George R. R. Martin Talks About Killing Characters, TV Collaboration and How The Avengers Inspired Him

During this final season of Game of Thrones, author George R. R. Martin sat down with Fast Company and opened up about how the sorrow he feels about killing off characters, whether or not the character was good or bad. Martin cited The Avengers character “Wonder Man” as an example of a bad guy who only pretends to be a good guy but ends up being a good guy in the end.

Wonder Man was a guy who joins the Avengers a new superhero who appears and he joins the Avengers but he’s really a supervillain who’s been created to join them pretending to be a hero, join them on false premises and then destroy them when their guard is down from within but when it gets to the moment that he’s supposed to destroy them he has a crisis of conscience and he can’t destroy them. So he sacrificed his own life and dies instead. I love this comic, it was terrific.

Martin also discussed collaborating with actors, directors, and showrunners.

When you get involved in television or film you’re working with a large team and that’s great you have other creative people you can have and they all have ideas too and some of them have their own areas of expertise … the actor is bringing their own interpretation to it. All of that is it can be very exhilarating but it can also be traumatic because sometimes their creative vision and your creative vision don’t match and you get the famous creative differences thing.