Five ASOIAF characters that should have made it into Game of Thrones

Young Griff, aka Prince Aegon

Another character whose entire plot was cut from Game of Thrones was Young Griff, who is possibly the son of Daenerys' brother Rhaegar Targaryen and the heir to the Iron Throne. (For anyone not afraid of possible spoilers for the future novels in the series, there is speculation about Young Griff’s parentage here). Young Griff is claimed by his foster father, Lord Jon Connington, and Varys to be Rhaegar’s son Prince Aegon Targaryen, who was safely smuggled out of King’s Landing as a baby before Tywin Lannister sacked the city. If this identity is true, then Young Griff is the rightful ruler of  Westeros, and has an even better claim than his aunt Daenerys.

To protect him from Robert Baratheon and the Lannisters, Young Griff was raised in secret on a river boat in Essos by Connington and a band of Westerosi exiles including a knight, a scholar, and a Septa who hope to create the perfect future King of Westeros. Young Griff is certainly that; he is charming, handsome, intelligent, well-educated, and brave. When Tyrion Lannister first meets Young Griff, he gets to sit in on his academic lessons, where Young Griff is learning his eighth language.

In one of the final chapters of A Dance of Dragons, Young Griff and the Golden Company (a mercenary organization who are way cooler in the books than on the show) invade Westeros. They rapidly capture several castles in the Stormlands and are preparing to attack the fabled castle of Storm’s End at the end of the novel. In any other series besides A Song of Ice and Fire, Young Griff’s backstory would herald his eventual triumph, as the returned son of a slain father, a secret prince right out of a fairytale. But this is Westeros, so he may die suddenly or not be who he appears to be. I personally think his inclusion in Game of Thrones would have been awesome and given the Lannisters a Targaryen faction to deal with well before Daenerys arrives, but nobody asked my opinion.