What happened to Daenerys’s child with Khal Drogo? He was supposed to be the Stallion That Mounts the World, but instead emerges a stillborn monster with scaly skin and tiny wings. (Also, not that we were Laurence Olivier at age 10, but this might be the worst piece of acting in the series.) Afterwards, we swear his corpse just vanishes, video-game style. Has the onscreen death of an innocent child ever been less of a tearjerker? This kid barely appears for a second before he’s being run through by Needle, and no one in the scene - not the writer, not the director, and certainly not Arya - seems to consider his death a big deal. How did Shireen’s death compare to series’ previous paedocides? Let’s compare:
If there was ever a scene meant to be watched behind closed hands, this was it.
As part of its mission to wallow in the worst aspects of human behavior, Game of Thrones has broken this rule early and often, and its commitment was never more painful than last night, when Stannis Baratheon offered up his daughter Shireen as a sacrifice to the Lord of Light. It’s an old storytelling rule: You never kill animals or children.