Small Council: What’s the best change the show made to the books?

It’s no secret that David Benioff and Dan Weiss made a lot of changes to George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire when adapting it for TV as Game of Thrones. Many, but not all, fans have bemoaned these changes. This week, we’ll talk about what, if any, changes we liked. Which ones made the show better, or at least not any worse, than the source material? CAUTION: CONTAINS SPOILERS.

DAN: I appreciate how the show has fewer resurrections and fake-out deaths than the books. Don’t get me wrong: bringing a character back from the dead, or revealing that they never actually died in the first place, can make for a great twist, but it has to be done sparingly or it starts to look silly. The novels have played fair with readers, but I feel like they’re about to reach a tipping point, especially if speculation about Jon Snow and the Hound pans out.

Mance Rayder is a good example. We see him burn in both the books and novels. But on the page, he wasn’t really him—Melisandre enchanted another guy to look like him and tucked the real one away. It’s fun to learn the truth and spend more time with the character, but Martin expended some narrative capital asking readers to accept his return, and I’m not convinced he’s made it back. That’s the thing with fake-out deaths: they’re sort of cheating, so if you’re going to do one, it better pay off.

All of that’s a long lead-up to saying that I’m glad the show doesn’t feature Lady Stoneheart. I know that a LOT of fans disagree, but I was wary of the idea from the very first time I read about Stoneheart in A Storm of Swords, and I feel like the rest of the books have borne out my concerns. I’ll happily recant if she ends up being crucial to the story, but thus far she hasn’t gotten up to much. Again, Martin expended narrative capital to bring her into the tale and I don’t think he’s made it back. The show was wise to be rid of her.

In all likelihood, we’re headed towards another resurrection on both the show and in the books. We can’t know exactly what’s going to happen, but when it comes to this sort of thing, the show has proven that it knows how to pick its battles.

RAZOR: Oof…Dan, you better find a dark hole to hide in for a while. The Lady Stoneheart truthers (of which I am a card-carrying member) are probably forming a posse, with pitchforks and all. In all seriousness, this is going to be a touchy subject because, on the one hand, we have the “book purists” who will say that the show has corrupted everything, and on the other hand we have the “shownlys” who say “what books?” I would caution a middle path; one where both factions can get along in peace and harmony.

Take the love story between Robb Stark and Talisa on the show and the one between Robb Stark and Jeyne Westerling in the books. As an avid reader who has read A Song of Ice and Fire multiple times, I just do not care for Jeyne Westerling. She’s not given much depth, she’s passed off as a whiney little girl, and her mother is a bully and a shrew who is working with Tywin Lannister to assassinate the Starks so her family can secure places in King Tommen’s court. Her own mother has more depth than she does.

Now, Talisa is a completely different story altogether. On the show, the Stark children are older than they are in the books, so Robb is a bit older, and thus Talisa is a full-grown woman. She is beautiful, and the fact that she is a highborn lady from Essos working as a field nurse on the battlefield gives her character more depth.

Finally, the fact that Robb fell completely in love with Talisa onscreen, and we were able follow each heart-aching choice he made—knowing all along that he was breaking a marriage pact with an ally—elevated Robb and Talisa’s love story over Robb and Jeyne’s, for me. When the two were married, and Talisa refused to shy away from the strong Lady Catelyn, I cheered. When Talisa told her husband she was pregnant, I both cheered and mourned, for I knew what was awaiting Robb at the Twins…I just didn’t know that Benioff and Weiss were going to rip my heart out with Talisa.

To have a pregnant Talisa at the Red Wedding, and to have her stabbed in the belly so brutally, just made me sick to my stomach. It was one of the few times that I had a physical response to a television show, and it was because of a pregnant Talisa. There are a few instances where the show has improved on the books, and Talisa is in the top of that list.

ANI: Razor, I actually didn’t like Talisa when she was first introduced, because she seemed way too smart to marry Robb Stark. She understood how the game was played–she herself was from the upper classes. As far as I was concerned, if she really loved him, she should have been smart enough to tell him “No” when he proposed marriage, as a disastrous choice that would bring down his Kingdom. I will give you though, that her presence and execution at the Red Wedding upped the emotional carnage significantly.

For me the answer begins and ends with Margaery Tyrell. In the books, Margaery is not a POV character–and she’s kept that way deliberately. Instead we only ever see her through the eyes of unreliable narrators. To Sansa, she’s at first a friend and confidant who wants to be her sister by marriage, and then a cold stranger the next, once Sansa is surprised!married off to Tyrion. (The Lannisters do that wedding in a rush, in order to steal Sansa away from the Tyrells while they can, unlike in the show where Tywin strong arms everyone into accepting it ahead of time.) Cersei projects upon her like a mad woman, to the point where she tries to convince her sycophants to put out the rumor that Margaery and Loras are having an incestuous affair. (In the books, Loras’ homosexuality is not nearly as open, and Cersei does not know of his predilections.) To Tyrion and Jaime, she’s a cipher, a pretty smiling face that’s the front for the Tyrell machinations. Is she merely their pawn, or is she playing to drive the agenda?

Meeting Margaery on screen for the first time was a revelation. “I want to be The Queen,” she tells Littlefinger within only a few episodes of on-screen time. Her original marriage to Renly, which in the books it is unclear how much a choice she had–is suddenly all her, and her offer to have her brother in bed with them if that’s what it will take to get her pregnant speaks volumes of the lengths she will go to in committing to her choices. Once she arrives in King’s Landing, she is no front to Olenna’s machinations, but neither is she fully privvy to her Grandmother’s plans. She is the student, sitting at the feet of the master, trying to learn all she can as fast as she can, before she must step forward and take the reigns.

In this, Margaery is a symbol of Female Power in a Patriarchal Hell. Her memories would be entitled “How To Win Peasants and Influence Men.” Unlike Brienne, Arya or Dany, she fully functions within the given confines for women of this world, believing that just because the man is the face of power does not mean she cannot be the one in control. But it also speaks to her own innocence that she thinks she can manipulate Joffrey and tame him, whereas Olenna understands that in order for this vision of soft power to work, the man must be pliable in a way that Mad King Joffrey is incapable of being.

Her story in the books is curious, because the reader always wonders what her game is. But her story on the TV show is infinitely more interesting because we know exactly what her game is–leaving us to wonder, as she rots away in the dungeons, having overstepped her power–how and if she will succeed.

[polldaddy poll=9350639]