Barristan Selmy
Ser Barristan the Bold: Lord Commander of the Kingsguard, the greatest living knight of the Seven Kingdoms, who has guarded kings since he was a boy.
A soul born at Harvest Hall, sworn to The Kingsguard.
The fuller tale
Season Three
Dany offers a dragon for eight thousand Unsullied; Jorah and Barristan protest in unison.
Season Four
Ser Barristan hands Jorah a royal pardon signed by Robert Baratheon: the spying is out; Dany exiles him.
Where they stand. Meereen.
Season Five
In Sons of the Harpy ÔÇö The Bold, dying as he lived: outnumbered and unyielding. The Harpies ambush the Unsullied in the tunnels; Grey Worm falls wounded; Barristan the Bold falls forever.
How it ends for them
On the screen. Fell in Meereen (alive in the books) (S5┬ÀE4)
Barristan the Bold, the finest sword of his age, died in a Meereenese alley with a dozen Sons of the Harpy dead around him. He fell defending the city of a queen he'd crossed the world to serve.
In the show Barristan dies in the fifth season, ambushed in the winding streets of Meereen when the Sons of the Harpy rise. Finding Grey WormÔÇÖs Unsullied cornered in an alley, the old Lord Commander joins the fight one final time, and the choreography is written as a thesis: one aging knight against a dozen masked insurgents, and it is nearly enough. He kills and kills, takes his wounds from behind and beside, and falls among a heap of his enemies ÔÇö Barristan the Bold, dead on foreign stone for a queen he served barely two years, mourned by a court that only half understood what it had lost. His death hardens Daenerys toward MeereenÔÇÖs old blood and shoves the whole storyline toward the fighting pits.
In the published books he is alive and at the height of his consequence ÔÇö Hand of the Queen in DaenerysÔÇÖs absence, leading MeereenÔÇÖs sortie against the Yunkish siege as A Dance with Dragons ends. Whatever end Martin writes him, the showÔÇÖs version bought its shock at the price of the characterÔÇÖs last act; the books are still spending it.
Their chapters, book by book
Ser Barristan the Bold: the greatest living knight of Westeros, who crossed the world under a false name to serve the last Targaryen ÔÇö and in the books stands as her Hand, alive and commanding Meereen.
A Game of Thrones 1 chapter that name them
A Dance with Dragons 4 chapters of their own
Where the page and the screen part
The divergence here is total after a point. In the books Barristan comes to Daenerys in disguise, as the humble squire Arstan Whitebeard attending the Astapor-bound merchant party ÔÇö a deception that lasts a full book, ends in the dramatic double unmasking of himself and Jorah, and colors everything after; the show, reasonably, spends the disguise in a single scene and has him declare himself on a Qarth street. Far larger: book Barristan is alive, a POV character, and effectively the ruler of Meereen ÔÇö Hand to an absent queen, jailer of Hizdahr, commander of the cityÔÇÖs defense as the fifth book closes. The show killed him in a fifth-season alley specifically to raise the Sons of the Harpy stakes, a choice that remains one of the adaptationÔÇÖs most protested cuts, not least because the actor had reportedly been told his biggest material was still coming.
The books also give him one of the sagaÔÇÖs quietest running themes: an old man auditing his own legend, chapter by chapter, and finding that boldness was always the easy part ÔÇö it was the standing post outside the wrong doors that stained. None of that interior audit survives to the screen; what survives is the sword, and the scene where he tells Daenerys the truth about her father, which both tellings agree no one else would have dared.
Their journey
Where the two tellings send them to the same place the road runs whole; where they part, the screen keeps the left and the books the right.