The good news about the next Game of Thrones season will be, we would be having one less storyline to manage. But the bad news is it’s the one with Hodor and Bran Stark.
In an interview, actor Kristian “Hodor” Nairn confirmed that he’s got the year off:
“We have a season off from Game of Thrones 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.”
The news is disappointing but not surprising. Seasons 3 and 4 of Game of Thrones covered Book 3 of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, more or less, but it also pulled in certain elements from Books 4 and 5. The fifth book being A Dance with Dragons, the last ASOIAF novel released to date.
Bran and Hodor’s Season 4 storyline in particular relied heavily on material from A Dance with Dragons, and even added some scenes invented just for the TV series. Its unlikely Bran and Hodor will be the last characters to face this issue. As many people have pointed out many times before, the TV series is burning through the books much faster than Martin is writing them.