Hey, there, Game of Thrones fans reading this: do you prefer to be kept blissfully unaware of the potential and/or hypothetical doings on your favorite TV show? Well then allow us to urge you to stop reading right now and complain not of the spoilers — yes, SPOILERS! — you’re about to read if your eyes move below this very line (yes, this one). Don’t say we didn’t warn you ‘cuz we did. Alright, now that that’s out of the way…
Did you hear this? The one about how Lady Stoneheart, the returned-from-the-dead iteration of Catelyn Stark, might not even appear on the HBO series Game of Thrones? Because according to many fans, the idea certainly reads like a joke. (In fact most people expected her to show up at the end of the finale.) But if Michelle Fairley is to be taken at her word in a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, we may not ever see the much-anticipated in the television series at all.
When asked point blank about a rumor that she was told there would be no new Lady, Fairley responded, “[T]he character’s dead. She’s dead.”
And while that news might upset many a book reader of the Song of Ice and Fire, Fairley was more compassionate to the limitations of the small screen adaptation. “You respect the writers’ decision. … They can’t stick to the books 100 percent. It’s impossible — they only have 10 hours per season. They have got to keep it dramatic and exciting, and extraneous stuff along the way gets lost in order to maintain the quality of brilliant show.”
Personally, we agree with Fairley if that is indeed how showrunners Dave Benioff and D.B. Weiss decided to play it. I mean, jeez, the show is already a behemoth, what more do you want from the guys, you know? Stoneheart’s in the book — can’t that be enough?
Let us know what you think in the comments.
uhhhhh— Lady Stark is dead very dead in fact and uhh Lady Stoneheart is a reanimated corpse… dead-things always come back wrong
What is dead may never die but it rises again harder and stronger.
<3
and sigh-she is my cosplay this year for sdcc I guess I have much splaining to do
She’s important to Arya’s arc. I think Arya needs to visit the Lady, after she completes her training in Braavos. Arya has a god to serve and a family to reconcile with, on her way to Winterfell. Both will be served when she meets Lady Stoneheart.
I think Lady Stoneheart is a pretty important character and would love to see her in the series. 1. She demonstrates yet another place where the Lord of Light is making inroads in Westeros.
2. It satisfies our need to see the Freys PAY for the Red Wedding.
3. I don’t know how long it will be before the book series lets us know what word Brienne said to her to save her life.
The “one word” was Sword. Stoneheart asks Brienne “Sword or noose?” Confirmation here: http://www.westeros.org/Citadel/SSM/Entry/Miscon_Report
The books aren’t finished so we don’t know how important Lady S will be to the outcome of the characters. They may have to bring her in. It’s impossible to know yet. Besides, shows evolve with every season, and there’s plenty of time to keep her up their sleeve.
So, who’s gonna kill Brienne?
She doesn’t die.
“It’s in the books, isn’t that enough?” Could be said about literally every single aspect of the show/adaptation.
Several things are possible: 1) they’re really leaving her out, which means she must not play a large role in the ultimate overarcing story that GRRM laid out to the producers/writers.
2) She’s playing coy to keep the surprise a surprise.
3) She really doesn’t know one way or the either and chooses to deny it.
I would love to see her, but as of now, it’s hard to say what impact it would have. with the way the timelines between books have shifted, it really could happen at anytime. When Briene meets her, it really ends her known story, so if that meeting happens on the show, it probably wouldn’t be until at least towards the end of season 5.
I’d like to see Lady Stoneheart on the show, she’s an indicator of how much magic is at play & how much it saturates the story.
Hard to know what to think about it, when we have no idea where the character is headed in the books. If that character becomes pivotal to plot as the books move forward, than I can’t imagine leaving her out of the show. Otherwise, I can understand where they’re coming from. They’ve also left out Coldhands for the same reason I suspect.
I was mainly interested in how they would handle it!
“[T]he character’s dead. She’s dead.”– I think it could be argues that Cat and LSH are not the same character. They don’t even have the same name.
LS and coldhands would be great for next season, as the producers are quickly running out of source material. LS is certainly not fluff compared to some of the sidetrips the producers have taken. I want to see more freys dead and i want to start hearing about wild wolfpacks. and benjen stark hasnt been confirmed dead yet. whats up with that?
They have to cut extraneous stuff… like random romantic inclinations from a eunuch, and an interminable road-trip with Pod and Brienne that no one actually cares about? Ugh. I was really looking forward to seeing her, but no, they wanted to put in random fluff no one gives a crap about instead. No Lady Stoneheart, no Coldhands… I’m losing my patience with this crap.
Hell yeah she should be on. HBO has to green light more episodes per season. Sopranos, Sex in the City all started with a dozen or so episodes and soon jumped to about 20 episodes a season and they had less characters to focus on. Enough is enough you have the following, the ratings, and the fan base of the books. Now all you need to keep it all is add more episodes which will help with keeping EXTREMELY important characters such as the Lady Stoneheart.
Maybeyou don’tunderstand how showsare made but you should know that GOT costs anabsorb ant amount more to make per episode. It’s crazy howuch this show cost to make. This is somethingtheyfactor in.Not to mention the difficulty level shooting onvariouslocationscomicates things and writingfor a show like this just addsto the difficulty level. It’s not like secondthe city or sopranosonany scale.
