Hold the Door: Game of Thrones and the New Frontier of Storytelling

You know what I’m talking about. Film and TV adaptations of novels, comics, and novellas are common, yet every time a new one shows up, someone pops up to rage about how the book does the story better. Now, sometimes they’re indisputably right—no one’s arguing that Eragon deserved to break records at the box office. But often, what proponents of this claim rally seem to be saying is that a book offers a truer display of the author’s vision.
I think two things are chiefly driving this belief: one, the book comes first, making it the primary text; any other medium must therefore be a form of derivative reboot. Two, we assume the author had full creative control over the book, and an adaptation’s writers and director merely came along later to dilute the author’s genius.
Both of these arguments are torpedoed by the latest game-changing episode of Game of Thrones, in which Hodor dies in the present while Bran wargs him in the past, and we discover that Hodor’s incessant “hodor-ing” was caused by present-Bran overloading past-Hodor’s brain during a vision quest, leaving the unlucky giant unable to speak outside of a constant, slurred repetition of the words that would one day seal his doom: “Hold the door!” (It made sense in context, and if you are reading this, you watched it already anyway, right?) Time-y wime-y confusion aside, it was a stunning revelation: Hodor’s origin and his final sacrifice exist in the same moment, stretched across the decades, a plot twist Steven Moffat is probably jealous he didn’t think of first.

It’s a twist George R.R. Martin set into motion 20 years ago—as we discussed here—but it’s also the first major moment that the TV version of Game of Thrones has all to itself. The TV show passed up Martin’s slow-running source material this season, and the most rabid fans of the A Song of Ice and Fire universe no longer have a bible to pore over while constructing their elaborate fan theories. Unless Martin starts putting out new books at an impossible (for him) rate, the show is definitely going to end first. Once, the book came first. Now, the TV show is the original text. To put it in Machiavellian terms, the balance of power has permanently shifted.
The “book is better” argument has shifted, too, at least when it comes to this series. The show is crafting its own ending to a story that now exists outside of the book/television binary.
Furthermore, the show isn’t even a diluted version of Martin’s story—Martin has served as co-executive producer all along, and his storylines undeniably form the basis for the show’s general direction, past and future. Those who love to nitpick (a common geeky pastime, I’ll admit) may complain that Martin’s influence over the TV show isn’t total creative dominance, but that’s something that the television format simply won’t allow. Even when the show seems to have skipped over key plots, it sometimes circles back around to pick them up—witness season six’s events on the Iron Islands—so at the very least, it’s a debate that needs to wait until, well, spring is here.
Plenty of other stories evolve across mediums, if not as definitively as Game of Thrones. Some might not recall that The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy began life as a radio show before becoming a book series, TV show, and later, a film. In each version, creator Douglas Adams tweaked, trimmed, and added as he saw fit, meaning there truly is no “definitive” version, just whichever version you, the fan,encountered first.

Interestingly, the video game-influenced graphic-novel-turned-film Scott Pilgrim is another great example of a story that can’t be fully pinned down to one “original” medium. The author of the graphic novels, Bryan Lee O’Malley, was still writing the ending when the film’s director, Edgar Wright, consulted with him. As a result, the Scott of Wright’s version winds up with ending, while the comics’ Scott gets another—and O’Malley fully endorses both. Even better, when the comics’ color edition came long, O’Malley suggested that colorist Nathan Fairbairn simply “watch the first half-hour of the movie a million times and do his own version of the palette of the movie.”
But as far as mainstream storytelling goes, Hodor and Bran’s not-so-excellent adventure is the first instance of a story truly shifting mediums partway through a tale. GRRM’s saga has bent storytelling like an Avatar can bend elements.
I’m not entirely sure what this development means for the future of how stories are told. The barriers to different types of mediums are being lowered. Anyone can now start their own podcast or webcomic, and more TV shows are being greenlit than ever. Plans are in the works for adaptations of The Name of the Wind and The Dark Tower that will encompass both multiple seasons of TV and feature films (and, in the case of the latter, perhaps even serve as a canonical reboot). Perhaps what this truly means that the actual medium in which a story is told will be eventually be considered even less important than the story itself. That concept certainly aligns with the massive cross-platform appeal that multimedia brands like Marvel or Star Wars wield.  
One thing’s for sure: from now on, when I fight back against the claim that a book is better just because it came first, I’ll have the world’s most popular TV show to point to as evidence.
So what do you think: is the book always better?