Warning: Spoilers for Game Of Thrones season 8 ahead.
Now that Game Of Thrones can no longer break our hearts by killing off characters, it's instead making us just as sad by letting us know which now-dead characters had a chance to survive. In conversation with Entertainment Weekly, writer Dave Hill revealed that there was one character that was supposed to survive all the way to the last scene of Game Of Thrones and beyond, but they killed him off once they realized they couldn't get it to work with the story: Jorah Mormont (Iain Glen).
"For a long time we wanted Ser Jorah to be there at The Wall in the end," he told the outlet. "The three coming out of the tunnel would be Jon and Jorah and Tormund. But the amount to logic we’d have to bend to get Jorah up to The Wall and get him to leave Dany’s side right before [the events in the finale]…there’s no way to do that blithely. And Jorah should have the noble death he craves defending the woman he loves."
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Plus, with Jorah by her side, Daenerys (Emilia Clarke) wouldn't have experienced the same level of heartbreak that pushed her to become a mad queen in the first place — something that Iain Glen is glad Jorah never had to witness.
“There’s a sweetness in that because Jorah will never know what she did,” Glen told EW. “That’s probably best. It’s a blessing for him that he never found out what happened to her. And from a pragmatic story point of view, his death served a greater purpose. Where could we have taken Jorah from there? Fuck if I know."
It's nice to imagine that if Jorah had lived, Daenerys would have never become a tyrant. Perhaps she and Jon Snow (Kit Harington) would be happily co-ruling The Iron Throne right now — with Ghost by their side, of course.