Jon Snow dead: Game of Thrones star Kit Harington on dramatic season 5 finale

Spoiler alert: Contains crucial plot details from the Game of Thrones finale

The Game of Thrones season five finale was never going to be anything but bloodthirsty, but the death of a much-loved main character and his confirmation that yes, this really is the end, has sent ripples through the Westeros fandom.

*This article contains spoilers*

"Mother's Mercy" was jam-packed with violence but it was the demise of Kit Harington's long-serving character Jon Snow that really shocked us to the core.

Readers of George RR Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire books will have been less surprised, as Jon's stabbing takes place in the final chapter in his fifth novel, A Dance With Dragons.

But when little Olly and the Night's Watch brothers took their gruesome revenge on the Lord Commander for being a "traitor" during the Battle of Hardhome, we still could not quite believe that this was truly happening. Winter had arrived, and nobody was happy about it and the worst was still to come.

Harington has spoken about his grisly demise and revealed that he will not be returning to the HBO drama.

"I'm quite dead. It's over for Jon Snow - at the very least, he gets to join his family and kin and leave this terrible world behind," the 28-year-old actor told the New York Daily News.

"Follow Tyrion (Peter Dinklage) or Daenerys (Emilia Clarke) or Brianne (Gwendoline Christie. There are certain good people left in there. Jaime Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) to an extent, although that's a very gray area."

Harington paid tribute to his altruistic alter ego, who was "always trying to do the right thing". "He really was one of the last bastions of goodness left in Westeros," he said, adding in another interview with Entertainment Weekly that showrunners Dan Weiss and David Benioff had told him there would be no resurrection.

"Quite honestly, I have never been told the future of things in this show, but this is the one time I have," he said.

"They sat me down and said, 'This is how it is'. If anything in the future is not like that, then I don't know about it - it's only in David and Dan and George's heads. But I've been told I'm dead. I'm dead. I'm not coming back next season. So that's all I can tell you, really."

Fans are still clinging to the faint hope that Jon Snow will somehow be back in Martin's sixth book The Winds of Winter, which is yet to be published but promised soon.

Sadly, we have our doubts - time to reach for those last remaining tissues.