Ned Stark. The Red Wedding. “Hold the Door.” Being a fan of Game of Thrones means constantly dealing with tragic deaths, the kind that leave you an emotional wreck. It also means experiencing lots of horrible ends, like when Ramsay fed his stepmother and baby brother to his hounds, or when The Mountain crushed Oberyn’s head like a tomato. But now the show has finally gone too far, with a death so sad and so gratuitous we will never forgive them for burdening us with such a loss: Ser Pounce is dead.
Show co-creator David Benioff told Entertainment Weekly the late King Tommen’s beloved pet, who Joffrey threatened to kill and feed to his brother, met his demise the way many others in King’s Landing have: at the hands of Cersei. Apparently the Mad Queen hated Ser Pounce’s name so much she decided she couldn’t let him live. Uh, we also imagine the cat reminded Cersei of her late son and that seeing the kitten was painful, but we’re in NO MOOD to be understanding right now.
How did Cersei murder him? Benioff said, “Ser Pounce’s death was so horrible we couldn’t even put it on the air.” Co-creator D.B. Weiss joked the cat’s curtain call will be included on a special box set. None of this is funny.
And while we loved Ser Pounce, who Margaery described as a handsome “proper fellow,” we now know why he only appeared in a single season four scene. Benioff said the cat was very hard to work with. That’s fine. We love cats, but we know they aren’t exactly big on following orders, so we get not wanting to work with them on a TV set. But couldn’t they have just let the little guy live a happy little life in the Red Keep off-screen? Did we need to know this? No, we did not. And yet here we are, mourning a cat we hardly knew on a show where important people die every five minutes. It’s valar morghulis, not valar….catghulis. (We don’t speak Valyrian.)
This is one loss that is too much to bear. Fortunately we can find comfort in one famous saying from the Realm: “What is dead may never die.”
Long live Ser Pounce.
Images: HBO