No Duh: The Leading Cause of Death In "Game of Thrones" Is "Injury" to the "Head and Neck Region"

Together, we can find a cure.

You’ll be glad to know the world’s brightest minds have put together a research paper on the leading cause of death in the fictional universe of the HBO television series Game of Thrones.

(Is this what it means to study STEM?)

A new paper by researchers Reidar P. Lystad and Benjamin T. Brown has drilled down into the most common reasons for expiry in the GOT universe, documenting every single "important" character death from the show’s first seven seasons. (NB: 186 "important" deaths were counted.)

Their research found that 56.4 per cent of important characters had died over the course of the show, and the majority of the deaths were classified as "injuries" (73.7 per cent). Most of those were wounds of the "head and neck region", including 13 "traumatic amputations at neck level", which is just a fancy way of saying…

Burns and poisonings were the second and third most common causes of death, respectively.

And if you were wondering how many of these characters died of natural causes, that’d be ‘two’.

If you want to read clinical descriptions of every GOT death, ever, follow the link, and find out how many characters were killed by "assault by pushing from high place" (2.2 per cent) or "bitten or struck by other mammal" (2.7 per cent).

Game of Thrones returns for its final season in April of 2019, and we look forward to seeing these numbers grow exponentially.

Header Image: HBO