- When “game of thrones” first started in 2011, no one, not the showrunners nor the author george r.r. Martin, thought the series would top the ongoing book series.
- but as time went on, it became clear that the dreaded prospect would soon be a reality.
- since 2014, public statements about martin’s respective planned endings and the “game of thrones showrunners david benioff and d.b. weiss have changed You’ll be surprised by the big differences.
- “King Bran” is the only plot point from the “Game of Thrones” ending that we know Martin had planned in 2013.
- Visit the home page for more stories.
When the “game of thrones” series finale credits rolled, daenerys targaryen was dead. bran stark was crowned king of the six kingdoms. sansa stark was queen in the north. Arya Stark set sail to find out what lies west of Westeros. Jon Snow went beyond the wall, exiled, and (most likely) settled down to live among the free people for the rest of his days.
but none of this has happened yet in author george r.r. Martin’s book series, “A Song of Ice and Fire”, on which the show is based. He still has two books planned to finish, and as soon as the HBO adaptation came to an end, fans began debating how many of this final season’s stories they can expect to read in Martin’s novels.
You are reading: Who wins the iron throne in the end of the books
To better contextualize how much of Martin’s story was “spoiled” by the “Game of Thrones” ending, let’s review how we got to this point. What exactly do Martin and showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss said about how closely the books will match the show. And how have those answers changed in the last six years?
It turns out that many of the show’s conclusions might not be found in Martin’s intended version of the story.
The more it became clear that Martin would not finish his last two books before the show, the more Benioff and Weiss began to talk more openly about how the show and the books could end differently. By the time the series finale was about to air, fans were shocked to learn that neither Martin nor the “Game of Thrones” showrunners knew for sure how the other would end the huge story.
So, let’s take a closer look at how the show and books have evolved over the last decade, and what fans should know about the not-so-matchy endings.
‘game of thrones’ began under the assumption that george r.r. martin had plenty of time to finish the books
martin calls himself a “gardener” style writer, meaning he doesn’t map out every character arc and plot trajectory ahead of time for his books. in his analogy, the opposite style of writer is an “architect.” (J.K. Rowling is a notable example of an “architect” series writer: she described all of the “Harry Potter” books before starting “The Philosopher’s Stone”).
martin has also had a historically difficult time with deadlines. We’ve summarized the pattern of delays and setbacks in his “A Song of Ice and Fire” series here, if you’d like a more detailed story. But the shortest thing to know is that Martin was running into roadblocks with the book series right around the same time he was linked with David Benioff and D.B. Weiss.
Benioff and Weiss first met Martin in 2006, when four of the seven books he had planned in “A Song of Ice and Fire” were completed. The HBO adaptation was launched and created by Benioff and Weiss under the assumption that Martin would finish the last three books long before the show could catch up.
but martin’s fifth book, “a dance with dragons”, had its own delays. “game of thrones” was released on sunday, april 17, 2011. “a dance with dragons” did not hit the shelves on july 12, 2011.
martin has been working on the sixth book in the series, “the winds of winter”, ever since.
The popularity of ‘game of thrones’ skyrocketed when the first 3 seasons aired, and people began to worry about the delay of the book series
Seasons two and three of “game of thrones” aired in 2012 and 2013, bringing millions more into the fandom. The famous Red Wedding episode at the end of season three launched the show to new heights when Robb and Catelyn Stark, along with most of the House Stark army, were slaughtered. a new level of attention was brought to the show as hype was built around the devastating twists and turns of those first three seasons.
On the day the Season 3 finale aired, Entertainment Weekly published an interview with then-Hbo Programming President Michael Lombardo. This was the first time that the producers of HBO and Martin had spoken publicly about the pace of the show and the hint of trouble to come.
“I finally understand the fear of the fans, something I didn’t understand a couple of years ago: what if the narration catches up with the books?” Lombardo said. “let’s hope and pray it’s not a problem.”
martin wasn’t worried at the time.
“I still have a clue of several giant books,” Martin said. “If they include everything in the books, I don’t think they’ll catch up with me. If they do, we’ll have some interesting discussions.”
although martin thought he still had plenty of time, benioff and weiss realized they were catching up. everyone got together to discuss martin’s endgame in 2013.
ew’s james hibberd also reported that, in June 2013, martin had “told the showrunners his top-secret endgame plan” for the book series.
