Game of Thrones showrunners explain why they chose to diverge from the books

David Benioff, Dan Weiss and George R.R. Martin explain why and when Game of Thrones diverged from the books, and some places it didn’t.

Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon, James Hibberd’s extensive oral history of the making of Game of Thrones, is out today. And based on everything we’ve read so far, it’s a must-have for fans.

We’re still making our way through the book, but plenty of fans have already read it and pulled out some of the best bits, including on Reddit. Some of the most interesting quotes come from the chapter “The Forks in the Road,” where people like showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss, writer Bryan Cogman, and A Song of Ice and Fire author George R.R. Martin talk about when and why the show diverged from the source material.

Obviously, the show was always going to be different from the books, but it sounds like it’s something Martin only really realized when he visited the set in season 1. “The director was talking to Dan and Dave,” he remembered. “Nobody was saying , ‘George, come over and tell us your opinion.’ I didn’t throw a tantrum or anything…I just came to the realization: I gave my baby up for adoption and now there is a parent teacher conference and I am not invited.”

Although some changes did rankle him, like the decision to have Joffrey cut out the tongue of the singer Marillion, who in the books went to the Vale rather than King’s Landing. “George was none too pleased, because in the books Marillion ends up being a patsy for Lysa Arryn’s murder,” said Bryan Cogman. “David and Dan’s reasoning was it’s better television to have this minstrel that we’d spend the season with and that we’d figure out Lysa’s murder when we got to it, and we did.”

And then came the moment when it became clear that the show was going to get made faster than Martin was writing the books, and that Martin was going to have to tell Benioff and Weiss what he had planned for the end. “It wasn’t easy for me,” Martin said. “I didn’t want to give away my books. It’s not easy to talk about the end of my books. Every character has a different end. I told them who would be on the Iron Throne and I told them some big twists like Hodor and ‘hold the door,’ and Stannis’s decision to burn his daughter. We didn’t get to everybody by any means. Especially the minor characters, who may have very different endings.”

First off, it’s interesting that Martin straight-up says that Stannis decides to burn his daughter, since there are some fans who think that while Shireen will die in A Song of Ice and Fire, Stannis won’t be the one to pull the trigger. Although the book version will no doubt happen a bit differently, Stannis will still be behind it.

But overall, Martin’s description pretty much tracks with what we’ve heard about this meeting from Benioff and Weiss: the showrunners got the broad outline of what happens but not the details. Not to turn this negative, but I think this makes sense given a lot of the criticisms fans have about the later seasons of the show. Sure, they knew that Bran was going to be king, but they didn’t have all the supplementary info they needed to really sell that twist to the audience.

Fans can also look forward to “very different endings” for the minor characters in the books. The Winds of Winter is looking more divergent by the day.

For his part, Benioff gave his take on when they chose to break with the books. “We don’t get bonus points for being strictly faithful to the books,” he said. “It doesn’t give us anything extra. For every decision, if there’s a fork in the road and the fork to the left is strictly adhering to the books and to the right is what’s better for the series, we’re always going to take that path to the right.”

I get this general sentiment, and I think there are areas where the show was right to forge a new path. (Like cutting Lady Stoneheart; fight me.) But I also think there were other circumstances where sticking closer to the books would have been the better choice, although hindsight helps there.

”We chose to see it as a great thing on both sides,” Weiss said. “There’s this amazing world George has created, and now there are two different versions out there. There’s no reason we can see why you can’t be thrilled and surprised and dismayed by both of these two different versions of this world.”

Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon is on sale now!

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