Stannis Baratheon
Robert's dour middle brother, Lord of Dragonstone: humorless, rigid, and unbending in his sense of what is owed him by right and law.
A soul of House Baratheon, born at Storm's End.
The fuller tale
Season Two
In The North Remembers ÔÇö The rightful heir, with the charm of a ledger. Stannis Baratheon proclaims his claim and burns the Seven on Dragonstone's shore for the red god. Davos recruits the pirate Salladhor Saan to Stannis's cause. In Garden of Bones ÔÇö Offers his brother one night to reconsider. One.
Renly and Stannis parley and part as enemies; Davos rows Melisandre into a cave beneath Storm's End. The shadow kills Renly in his own tent; his hundred thousand scatter to Stannis and Highgarden. Stannis's fleet sails; Tyrion and Bronn count wildfire jars and chain links. In Blackwater ÔÇö Dragged from the walls still swinging.
Stannis's fleet enters the bay; one empty ship meets it, leaking wildfire.
Where they stand. Dragonstone and King's Landing.
Season Three
In Second Sons ÔÇö Three leeches in a fire, three kings named.
Season Four
In The Laws of Gods and Men ÔÇö The Iron Bank backs grim arithmetic over golden promises. Stannis and Davos ask the Iron Bank for gold; the ledger votes Stannis. In The Children ÔÇö The only king who answered the Watch's call. Stannis's cavalry breaks the wildling camp; Mance yields; the debt to the realm is paid at the Wall.
Where they stand. Braavos, Dragonstone and Castle Black.
Season Five
Stannis offers Mance Rayder his life for a knee; Mance chooses the fire, and Jon's arrow ends it early. In Sons of the Harpy ÔÇö The stone doctors said to give up on Shireen. He didn't. Melisandre tempts Jon; Stannis explains greyscale to Shireen the only way he can: I fought for you. Stannis marches from Castle Black for Winterfell, family and red woman in train.
In The Dance of Dragons ÔÇö Sacrificed the only person who loved him for a melted snowdrift. Ramsay's twenty men burn Stannis's camp; the march to Winterfell strands in snow and hunger. Stannis burns Shireen. The princess who taught men to read screams her father's name. Stannis's host deserts; Brienne finally gets her sentence ÔÇö and Ramsay's men get the field.
How it ends for them
On the screen. Fell at Winterfell (S5┬ÀE10)
The last of his army broken before Winterfell's walls, his daughter's ashes behind him, Stannis was found wounded against a tree by Brienne of Tarth. She named her charge ÔÇö the murder of Renly ÔÇö and he answered 'Do your duty,' and she did.
In the show, the end comes as a ledger being balanced. His sacrifice of Shireen buys a thaw and costs him half his army by desertion and his wife by her own hand; Melisandre abandons him last. He marches the remnant on Winterfell anyway ÔÇö because the alternative is that the price was paid for nothing ÔÇö and the Bolton host breaks it in the field. Wounded against a tree in the snow, he is found by Brienne of Tarth, who has waited years to name the charge: the murder of Renly, by blood magic and a shadow. Stannis does not dispute it. 'Do your duty,' he tells her, and she does. The camera looks away at the last ÔÇö a famous ambiguity the show later closes by confirming his death.
In the published books Stannis is alive ÔÇö entrenched in the snows outside Winterfell, planning battle, with Shireen unburned at Castle Black and Melisandre far from his side. A letter reaching Jon Snow claims Stannis is dead and broken; the letter's author is Ramsay Bolton, and nothing in it is verified. The books' readers hold their breath on a battle not yet fought.
Their chapters, book by book
A Clash of Kings 6 chapters that name them
A Storm of Swords 4 chapters that name them
A Dance with Dragons 6 chapters that name them
Where the page and the screen part
No principal character divides book readers and show watchers more sharply. The books' Stannis ÔÇö dry, precise, bleakly funny in a way he himself never notices ÔÇö is a serious contender for the best military mind in the story, and his Dance with Dragons campaign is a study in adaptation and grit. The show compresses him toward his worst hour: the humor is pared away, the northern strategy shrinks to a doomed slog, and choices the books frame as Melisandre's temptations become his own decisions, made onscreen with open eyes. Book partisans call the show's version character assassination; the show's defenders point out that the books load the same gun ÔÇö the tellings disagree about whether Stannis fires it.
Smaller divergences ripple outward. Book Stannis never burns men for apostasy at Dragonstone quite as the show stages it; his brother's shadow is dealt with at Storm's End in front of witnesses the show trims; Renly's peach, Proudwing the hawk, and the bleak wedding-night arithmetic with Selyse are all book textures the show never touches. And the show's Stannis loses his campaign before Winterfell entirely, while the books leave him mid-move on the board ÔÇö with a letter claiming his defeat that the fifth book pointedly declines to confirm.
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.