Quote Originally Posted by Vyrerus View Post
I've never watched any Game of Thrones. For me, character death is way to remind the audience that there are stakes for the protagonists. And if it's a sudden, shocking death from something unexpected, then it's usually to instill in the audience that the characters aren't beyond the mundane ways to die.

Not so much in Final Fantasy, but in something like say... Blue Gender, where the military members that pick up the main guy at the start mostly die due to not being properly secured in their seating or from not wearing helmets etc. Just whoopsie doopsie, my chair fell backwards from a shockwave and I snapped my neck! Real world example was, a guy I knew from Scouts slipped in the shower and broke his neck when his head collided with his towel rack.

Obviously not asking for shock value/mundane death, not with how invested in these characters a lot of people get, but at a certain point we need stakes raised and the air of uncertainty let into the story.
The pitfall Game of Thrones books was that too many interesting character died and you just didn't care about the random grab bag of character that showed up in their place. That's one of the reasons you don't kill off character in a story, because your lose character relationships, story threads get broken and potential character arcs get cut short. Game of Thrones did it well at first because it was entirely logical that the effective protagonist was executed in the first book / first season but it started to turn the story into swiss cheese by book 4-5 seasons 4-5. Killing the character known as Tywin was it mistake, it just removed a very interesting character from the story and made the killer far less interesting.