Click the image above for the full chart.
Game of Thrones is back, and gone are the simple days of “one season, one book.” The showrunners have split the third book into two seasons, and, what’s more, the show’s episodes are synchronizing less and less with chapters from the books, as the chart below, created by Reddit user JoelTone and based on data from the Game of Thrones wiki, illustrates.
Making a TV show out of a 4,200-page (so far) series is necessarily an exercise of rearranging, cutting, and, sure, adding some more torture and nudity. (This is HBO, after all.) While each Season 1 episode covered a predictable block of consecutive chapters from the book, Season 3 spliced chapters more liberally, portraying events from one chapter alongside events hundreds of pages later in the book, and spreading, for example, a single Daenerys chapter across four episodes. Anyone who had the notion of reading the books along with the show must accept that the show is going to spoil the books, and vice versa. As in Westeros, you must pick sides!
