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Game of Thrones Nudity Scandal Reveals Major Spoiler For Season 5

A Croatian church's public outcry for a nude scene to be filmed in the streets has revealed major Season 5 and adaptation spoilers.

By David Crow | August 26, 2014 | | 0

Despite being based on books that were mostly published over a decade ago, HBO’s Game of Thrones has been notoriously tight-lipped about plot points in upcoming seasons, especially when they’re almost a year out from airing on the premium cable juggernaut. But sometimes there is no getting around God, or the incredulous Croatian church that just learned what indecency has been invited into their community.

Holding major sway over the Croatian government, the Church of St. Nicholas is loudly protesting an upcoming scene intended to be shot in Dubrovnik, Croatia, which is doubling for the streets of King’s Landing. The scene, which involves an actress walking outside in the complete nude, has crossed the religious leaderships’ line over “public displays of sexuality.”

As a result the scene in question has been delayed because the Croatian Film Commission will not give Game of Thrones the permit to shoot the major moment. Of course, there will be ways to work around this, we’re sure.

What’s more interesting is how it reveals a major spoiler for both what will come in season five of Game of Thrones, and how the show is radically intending to adapt the fourth and fifth “A Song of Ice and Fire” novels by George R.R. Martin: A Feast For Crows and A Dance with Dragons.

This article contains spoilers from this point forward.

The scene in question is, according to Croatian reports found by TMZ, explicitly a sequence that involves Lena Headey’s Cersei Lannister to walk down the streets of King’s Landing in the nude. Besides marking the dubious honor of being Headey’s first nude scene in the series, it is also a hugely telling move about how Game of Thrones creators and showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss are approaching an adaptation of the material.

This pivotal scene of Cersei’s complete and total shaming is from the very end of the fifth novel in the series, 2011’s A Dance with Dragons. This means that the HBO series is likely going ahead with what we speculated should be the approach for season five, which is combining the fourth and fifth books whole into one season. Granted, Cersei is barely in A Dance with Dragons, and this could simply be the showrunners adding more finality to her story arc that resides primarily in A Feast for Crows.

However, A Feast for Crows already had a fitting cliffhanger for Cersei, and this is her final scene from A Dance with Dragons. Humiliated to the last degree by the High Sparrow (who will be played by Jonathan Pryce), she is stripped of all honor and pride. It also demands immediate follow-up in season six.

In short, this likely means that by the end of season five, Game of Thrones will have caught up with all of the George R.R. Martins books that have been published to date.