george rr martin Archives - Ian Thomas Malone

Monday

25

April 2016

0

COMMENTS

Game of Thrones Season 6 Recap: Episode 1

Written by Ian Thomas Malone, Posted in Blog, Game of Thrones

This recap features analysis from a devoted book fan. As the show has largely deviated from the books I’m not sure how much this matters, but if you hate spoilers you should probably not read these articles. I encourage you to subscribe so you never miss a recap. Thank you for reading.

I found myself constantly wondering about the timeline as the season opener progressed. At the beginning of A Storm of Swords, George R.R. Martin clarifies that the chapters aren’t necessarily linear and the show hasn’t always been either. The fact that several of the episode’s plotlines, mainly The Wall and Sansa/Reek appeared to happen immediately after last episode while others, mainly Dorne/King’s Landing/Meereen, clearly happened a little while later created a bit of uncertainty for me at least.

Pacing a ten episode season with a massive ensemble cast is very difficult. With that in mind, it seems hard to praise Davos’ bravery at the Wall with him still locked in that room by the end of the episode. I’m inclined to give this a pass, especially since I’m trying to purge the image of old naked Melisandre from my mind and am okay if that involves forgetting the rest of the plotline at Castle Black.

It is also important to note that there will likely only be thirteen episodes of the rest of the series after this season, which makes me think that a Sansa/revived Jon Snow/Stark reunion could happen sooner rather than later, depending on how quickly the inevitable Wildling/Alliser Throne conflict lasts. I say this mostly because Sansa’s story lacks any other logical direction and I don’t see how the merry band of Brienne, Poderick, Sansa, and Reek can wander around in the cold indefinitely.

Though it made sense for Brienne to finally stop wandering around Westeros in search of spare Starks, I have a bit of trouble accepting the fact that this woman obsessed with “duty” killed Stannis in cold blood. Longtime readers know my feelings regarding a certain One True King quite well, but this isn’t so much about what you think about Stannis, but rather whether or not Brienne’s actions were just.

Now you can make the case that Game of Thrones isn’t a show that’s concerned with having its characters have a black and white sense of moral justice, except that’s far truer in the books. We saw this on display in Ramsey’s first scene, where he displays a shocking amount of remorse for Miranda’s death. I was completely taken aback by how sympathetic the character was portrayed as, especially considering how controversial his rape of Sansa was last season. The show made up for this almost immediately with a rather out of place comment by Ramsey to merely feed her body to the dogs. Of course, Ramsey is a psychopath, but we didn’t need that scene to remind us of that. It seems puzzling as to what that scene tried to accomplish besides simply screen time for the character.

I have a hard time buying into the Lannister threat to the Boltons. In theory, this makes sense, but the Lannisters have never looked weaker. Who really thinks they’re in any position to move on Winterfell?

Cersei and Jaime aren’t really up to much at all. The whole prophecy bit made sense and all, but neither sibling seemed particularly troubled by Myrcella’s death and Tommen wasn’t even mention at all. For a show that constantly brings out the question, “who will win the game of thrones,” it doesn’t seem too concerned with who’s actually sitting on it.

The fact that Trystane Martell wasn’t even under arrest says it all about what the writers are trying to do with Dorne. I spent much of last season wondering where all of that was going and the answer is clear. Now that the show is freed from most of its obligations to the books, it doesn’t want people like Doran Martell and Stannis around.

I’m kind of okay with that. Book fanatics have been trying to figure out Doran’s plan for years. The show basically went and admitted that he doesn’t have one at all, but this shouldn’t alarm book fans. The show simply doesn’t have time to integrate a character like that into its end goal in any substantial way.

So why include them at all? I have no idea. The Sand Snakes don’t seem to have much appeal to anyone, especially after they committed needless treason. Is the viewer supposed to feel sympathetic to their desires for vengeance, which involved killing two innocent teenagers? Like much of their dialogue, this plot is laughable.

The Dothraki dialogue was also painful to read. I still can’t believe the writers won an Emmy last year. Pathetic.

Margaery in jail could have been handled better. It took me a while to remember why she was even there (for lying about Loras’ homosexuality). Jonathan Pryce is always a treat to watch, but it’s hard to care about what they’re doing.

