What Does Game of Thrones Season 6 Mean for The Winds of Winter?

Now that Game of Thrones Season 6 is over and done with, what, if anything, does it tell us about The Winds of Winter?

Game of Thrones Season 6 is over. We have around a year to wait before Season 7 begins. If the fates are kind, we may not have to wait quite that long to get the next entry in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, The Winds of Winter. Martin has been working on Winds since 2011, when the last book in his saga, A Dance with Dragons, hit bookshelves. Before Dance, there was A Feast for Crows, which came out in 2005. Assuming the space between releases stays consistent, Winds should be coming out in early 2017.

But there’s a concern. It’s no secret that the show’s plot overtook the one in the books some time ago. This past season consisted mainly of stuff that hasn’t appeared in the novels yet. Has Game of Thrones spoiled the books for A Song of Ice and Fire fans?

Behold the horror of spoilers.

Spoilers Ahead?

It’s impossible to know the answer to that question without The Winds of Winter in front of us. But our money is on ‘no’. With a few exceptions, Game of Thrones Season 6 is unlikely to spoil much of anything in the books. The books and the show are no longer running on parallel tracks.

This has been coming for a while. At the beginning, the show stayed very faithful to the source material. Season 1 is a nearly page-for-age adaptation of A Game of Thrones, the first book in Martin’s opus. Then the divergences started. They were small at first. For example, Jeyne Westering, Robb’s wife in the book, was replaced with a character named Talisa Maegyr. Arya serves as a cupbearer for Tywin Lannister, rather than Roose Bolton. Gendry the blacksmith travels to Dragonstone with Melisandre, filling in for a book character named Edric Storm. These changes were mostly made to keep things moving along. The show couldn’t be said to have abandoned the books yet.

Then, in Season 4, the producers grew bolder. They started engineering plotlines and set pieces that had no basis in the novels. There was the brawl between Brienne and the Hound in “The Children,” for instance. This intensified in Season 5, as Sansa traveled to Winterfell and married Ramsay Bolton. Jon Snow went to Hardhome and fought White Walkers. Jaime went to Dorne, and did very little. Vast swaths of plot were cut. Many of the big events from the books still showed up, but by the end of Season 5, it was clear that the producers weren’t interested in adapting the novels page by page. The broad strokes were the same, but the detailing was entirely different.

Thanks for this change, Game of Thrones.

Season 6

We don’t have a book to compare Season 6 to yet, but odds are that the show went even further afield of the source material during the most recent 10 episodes. This lines up with comments that showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss have made. Here’s Benioff talking to Entertainment Weekly before the start of Season 6:

"People are talking about whether the books are going to be spoiled – and it’s really not true. So much of what we’re doing diverges from the books at this point…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."

Weiss expanded on that. Comparing the way George R.R. Martin approaches A Song of Ice and Fire he explained how he and Benioff approach Game of Thrones.

"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. 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."

David Benioff and Dan Weiss

Gardeners versus Architects

To paraphrase George R.R. Martin, it comes down to gardeners versus architects. According to the author, some writers plan out every beat of a story beforehand (architects). Some nurture the soil, plant seeds, and see what sprouts (gardeners). Martin considers himself more of a gardener, meaning that he likes to discover where his story goes as he writes it. “I know the broad strokes of the story,” he said during a talk at Northwestern University, his alma mater. “I know the end of most of my characters, but the devil is in the details, and a lot of it I will discover in the course of writing.”

Benioff and Weiss, on the other hand, can’t afford to be gardeners. They have bosses who need content, and hundreds of jobs depending on their output. It’s one thing for Martin to take his time writing his novels. His fans may not like waiting, but a vast international production machine doesn’t depend on his hitting a deadline. Not so for Benioff and Weiss. If they’re going to wrap the show up before it runs out of steam, they need to have all the details in place as far ahead of time as possible. In other words, they have to be architects. They’ve likely laid out plot points Martin won’t even consider until he gets to the applicable chapter. The chances that the two camps are thinking along the exact same lines are very low.

George R.R. Martin, seen during a rare moment away from his garden.

For the record, what happens on the show influences Martin no more than what’s to come in the books influences Benioff and Weiss. “The show doesn’t influence what I write,” he said at Northwestern, “other than adding to my stress.” Given what we know, we can safely assume that most of The Winds of Winter will bear little relation to Game of Thrones Season 6.

Although that’s not to say there won’t be some similarities. Benioff and Martin know the general outline of Martin’s story, and have assumedly written their scripts accordingly. In fact, we know of at least two instances where Game of Thrones has spoiled events in The Winds of Winter (TURN BACK NOW IF YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW): 1) Shireen Baratheon is getting burned at the stake; and 2) it will be revealed that Bran Stark was behind Hodor’s mental disability.

Those are two out of three huge twists that Martin revealed to Benioff and Weiss a few years back. Once it became clear that the show was going to overtake the books, the producers met with Martin so he could sketch the rest of the tale out for them. What’s the third big twist? That one “is from the very end.” Stay tuned.

Will the third big twist involve Gendry taking the Iron Throne? Your guess is as good as mine.

To summarize, while The Winds of Winter will likely hit some of the same big plot points as Game of Thrones Season 6, for the most part the two will bear little resemblance to each other. What does Game of Thrones Season 6 mean for The Winds of Winter? To put it in the parlance of A Song of Ice and Fire, little and less.

h/t Goodreads