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Victor D. Infante: ‘Game of Thrones' catches up with the books

Well, it looks like winter is finally here. That is, if you're one of the people who both have already read all of George R.R. Martin's "A Song of Ice and Fire" novels that have been released to date, and who also watches the HBO TV series based on them, "Game of Thrones."

If you haven't quite caught up with either of those, rest assured, you will be spoiled if you continue reading. But if you are caught up on both, you have probably realized that the June 14 season finale, "Mother's Mercy," was also another sort of ending: It was the end of being able to lord over your knowledge of the books on the people who just watch it on TV.

Now, not everyone has been a jerk about it. Some people just sat pensively, waiting to share big moments such as — SPOILER! — Night's Watch commander Jon Snow getting stabbed to death or — SPOILER! — "Mother of Dragons" Daenerys Targaryen being rescued by one of her "children" with their TV-only brethren after they've aired. Others reveled in their foreknowledge, some being so cruel as to spoil the show outright. But a funny thing happened this season: The show got ahead of the books, meaning that in all likelihood, the TV show was spoiling the people who were reading the books.

There have been some divergences between the books and the TV show, so it's not entirely possible to say what's spoilage and what's divergence. In the books — SPOILER! — Catelyn Stark is sort of back from the dead as a merciless bandit called Lady Stoneheart, murdering members of the treacherous Frey family. It's all very heartwarming. And in the books, the perpetually-in-danger Sansa Stark is nowhere near Winterfell — her character's storyline was combined with a minor character who was posing as Sansa's sister Arya — so it's hard to see how that will rectify with Martin's literary plans for the character. Maybe he'll just kill her. It would be in character.

But some stories seem to have skipped past the most recent book, 2011's "A Dance With Dragons." Everyone's favorite character, Tyrion Lannister, catching up with Daenerys, for example, seems to be something that may happen in the forthcoming book, "The Winds of Winter," as is — SPOILER! — would-be king Stannis Baratheon's brutal murder of his daughter, Shireen. Where once some of us were waiting for the big scenes to pop up on the screen, now we'll be waiting for them to appear on the page.

Does that make the books now novelizations? That would be a little weird, and a little annoying for the people just reading the books. For the past few years, it was relatively easy to avoid being spoiled by the bibliophiles. Mostly, the noise wasn't loud enough to ruin the surprises for the average TV viewer, unless someone was actively trying to spoil you. But TV is a different beast, and as each new episode of "Game of Thrones" airs, plot details will be … pretty much everywhere online: Rolling Stone, The Los Angeles Times, Nerdist, i09, Black Nerd Problems and more all recap every episode online within days of airing. Not being spoiled after an episode airs will pretty much entail staying away from the Internet entirely.

Still, if Caitlyn can be alive in the books and not the TV show, it stands to reason that there will be other substantive differences between the mediums, which means the books will likely still hold plenty of surprises. And indeed, the story is so much larger in the books that it would be impossible to spoil everything. One hopes. But if "The Winds of Winter" doesn't come out before the next season of "Game of Thrones" premieres in 2016, and Jon Snow is shown to somehow survive his stabbing, we can be pretty sure he'll be alive in the books, too. And that foreknowledge is going to change the reading experience, and maybe not for the better.

But hey, it's "Game of Thrones," so anything is possible.

Email Victor D. Infante at Victor.Infante@Telegram.com and follow Pop Culture Notebook on twitter @TGPopCulture.