Game of Thrones season 6 will enter into completely new territory away from George R.R. Martin’s source material and the show runners say the series is veering away from the books entirely…
There’s a loyal segment of Game of Thrones fans who started out as readers of the books written by George R.R. Martin that first launched in the mid 1990’s.
For the first five seasons of the popular HBO adaptation, book readers were always one step ahead of the viewing audience because the show mimicked the source material very faithfully and outside of a few story beats, Game of Thrones was very much based on Martin’s material.
But that won’t be the case for Game of Thrones season 6 because the show has out paced Martin’s writing and instead of waiting for his new book The Winds of Winter to be released, the series will move forward and away from the source material.
So while show runners David Benioff and Dan Weiss have spoken to Martin about his long range plans for the characters and the series finale, they are going in new directions for the show that will make Game of Thrones an entity of its own while the books will have a direct story all together.
“People are talking about whether the books are going to be spoiled – and it’s really not true,” Benioff said recently. “So much of what we’re doing diverges from the books at this point. And while there are certain key elements that will be the same, we’re not going to talk so much about that – and I don’t think George is either.
People are going to be very surprised when they read the books after the show. They’re quite divergent in so many respects for the remainder of the show.”
Benioff and Weiss famously spent several days with Martin at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico where they poured over his ideas for the characters and the way he intended the story to come to a close.
Weiss says Martin has always outlined the ideas for his books and how the characters would develop but the minor details don’t usually get fleshed out until he starts writing and that’s why the final few seasons of Game of Thrones may still following the larger direction the creator of the series intended, but the rest of the details are left up to the show runners.
“What makes the books so great is that George doesn’t make meticulous blueprints for every beat of this story and then fill in the blanks dutifully going from A to B to C, fleshing out an outline,” Weiss said.
“At a certain point, we realized we were going to outpace the books and we kind of choose to see it as a great thing on both sides – there’s this amazing world George has created and now there are two different versions, and there’s no reason we can see why you can’t be thrilled and surprised and dismayed by both of these different versions of this world.”
It will be interesting to see how Game of Thrones is received when season 6 arrives on April 24 and then how it compares to Martin’s next book when it is finally released at some point in 2016.
H/T: EW