2013 was the year the third season aired, and the events of that third season coincided with almost everything that happens in the first two-thirds of Martin’s third book, “A Storm of Swords.” Benioff and Weiss saved the final dramatic storylines from that book, such as Joffrey’s death, Tyrion’s trial, and the subsequent murder of Tywin and Shae, for season four.
While preparing for season four, benioff and weiss decided it was time to have a big meeting with martin to discuss their plan for the finale.
“Last year we went to Santa Fe for a week to sit down with him and talk about how things are going,” Benioff told Vanity Fair in a March 2014 interview. “Because we don’t know if we’re going to catch up and where exactly that would be. if you know the ending, then you can lay the groundwork for it. and so we want to know how it all ends. we want to be able to set things up, so we just sat down with it and literally went through each character.”
martin held out hope that he could stay on top of the show. He said that he told Benioff and Weiss “certain things” but that he could only provide “general outlines.” Going back to the gardening style metaphor, Martin was able to effectively tell them what he thought the finished garden would look like, but he still didn’t know which plants would grow where.
“I can give you the general outlines of what I intend to write, but the details are not there yet,” Martin said. “I’m hoping I can’t let them get to me.”
but in 2014, with season four just around the corner, all three men were now more explicitly concerned about the show outperforming the books. The interview with Vanity Fair was also the first time that Martin indicated that the show’s arc (and thus, ultimately its conclusion) would work differently than the books.
“eventually, it will be different,” martin said. “You have to admit there will be some differences. I’m very pleased with the show’s fidelity to the books, but it will never be exactly the same. You can’t include all the characters. You’re not going to include their actual lines of dialogue or subplot, and I hope each one stands on its own.”
benioff and weiss drastically cut the storylines from the books in seasons 4 and 5, almost catching up with the published material
next season would reveal how benioff and weiss were beginning to scale back characters and subplots from martin’s books (like moving theon’s transformation to stench from book five, or removing “lady stoneheart’s” resurrection altogether by Catilyn Stark).
other characters such as arianne and quentyn martell, or the mysterious “young griff” (who, according to variations, is actually aegon, the son of rhaegar targaryen who was believed dead), never showed up. At the point in Martin’s novels when the story grew and grew, Benioff and Weiss were choosing the adaptation to keep the cast of characters and stories more contained.
the fifth season of “game of thrones” ended with the same great cliffhangers that remained in martin’s last published book, “a dance with dragons”. Jon Snow was killed by a group of riotous night watchmen, and Dany escaped from the Dragon’s Pit in Meereen on the back of Drogon.
but even as benioff and weiss were making some drastic cutbacks, they said they were headed for the same end point as martin.
About a month before the season five premiere, Benioff and Weiss (along with “Game of Thrones” actors Kit Harington and John Bradley-West) sat down for a question-and-answer session at Oxford Union. An audience member asked how the show’s creators felt about the fact that they might soon start “messing up” plot points from Martin’s unpublished books.
Benioff responded by saying that the show “would meet in pretty much the same place George goes.”
“There may be some deviations along the route, but we are heading towards the same destination,” he said.
Benioff went on to say that one thing that is “a little funny” for Martin was the “idea that he may still have surprises in store for people, even once they’ve seen the show through to the end.”
Some of those surprises for book readers will surely include things like the “young griff” character we mentioned earlier, or more details about the greyjoys (since there are other major greyjoy characters, like victarion, in the books).
martin came up with a twist for a character and revealed that it’s not possible for the show to pull off the same twist
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Just a few weeks after the oxford union Q&A was uploaded to youtube, martin dropped a new surprise to fans during an interview with ew: he had just come up with a new twist on a character, one that I didn’t have. planned earlier in the series. this was the nature of his “gardening” writing process.
“it’s easy to do things that are shocking or unexpected, but they have to come from the characters,” martin told ew. “They have to get out of situations. Otherwise, it’s shocking for shocking sake. But this is something that feels very organic and natural, and I could see how it would happen. And with the three or four characters involved… it all makes sense, but it’s nothing I’ve ever thought of before.”
martin said it was specifically a twist that wouldn’t be feasible for the show.
Perhaps most importantly, this twist had only occurred to Martin after that fateful 2013 meeting in which he gave Benioff and Weiss a breakdown of the character’s planned endpoints. Speaking to IGN’s Terri Schwartz in February 2016, Martin said the twist involved a character who was dead on the show.
