spockvarietyhour asked:

So what happens, if anything to Shireen in the books

airyairyquitecontrary-deactivat answered:

So far nothing really bad has happened to Shireen (apart from being very sick as a baby and having an uptight born-again religious mum and a boring dad with a stick up his bum).  She hasn’t had as much page time as she’s had screen time, and while book Shireen also teaches Davos to read while he’s in prison and is a sweetie-pie, she doesn’t teach Gilly to read or interact with her and Sam (we also never hear of Gilly having had sisters who caught grey plague).  

In the books, a character who I don’t think made it to TV, a wildling woman called Val, tells Jon Snow that Shireen is half-dead because of her greyscale and should be put down, less because she’s an active risk of contagion (which she hasn’t been for years), more because there’s a kind of superstitious feeling among the wildlings that she’s contaminated and unlucky to have around.  Jon disagrees with Val, and to date nothing further has been said or done about it.  Shireen is still in her mother’s care, and her father has expressed a wish that if he doesn’t survive, his followers will continue to press his claim and place Shireen on the Iron Throne as his heir.  

Book Shireen also has a few friends that aren’t present in the TV series, like her cousin Edric Storm, one of Robert Baratheon’s many bastard children who was fostered at Dragonstone.  In the books, it was Edric, not Gendry, whose blood (all of it) Melisandre wanted to use to attack the usurping kings, and Edric who Davos smuggled away and saved because he couldn’t countenance hurting or killing a child to win a kingdom.  (Edric is a child and there was nothing sexual about what Mel had planned for him, but you know how the TV show likes to pour on the tits.)

Shireen is usually accompanied by the Baratheon family’s fool, Patchface, who may or may not be unspeakably sinister, we’re not sure yet.  He didn’t make it to the screen either.