I like the direction of Dany’s story. She likely needed Dothraki help even before the Sons of the Harpy burned her Meereen fleet. As a character, Dany works best as the underdog and it’ll be interesting to see how the Vaes Dothrak storyline plays out.

Obligatory Jorah still has greyscale for no reason mention (yes we’re still doing that and we always will). It looks worse. The scene where he and Daario discuss his weird love for Dany was creepy. Not as creepy as old naked Melisandre, but then again few things are.

The Tyrion/Varys exchange was a pleasant throwback to season two, but that also highlighted a major problem with Tyrion’s plotlines since. Tyrion hasn’t really done much big picture stuff since he commanded the troops at the Battle of the Blackwater. He spent season three recovering, four in prison, and five on the road/hanging out with Jorah. Now he has power, but he’s really far away from the main action. Peter Dinklage is one of the show’s biggest assets and while keeping him in Meereen makes sense given the timeline of the books, it doesn’t seem like the best place for him now that the show has gone completely off book.

Which is something that needs to be considered as the show moves forward if the rumors about there only being thirteen episodes left are to be believed. The show doesn’t have a ton of time to waste having Tyrion rule a city that’s relatively inconsequential to the bigger picture. I don’t want to come down too harshly on the whole plot based on five minutes of screen time, but the last season didn’t inspire a ton of confidence in that realm.

Arya is actually still relatively on book. Her blindness only lasts a single chapter in the books though. I don’t think blind Arya is particularly interesting so hopefully the show follows a similar path.

No Littlefinger, Samwell, Ironborne (if they’re actually coming), or Bran this episode. I hope there’s some direction for LF’s incomprehensible Northern plans. I sure don’t see any logic there.

All in all, this was a pretty good premiere. I don’t think it completely fixed the wrongs of season five, but there does seem to be some direction for most of the major players. After last year’s mess, I’ll settle for some entertaining set-up that promises better things to come.

Just a slight programming note. After each episode airs, I’ll do a live video on my Facebook page summarizing my thoughts. Written recaps will be posted on Mondays. Thank you for reading.

Tuesday

5

January 2016

0

COMMENTS

The Martinese Knot: Can We Fault George R.R. Martin for Not Finishing The Winds of Winter?

Written by Ian Thomas Malone, Posted in Blog, Game of Thrones, Pop Culture

It’s official. The Winds of Winter will not be out before the sixth season of Game of Thrones. George R.R. Martin recently put out a lengthy blog post explaining the delays and apologizing to the legions of angry book fans. Many writers, most prominently Neil Gaiman, have rushed to his defense, urging book readers not to berate Martin’s slow creative process.

As a dedicated fan of A Song of Ice and Fire as well a published author, I know that the delay is both frustrating and understandable. I find it horrifying that a TV show would overlap a book series, but I can’t fault a fellow author for taking his time and enjoying the spotlight. I’ve written about the important work GRRM does with his anthologies, using his star power to help dozens of sci-fi and fantasy authors gain much needed exposure. Few, if any, mainstream authors do more to promote their genre than GRRM and I’ll always respect him for that.

Fans of ASOIAF know that the show and the books are two completely different entities. Season five bore little resemblance to A Feast for Crows and A Dance With Dragons. There is the risk that big storylines in the books will be spoiled by the show and that’s certainly legitimate. With that in mind, I don’t think it’s necessarily unreasonable for fans to be mad at Martin for the delay.

Two things about Neil Gaiman’s blog stick out to me that I don’t agree with. He titles the post, “Entitlement Issues” and then goes on to italicize the phrase, “George R.R. Martin is not your bitch.” While he’s certainly right about the second part, I do take some umbrage with the notion that wanting to see a book released before it’s spoiled by television somehow reflects entitlement.

Gaiman is right to point out that by buying a book, you aren’t signing a contract where you then get to control the author’s whole life. The audience cannot force an author to write something and if they could, it would probably be terrible. Writers need creative freedom.

GRRM can take as much time as he wants. Should he? Entitlement is one thing, but what about obligation?

