MAJOR SPOILERS

Many of us are still reeling from Sunday night’s episode of Game of Thrones, “The Dance of Dragons.” What’s weird is that I have a pretty high tolerance for contextualized violence, as in, I tap out when on-screen carnage has no purpose, but if it’s within an interesting story, I’m cool with it. But even I thought that Stannis “sacrificing” his only daughter (Princess Shireen) to the Lord of Light just to get some military edge was… difficult to take. Like with every controversial choice, the Game of Thrones showrunners, DB Weiss and David Benioff, are getting a lot of heat. This time, they’ve sort of deflected and basically told everyone that George RR Martin said it was going to happen in the sixth book anyway. Entertainment Weekly sat down with Weiss to discuss it – some highlights:

Why Shireen’s sacrifice made sense in the narrative: “Horrible things happening to people in this show, and this is one that we thought was entirely [narratively] justified. It was set-up by the predicament that Stannis was in. It will be awful to see, but it’s supposed to be awful.”

Why Shireen and not someone else? “It’s like a two-tiered system. If a superhero knocks over a building and there are 5,000 people in the building that we can presume are now dead, does it matter? Because they’re not people we know. But if one dog we like gets run over by a car, it’s the worst thing we’ve we’ve ever seen. I totally understand where that visceral reaction comes from. I have that same reaction. There’s also something sh-tty about that. So instead of saying, ‘How could you do this to somebody you know and care about?’ maybe when it’s happening to somebody we don’t know so well, maybe then it should hit us all a bit harder.”

Weiss on the world of Stannis and Melisandre: “People who watch Game of Thrones don’t see the same world as Stannis and Melisandre. To those characters, magic is real and it works. That’s something fun about this genre because when magic is real and you can see it with your own eyes in the show, it gives you a window into the heads of people who believe irrational things on faith. I can’t really get my head around how those people operate in our world, as they’re so completely disconnected from the way I process the world. So in a strange way, fantasy is a cock-eyed window into the heads of people who would do something terrible for an irrational reason.”

[From EW]

HBO also released a behind-the-scenes video for “The Dance of Dragons” in which David Benioff insinuates that George Martin told them that Stannis killing Shireen was a future plotline in the book and Benioff says, “It was one of those moments where I remember looking at Dan and [thinking] that’s so horrible and so good in a story sense…The very first time we saw Stannis and Melisandre, they were burning people alive on the beaches of Dragonstone and it’s really all come to this. There’s been so much talk of king’s blood, and the power of king’s blood, and it all leads ultimately, fatally, to Shireen’s sacrifice, and it’s one of the most horrible moments we’ve shot … It’s obviously the hardest choice he’s ever made in his life and for Stannis it comes down to ambition versus familial love and for Stannis and for Stannis sadly that choice is ambition.” Here’s the video.

This admission – that Stannis will do the same thing in a future GoT book – has gotten some people upset. They’re accusing Weiss and Benioff of “spoiling” the book and now it’s just some massive flame-war between book-purists and show-watchers and all of that. I don’t know… I love Game of Thrones and I love to obsess about it (it gets me through so much gym time!), but I do think people need to take it down a notch. It’s a TV show and popular book series. Enough.

Photos courtesy of HBO/Game of Thrones.