George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones Nightmare Is Coming True in Stranger Things Season 5
Beyond worries about veering from his books, George R.R. Martin’s bigger on-set anxiety was the clock. As Game of Thrones rolled out each year, its child stars sprinted into adulthood while their characters were meant to stay much younger—threatening fidelity and forcing tricky choices behind the scenes.
Kids age. Characters don't. That disconnect is a recurring headache for long-running shows, and two massive franchises have tackled it in very different ways: Game of Thrones tried to bend storylines around reality, and Stranger Things is about to jump ahead to catch up.
GRRM vs the march of time
George R.R. Martin says one of his big anxieties during Game of Thrones wasn't just adaptation choices, it was watching the child actors age out of their book ages in real time. In an interview with Vanity Fair, he put it pretty bluntly:
"I don't want to sound too glib about this. This is a serious concern. We're going forward, and the kids are getting older. Maisie [Williams] was the same age as Arya when it started, but now Maisie is a young woman and Arya is still eleven. Time is passing very slowly in the books and very fast in real life."
The Thrones timeline problem, explained
Here's the math: in the A Song of Ice and Fire books, Arya Stark stays 11 for a while because the narrative moves slowly. On TV, that wasn't an option. By the final season of Thrones, the character is presented as 18, while Maisie Williams herself was 22. That's a big gap from book-Aria, but it synced up with the actor we were watching on screen.
Production pace didn't help. Game of Thrones mostly dropped a new season every year, only slowing down significantly for Season 8, which took close to two years. Compare that to House of the Dragon, which is on a roughly two-year timeline per season. Even with Thrones' relatively brisk schedule, there was no way to freeze the cast in teen mode.
The showrunners did what they could: as the kids became young adults, the writing leaned into more mature choices and storylines. You can argue with specific beats, but the overall shift made practical sense because the actors simply weren't children anymore.
Stranger Things has a plan
Stranger Things started with a core group of pre-teens who are now, very obviously, not pre-teens. Rather than pretend, the Duffer Brothers are building that reality into the story with a time jump. Season 5 skips ahead 18 months from the end of Season 4. That does two useful things: it ages the characters to match the actors, and it opens up fresh story space about what happened during that gap.
- Stranger Things Season 5
- Created by: The Duffer Brothers
- Release date: November 26, 2025
- Streaming on: Netflix
Where to watch
Game of Thrones is streaming on Max. Stranger Things Season 5 hits Netflix on November 26, 2025.
Smart fix or clunky workaround? How do you feel about shows time-jumping to match their casts? Drop your take in the comments.