Can’t we all just forgive and forget?

It’s been 3 days since HBO aired the Game of Thrones episode “The Rains of Castamere.” People were pretty upset after watching the ending of the penultimate episode to season 3, but time has past and hopefully with it hard feelings have past as well.

This is my warning right now that MASSIVE SPOILERS are about to be given. please do not read any further if you have not seen this episode yet. The last thing I want to do is ruin this unbelievable, yet controversial moment for you.

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I, like many of you fellow GoT fans, was rooting for the Stark family in the quest for the throne. My immediate reaction to the Red Wedding was the same as most of you- first i wanted to throw up and then I never wanted to watch the show ever again.

Now that I’ve had some time to reflect on the deaths of Rob, Kaitlyn, Talisa and little unborn Ned Stark, I’ve decided that I may have over reacted a tad. Let’s get serious, how could I actually stop watching this show?

It’s like when anybody’s favorite sports team loses. You’re upset that they lost and you see that they aren’t going to win any time soon because the team is so young now after losing it’s key players. Jon Snow now has to carry the Stark team of Sansa, Arya, Bran and that one kid nobody new could talk until this past episode. When the outlook is so bleak for your favorite team, you don’t want to watch anymore, but you do anyways. Your team might be doing so great but the league is so entertaining you have to keep following. That’s the same with GoT. The rest of what’s going on with the other “teams” is so good that it will be easy to get past the brutal slaying of our favorite team, the Starks.

The other thing that bothered me aside from my “team” losing (for now) is questioning the purpose of this Stark-icide. My first thought was that it was simply for shock value. George R. R. Martin killed Ned Stark in the first season and now had to top himself. The only way he could do this was by killing more than one of our favorites.

Again, after going through the stages of grief and reaching the acceptance stage, this is more and more apparently not the case. Yes the slaughter was shocking, but it wasn’t purely for shock value. This is something that hasn’t been done before on television. More than once, main characters who seem to be the ones we are supposed to root for have been killed. No one is safe..

As I said in my introduction to Glued 2 The Screen, we can’t help but show our emotions to what we’re watching. Game of Thrones played with ours perfectly. I’ve never experienced anything quite like the emotions I did during this episode, I don’t think any of us have- the feeling of a punch in the gut.