People are very, very worked up about what happened on last night’s Game of Thrones. Here is a bare-bones version of the Big Thing that went down, for those not deep into the Seven Kingdoms who still want to know what Twitter is atwitter about. (Read the recap here.) Spoilers, duh.
Robb and Catelyn died. And so did Talisa, Robb’s pregnant wife, and a whole bunch of other guests at a wedding, all of whom we liked. (It’s called “the Red Wedding” on account of the bloodbath. We’re talking hundreds of people.) Last season, Catelyn Stark — the mom — promised that her son Robb would marry one of the many sniffly and kind of gross girls from the Frey family. Instead, Robb married a super-hot lady of his choosing, and the head of the Frey clan, Lord Walder, got piiiiiissed. Pissed enough that he formed a secret alliance with the Lannisters, the Starks’ enemies, and agreed to murder all of the people at the party, in violation of all the social laws of the land, which do allow for plenty of executions in other situations.
The massacre was made even more emotional because Arya Stark, the youngest sister in the Stark family and the show’s best and most lovable character, had almost made it there in time to see her mother and brother again, but instead showed up minutes after their deaths. (Arya hasn’t seen any of the other Starks since the end of season one, when her father was executed and she went into hiding.) Sure, if she had shown up in time, she would have been killed, too — a tragedy too great to imagine — but the near-miss just exacerbated the trauma.
Other people died elsewhere on the episode, too, but this is the biggie. Now you know!
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