For the past four seasons of Game of Thrones, readers of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series have had an advantage over their TV-viewing counterparts, in knowing when the Red Wedding, Purple Wedding, and every other devastating character death will come. However, Martin has recently revealed that the show is deviating from the books in a big way, and now no one will be safe.
At the Writers Guild West Awards this weekend, Martin warned Showbiz411 that the Game of Thrones creators have special plans for season 5:
People are going to die who don’t die in the books, so even the book readers will be unhappy. So everybody better be on their toes. David [Benioff] and D.B. [Weiss] are even bloodier than I am.
So now the book-reading viewers will be just as on-edge as everyone else, wondering if Brienne or Cersei or Littlefinger will be offed in a spectacularly violent fashion. This is going to make Game of Thrones viewing parties even more stressful.
You know what, we’ll be okay just so long as Hot Pie makes it! He needs to live on to bake more direwolf-shaped breads.
[via Winter Is Coming]
Calling it now.
Jaime is toast in Dorne.
This is actually kind of exciting to me. Also, this made me laugh:
“People are going to die who don’t die in the books, so even the book readers will be unhappy” – I love how their goal is basically to be as cruel to their viewers as possible. ;)
Seriously, I mean it, don’t kill Hot Pie. There’s a line between grimdark and, well sadism (against audience, characters or both), and that would CROSS IT. Let the poor kid bake some bread, OK?
Would not cry at all if Jaime bit it.
As far as I’ve ever been able to tell, the only characters who have genuine unbreakable plot armor are Jon (Ice) and Dany (Fire). Everyone else is fair game.
@@.-@, You’re ignoring that Jon is actually THE Song of Ice and Fire.
So Dany’s plot armor has a chink in it, IMO.
Well frankly there’s no way they can kill Dany – she’s the Dragon Queen. I don’t see how the plot with dragons will make any sense without her. Unless they are getting sick of the CGI bills and are killing off the dragons too, lol.
I could see them killing Jaime, just for the shock factor and because they’ve already ruined his character in the show, so they might be thinking “get rid of him before we make it worse”. Cersei I could also see dying.
No way they’d kill Tyrion. Dinklage is winning the show for them. Unless, again, the bills getting too high?
I could maybe see Brienne or Pod biting it. They are becoming very popular among the community, so maybe they’d kill them just to be sadistic.
I find it so odd how the producers take pleasure in that though. I mean, why would you want to piss off your audience? I can’t see any legit storytelling/plot way to kill off more characters than Martin has, in a way that has any real meaning. Any deaths beyond the books to me will always come across as just a way for the studio to gain shock value. That, or some kind of actor contract business that happens every so often.
I dunno. I guess I’m just always confused by people who like to troll their audiences, or generally treat their fans like crap. But seeing as Martin does I guess I shouldn’t be surprised the show doing it too.
This was bound to happen sooner or later. And you know what? I’m okay with it. I’ve finally reached a point where I can separate the adaptation from the source. Plus, this sort of already happened with Jojen.
Spoilers below
This is no surprise. David and D.B have killed off many characters who are still alive in the books, including Drogo’s bloodrider Mago (Season 1), Dany’s bloodrider Rahkaro (who has another name in the book and is still alive) (Season 2), handmaiden Irri (Season 2), handmaiden Doreah (Season 2), Ducksauce from Qarth (lol, I know that’s not his real name) (Season 2), the Mountain’s man Polliver (Season 4) and Jojen (Season 4). Why should it change for Season 5?
Doreah actually lasted longer in the show. In the books, she died on the march in the Red Waste.
Calling it now:
After deciding to out-ick Jaime and Cersei, Sansa and Arya go for a mutual-suicide pact that can only be described as “Hodorific”…
@5, I’d agree that Dany does not have flawless plot armor. She won’t die in Season 5. . .but my money for the ending (whichever ending) is on her dying in a blaze of glory at almost-the-end defending the world against the Others.
