Small Council: How different will the show end up being from the books?

Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss recently said that Season 6 of the show will not spoil the books, since “[s]o much of what we’re doing diverges from the books at this point.” The show has been drifting away from the books for a while, but it looks like it’s about to go in a different direction entirely. How do we feel about this, and just how different do we expect the show to be from the books after both are finished?

RAZOR: This is a nearly impossible topic to tackle. With at least two more seasons to go, and two more books to read, we have no idea what’s coming…so how can I best answer this question? Well, George R.R. Martin has the freedom of using characters that are dead on the show, yet alive in the books, so there’s that advantage. Stannis may yet have a part to play in the final battle between the Dead and the Living, the Darkness and the Light, but if he’s gone from the show, his fate may already be sealed.

It may come down to budgetary concerns. How do you show full-grown dragons breathing fire down upon massing armies of the undead without blowing an entire season’s budget? Perhaps making a feature-length film is the best option. It all depends on how far down the fantasy rabbit-hole George R.R. Martin decides to go. Also, there is no way he will have the final book in A Song of Ice and Fire—A Dream of Spring—finished before Season 8 of Game of Thrones has come and gone.

Benioff and Weiss will have the outline of the final chapters, but they won’t know the meat and potatoes of the text, which is what makes the books so important, and that is on Martin’s shoulders. I honestly don’t know if Game of Thrones will end with Bran on the Iron Throne, or with Jon and Dany married, ushering in a new Targaryen dynasty, but what matters to me is how Martin and Benioff and Weiss collaborate to get the finished product right…for the fans.

ANI: And I quote: “In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state.” In short, for every choice we make, a thousand paths open for us. But when we choose to go another way, hundreds of those doors close, while hundreds more open.

It probably seemed harmless at first, the tiny changes and shortcuts the production used to condense pages of exposition into a neat linear plot that a TV viewing audience could follow. But for every moment someone turned right instead of left, a small crack formed between what was on the page and what was on the screen. By last year, those cracks had become yawning chasms. And with Martin now free of the weight of somehow beating the TV show to the punch, he’s free to turned those chasms into Planck space.

But as Game of Thrones (the TV show, not the books) has told us, Chaos is a ladder. Only the ladder is real, and the climb is all there is. The same could be said about the show’s philosophy towards the books. For every moment of chaos the show creates when it deviates from the novels, they climb higher. They up the ante when Arya becomes Tywin’s cup bearer, and he knows she’s a girl. They up the stakes further still when Jeyne Westerling becomes Talisa, gets pregnant, and attends the Red Wedding. They ratcheted up the emotional stakes almost too high last season when Sansa turned towards Winterfell, instead of staying safe in the Vale as Alayne Stone. And now they’ve nearly changed the game completely as we enter Season 6. Margaery’s own strength of personalty will lead her in very different directions onscreen than on the page. Jaime and Cersei will be together after Cersei’s Walk of Shame, and mourning a daughter who’s still very much alive and living in Dorne in the books. Tyrion will become city manager of Meereen with Dany’s implicit blessing, instead of just another rider in a company of sellswords outside the city walls. Theon will return home to a father who still lives, a thing that cannot happen in the books, as his father has been dead for novels now. And lord only knows where Sansa is off to, but she’s certainly done following Jeyne Poole’s storyline, that’s for certain.

With the books stalled out and the plotlines on the page convoluted, the choice to streamline and change looks brighter everyday. Even though they started at the very same time, Benioff and Weiss continue to climb. How to account for their rise to the top? Man, the show is Non-Stop.

DAN: I think Ani’s reference to the show’s ladder metaphor is important. At the end of the day, the ladder is the only thing that’s real, and climbing it is all that really matters. That is to say, regardless of how different the show and books end up being, the experience of watching and reading them is what we’re here for. As long as those experiences are satisfying, we’ll be satisfied. (Deciding whether they actually are satisfying is a subject for a different day, or several hundred different days, to be more realistic.)

