The perils of repeating someone else’s material

Natalie Bochenski writes in the SMH under the heading “Game of Thrones season 4: did TV creatives get Wall battle right?”:

In her Washington Post blog, Alyssa Rosenberg mourned a moment from the book that was changed for the episode.

“For some reason…they were afraid to preserve a key moment from Martin’s novels: Jon’s belief that it may have been his arrow that killed Ygritte, the woman he loved,” she wrote.

“In the books, that uncertainty reinforces Jon’s loyalty to the Night’s Watch and what it has cost him. Here, that task is given unambiguously to a child. When Jon holds a dying Ygritte in his arms, there is no fear or anger that either of them need to push aside.

Except that the scene in the book reads:

“He found Ygritte sprawled across a patch of old snow beneath the Lord Commander’s Tower, with an arrow between her breasts. The ice crystals had settled over her face, and in the moonlight it looked as though she wore a glittering silver mask.
The arrow was black, Jon saw, but it was fletched with white duck feathers. Not mine, he told himself, not one of mine. But he felt as if it were.

So: source in error; SMH likewise.

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