Game of Thrones Season 7 — What should book fans do?
Anyone who has read George RR Martin’s “A Song of Ice & Fire” and fallen in love with it is faced with a unique type of first world problem. Namely that the HBO behemoth Game of Thrones has finally gone well beyond the scope of the books.
I like the show. I’ll state that right at the start. I think some of the criticism of it from book fans is nothing more than hipster elitist “but I found it first” hysteria. That’s not to say that it’s consistently great. Season 5, “Hardhome” aside, was largely awful. As was season 2. But by and large Game of Thrones is pretty great and usually tackles the translation of incredibly complex source material very well indeed.
But…it still isn’t the books. This is where my issue really lies with the show. I want to read the end of the story before I see it and now we all know that won’t happen. It’s impossible to avoid spoilers from the show as co-workers love talking about it and sites love to run game of thrones quizzes and features about “which great house are you”. So even if I stopped watching the show, I would be spoiled. Unless I decide to go and live on the moon, which is actually an appealing option given the current state of politics in 2017.
So like most book first fans, I’ve decided to keep watching. Largely as it seems I won’t get the next book any time soon. But it still feels like a compromise I didn’t want to make. I’m not saying GRRM owes his fans or anything like that. He’s a great author that takes a long time to create and the book will be ready when it’s ready. But the compromise will still undermine the final two books in the series. All the major events will be spoiled, we will know the fate of all the key characters. How they get to their destinations may be totally different, but their ends will be the same.
So what should book fans do? My approach has been to enjoy the show for what it is. It won’t change how you feel about the books (which also have some bad in them. The ironborn and “fat pink mast” to name just two examples) and it’ll keep you going until we do get Winds of Winter.
At some point I’ll get a more nerdy about this stuff. This was really just a “feelings” type post to set some ground rules. I’m going to look at each episode from a book perspective at a later date.