How much from Game of Thrones season 8 will be in The Winds of Winter?

Game of Thrones is over, but A Song of Ice and Fire isn’t. How much from the final season of the HBO show will be in George R.R. Martin’s books?

Over two years removed from the series finale of Game of Thrones, the remaining fans of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series wait patiently for the sixth book, The Winds of Winter.

But the question must be asked: if you’ve seen the end of Game of Thrones, do you have to read the books on which it was based? Don’t you already know what happens? Well, that depends on whether the show adapted Martin’s yet-to-be-published works exactly as he planned them, and given that he’s not much for planning, that seems unlikely. While some things will undoubtedly be the same, others will be different, with Martin himself recently saying that the show went in “somewhat different directions…I’m still working on the book, but you’ll see my ending when that comes out.”

Still, there are likely still some aspects of Game of Thrones season 8 in The Winds of Winter and/or the alleged final book in the series, A Dream of Spring. Let’s see if we can’t pin some of them down.

Benioff, Weiss and the three “holy s**t” moments

To start, let’s look at the communication between Martin and Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss. As Martin wrote his books on his Wordstar 4.0, Game of Thrones ran through the five books of source material already available at a rapid pace. It was around season four that the three men got together to discuss a contingency plan:

"Last year we went out to Santa Fe for a week to sit down with [Martin] and just talk through where things are going, because we don’t know if we are going to catch up and where exactly that would be. If you know the ending, then you can lay the groundwork for it. And so we want to know how everything ends. We want to be able to set things up. So we just sat down with him and literally went through every character. David Benioff, Vanity Fair"

Then as now, Martin was writing The Winds of Winter. When he met with Benioff and Weiss, he noted that not all of the pieces of the puzzle were in place. “I can give them the broad strokes of what I intend to write, but the details aren’t there yet,” he said. “I’m hopeful that I can not let them catch up with me.”

After that, Martin tried to finish his latest book before the start of the sixth season, but after he missed the deadline in 2016, the show once again prepared their own route. “Luckily, we’ve been talking about this with George for a long time… and we know where things are heading,” Benioff said during a speech at the Oxford Union. “So, we’ll eventually meet up at pretty much the same place where George is going. There might be a few deviations along the route, but we’re heading towards the same destination.”

Before Season 8, Benioff and Weiss talked again about Martin’s involvement. “One thing we’ve talked to George about is that we’re not going to tell people what the differences are, so when those books come out people can experience them fresh,” Benioff said. “The show has become so different that people will have no way knowing from watching what will or won’t appear in the books.”

Also of note, the showrunners once told Entertainment Weekly that, in their fateful meeting with George R.R. Martin, he revealed to them three “holy shit moments.” Through inside-the-episode commentaries, we’ve learned one of them was the burning of Shireen Baratheon, although we’re not sure if that will happen exactly as it did on the show. The second was the revelation about why Hodor’s past from “The Door,” and the third moment was “from the very end.”

There were certainly some “holy shit” moments from Game of Thrones season 8, but which one will appear in Martin’s books? What doesn’t count as a “holy shit” moment but could still come to pass anyway? Let’s take a closer look: