With only 13 episodes (probably) left in its run on HBO, Game Of Thrones is really going to have to step up its murder game if it’s going to fulfill its apparent goal of killing more people than heart disease and the Black Plague combined. But as we all know, to kill a character, you must first cast the character. Which means it’s time for one of our favorite games here at the A.V. Club Newswire: Game Of Thrones Casting Call Speculation, where the goal is baseless theorizing, and the only prize is a smug sense of satisfaction if you eventually turn out to be right.
Today’s rumor fuel comes courtesy of io9 (which got it from the fan detectives at Watchers On The Wall), revealing some of the future corpses likely to pop up in the show’s truncated seventh season. As usual, they all read like character classes from Dungeons And Dragons, with entries for a “Priest” (“a white actor, using an RP accent, with characterful face”), a “Warrior” (“a tough-looking bruiser with the attack skills of a pit bull”) and a “Merchant” (“a character actor, for a non-combatant role.”) There are also calls for a gate guard (“characterful”), a young lord (“handsome”), and a “lovely lady” (“full nudity required), reminding us that everybody in Westeros comes in one of three flavors: “characterful,” “handsome,” or “nude.”
In terms of rampant speculation, most of the theorizing right now centers on the high number of “RP”—i.e., “Received Pronunciation”—accents on demand, which indicates a lot of upcoming action in the posh, explosion-prone setting of King’s Landing. (That gate guard, meanwhile, is described as a straight-talking Northern lad.) But there’s still a little dirt to be dug, spoiler-wise, because it’s always (if distantly) possible that that pit-bull-esque warrior—who’s apparently wanted for a multi-episode role—could be Lord Jon Connington. A prominent character from George R.R. Martin’s The Winds Of Winter, Connington has since joined Strong Belwas, Victarion Greyjoy, and Lady Stoneheart in the pantheon of important A Song Of Ice And Fire characters who’ve been skipped over by the show. If that is the lord of Griffin’s Roost, it also raises the possibility that the “young lord” being cast could be his adopted son Young Griff, although by now we’re really out in the bloody, corpse-strewn weeds, because season 7 seems crazy late to introduce that particular bag of plotlines and worms into the already convoluted action of the show.