10 ways Game of Thrones improved on A Song of Ice and Fire

10. Hardhome

Another place where Season 5 truly knocked it out of the park was with the battle at Hardhome. Really, it needs no introduction. If you’ve seen it, you know why it’s on this list.

Where do we even start here? The brutally funny execution of Rattleshirt by Tormund? The ominous meeting where Jon Snow seemingly convinces some of the wildlings to join him against the army of the dead? The foreboding chill that sweeps over the camp and sets the hounds to baying? Or how about the 20-minute-long battle between the living and the dead, the first encounter of its kind to appear on the show?

I can’t beat around the bush: the battle at Hardhome is one of my all-time favorite fantasy battles ever played out on the big or small screen. There’s a pervasive air of terror to the whole thing, and it’s so sharply crafted that you hardly ever get a breath to collect yourself before Jon, Dolorous Edd, Tormund, and Wun-Wun book it to the Shivering Sea with a mob of wights hot on their heels.

It’s even better when you take into account that the entire sequence is a total invention of the show. There is no battle of Hardhome in the books. Instead, there’s a historic event that took place there where the city was destroyed seemingly overnight, and no one knows why. That was 600 years before the events of A Song of Ice and Fire. During ASOIAF itself, there’s also an an attempt to rescue some of the wildlings trapped there, which Jon plans. But he never leaves the Wall, and the issues that his men face there are nowhere near on the level of what happens in the show.

That’s why when it comes to page-to-screen improvements, Hardhome clocks in at the top of the list.

Aside from the fact that it’s just a spectacular battle sequence that enhances the show, there’s also a very specific narrative reason that Hardhome was an improvement on the books: it let us see the White Walkers more. In the novels, we haven’t seen a White Walker since A Storm of Swords was published back in 1999. I doubt I’m alone when I say I was really surprised they didn’t even make a cameo in A Dance with Dragons. No matter how threatening an enemy is, leaving them out of the story for that long is bound to make them feel slightly less threatening.

The show took that empty space and filled it spectacularly. In fact, I’d go so far as to say it gave viewers (and the characters) the best reason they had to fear the White Walkers out of anything that had happened in the series up until that point. It’s scary enough to just say “the army of the dead is coming,” but it’s a whole different level of terrifying when said army has just massacred a hundred thousand wildlings, and the only thing saving our heroes from the same grisly death is a small stretch of ocean.

There was also that showdown between Jon Snow and the White Walker, where we first got the reveal that Valyrian steel can withstand their weapons and kill them in the same way as dragonglass. This is a crucial tidbit, and while it has been hinted at in the books and I’m sure it will be just as important, the way the show revealed it was edge-of-your-seat amazing.

Really, I could carry on all day about how fantastic “Hardhome” was…but as I said, if you’ve seen it, you don’t need me to tell you. Including this battle was a top notch choice that the show made, and no matter what happens in the books, we can rest assured that Hardhome will go down as one of Game of Thrones’ defining moments.

So what do you think? Did we forget any of your favorite page-to-screen changes? Were you glad that Moon Door was a moon floor? Let us know in the comments!

To stay up to date on everything fantasy, science fiction, and WiC, follow our all-encompassing Facebook page and sign up for our exclusive newsletter.

Get HBO, Starz, Showtime and MORE for FREE with a no-risk, 7-day free trial of Amazon Channels