To anyone that has read the books, where exactly did George get up to storywise? and when did the show start writing its own material? Just curious. I was thinking about reading the books, but wasn't sure where the show started doing its own thing.
Season 5ish was when they started to run out of material re: main characters and their arcs. In the books
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Jon Snow is newly dead, Tyrion and Dany haven't met yet (they almost met), Cersei isn't a queen and is unlikely to become one, Jamie and Brienne have run into a character that's not in the show, Sansa has a different arc and she's still doing things with a very much alive Littlefinger, Arya is still assassinating people, Bran is slowly gaining his magical powers but Hodor is still alive. Euron is a lot different when he appears in the released chapters from the sixth book - he messes with a lot of dark magic and has big plans to fuck the world up. I think they downplayed him in the show because they already have a Big Bad, the Night King.
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There's a lot of clues in the books about things happening that happened in the show so I can see the books going in that direction - there's no way Dany will keep all of her dragons, no way Jon stays dead, no way Stannis survives to the end, Shireen is likely to be sacrificed at some point, all of Cersei's children will die, they got the Hodor thing straight from the books most likely, the Others and the Children of the Forest seem to be connected, Jon and Dany might fall in love (there's some foreshadowing that points in that direction). But there's no way it all happens like it happens in the show. The show just feels... they had notes on what might happen or the logic of things, and they just went with the most straightforward way to put all the chess pieces together and get rid of the superfluous people so the Others can finally be fought by the forces of the living. They did a good job and I admire them for doing that because it's not what they signed up for. But the books are better.
When you read the books, you don't feel like you're watching chess pieces move, and the world of magic and what's beyond the Wall seems much more mysterious than the whole Walking Dead thing the show is doing. I hope we get at least the sixth book, and some of these magical mysteries start paying off, because I know they're not going to reveal anything about the Others in the show. They're saving that for the prequel thing.