Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

I don’t have HBO, so I can only watch HBO’s Game of Thrones a decade or so after the premium class sees it. However, that has not saved me from seeing meme after meme based on the series, nor from having to wade through a sea of posts about how this was so good and that was so bad and–of course–how so many things were different than they were in the book.

Aficionados are terribly tempted to hold forth on the subject of their passion (and trust me, I do understand this temptation) but before you do so, before you post that screed on that critical aspect that HBO got wrong, there are three things you need to know:

1. George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones is a series of novels.
2. HBO’s Game of Thrones is a television series.
3. A series of novels is not the same thing as a television series.

In other words, spare me the pedantry. It is as simple as that.

The same thing happened when Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings cycle debuted. I actually had one person stab a finger at me across the dinner table as she announced: “The ring never went to Gondor!” To be honest–though I had read the series decades before–I couldn’t remember if the ring ever had gone to Gondor.

More importantly, I didn’t give a damn.

It wasn’t important. In the movie, the Ring went to Gondor, and it made perfect sense for it to do so. The reasons why Jackson decided to change that detail are irrelevant to the result, as the movie made smooth transitions between scenes and showed us action without introducing new POV characters. Was it different from the books? Quite possibly, yes. Did it matter? Not a whit.

A book is a book and a play is a play and though a book and a play can tell the same story, they must necessarily present those stories each in a different manner.

In short, the medium matters.

Not only would it be impossible to take every word comprising the 5,000+ pages of Martin’s 5-book series and translate it directly to the visual medium, the result would be truly, truly awful (not to mention long, tedious, and exorbitantly expensive to produce). The written word depends so much upon the reader’s inner eye and can delve so much deeper into the minds of characters that some things simply do not translate from the written to the visual.

Turn it around. A novelization of a popular movie would be dull as ditch-water if all it did was describe what had been shown on the screen. To be honest, we expect more from novels than we do from movies, and an author who adapts a movie to book form must look beyond the screen, provide more depth to characters, and show more detail than the camera can catch.

Therefore, though I understand your angst, I must implore you: Consider before you post.

It is going to be different. There’s no question about that.

The important question is: Is it still a good movie?

k