Actually I understand very well thank you. Do you even know what it costs to film in NYC? Also this series has something that the other series do not have…they make a killing in merchandise sales and of course the free press at all the Cons. Lastly, did you ever stop to think that more episodes means less main characters cast per episode as the writers won’t need to feel they have to speed through along with the story line and cram so many scenes in each episode. So again why can’t they extend the season? Maybe now you understand.
LS has had two scenes with very minimal impact, and on tv, she might just appear to be rather goofy. Until if I were a writer on the show, I’d want to see where Martin was taking LS before I included her.
Very little Impact?(SPOILER) I think we were reading different books. It sets the stage for what is about to happen to Brienne and Jamie. It makes Jamie’s plotline go full circle. He was released by Cat as a ‘kingslayer’ and he sends Brienne off to go find the Stark girl with ‘Oathkeeper’ because he promised Cat to get them back. Now Cat is setting him up with the bwb because she believes he is still the same oathbreaker. While LSH isn’t scene a whole lot the chaos she is causing is noticed in the riverlands and mentioned throughout Brienne and Jamies chapters.
I think it depends on what Martin plans to do with the character in the next book. If she doesn’t play a key role, then not having her in the show is ok. However, if her role is key to the story in the book, then leaving her out could change the story too. I guess them leaving her out of the show should tell us something.
We are forgetting one thing, the writers know where Lady Stonehearts story ends, we don’t. Maybe her plot line in the upcoming books fizzles out and they don’t feel the need to include here in the tv show.
It’s hard to say exactly how important LSH will be to future events in the book just yet, but from what we have seen I’d guess that GRRM has something in mind for her. I’m not opposed to changes in the story/characters between the two versions, but some elements do need to be present in both. Is LSH one of those? I don’t know that for sure yet,
It’s called a recast. They are keeping Lady Stoneheart as they have blatently set it up. I mean Brienne literally meets up with her. And it shows Arya’s warg abilities. It’s very important to the story. Not to mention it ties up what happened with the Brothers without Banners and Dondarrion.
Michele Fairely’s statement neatly fits into the “UnCat” meme of ASOIAF fandom. LS is too important to so many characters story arcs it seems unlikely they’ll toss her.
You can toss all those arcs for a screen adaptation. GOT is full of superfluous characters. Lady Stoneheart is a fine example of one.
I think it’s pretty obvious that they are keeping the Lady Stoneheart storyline for next season. Because *spoiler* Arya need to warg trough Nymeria and see the body of her mother. Only then Thoros of Myr and Beric Dondarrion can bring her back. I’m sure the writers didn’t want to confuse the viewers with all of this in an episode already full of events. It’s still really possible to see Lady Stoneheart on the Brienne storyline because it’s what’s supposed to happend next with her. All the talk about this is really weird, because we saw that the order of the books is not respected. Arya just finished A Storm of Swords but Bran is already in A Dance with Dragons.
George specifically points out that books 4 and 5 pretty much happen simultaneously. So, the order of the books is irrelevant to the chronological order of the storylines.
ASOS is book 3, which happens before 4 and 5. Hai’s point is valid: some story lines are very very close to the end of the current books while others aren’t. 4 and 5 are the only books that break any sort of sequential/chronological ordering.
Considering we don’t know how her role in the books affects the main storylines yet (her role is still ongoing in the books) it might come back to bite them in the end.
The showrunners know how the series ends, and presumably know how important she is in the end.
Her roll is more behind the scenes right now. when she takes over the brotherhood she turns them towards slaughtering
Freys and Lanisters which is part of the reason Jamie leaves Kings Landing to pacify the riverlands
It’s fine, she wasn’t really even necessary in the books, glad to see them skip that part.
Maybe she hasn’t read the books and doesn’t know.. We can always hope…
Well to be fair Charles Dance didn’t know about his death until some fan walked up to him on the street and told him
For any character from the books, if they move the plot forward in a way that only they can, then they must be included in the show, but if not then the writers must be free to exclude them. It is hard, as a book reader and a show watcher to see them change or eliminate people or interactions, but the books and the show are two different entities and the sooner the fans realize this, the better off we will all be!
As cool as that concept is, she’s barely in the book. They would have to make up all her scenes of they put her in the show. And her back story. They showed the red priest once, a long time ago and he’s pretty big in the books. Putting Stoneheatt in the show would be like “hey remember this guy who brought back the dead and makes us think the red god is for real? Well he brought back Cat and she sounds like Tom Waits. Mmkayy?”
We don’t yet know how big a role Lady Stoneheart will play in the books. Presumably, she has Jaime Lannister, whom she intends to kill. It’s premature to suggest anything at this point.
Lady Stoneheart is the catharsis for the Red Wedding victims. It doesn’t make sense to leave her out of the show unless they are going to find another way to let fans feel vengeance for the wedding.
Well, to be fair, being dead and being Lady Stoneheart aren’t exactly mutually exclusive.
^ this.
ITS NOT ENOUGH