This serves as a general Game of Thrones spoiler warning. Spoilers ahead!

As universally beloved as Game of Thrones may be, not every plot can be a winner, and I think most people would agree that the trials and tribulations of Bran Stark haven’t been the most dynamic story the show has to offer. Now viewers tired of watching Bran getting dragged through the snowy woods can rejoice! He won’t be in Season 5 of Game of Thrones at all. Unfortunately, that also means we won’t get any Hodor-ing either. The actor who plays Hodor, Kristian Nairn, told Yahoo! News:

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.

That’s right, the Bran scenes we saw in last season’s finale (you know the one’s with the swashbuckling skeletons?), those are pretty much the last Bran scenes in the last Game of Thrones book George R.R. Martin has written. (Insert obligatory “Get to work, George!” comment here.) It’s too bad that we’re leaving Bran just when things started to get exciting. (Did we mention the skeletons?) But if you want to find out what the deal is with those skeletons, the strange grenade-lobbing children, and the mysterious old man with the serious root issue, you’ll have to wait until Season 6.

This isn’t the first time in the show’s history that a Stark child has taken a season off. Or did you not notice that Rickon and Osha where nowhere to be seen in Season 4? But this news is at least somewhat of an indication that showrunners Dan Weiss and David Benioff aren’t willing to diverge too terribly far from the book. None of the other storylines on the show have progressed quite so deeply into A Dance with Dragons, the most recent book, so your other favorite characters should be safe. Or at least as safe as anyone in Westeros ever is. The real question now is just how tall will actor Isaac Hempstead-Wright be when he comes back for Season 6? Given how much he’s shot up over the last couple of years, we’re guessing he’ll be just about even with Hodor himself. Not that you can tell sitting down.