Scott Pilgrim and Game of Thrones chart the tensions of adaptation

The tension around adapting George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire into HBO’s Game of Thrones is often one of the most fascinating aspects of the popular series. It’s always been true that the process of adaptation raises questions about the nature of a text but for a story as density and incomplete as Martin’s series, these questions become more involved ones.

What the most important aspects of a text are and what can, can’t or shouldn’t be changed in support of these aspects is widely-open to debate. Every fan of A Song of Ice and Fire has a bone to pick with showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss about this scene or that, and this ire is only likely to rise in coming months as Season 6 moves past the end of the fifth book A Dance With Dragons.

The predicament facing Thrones fans unsure of whether should feel conflicted about seeing an adaption end before its source material often feels unprecedented but there’s an interesting analogue to be found in Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim vs The World. Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim comics weren’t especially well-known outside the indie comics niche that birthed them. However, after Wright’s film, Scott Pilgrim exploded into the pop culture mainstream. The rapid rise of interest around Martin’s books in the wake of HBO’s success is easily comparable — as are the challenges attached to adapting them.

When production began on Scott Pilgrim vs The World, the penultimate book (Scott Pilgrim vs The Universe) had just been released and fans were eager to see the how the saga of evil exes and Canadian eccentricities would shake out in the end. It’s not that much of a stretch to see a parallel here with HBO’s series. Game of Thrones launched its first season around the same time the fifth A Song of Ice and Fire book hit shelves and is now seeking to find its own resolution in tandem with Martin’s books.

David Benioff and D.B. Weiss efforts as showrunners will prove crucial here as they shift from custodians of Martin’s work to creative forces in their own right. They’ve done a great job converting A Song of Ice and Fire into TV-friendly chunks but the challenges facing them ahead of Season 6 are very different ones. They started work on the series with a comprehensive bible but they’ll have to end it with nothing more than a blueprint.

It’s a startlingly similar situation to the one faced by Edgar Wright during the production of Scott Pilgrim Vs The World. Though the 2010 film and O’Malley’s final book, Scott Pilgrim’s Finest Hour, released around the same time, their simultaneous development — as well as their difference in scope — led them to conclude the same story in very different ways. O’Malley’s original novels are often a little more meta-fictional and zany in ways that Wright’s film doesn’t have the time to be. While the books saw Scott and Ramona’s relationship develop over a period of months, the film adaptation accelerates this — taking place over a matter of days.

A lot of the imagery remains the same but the contexts, especially towards the end, change dramatically. Both the book and film see Scott face-off against Gideon at the Chaos Theater but the way these fights unfold is very different. It’s quite likely that Game of Thrones will find its along the same lines. Jon Snow will probably return from the dead and the White Walkers will probably face-off against Dany’s dragon but the path Benioff and Weiss are taking to those plot points is likely to be very different from Martin’s.

In some ways, it’s even a cleaner path. Though subplots like Scott’s tussle with Knives’ sword-wielding father and Stephen Stills discovering his sexuality add a lot of charm to the books, the more-streamlined structure of the film works too. Similarly, stuff like Ramsay’s initial deception in A Clash of Kings and Quentyn Martell’s pilgrimage to request Dany’s hand in marriage in A Dance With Dragons are important parts of the story that Martin is telling but less important to the story that Benioff and Weiss are trying to execute on.

Adapting an existing work could almost be considered an entirely different creative context to creating something from scratch. Sometimes deviation from the material makes sense, other times it does not. The process from the pages to the screen can’t include everything, especially for a story as detailed as Martin’s. Even for a series with a $10 million dollar budget per episode, there come times where decisions have to be made about which aspects of the story are more important than others.

Those decisions are ultimately what shape the identities of Thrones and Scott Pilgrim vs The World. Though both O’Malley and Martin were reportedly very hands on with the adaption of their work, it kind of doesn’t matter — we shouldn’t be treating Game of Thrones and Scott Pilgrim vs The World as synonymous with their sources. Like Stephen King’s The Shining and Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, there is an important distinction to be made.

You can go into the latter knowing that Scott and Ramona will walk through the door together but still be surprised and delighted at the path the film takes to get there. Season 6 of Game of Thrones is certain to resolve a lot of stories still outstanding in its source material — but that’s not the point.

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