When you write something, or create something in any fashion, a very fair thing to do is prop it up and even at times put it over other things in order to showcase how much it means to you. However, in the case of George RR Martin, the creator of Game of Thrones, he recently said that his Red Wedding scene (in the books, though technically also the show) is better than anything Star Wars did in terms of death.
No, really, he said that:
“Star Wars kills more characters than I do!” Martin argued. “In the very first Star Wars movie they blow up the entire planet of Alderaan, which has, like, 20 billion people on it, and they’re all dead. But you know what? Nobody cares. Everybody on Alderaan is dead. Oh, OK. But we don’t know the people on Alderaan. We don’t feel their deaths. It’s just a statistic. If you’re going to write about death, you should feel it.”
Ironically, we would learn more about those people via the prequels, but he does have a point. After A New Hope, Alderaan isn’t mentioned again, and to Martin, that’s the key difference between Game of Thrones and Star Wars, how death is treated:
“In our entertainment, television, film, books, over the centuries as it’s evolved, death is often treated very cavalierly” Martin explains. “Somebody is dead, we’ve got a mystery, and the detective has to figure out who did it. We never consider who the corpse is, or what his life was like…what it’s going to be like without him. If I’m going to write a death scene… I want to make the reader feel it… People felt that death.”
He’s not wrong, the Red Wedding setup many things in the series, and several characters that other franchises (like Star Wars) would’ve put the “bulk of the burden on” to save the day…died. So whether you agree with it or not…Martin does indeed make his point clear.
Source: The Independent
