"There is only one god and his name is Death," the master swordsman Syrio Forel tells his pupil, Arya Stark in Season One of Game of Thrones. "And there is only one thing we say to Death: 'Not today.'"
But for many GoT characters, dying old and gracefully is not an option.
Over the past seven seasons, scores of characters have been written out of the script. And too often, it's the good who die young.
A study by two academics from Sydney's Macquarie University published last week in the journal Injury Epidemiology examines the mortality and survival of 330 key characters in the first seven seasons of the award-winning HBO series.
The study finds that of the 186 recorded key character deaths, only two died of natural causes.
The remainder mostly succumbed to a violent death: put to the sword, burned, decapitated, poisoned, savaged by dogs and — mostly gruesomely — by a head crush.
After reviewing all 67 episodes, the researchers found that the characters with the shortest life expectancy were those who were male, commoners, did not switch sides and who had featured more prominently.
The final season of GoT goes to air in April, 2019.
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