An author is nothing without fans. Fans made GRRM. I may have maybe .01% of GRRM’s fanbase, but they’ve helped me get to where I’m at today and I won’t have much of a future in this business without them. We may not owe our fans our firstborn children (or dragon in GRRM’s case since he doesn’t have kids), but there is a sort of moral obligation to the people who got you to where you are. If Davos were real, I’m sure he’d say something similar.

There is also the fact that ASOIAF is not a new series. The first book came out twenty years ago. In the new foreword to The Gunslinger written after The Dark Tower was finished, Stephen King wrote about how he’d receive letters from fans who were terminally ill or on death row asking how the story ends. I don’t mention this to suggest that GRRM should hurry up because his fans are dying, but rather to point out the obvious. Fans invest in stories.

ASOIAF matters to many people. It matters to me. I’ve made many friendships through a common love of these books. I’ve spent countless hours obsessing over them. GRRM doesn’t owe me anything, but I’m also not going to call anyone who’s a little miffed at him entitled either.

Books matter. We’re supposed to feel something when we read. If people are angry that a TV show may ruin a book, that should be taken as a compliment for it shows what a marvelous job GRRM has done over the years.

Saturday

11

April 2015

0

COMMENTS

Varys and the Importance of Hedging Your Bets

Written by Ian Thomas Malone, Posted in Blog, Game of Thrones, Pop Culture

This article contains spoilers for all five books. Though the upcoming season will deviate quite a bit from the books, there are some spoilers that could impact your enjoyment of the show if you hate spoilers. Proceed with caution. Also, I’ll be doing Game of Thrones recaps every Monday that focus on the relationship between the books and the shows so please subscribe if you are interested.

While Varys is known as Game of Thrones’ most notorious schemer, both to the characters and the audience (Littlefinger is more trusted by the former than the latter), he loses a bit of his mystique by the epilogue of A Dance with Dragons, where he reveals his plans to a dying Kevan Lannister. I don’t mean to suggest that he’s not interesting anymore, but seeing his plan out in the open puts him a bit behind other manipulators such as Littlefinger, Olenna Redwyne, Marwyn, Doran Martell, and Mance Rayder in terms of intrigue. We know Varys’ plan. We don’t really know any of theirs.

With the knowledge that Varys wants to put (f)Aegon on the throne along with his decision to off Kevan and Pycelle in order to prevent them for cleaning Cersei’s mess, we can pretty much piece together why he disappeared after A Storm of Swords. Varys needed to create chaos in King’s Landing. Having accomplished that, sticking around only served to put him at unnecessary risk. Cersei would presumably rely on him or blame him for Tywin’s death/Tyrion’s escape, which put him in the position of either having to help Cersei at the cost of his own agenda or risk his life for not doing so.

There is one decision that doesn’t make much sense if Varys’ plan is to put Aegon and not Daenerys’ on the throne. Why send Ser Barristan to Dany if Aegon is the real objective? It seems to serve no purpose other than to make a potential enemy stronger.

Now the whole Barristan to Dany story isn’t 100% clear, but we know that Varys’ planted his dismissal in Cersei’s mind and then Illyrio Mopantis, Varys’ BFF, took care of getting Ser Grandfather, along with Strong Belwas, to Qarth to take Dany back to Pentos, which of course ended up not working at all. If Barristan knows that Varys has any involvement, he’s kept quiet. Chances are, he doesn’t know that Varys was behind all of this.

Why am I sure of that? In A Storm of Swords, Stannis tells Davos, “Ser Barristan once told me that King Aerys’ rot began with Varys” (Davos IV). Pretty damning right? There’s also the fact that Barristan knows that Ser Jorah is spying on Dany for Varys, adding another element of distrust. It’s hard to believe that Barristan, bold as he may be, would get involved in any plan spearheaded by the eunuch. That doesn’t mean that Varys doesn’t see value in having Barristan in the picture.

We know that Barristan came up with the idea to go to Dany on his own. It’s not really clear whether Illyrio found him in Pentos or if it was the other way around, but we do know that Barristan agreed to disguise himself as Arstan Whitebeard, a shady thing for a man of honor to do.

