George Clooney isn’t the only one fired up about false claims. Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss are hitting back at reports saying they switched up a few things after criticisms over last season’s storylines—particularly Sansa Stark’s sexual assault. In contrast, this year seems to be all about the women taking control.
Director Jeremy Podeswa reportedly said, "They were responsive to the discussion and there were a couple of things that changed as a result. They did not want to be too overly influenced by that [criticism], but they did absorb and take it in and it did influence them in a way."
However, Benioff and Weiss are saying this is completely untrue.
"The thing that’s slightly frustrating is the idea that we’re responding to criticism from last year, so therefore we’re going to beef up the female roles—that’s blatantly untrue," Benioff said, according to Entertainment Weekly. "What happens this year has been planned for quite some time and is not a response. We can take criticism – and certainly we’ve gotten our share of it – but hearing people look at a middle chapter of a story and make claims about the story as a whole…it’s not in any way a response to online criticism, or any other type of criticism."
"I can literally say that not one word of the scripts this season have been changed in any way, shape or form by what people said on the Internet, or elsewhere," Weiss added.
While they may not have been influenced by fan criticisms, both showrunners ensure that this season will be a crowd pleaser. In fact, they're calling it their best one yet.
