As with any adaptation, the makers of the TV Series Game of Thrones have had to make certain accomodations as they bring George RR Martin's series to the screen. Necessarily, story lines are compressed, minor characters are merged onto one, and events are reordered in the interests of narrative flow and on-screen drama. I doubt they anticipated, though, how small changes at the beginning of the series begain to compound over time. Recent episodes of TV series have started to diverge significantly from the books (a phenomenon GRRM has called the "butterfly effect").
You can see the butterfly effect clearly in this lovely visualization by Joel Geddert (and noted by Vox), which maps episodes of the TV show (vertical axis) to chapters of the books (horizontal axis). The show and the books align closely in Season 1, but as time goes on the chronologies diverge and entirely new events appear. I've only shown the first 3 books below -- click to see the entire visualization.
That's all for this week. See you on Monday!
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