“I’ve decided to do that, yes,” Martin said. “I decided to do it, and will you know? I don’t know. It’s pretty obvious because it’s something that involves a couple of characters, one of whom is dead in the show but not dead in the books. So the unfortunately, the show doesn’t can do this because they’ve killed off a character that I haven’t killed off, but that doesn’t cut it very much because at this point there are like 15 characters that are dead on the show that are still alive in the books.”
once again, we had a clear indication that at least some major plot point in martin’s books would never fade into the show.
As more time went by without new books, fans were under the impression that the show was heading towards the ending outlined by Martin. but maybe that was a mistake.
In April 2015, Benioff and Weiss spoke at length about how they had the show’s ending in mind. At the time of this interview, Benioff and Weiss were working on the scripts for the sixth season.
“We’ve had a lot of conversations with George, and he makes a lot of stuff up as he writes it,” Benioff told Variety. “Even as we talk to him about the ending, that doesn’t mean that the ending that he has currently conceived is going to be the ending when he finally writes it.”
“It’s like looking at a landscape and saying, ‘Okay, there’s a mountain over there and I know I’m going to get to that mountain,'” Weiss said. “There’s an event that’s going to happen, and I know I’m moving in the general direction of that event, but what’s between where I’m standing right now and that thing on the horizon, I’m not totally sure.” I’ll know when I get there, and then I’ll see what the terrain looks like around me and choose my path once I get close to it.”
This 2015 interview was the first time fans had been told the perks, and Weiss had a clear end in sight. a lot of people clung to the mountain analogy and assumed that both the books and the show would go from the same point a to the same point b – only the way they got there would be different.
After this interview, the conventional wisdom among fans was that Martin had told the showrunners his plan for the finale, and that Benioff and Weiss just had to fill in the gaps to get there.
but in hindsight, that might have been the wrong conclusion.
with the final seasons of the show just around the corner, benioff and weiss began to talk more openly about how the endings would be different
In an interview with Time magazine in 2017 before the premiere of the seventh season, Benioff and Weiss were asked if they knew in the second season where the story would end. again the showrunners referenced that 2013 meeting with martin.
“That’s when we started talking to george and he was giving us a glimpse of things he was working on and things to come,” benioff said. “that’s when he told us about hodor’s backstory and endgame stuff. he had some cool stuff he could share with us, like the hodor thing, but he wasn’t sure about a lot of things yet, because he was writing, and discover things by typing.”
(the “hodor thing” that benioff is referring to was also the shocking death of bran’s mate and the revelation that “hodor” was a name born from a traumatic green vision event that caused young hodor will repeatedly yell “hold the door!”)
A little later in the interview, time asked the two men, “to what extent do you think it should be perfectly congruent with the vision of the end of the novels that martin presented to you?”
“It’s too late for that now,” Benioff said. “we’re past the point of 100 percent mocking. we’ve moved on to george and that’s something george was always worried about: the show caught up with him and eventually passed him, but the good thing about us splitting at this point is that the George’s books will continue to be a surprise to readers who have seen the series.”
This sounded very different from Benioff’s 2015 statement at Oxford Union, when he said the show would “meet in pretty much the same place George is going to go.”
especially when benioff went on to say that there were things martin had told them about the ending that weren’t going to make it on the show.
“certain things that we learned from george in that meeting in santa fe are going to happen on the show, but others are not,” benioff continued in the time interview. “and there are certain things george didn’t know was going to happen, so we’ll find out for the first time, too, along with millions of readers when we read those books.”
Before the final six episodes, fans were shocked to learn that neither martin nor the showrunners were sure what the other had planned for their endings
Years passed as the “game of thrones” team went through an extended production period leading up to its eighth and final season, and “the winds of winter” remained unfinished. With the arrival of 2019 came a new revelation: Martin himself didn’t know exactly what Benioff and Weiss had in store for their version of the ending. and they weren’t “completely sure” of theirs.
In a March article for ew, reporter james hibberd wrote that “the showrunners [benioff and weiss] noted that they aren’t entirely sure about future martin stories anyway.”
To begin with, martin hadn’t read any of the upcoming scripts. Which meant he didn’t know the ending of Benioff and Weiss.
