10 Shocking Television Deaths That Showed Us Nobody Is Safe

Ned Stark – Game Of Thrones

Looking back, we really should have seen it coming. After all, it’s pretty common knowledge that George R.R. Martin’s favorite hobby is killing off beloved characters, and Sean Bean doesn’t exactly have a reputation for surviving many of his films. But at the time, the second when we realized that Joffrey was actually going to have Ned Stark executed…it was incredibly shocking. It was like the television version of the exact moment when you realized, as a child, that life wasn’t fair. Westeros was not a just land, and good people were going to die.

Since then, there have been a number of other fairly traumatic deaths on the show. That first one with Ned was huge in terms of impact, though. Viewers who hadn’t read the books never would have expected them to kill off the man who seemed to be the main protagonist, and Ned getting his head chopped off made it abundantly clear exactly what kind of show Game of Thrones was going to be.