Game Of Thrones Saddest Kid Death

It's an old storytelling rule: You never kill animals or children. 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. If there was ever a scene meant to be watched behind closed hands, this was it. How did Shireen's death compare to series' previous paedocides? Let's compare:

  Unnamed Stableboy (Season 1)
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. Afterwards, we swear his corpse just vanishes, video-game style. (Also, not that we were Laurence Olivier at age 10, but this might be the worst piece of acting in the series.)

 

Rhaego (Season 1)
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. It was almost certainly Mirri Maz Duur's doing — in Daenerys's vision of the life she could have had, this future warlord appears to be like a perfectly healthy baby boy.

 Unnamed Farm Boys (Season 2)
Remember when it seemed like Theon had killed Bran and Rickon, but then a few episodes later we found out that they were still alive, and everyone breathed a sigh of relief? Except that there were still two tiny corpses to account for, which meant that we were all technically cheering for the deaths of two anonymous farm boys who had gotten only a smidgen of screen time — a very unpleasant realization.

 

Joffrey (Season 4)

Credit director Alex Graves for not skimping on the tragedy here. It would have been easy — too easy — to turn Joffrey's wedding-day death into a simple celebration. Ding dong, the witch is dead, let's topple the statues on Coruscant. Joffrey was an evil, psychotic, murderous child despot, but he was still a child, and when he dies in his helpless parents' arms, they are as heartbroken as yours or ours would be.

  

The Baratheon Bastards (Season 2)

 As Maggy the Frog made clear, Cersei Lannister would have three children, but Robert Baratheon would have 20. In the Goldcloaks' murder of those unlucky brown-haired bastards, we got our fullest look yet at the depravities King Joffrey was capable of. The victims were often faceless, but the montage of death intruding on everyday domestic scenes drove the point home: In the game of thrones, it's the powerless who suffer most of all.