‘Game of Thrones’ season 5 spoilers: No Hodor … or Bran Stark?

How about this for some surprising “Game of Thrones” news to start off your day? While Hodor may be very much a beloved character for many out there, it has now been reasonably confirmed that neither he nor Bran Stark will be in the fifth season 5 of the HBO show. Is this a shame? Definitely, given that their storyline really just started to get interesting with the Children and with Bran starting to understand his true purpose.

However, the problem here is just as Kristian Narin explains it to Yahoo Australia, in that the characters’ story does not have anywhere to go right now unless the show wanted to move ahead of the books:

“We have a season off and we have a year’s hiatus, solely because I imagine our storyline is up to the end of the books … So, I get my year off now to do Rave of Thrones and gallivant all over the world.”

Nairn is of course speaking about his musical passions here, and we certainly support all of that and then some.

This news really does showcase perfectly the flaw of this TV series working based off of incomplete source material, and who knows what other problems the show could run into? We would like to think that George R.R. Martin’s sixth book will be released prior to season 6 in 2016, so there will not be a need to delay that particular season. But what happens in 2017, when there is a planned seventh season of the show, and then no book? Do you put the series on hold? These are questions that you are going to have to answer eventually, especially since it could end up causing all sorts of schedule conflicts for the cast.

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Photo: HBO