But back on the topic at hand, I realize now that it was pure foolishness to ever think that the show and the books would follow the same basic timeline. George R.R. Martin was right: the proverbial butterfly flapped its wings back in Season 1, and there were hurricanes in Season 5. If Benioff and Weiss don’t even think that Season 6 will spoil the books, I assume that those hurricanes have all but wiped the landscape clean. Even if the books and show hit some of the same general plot points, I doubt the latter will ever really feel like an adaptation of the former again. And given what Martin has said about his writing style, I’m not even convinced we’ll be hitting the same general plot points—Martin develops parts of his story as he goes, and even if he has an idea of how he wants his series to end, who’s to say he can’t change his mind?

The next question is: is this a good thing? Benioff and Weiss’ credibility as storytellers took a bit of a hit among fans during Season 5, but they still did some excellent work, and have plenty of time to redeem themselves.

Moreover, this kind of thing has happened before. At the risk of revealing how big of a nerd I really am, I’d like to talk about an anime series called Fullmetal Alchemist for a minute. That show, which ran back in the mid-2000s, was based off a manga series (Japanese comic book) of the same name, a manga series that was still coming out in installments during production of the TV show. At one point, the show overtook the manga, and the writers had to start making up new storylines, since they’d run out of source material. Sound familiar?

Later, after both the manga series and the show wrapped up, another TV series was made. This one followed the manga very closely. And here’s the funny thing: the first TV series, the one where the writers had to make stuff up, ended up being way better than the second one, which followed the source material as closely as it could. The first was denser, richer, and more involving (to me, anyway—I’m not sure what the prevailing opinion is among fans), in part because it went off book.

I’m not saying the situation is exactly equivalent to what’s currently happening with A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones, but it makes for an interesting point of comparison. When Game of Thrones is finished, we almost definitely won’t have a point-for-point adaptation of A Song of Ice and Fire, but that doesn’t mean we won’t have something good.

COREY: As my fellow small council members have stated, predicted how different the show will be from the books, is a task of epic proportions, one in which we could discuss with no real conclusion until George finally finishes the series. I say series, because its my strong suspicion that there will be more than just Winds and Spring, which means we could discuss this for a very long time.

So getting back to the question at hand, how much will the show diverge from the books? I think there are two key factors to take under consideration. As everyone has mentioned, the series has made key choices, even as far back as the first season that have had profound effects on the current storyline, and as others have stated that handcuffs the producers in a certain manner.

But what we have to also consider, is how much the producers might want to make original changes all on their own. That is to say, if in using Martins’s outlines for the remainder of the series, the producers decide they simply do not like an angle that Martin takes with a character, how are we to predict that? Say Martin has Jon Snow defeat the WHite Walkers, but perish in the attempt? D&D might decide that’s too depressing even for Game of Thrones, so lets have Jon marry Daenerys instead? IT’s hard to predict  what the producers may or may not like, and despite their loyalty to the books, they might feel they have a greater loyalty to the show, and its fan base. It’s a rabbit hole with no bottom.

Second, and I believe this to be even more likely than the first point, is what if Martin simply changes his min as he is writing? Martin is the king of slow writing, and not because he uses software from the 80’s to write, it’s because the stories are notoriously complex with interwoven plot points that sometimes take multiple books to come to fruition. And if we look at Martin’s writing pace, its likely that we wont get the final novel, until four to five years after we get Winds of Winter.

That’s a very long time for a writer not to change his mind about a character’s story arc, or conclusion. So even if Martin has provided notes to the show producers that say Tyrion ends up on the Iron Throne, what is to say that Martin doesn’t change his mind sometime in the next five years? I remember reading a year ago that MArtin said he had just come up with the manner in which a major female character would perish? Does that sound like someone who has it all figured out? If the show finishes filming four years before the last book comes out, a very real possibility, there could be some very different endings for your favorite characters.

So at the end of the day, my best guess is who knows? Major changes could come from a variety of factors, tha make predicting how different the series will be from the books. Like predicting the weather, we can offer our best guess as to when it will rain, but its quite possible it will be the next day instead. Or not at all. But I don’t think there is a problem with the there being show and book differences, I find it to be exciting. It just means there is more material for me to devour, and I will never complain about that.

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