Benioff and Weiss say that Game of Thrones season 6 will not spoil the events of unpublished books. This is nonsense.
Speaking to EW, Benioff claims that “it’s not really true” that the upcoming season will play out the story of A Song of Ice and Fire in a way that spoils George R.R. Martin’s future novels.
“So much of what we’re doing diverges from the books at this point,” he says. “People are going to be very surprised when they read the books after the show. They’re quite divergent in so many respects for the remainder of the show.”
DB Weiss concurs, crediting Martin’s writing style with their flexibility in writing Game of Thrones.
“What makes the books so great is that George doesn’t make meticulous blueprints for every beat of this story and then fill in the blanks dutifully going from A to B to C, fleshing out an outline,” he says.
“At a certain point, we realized we were going to outpace the books and we kind of chose to see it as a great thing on both sides – there’s this amazing world George has created and now there are two different versions, and there’s no reason we can see why you can’t be thrilled and surprised and dismayed by both of these different versions of this world.”
These words from Benioff and Weiss come as a marked departure from the previous attitude they had adopted toward Game of Thrones season 6. In fact, it directly contradicts a confession Benioff made at Oxford last year.
“I kind of wish that there were some things we didn’t have to spoil,” the showrunner said, “but we’re kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place. The show must go on… and that’s what we’re going to do.”
While he allowed that “there might be a few deviations along the route,” Benioff said outright that the series will “meet up at pretty much the same place where George is going… we’re heading towards the same destination.”
In other words, it will spoil the ending.
But even as they claim independence from Martin, Benioff and Weiss are careful to cover their bases.
“While there are certain key elements that will be the same, we’re not going to talk so much about that,” says Benioff. “And I don’t think George is either.”
Benioff is probably right about that. George R.R. Martin’s most recent words on the subject of Game of Thrones season 6 came in the form of a long, self-flaggelating Not-A-Blog post in which he confirmed that The Winds of Winter would not be published in time for the new season. But even then, Martin teetered unusually close to confirming that the series would spoil his magnum opus.
“Maybe,” he says. “Yes and no… Given where we are, inevitably, there will be certain plot twists and reveals in season six of Game of Thrones that have not yet happened in the books.”
Of course, Martin also paid lip-service to the “butterfly effect” of changes made early in the series.
“Those pretty little butterflies have grown into mighty dragons. Some of the ‘spoilers’ you may encounter in season 6 may not be spoilers at all,” he says, “because the show and the books have diverged, and will continue to do so.”
And that, of course, is true. Some of the stories in Game of Thrones season 6 will diverge so extremely from Martin’s coming story that there will probably be little risk of spoilers for readers. But.
Many of those plot lines will be the same. Or more to the point, many of them will still be recognizable, whether or not they follow the lines of the books exactly.
Fans at the intersection of Game of Thrones and A Song of Ice and Fire tend to be smart people. Expanded plotlines, inserted characters, and stories transferred onto different actors are unlikely to bamboozle us into believing we have not been spoiled for the future. No matter what Benioff, Weiss, and to a certain extent, Martin claim, we are aware of the refraction, expansion, and reduction that will create the story of Game of Thrones season 6.
Benioff and Wise may be leading us into new territory first, but it is not theirs exclusively. Game of Thrones fans are not naive travelers looking for uncharted story; we know what we’re getting into. It is disingenuous — and insulting — for Benioff and Weiss to try and sell us something different.
Game of Thrones season 6 premieres on Sunday, April 24 at 9:00 p.m. on HBO.