): the equivalent of 28 full length novels.

In a single novel I could not portray more than three Main Character arcs (they have to be mostly together so their scenes overlap a lot); and sketch twice that (with overlaps too). The same goes for a typical movie.

But in a saga that can run 30 or 40 novels, you can portray literally a hundred Main Character arcs, and likely should, because it is difficult to prevent your audience getting bored following the same hero through that many books (with exceptions for compelling static characters that do not really develop at all, like Sherlock Holmes or Hawkeye Pierce).

Now obviously it would be a mistake to try and introduce a hundred MC in novel 1 of 40: You have to introduce them as you go. Their arcs must overlap, which means you (the author) need to take some off the stage to introduce others and give them a chance.

To Secespitus's point, one advantage of this approach is preventing the sense of "False Jeopardy" [A moment in a drama in which it is suggested that, despite the audience’s commonsense intuition to the contrary, a series regular might die]. We know Superman, disabled and mortalized by Kryptonite, is never going to be permanently killed or disabled. If Sherlock Holmes gets shot, it is temporary, he will be fine in a week or two.

Not so on GoT, favorite MAIN characters die every season, and the audience members that are emotionally invested in them, with love or hate, are fearful or hopeful every time that character appears. Full of anticipation about what is about to happen, which is the main fun of fiction.

It is far more difficult to pull this trick off in a single novel, there just isn't enough room to develop and kill more than one or two MC, but increasingly more leeway to kill secondaries, tertiaries, walk-ons and anonymous characters [e.g. everyone in Washington DC].

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