User blog:BrocktonBlocbuster/Stannis in the Finale (S5E10 Spoilers)

Okay, first this is not an attempt to try and convince a change on the pages in relation to this subject. This is meraly meant to offer some discussion on what I think is an interesting point.

In the Finale, after the battle of Winterfell, Stannis is left in the woods wonded and presumably killed by Brienne. Now the official site states this as fact, which is not as hard a proof as I would prefer, given it has in the past been altered to fit in with new show continuity, but that's another discussion.

The thing of interest here is why did they not show his death? The show has never been scared to show gruesome and brutal deaths, and as far as I know or can remember, no major character has ever been killed off screen. In and interview on EW.com, Weiss actually address the need to show the death without any ambiguity in it, in this case in Jon's death.

http://www.ew.com/article/2015/06/14/game-thrones-jon-snow-really-dead

“In a book, you can present that kind of ambiguity,” Weiss said. “In a show, everybody sees it for what it is. It’s that rule: ‘If don’t see the body then they’re not really dead.’ Like when we cut Ned’s head off, we didn’t want a gory Monty Python geyser of blood, but we needed to see the blade enter his neck and cut out on the frame where the blade was mid-neck—it was longest discussion ever of where to cut a frame; two hours of talking about whether to cut at frame six or frame seven or frame eight. And that’s all by way of saying we needed Ned’s death to be totally unambiguous. I remember reading the book and going back and forth, like, ‘Did I miss something? Was [Ned] swapped out for somebody else?’ There’s a level of ambiguity because you’re not seeing something starkly represented. In the book, you can write around things to preserve a certain level of mystery that you have to commit to on screen.”

They go into more in the interview, but this is major point that makes the scene so odd.

Even with the cut away in Ned's death they still showed the blade going into the neck.

So the question is, why? They had to have a reason to cut away, alive or dead, their had to be a reason to make a conscious choice to do this.

For him to be dead, they really had to have a reason to cut away, which is frankly a bigger mystery than if Stannis lived. If he lived, then the reason for the cut away is obvious, but with his death, it doesn't make as much sense. Does any one have any theroy as to why this would be done from a creative stand point?