“I haven’t read the scripts [for the final season] and I haven’t been able to visit the set because I’ve been working on ‘winds,'” Martin said. “I know some of the stuff. but there are a lot of minor character [arcs] that they’ll come up with on their own. and of course they happened to me several years ago. there can be major discrepancies.” /p>
since martin had stopped writing scripts for the show, fans realized that he had stepped back a bit from being actively involved in the production of the show. But it was a surprise to many to learn that he was unaware of Benioff and Weiss’s plans for the last six episodes.
back in april, ew’s james hibberd posted a longer interview with benioff and weiss in which they revealed for the first time that they would neither confirm nor deny any difference between their ending and what martin told them in 2013.
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“something we’ve talked about with george is that we won’t tell people what the differences are,” benioff said. “so that when those books come out, people can experience them in a fresh way.”
“It’s nice for him because […] the show has become so different that people will have no way [of] knowing by watching what will or will not appear in the books,” he said. Weiss. “And honestly, neither do we.”
“We don’t,” Benioff confirmed. “and george discovers a lot as he writes. i don’t think the final book is set in stone yet, it’s not written on paper yet. as george says, he’s a gardener and he’s waiting to see those seeds blossom.”
again, this was a further departure from previous public conversations about the ending. Instead of the books and the show seeming like two different paths that would end up in the same place, now neither Martin nor the “Game of Thrones” showrunners knew for sure how aligned their endings would be.
after the series finale aired, martin only provided vague statements about the show’s conclusion, reiterating that we’ve only seen “an ending, not the end”
cut to May 2019, when the final episode of “game of thrones” aired. Martin wrote a new blog post updating his followers and addressed the show (although he didn’t explicitly say that he had watched the last season).
“‘the winds of winter’ is too late, I know, I know, but it will be done,” wrote martin. “I won’t say when, I already tried it before, just to burn them all and fool myself… but I’ll finish it and then ‘a dream of spring’ will come.”
then he got to the real heart of the matter.
“‘how will it all end?’ I hear people asking,” Martin wrote. “same ending as the show? different? well… yes. and no. and yes. and no. and yes. and no. and yes.”
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martin once again mentioned how the “butterfly effect” will work and listed all the characters that never appeared on the show.
“book or show, what will be the ‘real’ ending? silly question,” martin wrote, before mentioning his favorite rhetorical question. “how many kids did scarlett o’hara have? how about this? i’ll write it. you read it. then everyone can make their own decisions and discuss it on the internet.”
with scarlett o’hara’s question, martin was drawing on his most beloved analogy: “gone with the wind”. classic example of a book-to-screen adaptation and how they may differ. How many children does scarlett o’hara have? is Martin’s favorite question to throw at fans whenever the show’s differences are brought up.
The answer depends on whether you mean the book or the movie (three and one, respectively).
again, martin did not specify anything within the end of the show when he spoke about the series finale. Which means we still don’t know (publicly) if he knows exactly how Benioff and Weiss plotted the final paths for the main characters.
The last time Martin spoke publicly about the ending of “Game of Thrones” was in a January 2020 interview with the German news site Welt.
“people know an end, not the end,” martin said. “I was outdone by the creators of the TV series, which I didn’t expect. However, I’m still doing what I’ve been doing for years: I’m still trying to finish the next book, ‘The Winds of Winter,’ first, and then the follow-up novel.” ‘a spring dream’. That’s what I’m focusing on. After that, we’ll see what happens.”
good. so after a seven-year long saga of public talk about the show vs. the books and how they might (or might not) line up in the end, there’s very little we know for absolute certainty.
There is only one big exception: king bran.
king bran is the only endgame piece we were told was part of martin’s plan
In an interview with HBO for the “Making of ‘Game of Thrones'” website, published just after the series finale aired, actor Isaac Hempstead Wright (Bran) revealed that his character’s fate it was part of martin’s original plan.
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“David [Benioff] and Dan [Weiss] told me that there were two things that George R.R. Martin had planned for Bran, and that was the reveal of Hodor, and that he would be king,” Hempstead Wright said. “So it’s pretty special to be directly involved in something that’s part of George’s vision. It was a really good way to wrap it up.”
During an Insider interview on the Emmys red carpet that same year, Hempstead Wright addressed the revelation once again.
