The TV version of Game of Thrones is a pretty faithful adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s books, but it is not a perfectly faithful one. And because Martin is merely a co-executive producer and not the absolute head honcho, there are a few changes he’d make here and there, he tells the Times. For starters, he still wants more than ten episodes per season. “With 13 episodes, we could include smaller scenes that we had to cut, scenes that make the story deeper and richer,†he says, which is a point he’s been hammering for a while. He also admits that he’d tweak some of the costuming — “no, no, let’s make the helmet more like this†— and, as he wrote about last year, the iron throne itself does not match his imagined version. Plus he’s starting to notice that “small changes can lead to big changes.†From the Times:
Take the musician Marillion, from Season 1. On HBO, Marillion is maimed — his tongue plucked out — at the whim of King Joffrey and then vanishes from the show. That isn’t the case in the books, where he served as the fall guy in Lord Petyr Baelish’s murder of Lysa Arryn (shown on HBO this season). “So that has to be changed†for the TV show, Mr. Martin said of her murder. “The butterfly effects are accumulating.â€
All the constant raping and murdering and torturing and stuff, though — that’s all dead-on.