Warning: this post is
full of spoilers for all five seasons of Game of Thrones and all five A Song of
Ice and Fire books.
So, after five years
of threatening it, Game of Thrones has finally caught up with the ponderous
pace of George RR Martin’s writing. At long last, the entire GoT-watching
community can sit down to watch an episode with precisely zero knowledge of
what’s to come, which I believe is absolutely the best environment in which
Thrones can exist. Let me explain.
I was late to the
Westeros party and only leapt onto the bandwagon after the entirety of Season 3
had been broadcast (due to the repeated insistence of multiple friends that I
just had to watch this great new show). I was instantly sucked into this world
where anything could happen to anyone, and the great thrill of watching it was
the total sense of dread when a favourite character was in peril, or the
jaw-dropping curveballs the writers would throw at us. Of course, I hadn’t been
oblivious to spoilers throughout the time I’d let Thrones pass me by – I knew,
for instance that Ned Stark died in Season 1, and that bad things happened to
good people at a wedding in Season 3 – but a lot of surprises remained to keep
me gripped (“uh oh Brienne’s going to be raped! Sweet, Jaime Lannister saved
her, what a great guy! Oh what the fuck, why did they cut his hand off?”).
Daaaaaaaamn (Image Credit: Movie Pilot/Game of Thrones)
Upon finishing Season
3 and finding myself with roughly seven months until I could enjoy watching
even more of my favourite characters dying, I did what any sane person with
money left on their Amazon gift voucher would do and bought the complete set of
books. At first I was amazed by how closely the two mediums matched up and was
vividly able to imagine (remember?) the scenes in my head. That is, until I
started reaching points in the books that the show had cut out, characters that
they had combined, plotlines that had diverged. With the ever-expanding book
cast that didn’t have a face for me to reference, I quickly found myself losing
track of who was who and thus slowly losing interest. I started to go online to
find summaries and synopses of the parts I’d read, and then more and more the
parts I hadn’t. This meant that when Season 4 started, I was behind in the
books yet knew what was going to happen.
And it sucked. I’d
robbed myself of the element of surprise for the big moments – for example,
when Prince Oberyn was on his victory parade in episode 8, I knew what was
coming next – yet I didn’t have a keen eye for small details like Lady Olenna
getting her hands on the poison from Sansa’s necklace. So I decided to make
sure I finished A Dance with Dragons before the next season kicked off, which I
managed despite the plodding pace of book four, A Feast for Crows.
This is kinda how it felt to watch Season 4 (Image Credit: Norville Rogers/Game of Thrones)
Having finished the
entire series, and even starting again from the beginning, I approached Season
5 with an expectation of how it should play out; an expectation that was dashed
almost straight away with the rather limp-feeling death of Ser Barristan Selmy,
aka the greatest living knight in the Thrones universe. Changes from the books
were suddenly more numerous, more glaring and much more annoying than they had
been previously. All of a sudden I started asking why Sam and Gilly left for
the Citadel in episode 10 instead of roughly episode 2 or 3, why did the Sons
of the Harpy mount a coup at Daznak’s Pit rather than poisoning the honeyed
locusts, where were Jon Connington, Arianne Martell and Aeron Damphair? I was
becoming irked by the smallest differences, which made me realise I was now, primarily, a fan of the books, not the show.
I digress. Now that
both book readers and show watchers are all up to speed, there are no spoilers
milling around the web for the future of either medium, which means I can’t go
off and spoil it for myself. In addition, due to the high probability that
Season 6 will come out before Book 6, I won’t be able to point out the macro or
micro changes that have been made for the screen adaptation because I won’t
know that they’re changes; thus I won’t be able to get disproportionately
irritated by Messrs Benioff and Weiss. But do you want to know the real beauty
of this scenario? The show is so off-book already, and has been getting further
and further off-book with each successive season, that it seems probable that
the majority of on-screen moments won’t spoil the majority of the remaining
books – partly because there are so many non-existent plotlines on Thrones, and
partly because of the significant changes to what they have left. So yes, this
is an extremely exciting time for fans of Game of Thrones, A Song of Ice and
Fire and those of us who are in love with both – and not least because of the
vast number of cliff-hangers that are up in the air.
Spoiler alert though:
Jon Snow (or Jon Targaryen!) will not stay dead. HE JUST WON’T OK????
She got our back (Image Credit: chechar/Game of Thrones)
