Exactly. Him burning the letter was incredibly wrong and not at all the way the books did his character. If I was Martin I would be livid with the changes here and elsewhere that I will post about.

Theon's character couldn't be handled like he was in the books.

We can make sense of him and what he's really going through because he's a POV character. To fully undestand Theon, they would have had to cheat and give him a friend on the Isles that would be a plot device for him to explain/make sense of what he was feeling and his thought process.

When you tell a story in an audio-visual medium like TV, having Theon burn the letter makes a lot of sense. It would not have worked in the books.

The series had first of all to cut, and then to go alternative ways when a point or subtlety was hard to convey with the limited amount of screen time they can devote to any single character. If this was centered on Theon's story, they could have written him much like he is the book, but it isn't, he's part of a huge ensemble. But he's still essentially as he was in the books.


It's exactly the same thing with Arya, beside the facts there are things from the books - emotions mostly - they can hardly subject such a young actress to, and there are things a Fantasy audience can accept to read about (to an extent, those who don't like Martin often don't like the brutal unforgiving way he deals with characters, especially children) that the TV audience wouldn't accept. For all that, they've been fairly faithful with Arya so far.

As for your last comment, thankfully Martin has written for TV and understands the medium and its constraints (and advantages too) much better than you do. Far from being livid about the changes, he's been openly admirative of the cleverness of quite a few of them.