Game of Thrones was a show known for its violence. You had the Red Wedding, where the Stark family and all of their followers were brutally slaughtered over dinner. You had the fight between the Mountain the Viper, where the former squished the latter’s head like it was an overripe grapefruit. And you had the story of Theon Greyjoy, who we watched get brutally tortured for the whole of season 3, a process that ended with a crucial appendage being lobbed off.
To be clear, none of this dissaded people from watching the show; the popularity of Game of Thrones only increased the longer it was on. But it did earn the series plenty of criticism; did we really, the critics asked, need to see all of that?
According to author George R.R. Martin, whose A Song of Ice and Fire books HBO adapted as Game of Thrones, he was pulling his punches. “I know people say that Game of Thrones the TV show is very bloody and graphic and has a lot of violence, and yes, that’s true because it is a war story,” he said during an interview with the Bangcast. “But if you compare it with real history, I toned it down a lot.”
“History is written in blood. The Middle Ages, the Roman Empire…Boy, they were bloody times. There was a lot of murder and rape and genocides and torture.”
Obviously, Game of Thrones is not actual history, but it is heavily inspired by actual history, and all of those horrible things Martin mentioned figure into his story. “I think it’s important to include some of that so you kind of capture the flavor of the period,” he said.
However, Martin is wary about getting too explicit, since these things are awful and he’s ultimately trying to write a book people will want to read. “You have to walk up walk a tight rope there to decide how much to include and how much not to include,” he said. “Include too much of it [and] it can be very unpleasant reading. People still don’t wanna necessarily read hundreds of pages about torture.”
Why Game of Thrones showed Theon getting tortured while George R.R. Martin’s did not
That’s one of the reasons Martin chose not to include the parts of Theon Greyjoy’s journey where he was tortured for months on end at the Dreadfort by Ramsey Bolton. We see Ramsey capture Theon towards the end of A Clash of Kings, and when we see Theon again in A Dance of Dragons, he’s a haunted, broken man. “He kind of drops out of two entire novels,” Martin said. “You don’t hear about him and he’s being tortured all that time, but I didn’t want to write repeated scenes of Ramsey being tortured. So I just left him out of those books and then [brought him back when it] was necessary for him to come back. I brought him back much the worse for wear.”
As we said, the TV show did show a lot of Theon’s torture. Martin has some theories as to why. “In that case you have a contract with an actor…who’s signed up to be a regular on the show. You don’t want to just drop them for two seasons. So they showed a lot of the torture onscreen. And that’s one of the examples of the way things differ from books to television and what you can do and what you can’t do.”
Game of Thrones is now gone and Theon with it. The franchise continues with the prequel show House of the Dragon, but unless the producers throw a curveball at us, we’re unlikely to see any season-long torture scenes when the show returns on HBO and Max sometime next summer.
