JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Readers used to own Game of Thrones, or as we fastidiously put it, A Song of Ice and Fire. Having read the books we had an advantage over mere viewers of the HBO series, who were unprepared for the beheading of Eddard Stark, the Red Wedding, the Purple Wedding, and other traumas in Westeros. Part of the genius of showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss is that they make terrible events so much worse. It hurts to watch this series. I know people who are still recovering from the sight of Oberyn Martell (Pedro Pascal) snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, stepping too close to a behemoth who wasn’t quite dead, and getting his head crushed like fruit.

But with the series catching up to the events in the books, the showrunners having jettisoned entire chapters and plotlines that slowed down the action (Goodbye, Lady Stoneheart), it will soon be in uncharted territory. In interviews, Benioff and Weiss have announced that the series will likely end before all the books—we are awaiting the sixth of a projected seven volumes—are published. Meaning Game of Thrones is in a weird existential bind in which the series will spoil the books it is based upon. Here be dragons.

Read our TV column The Binge at BusinessWorld.