HBO‘s Game of Thrones had a notoriously unsatisfying ending, but in the years since the finale, many fans have revised their estimations of when the series went off the rails. The fantasy series started out strong, not least of all because it stuck closely to its source material, A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin. It’s an oversimplification to say that adaptations fail when they don’t stick to the books, but for Game of Thrones it’s more or less true. The show began to break away from Martin’s plot in Season 4, then went wildly off-book in Season 5. Two of Season 5’s story lines broke the narrative irretrievably: Sansa Stark’s (Sophie Turner) marriage to Ramsay Bolton (Iwan Rheon) and Jaime Lannister’s (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) adventure in Dorne.
There are plenty of other places where Game of Thrones deviated from A Song of Ice and Fire — mostly for the worse. In many places, characters and side quests were completely omitted, but these two cases are different. In Martin’s books, it’s not Sansa but another character who married Ramsay, which had all kinds of ripple effects on the plot. Martin himself has written about the “butterfly effect” when adaptations make small changes, and this is a prime example. As for Jaime’s time in Dorne, it pulled him away from a compelling part of the books without adding anything significant, breaking the pacing of his redemption arc.
‘Game of Thrones’ Hardly Adapted ‘A Feast for Crows’ and ‘A Dance with Dragons’
With some exceptions, the first four seasons of Game of Thrones are a pretty faithful adaptation of the first three books in A Song of Ice and Fire. After that, the show played it fast and loose with the material from the fourth book, A Feast for Crows and the fifth book, A Dance with Dragons. Sansa and Jaime’s stories in Season 5 are the most emblematic of this issue. In the books, Sansa is actually still in the Vale, disguised as Littlefinger’s (Aidan Gillen) daughter. The show made this look like a prison sentence for her, but in the books she spends this time learning quite a bit. She applies the lessons she took from King’s Landing, analyzes Littlefinger’s political machinations, and begins cultivating her own rapport with various allies.
Meanwhile, in the books Ramsay announces to the world that he is marrying Arya Stark (Maisie Williams), not Sansa. However, he is actually marrying Jeyne Poole, the daughter of Winterfell’s chief steward and a childhood friend of Sansa. This means Jeyne is able to pose as Arya convincingly, lending some legitimacy to House Bolton as they try to take over the North. It’s not clear who knows Jeyne is an imposter and who is fooled, but Jon Snow (Kit Harrington) believes she is the real Arya, and he sends wildlings south to rescue her. Presumably, if the books have a confrontation similar to the “Battle of the Bastards,” Sansa will be there in part to rescue either Arya or Jeyne.
As for Jaime, in the books he doesn’t even consider traveling to Dorne to rescue Myrcella (Nell Tiger Free). After their father’s funeral, Cersei (Lena Headey) sends him to the Riverlands against his will. Ostensibly, she wants him to secure House Lannister’s hold there and put down any remnants of the war with the North, but on a personal level she is angry with Jaime and wants to be away from him. She sees his lost hand as a failure, and even blames him for the deaths of their father and Joffrey (Jack Gleeson), as well as for Tyrion’s (Peter Dinklage) escape. Cersei is also having affairs with several other people, and does not want Jaime to find out.
Jaime is heartbroken by Cersei’s dismissal, but he does his best to act with honor back in the Riverlands. It’s an uphill battle considering his reputation, but he still manages to avert some fighting and broker compromises. It’s worth noting that he does not have Bronn (Jerome Flynn) with him. In the books, Bronn has married a minor noble and retired to her estate in the country. Jaime gets a letter from Cersei begging him to rescue her from the Faith of the Seven, but he burns it and leaves her to her fate. The last we see of Jaime, he is running off with Brienne (Gwendolyn Christie) to see the reanimated Catelyn Stark (Michelle Fairley), now known as “Lady Stoneheart.”
‘Game of Thrones’ Adds Nothing With These Changes
We don’t know where Martin is heading with either of these plots, and unless he publishes The Winds of Winter and A Dream of Spring, we may never know. What we can say is that the plots Game of Thrones’ showrunners put in their places do nothing to enrich the series. Much has been written about Sansa’s marriage to Ramsay — it is gratuitous, it leads nowhere, and many survivors find it to be an insulting depiction of abuse. By the end of the series, Sansa has processed the experience entirely off-screen, and seems only to have become more shallow and cruel because of it. Meanwhile, this storyline derails whatever sinister plans Littlefinger has for Sansa in the books, leaving him as a loose thread to be hastily tucked away in the Season 7 finale.
Jaime’s Dornish adventure is also rightfully critiqued as offensive for its flattened depiction of Dorne as a foreign land. The southernmost kingdom is reduced to a joke about promiscuity and spicy food, while Jaime’s escape strains the bounds of believability. The whole point seems to have been a scene where Jaime and Myrcella speak frankly about their secret familial bond, but it goes nowhere as Myrcella dies immediately, and Jaime does nothing to foster closeness with his last remaining child.
A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons spend a lot of time in Dorne on completely unrelated subplots, which can’t be described succinctly here. The books do leave Myrcella alive as a bargaining chip, and they loop Dorne into several other conspiracies spanning around the world. It’s debatable whether these are heading anywhere important in the books’ version of events, but if the show had nothing better to do, it should have stuck to the source material in this case.
The post-mortem on Game of Thrones may never end — especially if Martin does not finish his novels. The series started so strong and fell so flat, despite being a global sensation with a functionally unlimited budget from HBO. Hopefully one day the series will be finished properly in some form, but in the meantime Game of Thrones is streaming on HBO Max, and A Song of Ice and Fire is available in print, digital, and audiobook formats.
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