Five Last-Minute Changes That Actually Improved Game of Thrones
While Game of Thrones ended up as a giga-hit, it received quite a bit of criticism for its deviations from George Martin's novel series, serving as its literary source.
Indeed, it can be argued that many of the changes were both unnecessary and detrimental to the show. But if you take a look behind the scenes, you'll see that the showrunners were often forced to introduce changes, both to the source material and to their own early plans, by circumstances, from budget constraints to actors leaving the cast.
And some of those last-minute changes even ended up improving Game of Thrones. Let's look at five examples of such improvements.
5. Aging Daenerys Up
Daenerys was aged up by about four to five years by the time of her introduction to the viewers and forced marriage to Khal Drogo. In the book it took place when she was only 14-years old. No, thanks, George, even by the standard of medieval arranged political marriages she would have been considered unusually young!
4. Yorkshire Accent
The accent that Northerners have in the show became its recognizable part, but it was only added after showruners have listened to Sean Bean's natural Yorkshire accent during rehearsals and asked other actors to imitate it.
3. The Battle of Blackwater
Even severely scaled down from the massive fleet battle it was in the book, Blackwater was one of the show's biggest technical achievements, and difficult to film – making what we saw on a tight budget required a number of rewrites. Also, while it can be argued which sequence of events made more sense, the plan that Tyrion employed in the show version of the battle did not portray him as evil enough to blow up his own men and actually accomplished its purpose.
2. Bran as Three-Eyed Raven
Bran Stark's permanent blank-eyed stare after he became Three-Eyed Raven was properly unsettling, but it became a part of the series pretty much by coincidence. His actor, Isaac Hempstead Wright admitted that he acted like this, because he had to take his contact lenses out while filming.
Similarly, Sean Bean performance as injured Ned Stark after a fight with Jaime Lannister was so convincing, because Sean Bean caught the flu in real life and was severely ill when filming those scenes.
1. Additional Scenes
Some show-invented scenes, particularly early on, actually were good additions, such as the scene of Robert Baratheon and Cersei Lannister having a frank talk about their arranged marriage and whether it could have possibly worked.
Note, though, that most of these admitted improvements are related to early seasons of Game of Thrones.