Woe betide anyone who gets on Cersei Lannister’s bad side. For no matter who ends up sitting on the iron throne at the end of the rapidly approaching eighth and final season of Game of Thrones, Cersei already has a top spot of her own: the highest kill count.
Sure, she may spend most of her time quietly plotting revenge against those who’ve wronged her (“Shame! Shame!”), but when she strikes, buckle the hell up. In the climactic moment from the show’s sixth season finale, she wiped out 198 souls in one fell swoop. That’s ice cold! Or it would have been had she not done the deed with wildfire. In any case, Cersei’s destruction of the Great Sept of Baelor made her the deadliest character across the whole series. And that’s just one of the many interesting factoids to be found in a killer interactive guide from The Washington Post that’s been updated to get us all ready for the grand finale to eight years in Westeros.
First published in 2015, the animated analysis is divided season by season, highlighting the most important deaths along the way—ahoy, Red Wedding—and showing just how many people a Baratheon of Dragonstone soldier took out in the second season’s Battle of Blackwater. It also breaks down which areas on the map are to be avoided if you are a character who enjoys drawing breath. With 993 deaths, Beyond the Wall takes the crown, followed by King’s Landing with 326.
Apparently, the show has been getting deadlier and deadlier as it’s gone along. Beyond the continuously dwindling main cast, the sheer number of anonymous perished soldiers continues to rise. There were more deaths in season six than the first four seasons combined and nearly double season six’s count in season seven. Get ready to find out whether the forthcoming episodes prove to be the deadliest of all, and whether Cersei maintains her top tier, when the show comes back on April 14.
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