If you’re a fan of A Song of Ice and Fire, the series Game of Thrones is based on, the news that Winds of Winter won’t be out by spring is devastating, if unexpected. After all, that means that season 6 of the show will start spoiling the books in earnest, moving into totally new territory on almost all fronts. But if you’re a show fan? Don’t worry too much about the Winds of Winter release date. It won’t affect your enjoyment of Game of Thrones season 6. In short, it’s not your problem.
Game Of Thrones Season 6 And Winds Of Winter
The Winds of Winter delay is certainly the biggest cultural story of 2016 so far—granted, it’s early—and book fans are reacting pretty much as you would expect… some of them are throwing an entitled hissy fit; some are surprised and sad, but understanding; others are just resigned and unsurprised (those of us who have been reading the series for over a decade tend to fall in the latter camp). We’ve loved the books first and the show second, and have always taken a certain vicarious pleasure from knowing the story ahead of time. Well, no more.
Game of Thrones season 6 is passing the books whole hog. Season 5 already started it. If you’re a book fan, you’re worried about spoilers, about crazy changes that won’t be in the books, about simply having to transfer your love to a different medium and a show you maybe aren’t too keen on anymore. It’s tough sledding.
But for show fans? The Winds of Winter delay should make no difference. And that’s a good thing! The show has always bushwhacked its own path, and while that path was broadly the same as the books for a very long time, it has diverged in the last two seasons, increasingly significantly. As a show-fan, you’ve probably only noticed if you have book friends to complain about it. The show can feel rushed sometimes, especially with the character count at historic highs, but it’s still doing what it always did, and doing it pretty well. If you aren’t tied to the book narrative, the show’s changes aren’t so irksome: They generally—generally—make sense in the show’s continuity, and keep the story streamlined.
Besides, for show fans it doesn’t matter if the show is ahead of the books. The showrunners have known the whole story for a while now and are working off of GRRM’s story outline, to some extent… but they also have more freedom now to tell their own story the way they want to. To us book fans, that’s outright heresy. But to show people, it may be refreshing that Game of Thrones season 6 will leave the books behind. A Song of Ice and Fire was written with the intention that it would never work for television, and in some ways… it kind of still doesn’t. But leaving the vast world of the books for a more constrained and tightly told storyline may actually make the show better, evaluated as its own entity rather than as an extension of the books.
Plus, you’ll get to be smug about knowing story spoilers before anybody else—the same thing the book fans have been lording over you for years. My, the tables have turned.
