Five Ways Game Of Thrones Season 5 Improved On The Books

The fifth season of Game of Thrones diverged from its source material—George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire novels—more than any other year in the show’s past.

The examples are many. Instead of hanging out in the Vale as she does in A Feast for Crows, Sansa Stark headed home to Winterfell, where her marriage to Ramsay Bolton presented her with frightening new challenges. Tyrion Lannister skipped a lot of his material from A Dance with Dragons to arrive in Meereen in record time, while his brother Jaime found himself unexpectedly tooling around Dorne. The changes were big, small, and everything in between. Anyone who had read the books couldn’t fail to note them.

Season 5 has also taken a few beatings from the fan community, with some citing the many alterations as the main reason why the year failed to meet expectations. Generally, I think they have some points, but change isn’t always bad. Executive producers David Benioff and Dan Weiss have altered the source material before, often to wonderful effect. Here, we’ll look at five ways Season 5 actually improved on A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons, the two books on which it was based.