Lothar Frey
Lame Lothar, one of Lord Walder's craftier sons, who does much of his father's negotiating and scheming.
The fuller tale
They call him Lame Lothar for the twisted leg he has carried since childhood, and House Frey being what it is, the nickname doubles as a job description: barred from the tourney yard, Lothar grew a career out of wits instead, and became the son Lord Walder actually uses. He is the Twins’ steward and fixer, the smooth, courteous instrument sent wherever his father needs charm laid over calculation — most fatefully to Riverrun, where it is Lothar who delivers the olive branch of Roslin’s marriage and escorts the Stark party home to the wedding.
The Red Wedding is, in an administrative sense, his masterpiece. The books credit Lame Lothar with the planning — the seating, the tents, the disposition of who dies where — an atrocity organized with the same courteous thoroughness he brings to a guest list, which is exactly what makes him the most quietly chilling Frey on the page. The show goes further and puts steel in his hand: it is Lothar who begins the massacre itself, stabbing Robb Stark’s pregnant queen where she stands. Between the two versions he is the whole crime in miniature — the smiler at the door, and the knife behind it.
He is the tale’s reminder that atrocities need clerks. Black Walder frightens people and Lord Walder commands them, but somebody drew the map of the hall, and the story is careful to tell us it was the polite one with the limp.
The page and the screen
Book-Lothar never draws a blade on the page — his violence is entirely organizational, which arguably makes it worse — and he is alive in the published books, still stewarding the Twins. The show hands him Talisa’s murder, the single most brutal act of its most brutal scene, and then a poisoned cup: his screen death has no book counterpart at all.
Where they stand, season by season
Their fate — if death has found them, it is written here. Open at your peril.
The show: Killed at the Twins (S7·E1)
Lame Lothar, who planned the Red Wedding's seating and its slaughter, drank Arya Stark's toast at the feast that gathered every Frey man of worth. The wine was poisoned. The Freys' bridge outlived them all.
In the show he dies at his father’s table, which is to say at Arya Stark’s. Summoned with every Frey man of note to toast the family’s triumphs, Lothar drinks the wine “Lord Walder” pours — Arya, wearing the old man’s face, who had already baked Lothar into the pie she served the real Walder weeks before, in the show’s grisliest piece of double-billing. The books have collected no such debt from him yet: Lame Lothar lives, alive in the published books, with the Brotherhood’s nooses working their way up the family tree.