Game Of Thrones: 10 Ways Season 5 Was Better Than The Books

Up until Tyrion arrived, Dany’s storyline in Meereen wasn’t exactly the highlight of the season, but it was still a huge improvement upon the book version.

In A Dance With Dragons, Daenerys’ storyline is pretty uneventful for much of the book, with most of her chapters involving her sitting around in meetings and making increasingly horrible decisions. Her arc in the book is mainly about her whole mission being way more complicated than readers initially thought, which is a cool idea, but it gets kind of tedious a few chapters in. For a book called A Dance With Dragons where you’d expect a lot of Dany kicking ass, nothing exciting occurs until the fighting pits sequence towards the very end.

With Season 5, the show streamlined all of that and made things a bit more interesting. The threat of the Sons of the Harpy was really played up in an effective way in the series, and having Barristan Selmy die was actually a pretty wise decision on the showrunners’ part. While it was sad to see him go, it’s hard to take the Sons of the Harpy seriously as a threat if they only ever kill unnamed people viewers don’t care about. The Sons of the Harpy fight was shocking, but it also helped add some much needed stakes to an otherwise kind of slow storyline.