In last month’s season finale of Game of Thrones, Stannis Baratheon was killed by Brienne of Tarth, as revenge for murdering his younger brother Renly. Because Brienne’s coup de grâce was interrupted by a match cut to Ramsay Bolton, some viewers assumed this was a cliffhanger and, like Jon Snow, Stannis might have lived to fight another day.
It was not, and he did not.
Gwendoline Christie confirmed as much in a post-finale interview, and now at Comic-Con, director David Nutter has done the same. “From the very beginning, and [through] the script process, that was the intent — he’s dead,” Nutter told Entertainment Weekly, adding that it would have been “gratuitous” to show Stannis’s actual death. So there you have it: Stannis is no more. He has ceased to be. He has gone off to meet his makers. He is an ex-Mannis.