“Well, I don’t want to upset George and say something I shouldn’t,” the actor said when asked what Benioff and Weiss had told him about their conversation with Martin. “But that was the gist they gave me: that there were a couple of things that George has clearly established. I’m honored to be a small part of that.”
given this, it seems almost confirmed that bran stark will end up being the king in martin’s novels. it makes narrative sense (bran was the first character with a major point of view introduced in the opening chapter of the martin books) and many fans have done some great analysis showing that bran could be martin’s version of the arthurian legend of the king fisherman.
how some of the endings of other main characters may differ from (or align with) martin’s ending
Well, that was a lot of information to analyze. so let’s dive into the fun part now: educated guesswork.
knowing now that martin’s original plan might not have lined up with the show’s ending, and also considering that benioff and weiss were on a slack plot point trajectory since season three, let’s try to theorize what aspects of the ending could be part of martin’s plan.
king bran is a good starting point. If Bran becomes King of Westeros, that means neither Jon Snow nor Daenerys Targaryen will sit on the Iron Throne in Martin’s books.
to follow that thread, daenerys is most likely killed in martin’s books.
benioff and weiss once told ew that martin had revealed three moments planned for the book series that made them think, “holy m-“.
The first two of these “holy” twists were the burning of Shireen Baratheon (who worked in the show’s fifth season) and the reveal of how Hodor got his name (which happened in season six). The third, Benioff said, was from the “end” of the story.
it’s possible that jon killing daenerys could be the third “holy” moment that martin told benioff and weiss about.
The overall arc of Daenerys’ tragic fall from character seems very much in keeping with Martin’s story. You can read our in-depth analysis here on why Daenerys’ turn seems to align with Martin’s beliefs about the morals of war. however, we’re less sure that the details involved (such as Daenerys’s flaming king landing after the city surrenders) are going to play out the same way in the books.
what about jon snow? his exile beyond the wall and his fated leadership among the free people also seems a very likely ending to jon’s story in “a song of ice and fire”.
The relationship between him and the wildlings was a key part of his arc in the books published thus far, and would be a fitting way for Martin to continue subverting epic fantasy tropes. Vanity Fair reporter Joanna Robinson wrote a great analysis of how Jon Snow’s fate is similar to that of Aragorn and Frodo in “The Lord of the Rings,” which you can read here.
great, that’s what counts from bran, jon and daenerys. what about the lannisters?
again, it seems to be in line with the martin books that both jaime and cersei will die at some point. and again, the manner of his death probably doesn’t involve the details included in the show (crushed by rubble inside the red fortress and in the middle of a battle).
tyrion is a much murkier character to try to predict. Will he survive? maybe. Will it be the hand of the king to be saved? no idea.
Likewise, the fates of Arya and Sansa Stark seem possible for Martin’s planned ending, but also extremely uncertain. At the very least, having Sansa rule Winterfell at the end of the books would be another fitting arc for his character, and very much in line with Martin’s poetic sensibility (since Sansa begins her journey wanting nothing more than to leave the ancestral home of Martin). the).
but will she really be queen in the north? or just the guardian of the north? it is difficult to argue definitively in either direction.
As for Arya, it’s hard to see a long-term role for her in Westeros at the end of Martin’s books. it feels equally possible that she dies in the book version of events, or goes exploring or leaves westeros at the end.
and the biggest plot point of all, the fate of the white walkers, will likely be drastically different in martin’s books. Benioff and Weiss introduced the Night King as a leading figure for the Inhuman beings; that character doesn’t exist (yet) in the books. in fact, there is very little about white walkers so far in martin’s text.
so everything about the final battle and the enigmatic dragon and a Valyrian steel/dragon glass blade is the key to slaying the night king? It’s probably just Benioff and Weiss’s way of ordering the white walker threat in the version of the story they were telling.
as martin said, there is no “real” ending. And as Benioff and Weiss said, we’ll have no way of knowing for sure how close “Game of Thrones” came, in the end, to Martin’s version of the story that began in 1996.
fans will have to keep waiting for “the winds of winter” and then wait for “a dream of spring” soon after.
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- read more:
- george r.r. Martin’s friends explain the complicated reasons why it might take him so long to write his next book. game of thrones nearly ended before it started thanks to disastrous pilot
- 31 questions ‘game of thrones’ series finale left unanswered