‘Game Of Thrones’ Books Vs. Show: Season 6 Shows Cost Of Narrative Convenience

Book vs. Show structure

In the beginning, it was thought the show would adapt a season a book., a notion reinforced by the fact Season 1 was a very faithful adaptation of ‘A Game of Thrones.’ Seasons 2-4 began rearranging pieces on the board, filtering Martin’s tale through Benioff & Weiss into a TV format. For example, having to a big battle hitting every ninth episode of a season meant that in season four Jon Snow didn’t have much to do until that season’s Battle of Castle Black, necessitating the invention of Jon’s raid on the Night’s Watch mutineers at Craster’s Keep.

Season 5 and 6 is where the show became less adaptation and more fan fiction. It introduced substantial changes to the narrative while condensing and eliminating a great deal from the books. They are based on books focused not on the war but the fallout and trauma from it. Characters and storylines are constantly in flux. Martin had originally planned a time jump, which seems obvious given the inordinate amount of time characters spend training and/or traveling.

He conceived the series as trilogy until the tale grew in the telling. But the original three-act structure remains. Martin’s first three books correspond to the first four seasons of the show. Benioff and Weiss refer to this period as the expansion. The difference is whereas Martin used the climax of the third book (specifically, Tywin Lannister’s death) to further open up the world of Westeros, the writers treated the event as a “resetting” of the story on a downward slope towards the end.

This structural change trickled down to all storylines, allowing them to adapt later material far faster than earlier seasons. Thus, fifth and sixth seasons is where Benioff & Weiss start swimming against Martin’s current, drastically changing the fourth, fifth (and sixth) books by contracting the story instead of maintaining the expanse. Some is no doubt out of necessity; Martin fans out his characters far and wide, then takes his time with their individual journeys. The fourth and fifth books are full of transitory material, new characters and world-building. Delightful (if a bit slow) to read but full of introspection incompatible with a visual, action-focused format.

Not all narrative convenience is bad. Some, especially the earlier consolidations, work well. Gendry standing in as Melisandre’s potential sacrifice in season 3 stands out, as does Brienne stumbling across both Arya and Sansa – fighting the Hound and killing Stannis in the process. That one in particular feels like an exciting and narratively-purposeful alternative to the aimless wandering’s of her book counterpart in A Feast for Crows (literally hundreds of pages of it while we the reader know she’s not even close to the Stark siblings). Once again, what is soulful and existential on the page is boring on screen. On the other hand, Jaime’s journey to Dorne. Hoo boy, it’s astonishingly nonsensical (more on that next).

In the case of this season, a lot of the stakes are provided by characters returning simply to die, and thus wrap up their loose end. Nostalgia is a poor substitute for emotional investment and there’s an air of missed opportunity, especially given the contrived circumstances of many of these (the Martells, Three-Eyed Raven, Blackfish, Osha and Rickon) compared to the richness of their book counterparts. It also gives an air of invincibility the central characters, something particularly on display in the most recent episode “Battle of the Bastards.” It was impressively realized but strangely conventional for the series as well.

This continues a trend like from another flawed favorite of mine, Lost, a similarly epic ensemble show that insisted on whittling its entire  supporting cast away so, by the end, it was just the characters from the earliest seasons. As opposed to raising the stakes by raising the named character mortality rate, it’s turned into a rote exercise wherein the showrunners depict the various ways someone can cut Meereenese knots.

Let’s take a look at the other changes that didn’t work so well, like Stannis, my favorite creation of Martin’s, getting character assassinated Jon Snow-style by the show writers.