By the same token, Tyrion can’t die until the last minute (there’s no way any writer would kill their best character too early), but he could bite it during the endgame. Same goes for pretty much anyone who’s too enjoyable to read to kill right away but who might stop the end from being a letdown after all the bloodshed we’ve already had.
[This is assuming, of course, that my occasional thought that GRRM is so into subversion that the real ending is. . .”The Others take over the world, everything sucks, The End” is just a joke, not what he’s really planning.]
@6, I don’t think she’ll die before the show ends. I just don’t see her surviving the whole thing.
Aeryl @1 :: PBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBTTTT!!! Cuz I already called it in the other thread! You heard it there first, folks!
I’d mainly be shocked if they killed either Bran or Arya.
I’m terrified for Dany. She’s doing too well, I know Martin is going to target her. People aren’t allowed to be happy in his books. Also…I wanted to cry when I read the fourth comment.
@8 I agree to an extent — but the only person on your list who I see as a main player might be Jojen. But to me his death wasn’t surprising, since in the book I don’t think he was going anywhere (ie, didn’t seem plot relevant anymore).
All the other deaths you list are minor characters, and most of their deaths in the show were simply to get rid of some characters, and didn’t really add any depth to the story itself.
I’m not saying they won’t continue the trend of killing off other minor characters, I just took the quote from the producers as meaning some major characters are in trouble. But it’s possible that’s not the case. Maybe they are just drumming up suspense, and really only intend to kill off other minor characters. I’d even put Doran in that category. While he’s a major player in the world of ASOIAF, he’s not really all that plot relevant, and I could see him dying without impacting the story that much.
Anyway, I guess it’ll be interesting to see where they go with it.
I agree that most of these characters are minor players. Also, I agree Doreah lived longer in the TV show and I forgot about Grenn and Pyp dying at the Wall in Ep. 9 of Season 4. My essential point is that the showrunners are more than happy to kill minor characters to ramp up the drama and I fully expect that trend to continue in Season 5. I actually doubt that we’ll see any major characters dying in Season 5 – I for one will be shocked if Jaime bites the dust in this season or next season.
Even more than the deaths, I’m worried about the writing out of major characters. Arianne and Quentyn and a bunch of Sand Snakes are already gone, I have my doubts that we’ll see Old or Young Griff and their team, I haven’t yet seen any casting we’ll see some of the new people who will be traveling through the North with Stannis. And don’t get me started on the absence of Lady SH…. (No Gemma Lannister-Frey either, which is a particular bummer.) I’m having trouble seeing how the TV show will match the book story, especially once we see where it is going with WoW comes out. I hope it does, but I really hope they can pull it off.
Without Griff and Young Griff, Lady Stoneheart, and several other sub plots, there are any number of characters they could kill off. Tyrion will be getting to Dany a WHOLE lot faster tahn in the books, which can only be a good thing…
The TV Show WON’T match the book, except for maybe the final outcome. The show producers will be LONG ahead of the book by the end of Season 5, and already writing scripts for Season 6 before WoW even goes into editing. There is no way for them to be the same. They will be ver, very different, but with hopefully a similar enough outcome to not be totally jarring. Also, there is no question any more that the finale of the show will come long before the finale of the series. This will be an interesting experiment in storytelling. Will people who watch the show AND read the books stop watching the show? Will people like me, who have never re-read the books simply not read the final installments of the books? Will our enjoyment of the book finale be deminished because we already know how it roughly ends?
If they were always going to drastically, and foolishly, deviate from the books, then I think they made a huge mistake by killing off Oberyn Martell. Keeping Oberyn Martell alive in Game of Thrones would have made the Dorne storyline much more interesting.
The only point in keeping true to Oberyn’s death in the books would be if you maintain a critical amount of GRRM’s original plot. Otherwise, KEEP PEDRO PASCAL AROUND. He’s one of the most charismatic actors to ever star in Game of Thrones.
@20 Yes Pedro Pascal for ALL the things.
The cutting of Arianne and Young Griff and Quintyn just means that D&D are telling a different story.
