Game Of Thrones: 10 Worst Changes From The Books
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Book to film adaptations very rarely work. Even when they do, you're always going to find certain members of a respective fandom moaning about something.
Adapting George R.R. Martin's epic political drama, set in a fantasy world, was never going to be easy. There is just too many characters and subplots to do the thing justice. A word by word retelling would mean the show runners would still be churning out episodes long after we're all living in a Mad Max style, apocalyptic-wasteland.
For all the difficulties, Game of Thrones did a great job with Martin's work, at least early on. The show captured the complex political structures, while conjuring up a world of mystery, magic and intrigue. But somewhere along the line the wheels started falling off. The truth of the matter was, the writers were working off source material that had no resolution.
Getting ahead of the books doomed the show. It soon became clear that characters and plot lines, established early on, were not as integral to the story as first thought. This resulted in a baffling amount of false starts for new characters, and anti-climactic endings for old ones.
Without proper foresight and planning, these changes ended up harming Game of Thrones, in unforgivable ways.
10. Killing Off Stannis
Stannis really didn't have a lot going for him. He was hot-headed, stubborn, and lacked a sense of humour; combined with having a penchant for religious fanaticism, it was a recipe for disaster. The last we saw of him, he was surrounded by dead men after Ramsay wiped the floor with his army.
When Stannis was defeated by Ramsay, ending his bid for the Iron Throne, it solidified Ramsay as one of the key antagonists in the show. This completely changed the trajectory of Martin's story. For one, Jon was forced to spend an entire season trying to rally enough men to defeat him.
In the books, Stannis is still camped in the woods, not far from Winterfell. His army is in pretty bad shape, but they've laid a cunning trap to lure in the Boltons. Everything indicates that Stannis will likely defeat the Boltons, (or at the very least Ramsay), meaning the Battle of the Bastards won't take place.
Although that scene made for some great TV, it resulted in huge amounts of screen time being taken away from the Walkers - characters we never got any solid answers about.
Jon will likely warg into Ghost before being resurrecting, and gain some insight about the Walker threat. There's even some theories that believe the White Walkers will use Jon's body for some dark sorcery.