At this year’s Comic-Con there were over 6,000 fans in attendance for the ‘Game of Thrones‘ panel and you can watch it in all of its glory below. There were a ton of details about the upcoming season and even a few about the next book in the series! There might be a couple of spoilers within for those who like to go in blind, but I don’t think that any of what was shared was too big of a spoiler to need to avoid the details that they’ve given to us. Regardless, you have been warned.

So what were the highlights? Well it breaks down like this:

  • Stannis Baratheon will have a much larger role in the upcoming season. According to George R.R. Martin “Stannis has realized that he’s going about this all wrong. He’s been trying to become king to save the realm, when he should’ve been saving the realm to become king.” I think that this new direction is going to make him a much more enjoyable character to have on screen.
  • Martin won’t be writing any episodes this season because his schedule is booked finishing ‘The Winds of Winter.’ Specifically he said that “As you may know, there’s this book that people are kind of getting antsy about delivering, and it takes me roughly a month to deliver an episode, so I decided, given the realities, I’d better skip this one this season and just concentrate on finishing the book.” I think fans the world over can thank you for this one!
  • There is a focus on Jeyne Westerling, who is Robb Stark’s wife in the books, that will be featured in the prologue. Though Martin said that it won’t be through her eyes as “It’s the viewpoint character who always dies.”
  • The show is shot like a 10-hour movie compared to a standard television show. Showrunner David Benioff said that “Last year we shot scenes from the tenth episode in the first week. Basically wherever is the best time for a scene to shoot, it’s going to shoot.”
  • Jon Snow is a large constant in the upcoming season. When the showrunners sat down with Martin they “had a very long lunch with George where we told him what we wanted to do with the adaptation, and we had a three-hour talk. At the very end of it George said, “Okay, okay. Who is Jon Snow’s real mother?” That seems as if it may prove to be a important plot point going forward.
  • Sadly it seems as if there is no plans for a 13-episode season. Benioff chimed in that “Believe us, from a storytelling point of view we’d love to have 13 episodes. That would be fantastic. The problem is—the problem is we can’t. We finished post-production and we’ve already started up pre-production on the next season. There’s absolutely no downtime between the end of one season and the start of the next. There’s just no time for us to shoot more episodes and maintain the kind of quality in terms of production value, going to all the different countries, getting to those locations, having the visual-effects guys create the dragons—all that stuff.”

You can watch the full panel in two parts below which are full of all kinds of other details!


Video credit: Emergency Awesome

Are you excited for the next season of ‘Game of Thrones’? What stood out the most for you with the early details we’ve been given? Share your thoughts below!

Sources: Wall Street Journal, Slash Film