http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/news/a35066/george-martin-responds-game-of-thrones-controversy/
On Sunday night's episode of Game of Thrones, Sansa Stark married Winterfell's resident sadist, Ramsay Bolton, and was subsequently brutally raped by her new husband as childhood friend Theon was forced to silently watch nearby. While fans of the show are accustomed to quite a bit of brutality, the sick psychological effects of what viewers are dubbing the "Black Wedding" were too much even for some die-hards.
In a late-night blog post, George R.R. Martin defended the inflammatory episode, emphasizing that the show and the book series occupy different worlds:
There have been differences between the novels and the television show since the first episode of season one. And for just as long, I have been talking about the butterfly effect. Small changes lead to larger changes lead to huge changes. HBO is more than forty hours into the impossible and demanding task of adapting my lengthy (extremely) and complex (exceedingly) novels, with their layers of plots and subplots, their twists and contradictions and unreliable narrators, viewpoint shifts and ambiguities, and a cast of characters in the hundreds.
There has seldom been any TV series as faithful to its source material, by and large… but the longer the show goes on, the bigger the butterflies become. And now we have reached the point where the beat of butterfly wings is stirring up storms, like the one presently engulfing my email.
And despite the fact that the show and book series are "two roads diverging in the dark of the woods," Martin believes that "all of us are still intending that at the end we will arrive at the same place."