Man, I hate to say this: I’m pretty done with Game of Thrones. As a book reader, I’m having a really hard time getting excited about Game of Thrones season 5, which is out on April 12 on HBO. And that’s because, for a book reader, the show is now too different for me to care the way I once did. Indeed, season 5 will be when it hits peak divergence, and it will be agonizingly frustrating for those of us who seriously love the books.
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So, Game of Thrones season 5 is great news for those who just love the show and don’t also love the books. It will continue telling a story that’s consistent with itself, exciting, dramatic and all that. Great. But for book fans, there’s a problem. For a long time, the show has shown a reflection of the events in the books. They were different, of course, but they were still fundamentally similar stories. But we already know that season 5 is going to start to pass the books. That’s not even the real problem.
Game of Thrones season 5 is starting to change the books in a dramatic, irreversible way. They are cutting one of the book’s most important characters, Arianne Martell. It looks like they’re also cutting Griff and Young Griff, who look like they’ll become increasingly important in Winds of Winter. And they cut Lady Stoneheart too.
I don’t care that executive producers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have decided that these characters aren’t important enough to the overall arc of Game of Thrones to include. I don’t care that it’s their show and they could bring Ned Stark back to life if they wanted to. But I care that the show they’re making is becoming less and less like the books I love, and that season 5 will take it irrevocably down a different road. Those characters have had hundreds of pages devoted to them. The show will feel different without them. Not like a reflection in a mirror, but like a reflection in rippling water.
And that’s too different for me.