Game of Thrones is still a year away from its eighth and final season but it promises to go out with a bang… and a whole lot of character deaths.
Sophie Turner, who’s been on GoT since the very start, says fans should expect the season finale to be ‘bloodier’ than the previous seven as they try and fight off the ‘impending doom’ which is threatening to engulf the seven kingdoms.
While we expect no less from a show which kills off your beloved characters to serve the story, it does feel like things are looking ominous for houses Stark, Lannister and Targaryen.
When Ned Stark got his head chopped off in the first season I was shocked, but not too surprised – as he was played by Sean Bean and the laws of nature dictate Sean Bean dies in everything (except in Sharpe). But after the infamous Rains of Castamere episode from season three – you know, the one where an entire family, including a pregnant woman, were slaughtered at a wedding? – I learnt to not have any favourite characters.
It looks like I’m correct in my mantra as Turner revealed season 8 will see ‘more death’, while simultaneously being ‘more emotionally torturous’ than ever.
Speaking to Gold Derby she said:
I can tell you that there’s definitely a coming together of people. Everyone is coming together to fight the impending doom. There’s a lot of tension between these little groups, battling for what they think is right. It’s Game of Thrones, so it’s going to be bloodier and more death and more emotionally torturous than all the years before!
Turner, who plays Sansa Stark on the HBO show, recently commemorated her character and time on – let’s just say it – one of the greatest TV shows ever, with not one, but two special tattoos.
The newest tattoo shows a direwolf – the sigil for House Stark – with a quote below it, which reads: ‘The pack survives’.
Check it out here:
The quote is a line from a speech Ned Stark, (Sansa’s father), gives his other daughter Arya, (Sansa’s younger sister), in the first book by George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones.
He says:
In the winter, we must protect ourselves – look after one another. Sansa is your sister.
When the snows fall and the white winds blow, the lone wolf dies, but the pack survives.
As you know, Ned Stark didn’t say this line exactly in the TV show, Turner’s character Sansa reprises the speech during season seven’s finale.
Turner previously got a different Game of Thrones tattoo, which her fellow cast member, on-screen sister and off-screen bridesmaid, Maisie Williams, also got.
The pair were both inked with ‘07.08.05’ to commemorate the date they were both cast on the show.
While GoT is coming to an end next year, a prequel is already in the works, and according to Martin himself, it’s going to be a lot darker than the original.
This month HBO gave the ‘all clear’ for a new GoT series. It will be set ‘thousands of years’ before the War of Five Kings, incestuous shenanigans between twins, or terrible etiquette at wedding receptions ever took place.
Details on which lore of GoT will be dramatised has remained under wraps. Thankfully though, Martin was on hand to give fans a small idea of what they can expect.
In a blog post he wrote:
Yes, this is a prequel, not a sequel. None of the characters or actors from GAME OF THRONES will appear in the new show. All of the successor shows we’ve been developing have been prequels, as I have mentioned before.
This one really puts the PRE in prequel, since it is set not ninety years before GAME OF THRONES (like Dunk & Egg), or a few hundred years, but rather ten thousand years (well, assuming the oral histories of the First Men are accurate, but there are maesters at the Citadel who insist it has only been half that long).
We’re very early in the process, of course, with the pilot order just in, so we don’t have a director yet, or a cast, or a location, or even a title.
(My vote would be THE LONG NIGHT, which says it all, but I’d be surprised if that’s where we end up. More likely HBO will want to work the phrase “game of thrones” in there somewhere. We’ll know sooner or later)
Furthermore, on Twitter, Martin confirmed Jane Goldman, who is married to Johnathan Ross, will be penning the script.
Goldman has a strong writing CV having written the screenplays for the Kick-Ass and Kingsman series, both X-Men: First Class and Days of Future Past, The Woman in Black and Stardust.
Season eight of Game of Thrones, which will bring a conclusion to the epic fantasy saga, will premiere on Sky Atlantic next year, 2019.
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