His logic for doing so is also kind of suspicious. Barristan claims that he adopted a pseudonym because Ser Jorah was spying on her for Varys and this sort of adds up. Though Jorah had stopped spying by A Storm of Swords, Ser Barristan wouldn’t have known this and probably would have been mistrustful of double agents, whether it be Varys or Jorah. Jorah was also pretty obnoxious to him for their entire boat ride. It seems as though the real reason could be that Illyrio and Varys viewed Jorah as expendable at that point and that they were better off without him and his weird lust for Dany, though Barristan could have been acting on his own accord.

Which explains how they got Ser Barristan there, but it doesn’t really explain why. The answer to that is simple. I don’t think Barristan would’ve believed that Aegon was really Aegon, since there would have been no way of explaining that without involving Varys, who he doesn’t trust. The only way to get value out of the old knight was to help him get to a destination he was already determined to go to anyway.

The problem is that sending Barristan to Dany only strengthens her, which could become problematic for Varys when the time came to make moves with Aegon. It would be a shame for Aegon and the Golden Company to take the Iron Throne in the midst of all the chaos, only to have Dany, her dragons, and her Unsullied arrive to take it away. So why would Varys strengthen a potential enemy?

Varys, possibly more than anyone else, knows that plans go wrong all the time and there’s only so much he can do about it. There’s about a hundred different things that could go wrong with having two hotheaded Targaryen children running around Essos over the course of a few years. Angry Dothraki, angry stonemen, angry Qarth warlocks, slavers, and that’s only people problems. There’s ships sinking, pale mare, starvation, and plenty of other natural factors that Varys can’t do anything about.

What he can do is hedge his bets. In a perfect world, Varys has Aegon on the throne. Maybe he’s married to Dany, but one would think that a marriage to one of the great houses would a better idea, which doesn’t leave room for Dany at all. But that’s a perfect world and not one Varys lives in.

We’ve seen Varys forced to alter his plans before. He didn’t want the War of the Five Kings to happen at all and he would’ve had to clear out of King’s Landing completely if Stannis had taken the thrones. Varys has shown his prowess at gathering intelligence and long term planning, but he isn’t infallible.

Dany might be a problem for him eventually or she might be his only shot if something happens to Aegon, which at this point is a pretty realistic possibility. With that in mind, having a renowned knight like Ser Barristan protecting her makes perfect sense. The game of thrones is a gamble and problems will always arise. Having two Targaryens is better than one, for now at least.

Friday

3

April 2015

1

COMMENTS

Authenticity Sets Outlander Apart From Other Historical Dramas

Written by Ian Thomas Malone, Posted in Blog, Pop Culture

Like many, I was skeptical of Outlander when Starz announced it was picking up the series. The comparisons to Game of Thrones were inevitable, though Diana Gabaldon’s time traveling historical romance series bears little in common with George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire. Starz could’ve easily tried to make itself another Spartacus, which wouldn’t have been fair to the source material.

We’re in a pretty unique era for fantasy dramas and period pieces with Outlander having its feet in both genres. Probably the only valid comparison between Outlander and Game of Thrones is that they’re both fantasy shows where fantasy isn’t a predominant driving force in the narrative. Time travel sets the plot of Outlander in motion, but it’s hardly a show about time travel just as Game of Thrones is more of a political story than one about dragons, white walkers, and faceless men (also worth noting that Gabaldon and Martin have appeared in two anthologies together, one of which was edited by Martin).

In retrospect, it was foolish to have ever doubted Ronald D. Moore, who managed to take a cheesy Star Wars knock off and remake it into one of the greatest shows of the 21^st century with Battlestar Galactica. Moore pays all due respect to Outlander’s source material as he did with BSG, all whilst creating a show that sets itself apart from a very crowded field.

Outlander is a beautiful show to watch. The scenery almost plays like an infomercial for Scotland’s tourism department, filming on locations that really make you feel like you’re in the 1700s. Though only about half of the principal cast are Scottish, the accents could fool just about anyone.

The other thing that really sets Outlander apart is the reservation with which it handles its freedom as a premium cable show. It could have all the sex, gore, and foul language it wants and yet it’s pretty tame by cable standards. Moore knows that while those can be used to draw attention to a show, you don’t have to have nudity in every episode to make a compelling drama.

