The Red Wedding will live in infamy as one of the most shocking events in television history – at least for those who haven’t read the Game of Thrones books.
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Now that the final season is about to drop, it’s worth going over some of the big past events in the GOT series thus far, and the Red Wedding was one of the biggest of them all.
Here’s everything you need to know about that awful night…
What happened at the Red Wedding…
The Red Wedding was just as vicious as its ominous name would suggest, but first there’s some context to wrap your head around.
Back in GOT season two Robb Stark met and fell in love with Talisa, which presented a problem because he was at the time promised to a daughter of the cruel Walder Frey, which in turn was because an alliance with that house would give him a tactical advantage in the War of the Five Kings.
However Robb broke this promise, and married Talisa instead. In order to supposedly keep the Stark/Frey alliance going, the Starks conceded to Walder Frey’s fresh demands that Lord Edmure Tully, brother to Catelyn Stark and uncle to Robb, marry his daughter Roslin Frey instead.
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All of this all came to a head in an episode called The Rains of Castemere, in which we saw the wedding between Edmure and Roslin.
After the wedding, when Edmure and Roslin had left the party to consummate their marriage – awks – Roose Rolton, whom Catelyn thought of as an ally, and his men positioned themselves tactfully around the room in which the wedding feast was still ongoing.
Even though Walder swore a sacred oath that Robb, Catelyn and the then-pregnant Talisa would all be safe under his roof for the wedding, he, along with Roose and with the backing of Tywin Lannister, betrayed the Starks, and Bolton and his men killed all three.
Roose said the now-famous phrase, ‘The Lannisters send their regards’ to Robb right before he stabbed him in the heart.
Now raise your hand if you’ve ever been personally victimised by Game of Thrones.
Not only were the three Starks murdered, but most of Robb’s men who were either attending the wedding or celebrating outside the castle were brutally killed as well.
As if that wasn’t enough heartbreak for one episode, Robb’s direwolf Grey Wind was killed too, only for his head to be, erm, attached to Robb’s body somehow in a cruel act of desecration.
In the books, Catelyn, who was the last of the Starks to die that night and saw the whole horrid thing, is resurrected as the vicious and decayed Lady Stoneheart, who is indiscriminate in her hanging of those whom she believes even tangentially connected with those who betrayed her and her son to their deaths.
There’s been absolutely no indication that that’s going to happen in the show however, as in the books, her resurrection occurred days after her death, and we’re now way past that in the show.
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