In a blog post titled “The Show, The Books,” ASOIAF author George R.R. Martin addresses Game of Thrones fan complaints, and explains why the show diverts from book canon.
Last night’s episode of Game of Thrones season 5 left both book readers and unspoiled fans shocked at the unexpected and brutal turn of events.
Certain characters’ storylines have now diverted so far from what happens in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, it’s impossible to predict what’s going to happen next — and fans are getting increasingly worried that they’re not going to like where the show is going.
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George R.R. Martin himself is receiving a lot of angry comments on his blog from fans complaining that the HBO series is bastardizing the books, and in a new blog post, he explains why he’s been diligently deleting every single one.
“I have been saying since season one that this is not the place to debate or discuss the TV series. Please respect that,” Martin tells his readers. “There have been differences between the novels and the television show since the first episode of season 1.”
Martin goes on to remind us that creating a TV series is very different from writing a book. “Prose and television have different strengths, different weaknesses, different requirements,” he explains.
And once they start changing small things, Martin says, they have to follow through on the repercussions of those changes.
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“Small changes lead to larger changes lead to huge changes. HBO is more than 40 hours into the impossible and demanding task of adapting my lengthy (extremely) and complex (exceedingly) novels, with their layers of plots and subplots, their twists and contradictions and unreliable narrators, viewpoint shifts and ambiguities, and a cast of characters in the hundreds,” Martin writes.
“There has seldom been any TV series as faithful to its source material, by and large … but the longer the show goes on, the bigger the butterflies become. And now we have reached the point where the beat of butterfly wings is stirring up storms, like the one presently engulfing my email.”
In other words: yes, the show is different from the books. Instead of continuing to be surprised by this, let’s instead discuss what’s actually happening on the show, rather than try making parallels that are no longer applicable.
However, never fear: although Martin promises “more and more” changes, “all of us are still intending that at the end we will arrive at the same place.”