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'Episode 47: Inside the Episode'Season five has been a troubling one. It aggressively veered away from the books, especially with Sansa's story. At first, the deviations were exciting, as she seemed to be finding herself as actor, rather than a passive pawn being dragged across Westeros. Alas, the show creators—David Benioff and D. B. Weiss—seem to have made this move only to increase the pathos of her eventual rape at the hands of her husband. Maybe within the next three episodes she'll become the agent of her own liberation, since Theon has betrayed her and Brienne is outside the castle, but I'm not counting on it. No matter what, many viewers (including me) are tired of the endless pattern in which female characters can only develop through abuse.But there's another, subtler, impact of the changing relationship between the books and the show. This season has overlapped with A Dance with Dragons, book five of A Song of Ice and Fire. When the Benioff and Weiss cut characters and scenes from the show, as they have to in adapting the book, it reveals to readers that those characters weren't very important. Dorne wasn't just a site of liberated women with badass weaponry and poor impulse control in the books, but the site of a branch of the Targaryen family. Most readers expect there to eventually be three dragon riders, and there's a vast web of speculation about who they might be. As the show eliminates characters from the script altogether, our options are narrowing.
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