You’re not the only one in denial over Jon Snow’s fate.
“Three weeks ago our number one fan—the President of the United States—and I had a chance to meet,” frequent Game of Thrones director David Nutter told fans Friday at Comic-Con. “He came up to me and shook my hand, put his hand on my shoulder and said, “You didn’t kill Jon Snow, did you?’”
Let Nutter’s definitive response speak for itself: “Mr. President, Jon Snow is deader than dead.”
The shocking group shanking of GoT’s resident heartthrob at the end of last month’s season finale came up in a sprawling panel convo after celebrity moderator Seth Meyers ribbed Gwendoline Christie (Brienne of Tarth) for slipping on candle wax and Natalie Dormer (Margaery Tyrell) joked about her own character’s fate: “Poor Margaery… she needs a shower and a coffee.”
Did the cast mourn the seemingly final departure of their Jon Snow, Kit Harington?
Fans decked out in Game of Thrones T-shirts and cosplay attempted to probe cast member Carice van Houten for clues to the Great Jon Snow Conspiracy. Couldn’t Melisandre bring Snow back to life with a little magick?
“I’m as in the dark as you all are,” shrugged van Houten, echoing her co-stars’ claims that not even they know what showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have in store for the future. “It’s pretty dark, I admit… and full of terrors. But who knows, man? I can’t tell you anything.”
Snow’s maybe-probably-for real demise wasn’t the only unexpected curveball writers threw at the Game of Thrones faithful last season. Particularly when it came to putting its female characters through all manner of living hell.
Few GoT stars know the sting of critical outrage as sharp as Sophie Turner, who defended the headline-grabbing rape that her Sansa Stark endured halfway through Season Five.
“If there’s one thing Sansa still is, despite what happened to her, it’s strong,” she said.
“She’s been getting by without doing anything really radical because that could change her situations,” Turner continued. “She’s not stupid; she thought it through in her head. She could have fought back if she wanted to, but she didn’t. She’s a character who does her scheming in her mind rather than out of it.”
If Sansa chose not to fight back during one of the show’s most horrifying moments (and there have been many, many of those—just ask Cersei), blame the writers. From the hordes of over 6,000 fans packed into Comic-Con’s Hall H, it took two women dressed in full costume as Melisandre and Daenerys, respectively, to grill exec producer Carolyn Strauss over GoT’s often-infuriating women problem.
Will Season 6 at least frame violent events like the rape of Sansa Stark as the “pitfalls of patriarchy, rape culture, and other forms of oppression,” they asked?
“They’re trying to put together the best and most—‘realistic’ would be the wrong word—mix of those personalities in that world, at that mythical time when the show takes place,” Strauss replied, insisting that Game of Thrones is an equal-opportunity torturer. “Things were not great for a lot of people, male and female.”
Actor Conleth Hill came to her defense. “Girls are not the only ones to lose something,” he intoned, drawing laughs throughout Hall H. “The first season, I was the only eunuch in the village.”
So convincing is he as the fearsome eunuch Varys, Hill continued, that he once had a woman come up and grab his junk at a party.
“She said, ‘I just wanted to see if there was anything there,’” he quipped. “I don’t speak to my mother any more.”