GRRM is telling a story about how hubris can blind mankind to its own destruction. D&D are telling a cool visual story about Dragons and warfare and politics.
I get something different from both of the. Enhancing the differences can only benefit in the show in the long run.
Yeah, I’m still not even sure if I will watch this season. The last season was horrible IMO and if they are gunna deviate even more from the books then no thank you.
Also, @@@@@ 16, GRRM has said that Mago still has some part to play in the books, after all he is with the Khalasar that finds Dany at the end of ADwD. GRRM told D&D not to kill him off but they didn’t listen.
So here’s the weird thing for me; the show is inevitably going to affect the way that the novels are written going forward. Martin can’t unsee what he has seen. Anything he writes will be have to be written with the knowledge of what he has seen work in the show, and what the show-writers are doing in their final seasons.
And frankly I don’t believe that he has much of a plan for what he was writing anyway, I think he’s flying by the seat of his pants.
Which is why this will be an interesting experiment.
@22 That doesn’t worry me much. Dany can handwave descriptions of another former bloodrider of Drogo and move on from there. It doesn’t have to be Mago in particular IMO. Other changes worry me.
Also, I differ with you. I enjoyed Season 4 and thought they did a great job with nearly everything. Purple Wedding was great, Oberyn was great, Dany plotline was great, battle at the Wall was cinematic with a couple of flaws, etc. My concern is maintaining quality going forward.
@@@@@@.-@@@@@, 5
The show is called Game of Thrones, not A Song of Ice and Fire. No clues whatsoever of Jon’s parentage have been given in the show. For all we know, he could really be Eddard’s bastard in this alternate reality. So even him can maybe stay dead-dead after the Ides of Marsh, instead of probably coming back to life in WoW-comparable-season.
@@@@@ 17 RobM
There won’t be an Aegon in the show, so I don’t think there’ll be Griff or Young Griff. D&D thought this part of the plot was too complicated for their viewers. Other people that were axed were Aryanne Martell, for example. So we should expect a very streamlined version of the story, with gratuitous nudity and sex to compensate for that.
I also was thinking last night that R+L=J might only end up being true in one of the media…that would be interesting.
I used to write in high school and college, and I had fun going back and sometimes writing alternative endings based on different branch points. So maybe that’s what GRRM gets to do here. Overall I find the books better than the show (books usually are) but I still find the show enjoyable as its own thing.
@26, My idea is that they are giving Arrianne’s plot to Myrcella.
I hate the very fact that there is a show. I watched the first two seasons, got into the books/stories/fan sites/rereads etc, lost interest in the show and now find it distracting (especially for Martin, who I think has more pressing matters to attend, such as finishing the rest of the f books). And I hate the fact that the show is likely to affect the way the books are written, and that show fans will get to know how the story ends before only-readers.
Now that I’m done whining, I’ll go and bury my head in the sand again.
As long as they don’t kill off Jon or Arya, I’m OK. And Tyrion, I think …
y’all crazy. You think Martin would let the show-runners dictate how his books turn out?
y’all crazy.
@31, I don’t think they are saying that D&D are dictating, just that Martin will be influenced.
I agree with you, but there is a distinction
My wife, who doesn’t read the books, has already said she would stop watching immediately if they kill Tyrion. I resisted spoiling her up to now but it now seems I can’t even reassure he is ok to the end of book 5.
Personally, I doubt I will wade through the last two books when they are eventually published; watching the show will just leave it too confusing and I would feel I am only reading something ‘partially’ new.
I’m with Celebrinnen: Jon, Arya, and Tyrion are the characters I care about the most.
Although Jon seemed awfully dead at the end of the book.
I’m trying to remember, has a POV character, outside of Ned Stark and the prolouge people, ever died in this series?
You mean there’s a blue flower growing in it?
Catelyn.
@35 Quentyn
Sorry, I should have specified, ever died without reappearing.
Actually, haven’t all the prolouge deaths have ALSO reappeared in one form or fashion, as well?
EDIT:
Quentin. Well, we shall have to see if the above pattern holds true then.