Will The Winds of Winter delay affect how people watch Game of Thrones…?

Maybe. This was the most closely-contested poll we’ve ever had. People were pretty split.

As you can see, it was easy for most people to make peace with the delay, since they’d seen it coming for a while—pessimistic but fair. Others think the show is going to separate itself from the books so much that the spoilers won’t be spoilery enough to matter, and others will watch despite knowing that spoilers are coming. The immediate takeaway: relatively few people plan to forego watching Season 6 in favor of waiting for the books. Spoilers or no, people will watch. As Davos 4 King said:

Why would I stop watching the best show on television? I really want to read TWOW but I’m not going to not watch.

The second option is the most interesting to me. There was an interesting discussion in the comments about nature of spoilers, and how many Season 6 is bound to have. Without having seen the new episodes, I’m most inclined to agree with David H, who acknowledges that while “lots of things will be different,” the general outline of the story will match.

The major plot beats will still be mostly the same. The fates of the biggest characters will be the same. I think it’s safe to say that Jon Dany and Tyrion won’t end up in completely different places in the books and show. And you can probably add Bran, Arya and Sansa. And maybe Cersei and Jaime.

To me, in fiction, the journey is more important than the destination, so I’m ready to accept a world where the show reaches the same destination of the books by a different path. Having multiple angles on the same story will make both richer.

But I don’t think it’s outside the realm of possibility that we could end up with two different endings. Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss consult with Martin on the direction the books are going, but they’ve also said Martin has a tendency to go his own way. Here’s Benioff talking to Variety early last year:

We’ve had a lot of conversations with George, and he makes a lot of stuff up as he’s writing it. Even while we talk to him about the ending, it doesn’t mean that that ending that he has currently conceived is going to be the ending when he eventually writes it.

Also consider Martin’s comments from 2015 that he had come up with a “great twist” that will “drive readers crazy…The show has already – on this particular character – made a couple decisions that will preclude it, where in my case I have not made those decisions.” How many more of those twists will he have to come up with before his books end up somewhere entirely different than the show?

Also compare Martin’s original outline of the story to the completed A Song of Ice and Fire books. They’re vastly different. Martin makes stuff up as he’s writing it. Now that he, Benioff, and Weiss are all writing at the same time, the opportunities to go in different directions multiply.

Personally, I’m excited about that, and it makes me more excited to see what the show will come up with.

Via http://winteriscoming.net/2016/01/13/will-the-winds-of-winter-delay-affect-how-people-watch-game-of-thrones/