We’re living in a great time for shows like Outlander. The fact that the show is drawing plenty of hype when Game of Thrones’ own return come just a week after is a testament to its quality. Many of the posters advertising the show have a picture of Jamie along with the phrase “some like it Scot.” Very rarely does an advertisement hit its mark with such accuracy.

Thursday

12

March 2015

0

COMMENTS

The Advantages of Deviation for Game of Thrones

Written by Ian Thomas Malone, Posted in Blog, Game of Thrones, Pop Culture

Since the recent trailer releases for the season five of Game of Thrones, I’ve been asked how I feel about the show taking creative liberties from the books. The footage seems to suggest a stronger deviation than there has been in the past, but this is hardly new. Just ask Ros and Talisa Stark.

A Feast for Crows gets a lot of hate. That’s not that surprising. Tyrion, Daenerys, Stannis, Bran (okay, not a big loss), Hodor (much bigger loss), Theon/Reek, Strong Belwas, and Benjen Stark are all absent while Jon Snow only gets a small cameo in Ser Piggy’s first POV chapter. Perhaps more importantly, there isn’t really a climax that makes up for all the missing major characters.

Which is a shame because AFFC is a fascinating read filled with character development and clues for what lies ahead. Personally, I prefer it to A Dance with Dragons, which also suffers from a slow moving plot and lack of climax, but contains all the characters that get featured on the cover of Entertainment Weekly. I wouldn’t call it the best in the series by any means, but I think it’s the one that benefits the most from a second read.

As a complete work, it’s basically unfilmable as far as Game of Thrones is concerned, along the same lines as Dune Messiah (or the whole Dune series for that matter). You can’t have a season where the action highlights are summed up by Brienne’s brief skirmishes, Samwell banging Gilly, and Myrcella losing her ear. Combining it with the early parts of A Dance with Dragons doesn’t really change this all that much.

Deviations must be made. The masses want action. You can’t have major characters wandering around, doing nothing, or simply not there at all for large chunks of time (I’ve covered this in previous articles as well). That’s not how TV works.

Game of Thrones has to forge its own path. It can’t do justice to the Northern Conspiracy or the Dornish/Tyrell/Greyjoy/Illyrio/Citadel Master Plans. We can’t speculate on who poisoned the locusts (without Strong Belwas, there’s no one to eat them anyway). If we’re lucky, we’ll get more Ser Pounce. For that, I am grateful.

As an author, my loyalties will always lie with the written word over the spoken word. It’s important to not only acknowledge these two as separate mediums, but to also not hold the latter accountable for deciding to do things a bit differently. There are tens of millions of fans of Game of Thrones. There are not tens of millions of fans who can tell you all the regions of Westeros (which isn’t that difficult).

I roll my eyes when magazines like Entertainment Weekly talk about the battle for the throne and only mention Tyrion, Jon, Arya, and Daenerys as if this is really what it’s all been about. They’re doing that for the masses. Fine, even if it comes as a slight to a certain one true king.

What’s important is to not let the deviations interfere with your enjoyment of the show. This is a high budget production with hundreds of talented people working both behind the camera and in front of it. Including George R.R. Martin himself.

It’s true that not all deviations are created equal. The show should be faulted for ones that don’t work. We should not however, fault the show for making changes solely on the grounds that it’s different from the books. That isn’t fair.

There is the problem of the finale, which will almost certainly come before A Dream of Spring or an eighth book, which I think is likely to happen. I can’t really say that’s not going to be a problem because I don’t know. This is pretty unprecedented as far as screen adaptations go. I imagine this is something that GRRM has thought about once or twice.

That’s a problem for another year. Until then, I’m going to enjoy Game of Thrones and do my best to keep my inner ASOIAF geek at bay. If I had a gold dragon for every time something was changed in the upcoming season, I’d be richer than the Iron Bank of Braavos. To say that time and time again would grow more annoying than Joer Mormont’s raven demanding corn and it would also be ignoring the fact that deviation is fundamentally in the best interest of the realm (Earth).

