Anyway not to drag up the rotting corpse of GoT again but a detail I've always thought was so telling about the way it mangled the source material was how it dealt with the matter of Catelyn and Ned's wedding. To compare:
A score or more of Walder Frey's sons and grandsons began to bang their cups again, shouting, "To bed! To bed! To bed with them!" Roslin had gone white. Catelyn wondered whether it was the prospect of losing her maidenhead that frightened the girl, or the bedding itself. With so many siblings, she was not like to be a stranger to the custom, but it was different when you were the one being bedded. On Catelyn's own wedding night, Jory Cassell had torn her gown in his haste to get her out of it, and drunken Desmond Grell kept apologizing for every bawdy joke, only to make another. When Lord Dustin had beheld her naked, he'd told Ned that her breasts were enough to make him wish he'd never been weaned. Poor man, she thought. He had ridden south with Ned, never to return. Catelyn wondered how many of the men here tonight would be dead before the year was done. Too many, I fear.
-aSoS, Catelyn VII
In comparison, from a transcript of Season 3, episode 9, whilst Catelyn and Roose watch the bedding at the Red Wedding:
CATELYN: Poor girl. ROOSE: Every bride suffers the same. I’m sure you endured yours with grace. CATELYN: Oh, Ned forbade it. He said it wouldn’t be right if he broke a man’s jaw on our wedding night.
I always found it strange that the show added this dialogue - Catelyn's memories of her wedding night are never brought up in conversation (in this scene or elsewhere) and remain purely part of her internal monologue, so the show did not only seem to feel the need to change details, it went out of its way to add an interaction to assure the audience that Cat didn't experience a bedding. Like. I entirely understand why. If they said it did happen, or even just didn't mention it and had the audience come to their own conclusions, it makes Ned look terrible. Because our modern sensibilities recognise this as a fucked up practice in a way which Ned’s moral code uhhhhhhh doesn’t. But it is very details such as this which are so integral to the character!! And the removal of traits like these is part of a much broader pattern of the flattening of characters in the adaptation from book to screen!!
Ned is, essentially, a good person. He is deeply empathetic and kind and loving, but Ned is also a cog in a deeply brutal and violent system and often does not examine the tools of this system which he wields. The result of him being honourable to a fault is that he often has blinders on to the places where there is a gap between what is honourable (legal, respectable, fair) and what is right.
Ned thinks that rape is wrong. Obviously, Ned thinks that rape is wrong. But Ned takes no issue (or does not vocalise it) with the ritual sexual humiliation and violation of a teenage girl by a group of drunk strangers, because the bedding ceremony is customary. It is simply what is done. In the laws of gods and men, it is perfectly fine, and it is what his father and his father and his father did before him, so Ned sees no reason to spare this girl he barely knows from it.
This nebulous gap between what is honourable and what is moral is one of the most important themes in the whole series, and in this sense Jaime and Ned dovetail one another. Jaime is socially punished for doing dishonourable things (oathbreaking, kingslaying etc etc) despite the fact that they are, ultimately the correct moral decisions. Ned is famed for his unflinching honour with little consideration that often, the things he does are not the right things.
