One of the most exciting scenes in Game of Thrones' season four was the appearance of a White Walker (who are known in the books as "Others,") taking one of Craster's sons to a great icy version of Mordor (or for fans of the Warcraft computer games, Icecrown.) The White Walker - a kind of frightening, pale ice monster that seems very similar to the original, scary version of fairies, and who is riding an undead horse - rides slowly into a crater that is walled on all sides by rock and ice, and puts the child on an ice altar. Obscured through the altar, we see a line of figures standing watch, while the center-most figure approaches. Eventually, this figure picks up the infant. The figure is another White Walker, but with a kind of crown of spikes or horns along the rim of his head. He touches the child's cheek with his finger and the baby's skin turns the pale white of the Walkers, and his eyes turn the same icy blue.
There have been plenty of invented story lines in Game of Thrones - stories that did not take place in the books. The entire character of Ros, for instance, does not exist at all in the books. Yet these inventions have largely been useful to help with the adaptation process. Ros is a great example here, because in a large part, she existed so that other characters could spout exposition at her (often while having sex with her, because HBO.) This scene with the White Walker, however, hit us hard for two big reasons:
One is that for a fantasy show, we don't actually encounter the fantastical all that much. The show is largely about politics and family drama. Even outside of the intrigue-filled King's Landing, the plots on the edges that are more magical in nature still tend to deal mostly with the relatively mundane. Jon Snow must fend off an imminent Wildling attack and Daenerys is waging a war against several allied city-states and their institution of slavery.
It actually works out quite well, because sometimes fantasy can dull you to the fantastical through overexposure. It also imposes a challenge on the writer so that they can't pull a deus ex machina as easily. The other reason that it works so well is that when something magical happens, it really blows us away.
The other reason it hit so hard is that, unlike the Ros-style adaptational changes, this is a scene that we have just never been even close to witnessing in the books. The books limit our perspective on the world by having us see things through the eyes of "viewpoint characters." It's still in the third person, but each chapter has a clearly marked character (such that one book might have several chapters with the same title, like "Tyrion," which does make it hard to look for specific passages.) While in that character's viewpoint, we don't really see anything that he or she does not see, and thus we often have to pay closer attention than the characters to figure out just what is going on outside of his or her head. And on top of that, if something happens without a viewpoint character there to witness it, we just don't hear about it. So given that there's no chapter that is called "That One Other," "One of Craster's Doomed Babies," or "That One Other Other," we never saw anything of this apparent conversion. It's perfectly conceivable that this has been going on all along, and indeed the books might reveal this eventually, but this was the first time that things really seemed to be getting revealed to book-readers at the same time as the show-watchers-only.
And I suspect that as time goes on, we're going to have more of this happening. Game of Thrones' first season, and largely its second, were very faithful to the books (though the Arya/Tywin combination was an inspired alteration.) Season three largely adapted the first half of book three, using its episode 9 climax appropriately on the Red Wedding. Therefore, it seemed reasonable to expect that season four would simply finish off book three. In some cases, it did. Tyrion's plot ends in exactly the same way, as does Arya (if you count her story's end as just that last scene with the Hound and onward) and with Sansa and Jon Snow, it's pretty close, with Sansa delving slightly into book four and Jon hanging back a little and not quite finishing book three. Yet in some cases, things have steamed on far ahead. Daenerys is well into book five content (though there's still definitely enough left for a full season for her in the existing books) and Bran is practically finished with book five. Meanwhile, the Greyjoys (who are, admittedly, few people's favorite characters) are lagging behind a bit, at least when in comes to what's actually happening on the Iron Islands.
Given the asynchronistic status of the various plots, it means that while we have plenty to look forward to holding over those who for some bizarre reason have not read the books yet, in other cases, we are staring into an uncertain future - and the show could very well spoil the books for us! (Or we might see a far more profound divergence between the two. Hopefully this will turn out better than the Scott Pilgrim adaptation, where so much of the focus was on the already-completed earlier books that you came out of the movie hoping for Scott to wind up with someone else.)
Game of Thrones is a huge experiment, and it has largely paid off (it's the most popular HBO show. Ever.) But given that they began with an unfinished series of source material, the show now needs to navigate stepping off the moving walkway and start walking on its own.
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