If you asked someone to define a central conflict in Game of Thrones, they’d have a difficult time pinning one down. The story bucked ‘good versus evil’ conventions early in its run, and other options like ‘faith vs. science’ or ‘the living vs. the dead’ have been similarly complicated. Instead, in my view, the show (and the books) have been a long fought battle between Plot and Character, waged by GRRM, show writers, and online critics alike. Last Sunday, the TV show’s writing team completed the movement they’d been building towards all season — Plot has won out over Character. And as a book reader, I’m incapable of ignoring the ways this has damaged many of the things that helped this story transcend the usual fantasy shticks.

First though, the positives. Much of the narrative detritus that once overwhelmed the show has been killed off and shoved aside, to the relieved sighs of all those with better things to do on a Saturday night than close-readings of Westerosi family trees. The show’s mission was once to delicately balance the many tangled threads that GRRM was weaving, and this sometimes made very little sense in a weekly TV show. Plotlines that seemed unimportant dragged entire seasons, while the action we really wanted was consistently dangled ahead like a carrot on a stick. We kept seeing the dragons but they never showed up in combat; every Stark child had been thoroughly beaten down and demoralized, all without a single satisfying reunion; it seemed like no one we cared about ever got to win.

This season satisfied those hopes and then some. Glorious reunions were had, epic battles were waged, and the good guys finally got to notch some W’s. What was unquestionably better about this season being untethered to a slow-moving book was that it freed the writers to advance every plot some amount each episode. And yet here were the initial signs that I had been watching this show entirely differently than my show-only friends had been, from day one. The plot developments this season felt blistering to me — improbably convenient and expedited. Travel that once took characters half a season to complete could now be relegated to the space between episodes, or even within a single episode. Conflicts with three or four competing interests were resolved cleanly and quickly. And yet every other week I’d hear the groans of my friends complaining, “Well that was a boring episode.”

I was never watching the show as a TV show. My patience was ratcheted to an insane degree after waiting years for books that offered little in the way of clean, satisfying plot progression. In addition, I knew the big ‘wow’ moments way ahead of time, and the fun for me was watching how the show’s writers pulled them off, not in the surprise of the moments themselves. The show nailed so much of the books, but I was always watching it as complementary to the books, not supplementary. The show sequences that were light on character development were aided by the reams of internal monologues I had already read; the book sequences that were too complicated to enjoy as spectacle were rendered in beautiful CG and action-movie-caliber directing.

Meanwhile, for my show-only friends, this show was the story. This was their truth, these were the characters as they knew them — they’d never known any others. When a character in the show made a decision that was more motivated by where the writers wanted to move the story than what the character would realistically have done (Plot over Character), a show-only watcher doesn’t have an alternate history to fall back on. They have to reconcile the character choice with the character, and it makes the motivations of these people more muddied and less vital to the show’s success. This isn’t meant to be a value judgment; it’s a difference in the way we ‘read’ these two different mediums. And it’s created two groups of fans who are watching for distinct reasons, and who are hoping for different things.

I believe part of what has kept GRRM from quickly finishing this series is the commitment he maintains to the realism of the characters and the world he’s created. He’s known for years what the big plot developments needed to be, and the complicated game of chess he’s writing has arced towards those plot-necessities. But the beauty of GRRM’s writing is in his ability to ensure that all the pieces move according to the rules of the game. Within each story, each chapter, GRRM’s fundamental talent is in the agency and believable motivation he imbues to all of his characters. The joy of the battle at Blackwater is that we struggle to pick a side to root for, because we’ve been presented with genuine motivations on all sides, and no one who’s clearly in the right. The Red Wedding is thrilling not just because it is unexpected, but because despite the surprise it ultimately seems correct — it’s a smart and decisive move from the Lannisters and the Freys that we’d expect from them as ruthless independent actors with their own agendas. Anyone who has yelled at a super-villain for monologuing just when they’re about to claim victory can see the beauty in a “bad guy” who does exactly what a real bad guy would do, without sacrificing for the sake of plot.

These events aren’t just cheap plot twists; they’re moments when the truth of the characters and the world clashes with our expectations of what a fantasy story is supposed to be and how it’s supposed to make us feel. There’s a reason Ned’s head is a pivotal moment in anyone’s obsession with this story — for me it was the chapter that hooked me for good. It’s not as simple as “anyone can be killed” or “the bad guys always win,” it’s about what we have been taught is supposed to happen in a story like this, and how thoroughly those expectations are dismantled when all characters are genuinely trying to get what they want, and resolutions are as infrequent and imperfect as they are in the real world.

I think the showrunners’ impulse to consolidate and push towards the conclusion is not only smart, it’s inevitable. GRRM has yet to begin the important process of winding down — he’s still introducing characters and plotlines five books in, and it’s clearly presented him with some difficult writing problems to overcome. The show has admirably condensed these books so far, eliminating entire characters and plotlines that aren’t really integral to the core of the narrative. But what was missing from this season was GRRM’s guiding philosophy of Character over Plot. And “The Battle of the Bastards” crowned Plot as the new ruler in Westeros.

As Littlefinger’s troops rode in to save the day, as Jon Snow pummeled Ramsay’s face of pure evil into the ground, and as Sansa smiled walking away from his death-by-dog, I had a lot of questions. I wasn’t asking “Will Jon die?” because he had been resurrected episodes ago, and the only way to cheapen death in this show any more would be to pull Jon back one more time. I wasn’t asking “Who do I want to win?” because Ramsay had become a twisted vessel of villainy even less complicated than the young king who was hated before him. And I wasn’t asking “Will Jon’s underdog army initially flounder in the face of Ramsay’s onslaught, only to be saved at the last minute by Littlefinger because of that letter Sansa sent to him a few episodes ago?” because, well, of course that happened.

I was asking why Sansa would keep this reinforcement information from Jon, other than to make this scene more dramatic for the viewers. I was asking what Jon’s plan was exactly, was he planning to die? Did he want to die? That would explain his actions, but without an internal monologue we can only guess.

I was also asking questions that I realize now would be immensely difficult for the show to answer delicately. Questions like, how does Jon feel after being brought back from the fucking dead? Would Sansa really, after suffering at the hands of sadists for years, be so unequivocally satisfied and smug as she took part in a vengeful sort of sadism all her own? As TV fans we cheer at the villain getting what he deserves, but as a character Sansa suffers from the simplicity of her vengeance.

The fact is, these are not issues GRRM is easily able to overcome. They are likely a large part of why he’s taking so long to finish. GRRM is up against decades of internet obsessives theorizing every conceivable outcome there could possibly be. And on top of that, he is incapable of moving plot at the expense of his characters. He refuses to, yet he may have to if he ever wants to get his manuscripts to publishers.

The show doesn’t have time for any of that anymore. They’re on a fast track to a scheduled conclusion and they have more plotlines to tie up than any TV show I’ve ever seen. This season did an excellent job of consolidating, distilling the story down to the people we care about most, and figuring out how to get them together quickly. And it’s undeniably satisfying to see people we’ve grown to love finally accomplish what we expected them to do three, four, five seasons ago.

But it seems like I’ll be waiting many more years to get the conclusion to the story that I started in paperback. If it means I get some conclusion, a decade before the books are actually completed, that’ll likely be worth the sacrifices that have to be made. But the books have ruined me; the show will never be the real story to me, and that’s something I needed a season without the books to fully understand.