Game of Thrones has run through all the material from A Song of Ice and Fire

It’s official: Game of Thrones has finished adapting all of the material it’s likely to adapt from George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire novels.* Conventional wisdom had it that the show had burned through all the book material at the end of last year, but that wasn’t really true. In Season 6, we got altered versions of several things from the books: the battle of Meereen, Arya seeing a play based on events in King’s Landing, and the siege of Riverrun were among them.

The show continued to give us greatly altered versions of book-events in “The Winds of Winter,” last night’s season finale. Let’s look at them, and see how they morphed and shifted during the transition from page to screen. Obviously, this post contains SPOILERS for the books.

The death of Pycelle

In the epilogue of A Dance with Dragons, the latest book in Martin’s series, Pycelle dies much in the way he dies in “The Winds of Winter”: stabbed to death by knife-wielding kids. However, the circumstances of his death in the book are vastly different.

Most obviously, we don’t see Pycelle die in the book. Kevan Lannister walks into his chamber to find the Grand Maester already expired. More importantly, in the novels, it’s Varys who does the deed, not Qyburn. Varys is preparing for a Targaryen invasion, and kills Pycelle, who’s been running the kingdoms efficiently in the wake of Cersei’s walk of shame, to make sure she takes back over, thus ensuring that the chaos will continue. On the show, we more or less come to the same outcome: Cersei is back in charge, and chaos is pretty certain to follow, but in this case, she secures power for herself.

Frey pies

The show conflated a couple of plotlines here to give fans a crowd-pleasing moment from the books. In A Dance with Dragons, many of the Freys are at Winterfell with the Boltons, working together to oppose Stannis’ marmy. Lord Wyman Manderly, a powerful Northern Lord, comes to Winterfell to swear fealty to Roose Bolton, but he has some tricks up his sleeve. In his heart, he’s still loyal to the Starks, and works to undermine the Bolton regime from the inside. Having lost family at the Red Wedding, he’s no friend to the Freys, either. There are several Freys hanging around his court in White Harbor. He kills them and bakes them into pies that he then serves at a feast at Winterfell.

Vastly altered versions of these plotlines showed up in “The Winds of Winter.” First, the show introduced Wyman Manderly. He was the fat lord in the hall with Jon and Sansa, and the first one to declare Jon the new King in the North. While the character is still loyal to the Starks on the show, he didn’t act on it.

And then, there’s the scene where Arya feeds Walder Frey a pie made from the flesh of his own children, a clear nod to Manderly’s actions in the books.

“Promise me, Ned.”

Finally, we got a scene first described in A Game of Thrones, published 20 years ago: Lyanna bleeding out following childbirth in the Tower of Joy. This was the most faithful of this week’s book-to-screen transitions. Although the books don’t specify that Lyanna died in childbirth, fans have long guessed that this was the case, and this scene clinches it. They’ve also long suspected that her baby grew up to be Jon Snow, another thing the scene confirmed.

And with that, the last of the Song of Ice and Fire material is adapted. It’s pretty much all new from here on out. Daenerys has left Westeros. Arya has left Braavos. Cersei sits the Iron Throne. The Boltons are vanquished, Bran is on his way south, the Dornish are marshalling their strength, and Jaime has returned from the siege at Riverrun. With a precious few exceptions, Season 7 will be a whole new world.

Unless George R.R. Martin finishes The Winds of Winter before it debuts. We’ll keep our eyes open.

*True, there are a few things that the show hasn’t gotten to. Lady Stoneheart, for instance, is still offstage. But at this point, it seems like the show has passed over that completely.