Doran Martell
The ruling Prince of Dorne: gout-ridden, slow, and endlessly patient, keeping his own counsel in his water gardens while everyone underestimates him.
A soul of House Martell, born at Sunspear.
The fuller tale
Season Five
Prince of Dorne, gout-ridden and wheelchair-bound, and the opposite temperament from his dead brother in every way that matters — Doran wants peace with the Lannisters, not payback, and has spent years quietly keeping that promise instead of shouting about it. He handles the mess Jaime and Bronn's covert mission drops in his lap by doing the sensible thing nobody around him wants: he lets Jaime take Myrcella home, arranges a marriage between his son Trystane and the girl instead, and refuses Ellaria's demands for war outright, going so far as to have the Sand Snakes locked up when they try to force his hand. It costs him what little goodwill he has left in his own household, and it does not even work — Myrcella sails north with poison already working in her, a parting gift from Ellaria that Doran never sees coming.
Season Six
In Dorne, Ellaria and the Sand Snakes murder Prince Doran, Areo Hotah, and Trystane: Dorne goes to war.
How it ends for them
On the screen. Slain at Sunspear (S6·E1)
The patient Prince of Dorne, who played the long game while his country wanted vengeance, was stabbed in his own gardens by Ellaria Sand as his guards stood by. Weak men will never rule Dorne again, she told him as he bled.
The show dispatches him in his garden, in the coup his book-self would have seen coming a decade off. With Myrcella's death at Ellaria's hands about to reach King's Landing, Ellaria and the Sand Snakes strike first at home: as Doran takes the news of his brother's paramour's treachery, Ellaria puts a dagger into him where he sits, his guard Areo Hotah is knifed from behind in the same breath, and the prince's own men — Dorne's contempt for his weakness made literal — stand by and watch him bleed. Her verdict over him, that weak men will never rule Dorne again, doubles as the show's epitaph for its whole Dornish experiment. In the published books Doran Martell is alive at Sunspear, the marriage pact in play, the viper still in the grass.
Their chapters, book by book
A Clash of Kings 1 chapter that name them
A Feast for Crows 2 chapters that name them
A Dance with Dragons 1 chapter that name them
Where the page and the screen part
No adaptation choice angered book readers more than Doran's. The show kept the surface — the chair, the caution, the Water Gardens — and cut the works: no marriage pact, no Quentyn, no 'fire and blood' reveal, no long game at all, leaving a genuinely passive prince whose only function is to be wrong about the people around him. The books' Doran is the axis of an entire Dornish master-plot the show replaced with the Sand Snakes' vengeance arc; his watchful captain, his imprisoned daughter's education, and the slow disclosure of the Targaryen scheme are all page-only. Whether the show's simplification was mercy killing or malpractice is a fandom argument with no armistice in sight; that it inverted the character's entire point is not in dispute.
Their journey
Where the two tellings send them to the same place the road runs whole; where they part, the screen keeps the left and the books the right.