8 Things Game Of Thrones Did Better Than A Song Of Ice And Fire
6. Combining A Feast For Crows And A Dance With Dragons
When Martin wrote his fourth and fifth books, A Feast for Crows and A Dance With Dragons, his cast became so expansive that he had to split their stories into two separate volumes. He originally planned them as one book, but to make it a book people could carry without a forklift, Martin divided it, giving half the characters a story in Feast and the other half in Dance.
While both books hold up, it's a little unsatisfying reading A Song of Ice and Fire and not seeing some of our favourite characters. Jon Snow appears briefly in only one chapter of A Feast for Crows, and Tyrion and Daenerys, as well as her entire supporting cast in Meereen, sit out entirely. Similarly, Sansa doesn't appear at all in A Dance With Dragons, and we only get little glimpses of Jaime, Cersei, and Brienne.
When it came time to adapt the pair of books, the showrunners decided to make it one season. They split the previous book, A Storm of Swords, into two, so they'd already begun to change Martin's emphasis.
Every major character's story fits nicely into Season 5, and we didn't lose any of them for more than an episode. Only one character, Bran, gets left out, and judging from fans' reactions to his eventually becoming king, he wasn't terribly missed.