Absurdly High Casualty Rates in Game of Thrones battles for the sake of Character Drama

in gameofthrones •  6 years ago  (edited)

I wrote this for the ASOIAF subreddit and I thought I'd share it here too.


Correct me if I'm wrong, but has there been a battle in HBO's Game of Thrones since Season 4's battle at Castle Black which did not feature a near-complete wipeout of one side? Historically it was a disaster to be decimated, and decimated only means losing 1/10th of your forces. It's rare for armies to neither surrender nor retreat when a battle is clearly going against them. It certainly shouldn't be happening in every battle.

In most of these cases, it seems the purpose is to remove the army as an element so we can focus on 1 v 1 character fights, no matter how ridiculous or contrived or disastrous.

Stannis vs Boltons

After many desertions, Stannis has a complete wipeout against the Boltons. Refusing to surrender to a man is not a normal thing, but it's Stannis vs. Ramsay, fine whatever.

Hardhome

A handful of boats aside, near complete wipeout of the wildlings present. Fine, it shows the threat of the WW for what it's supposed to be and puts Jon in the position of fleeing the massacre.

Battle of the Bastards

Virtual wipeout of Snow's forces after some contrived stupidity. Snow acts like a moron with no restraint and ends up surrounded literally in a pile of bodies of his allies. All so that it can be completely desperate when Sansa, Baelish and the Vale knights can come in to save the day. Complete wipeout for Bolton forces and similarly pushes towards a 1 v 1 confrontation between Jon and Ramsay.

Battle of Winterfell

100% wipeout for WW (possibly the entire race). Visually we see a virtual wipeout of the Dothraki. In the after the episode they even say that it is the end of the Dothraki race. We later see what appears to be a wipeout of the unsullied and all the other infantry as well. By the end of the episode it looks like a complete wipeout of everyone bar named characters. With all the grunts dead, we get to have named characters swarmed by wights or 1 v 1 the Night King (each individually). I guess this one's ok, because despite what they show on screen and say in after episode - it turns out only 50% of winterfell forces are destroyed. 50% is a good result by the standards of recent GoT battles In later episodes it looks like the Unsullied are even stronger than before the battle.

Battle of King's Landing

Complete wipeout of Euron's fleet. Complete wipeout of Golden Company. Lannister armies look to be surrendering in the city, but then we get a complete wipeout of not just the army, but the civilian population as well...


I didn't watch Season 7 so I missed the battles in that one. Just based on the ones I have seen I imagine those featured total wipeouts as well.

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The quality of writing on the show has been going downhill for a while. In the books certain things play out the way that they do because they we were set up to by ten of fifteen chapters worth of material. In the show they largly skip the set up so everything seems to come out of nowhere. Further, once they ran out of source material they didn't really know what to do so they were reduced to writing every like a regular T.V. show.

They took inspiration from getting their troops wiped in Drugwars.

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The game of throne movie. I heard the movie fans are requesting for the re produce of the finale season. And seriously each time I hear about that name game of throne, I will really wish to watch it someday

We all can't have a perfect movie but damn I'm still angry at how cersie died... Like really? She Hastings die that way? Way too easy but not expected and I think that's what GOT is all about.

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