I will be doing recaps of the upcoming season. To ensure you never miss one, I encourage to subscribe by putting your e-mail address in the “Free Candy” form on the right. Also, I’d like to thank all of you who helped make A Trip Down Reality Lane a bestseller in metaphysical fiction and thank you for reading!

Sunday

19

October 2014

1

COMMENTS

The Importance of George R.R. Martin’s Anthology Work

Written by Ian Thomas Malone, Posted in Blog, Game of Thrones

“Finish the book” is a phrase that’s become intrinsically linked to George R.R. Martin in the wake of Game of Thrones’ success in 2011. The long wait for The Winds of Winter has many fans angry, though it’s worth noting that the delays are neither surprising nor unprecedented. Five year gaps have become the norm with A Song of Ice and Fire and that was before Martin became one of, if not, the most famous author on the planet. But Martin hasn’t been away from writing while he’s traveled the world giving interviews and attending launch parties.

Since A Dance With Dragon’s release in 2011, Martin has scripted four Game of Thrones episodes, served as the coeditor of five anthologies (also a contributor to two), and as a coauthor of The World of Ice and Fire, which comes out next week. He’s also released several TWOW chapters, though it’s still pretty unclear as to how far along he is with the book. For a man in his sixties who famously detests writing on the road, that’s a pretty heavy workload.

As expected, his work on other projects takes a backseat in the media to ASOIAF. That’s what happens when you author a worldwide phenomenon. While anthologies don’t create the kind of buzz that garners much mainstream attention, it can be easy to overlook the value of the work he’s doing on them.

Martin’s rise to fame is much different from other celebrity authors like Stephen King and J.K. Rowling, who achieved mainstream success quite early on in their careers. Martin’s first novel was released twenty years before A Game of Thrones, which in turn was released nine years before A Feast for Crows debuted at number one on the New York Times Best Seller list in 2005, placing him in the upper echelon of fantasy writers. That being six years before GOT premiered on HBO, showing us the long and unusual journey he took to stardom.

So what does this have to do with anthologies? Let’s look at Robert Silverberg’s Legends, the anthology that housed The Hedge Knight, the first Tales of Dunk and Egg novella. It’s certainly possible to make the case that Legends has the most star power of any fantasy anthology ever written with contributions from King, Robert Jordan, Terry Goodkind, Anne McCaffrey, Orson Scott Card, Terry Pratchett, and Raymond E. Feist among others. Legends II includes Terry Brooks, Neil Gaiman, and Diana Gabaldon, adding to the series’ immense name recognition.

The funny thing about Legends in the year 2014 is that Martin wasn’t even famous enough to be featured on the front cover when it came out in 1998. He didn’t get that accolade until the sequel in 2003. To your average consumer, Martin would likely be placed second behind King if the book came out today for the first time.

The success of Legends contributed to the fortunes of the lesser-known writers, who benefited from the exposure that they received from being featured alongside established names like King and Jordan. Many copies of A Game of Thrones still feature Jordan’s stamp of approval. While that’s something that’s easy to overlook, that sort of quote can be a tremendous boost for unknown writers.

Which is why Martin’s work on anthologies is not only important to the literary world, it also shows his true character. This is a guy who busted his ass for decades to get where he is now. But he didn’t make his fortune without some help and he remembers that. Pay it forward at its finest.

Martin’s name recognition changes the lives of the authors in his anthologies. His name headlining collections like Dangerous Women and Rogues is huge, even for the writers featured on the back of the book, like Martin once was. The literary world is as large and dense as Westeros and it’s very difficult to get exposure for books if you’re an unknown. Being featured in an anthology with someone like Martin’s name of the cover is practically a gift from R’hllor himself.

While “finish the book” is a catchy phrase, it’s important to remember that Martin is a man who achieved his dream late in life is and doing what he needs to do to get his creative vibes in order. That process serves as a tremendous benefit to the literary world as a whole, which needs people like Martin to champion works that might otherwise go unnoticed.

The wait for The Winds of Winter is certainly annoying and perhaps even more so now that the show is starting to catch up with the books, but there are still plenty of other Martin related works to enjoy. Who knows, you might even discover a new author. Anthologies might not be what the masses want from Martin, but he’s doing work that represents his continued devotion to maintaining interest in books as a whole. As Tyrion once said, “a mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge.”

Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed this article, there’s a Game of Thrones category under the blog section. I also have a Facebook page and would appreciate a “like” if you feel so inclined.

Thursday

22

May 2014

1

COMMENTS

The Troubles of Book to Screen in Game Of Thrones

Written by Ian Thomas Malone, Posted in Blog, Game of Thrones

As a bibliophile and a TV/film fanatic, I’ve always tried to curtail my expectations for adaptation of books I enjoy. It’s always been my belief that a good adaptation tries to capture the essence of a book rather than mimic it. Blade Runner is a good example of this. The film bears little resemblance to Philip K. Dick’s novella, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? but is excellent in its own right.

When it comes to George R. R. Martin’s epic Song of Ice and Fire, ten hours is simply not enough time to cover everything. More importantly, it would be foolish to even try even if more time was allotted. The show does cover most of the main points with min
or deviations, but that will likely change and the show progresses, even without taking into consideration that the final two books haven’t even been written yet.

There are many differences between TV and books, but the most important with regards to Game of Thrones is pacing. For a series that has hundreds of characters that covers thousands of pages, there’s a lot of downtime in A Song of Ice and Fire. We see this particularly with Daenerys Targaryen, who is given relatively little to do compared to the rest of the series’ major characters. The TV cannot have a character who sits around all season and thus deviation is required. We saw this in season two with the captured dragon plot in Quarth. People can criticize it for not being in the books, but without it we’d be left with a character who mostly roamed around with nothing to do all season.

The pacing also becomes increasingly more confusing with the fourth and fifth books, which take place over roughly the same amount of time and introduce several new POV characters. While the books can get away with this, keeping in mind that neither book received the kind of critical acclaim that the first three received, a TV show can’t. Television doesn’t just one day decide that the lead isn’t the lead anymore.

This requires the show to move certain plotlines along faster than the books do. Theon Grejoy is elevated to POV character in A Clash of Kings, only to disappear for the next two books before becoming important again inA Dance With Dragons. Game of Thrones can’t get away with this. If the producers tried to tell Alfie Allen that his character would be gone for two years, he would go find other work. Further more, people would naturally lose interest.

That’s part of what makes Game of Thrones such a groundbreaking show. Both the books and the show clearly have the Starks as the main protagonists when the story begins. The Starks are responsible for six of the eight POV characters (not counting the prologue) of A Game of Thrones, yet only three of the fourteen in A Dance With Dragons. The books show an increased effort to explore their depth and from the looks of season four, the show does as well.

As the depth expands, so will the deviation. For characters like Theon, Brienne, and Daenerys, we’re starting to get close to where they are in the series as a whole rather than just where they left off in A Storm of Swords.That’s going to anger some fan purists, who want a strict adaptation of the series. But it shouldn’t, especially since the show is going to catch up with the books sooner rather than later.

Game of Thrones should make plot decisions that work for the show and not strictly because that’s the way things happened in the book. Performances from actors like Charles Dance, Diana Rigg, and Richard Madden elevated their character’s significance and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Robb Stark may not have been a POV character, but it’s hard to argue that he isn’t a more interesting character to watch than his brother Bran.

The big advantage of having POV characters is that the reader is given access to the inner thoughts of a wide spread of characters. We get to see what the Starks and the Lannisters are thinking. In TV, we only get to see what they do. That’s not to say that the POV system isn’t without flaws either. Characters like Sansa are often passive characters in specific scenes between non-POV characters. We have to view these scenes through a biased source. The show doesn’t have those limitations.

The biggest problems with deviations occur when they don’t work. Talisa Stark wasn’t a figure of controversy, but Jamie’s rape of Cersei was a whole different story. While, “it didn’t happen in the book,” is far from the only point of objection to the latter scene, things like that are when the differences between book and show are fully exposed.

While personally, I’ll almost always prefer the book to the screen adaptation, I don’t make a comparison between the two a deciding factor. Book purists should avoid the show entirely, because anger at something for not limiting itself strictly to the confines of what came before it isn’t really fair. Books, movies, and television are all very different mediums that don’t flawlessly translate into one another and that’s okay.