He had plenty of chances to die but doesn’t. His death in Game of Thrones set the tone for the entire show that became an almost decade long cultural phenomenon! Of course, that’s what we remember! But what other major movies has he been in recently?Ī quick scan through Bean’s IMDb page reveals just three major Hollywood movies since his turn on Game of Thrones: Pixels, Jupiter Ascending, and The Martian. In Pixels, Bean plays a gruff, alien-fighting SAS officer. And Sean Bean’s characters’ deaths are pretty big emotional beats in all of those. Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, and Goldeneye are enormous cultural touchstones, especially for us Nerdy McNerdlingers. (Quick side note: Don’t be one of those dummies who thinks identifying a cognitive bias alone means you’ve won an argument and are now the supreme ruler of internet arguments. There are several categories of common types of cognitive bias and this doesn’t fit neatly into any of them, but I think the problem here is a combination of the Availability Heuristic (the tendency to only use examples that come to mind immediately) and the Affect Heuristic (the tendency to take one’s emotions about a topic into account) with a little bit of Confirmation Bias (the tendency to only remember things that fit our preconceived world view). “Cognitive bias” refers to humans’ tendency to think we are being rational when in fact our thoughts are irrational.

Quick, without using google or IMDb, how many Sean Bean roles can you name? If you’re like most people (specifically Americans, this argument becomes even more ridiculous if you’re familiar with Bean’s extensive BBC work), you can name three: Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, and Goldeneye. So what are we actually talking about here? Well, I have a theory. So that means that Sean Bean doesn’t even die in all of the swords-and-shields dramas written by David Benioff. Top Right, Troy: not only was he one of the few major characters to make it out alive, but Odysseus also lives so hard, the sequel book is about him journeying home, killing his usurper, and living into a ripe old age (spoilers for a 4,000-year-old story).įun fact, Troy was written by Game of Thrones co-showrunner David Benioff. What’s next?īottom Right, Game of Thrones: beheaded about 1/8 of the way through the series. Oops! Well, maybe the author misremembered the movie.

Ok, we’re off to a good start!īottom Left, Silent Hill: literally the only lead character in the realm of the living when the credits roll. Top Left, Lord of the Rings: turned into an orc pincushion. Instead, let’s examine the examples the tweet put forward. Entire books are being published about this nonsense as we speak. That’s a much larger issue with journalism as a whole. We’re going to put aside for a moment that a major news publication saw fit to embed a reply tweet with a paltry 9 RTs and 37 Likes from an unverified account with only a couple hundred followers (as of this writing). For example, the Timeversion of this story proudly embeds the following The Sean Bean death memes are endless! /mEvZBXGNLt

Not only is that not true (more on that in a moment), but the “Sean Bean dies in everything” meme is so out of control that we’ve started seeing him die in movies where he does not. If you’ve been following entertainment news lately you’ve likely seen numerous headlines proclaiming that Sean Bean is not taking any more parts where he’s going to die.

Sean bean dead