10 Reasons Game Of Thrones Is No Good For George R. R. Martin 

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10 Reasons Game Of Thrones Is No Good For George R. R. Martin

Game Of Thrones has officially reached the level of cultural phenomenon. Some would argue that it reached those dizzy heights (or terrifying lows, depending on your attitude towards pop culture) a couple of years ago, with context-free references to Lannisters, dragons and the ugly fate of Ned Stark being picked up for talk show opening monologues and bad stand-up since about late 2012.

But the benchmark of a true crossover into the mainstream is when a product is such a massive success that everyone else starts to want their very own version of it. Look at Nirvana in 1991, kickstarting a ‘scene’ in and around their hometown of Seattle among half a dozen or so completely disparate bands. Remember Twilight? Yes, so does everyone else, hence the rush to convert every supernatural young adult book under the full moon into a PG-13 movie franchise in the last six years or so.

Now there’s Game Of Thrones: inspiring Starz to bring piratical tales of blood and skullduggery to television with this year’s Black Sails and an adaptation of Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series, a historical romance with elements of time travel; persuading the BBC to film The White Queen, which failed to find Westeros’ audience, despite the cynical editing together of an HBO-style version with more naked flesh for the US cable market; and convincing Netflix to put together an historical epic drama in the shape of Marco Polo.

The trouble is, everybody knows that adaptations of novels for the screen are invariably hacked to pieces to make them fit. The makers of Dexter barely stayed faithful to Jeff Lindsay’s books for the first season before veering off to tell their own stories, and True Blood didn’t stick much closer to the text of Charlaine Harris’ novels than that.

Here, although the general narrative seems to stay close to the novels, no one disputes the vast number of subtle differences between author George R. R. Martin’s original A Song Of Ice And Fire and the adaptation Game Of Thrones – in fact, there are whole webpages dedicated to recording and honouring the storylines, characters and dialogue that have been lost in translation.

With the fourth season of the show bringing viewing figures over and above The Sopranos, officially making it HBO’s biggest hit ever, it’s time to decide: has the adaptation done the dirty to A Song Of Ice And Fire? Is George R. R. Martin’s great epic, the legacy for his vaunted career, in danger of being eclipsed by sexposition and CGI dragons? And, as always, here be SPOILERS…

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This article was first posted on June 15, 2014

Writer of weird fiction, coulrophile and punk werewolf. Obsessed with squid, spirals and story. And pro wrestling, which is both a blessing and a curse depending on exactly how bad RAW is this week. I tweet nonsense under the name Jack The Bodiless at @desincarne. You can follow me all you like, just don\'t touch my stuff.