So, Game of Thrones is back, and I’ve been writing quite a lot about it. First, for Dear Television, I covered Arya Stark’s revenge plot and the idea of marginality on the show:
“Game of Thrones isn’t brave because it kills its protagonists. It’s brave because it doesn’t have any.”
And then, this week, in my debut essay for The Daily Beast, I wrote about That Thing That Happened To That One Character and the afterlives of TV deaths:
“While the loss of a major character obviously places a limit on narrative—one less character, one less narrative arc, one less set of possible combinations—these shows have become uncommonly invested in the possibilities opened up by an abrupt exit.”
Phillip Maciak 