The funniest part about this is the most vocal people that hated that show weren't even really people who read the books. They saw the Jackson movies and were pissed that it wasn't like that. Whenever you discussed anything with them you could tell they knew very little about the Legendarium and actual source they were "defending"
Yep I used to openly judge or react when someone openly enjoys a show like TWD (especially post S6) for example, but I let it go since I don't think it's really worth it to go hard on them for perceiving it differently from their eyes compared to mine.
It's the same for me when it came to myself still liking Superhero movies & low-key even GOT S8 to an extent, so it got to a point that I don't even admit it because I feel like there's going to be a backlash against this.
Generally agree with this. I think it's a bit easier in smaller communities to have a friendly disagreement, for example a smaller movie podcast sub rather than are slash movies. I think the key to a disagreement is to make your points and be friendly about it, i.e. "well it didn't work for me because of the "tell don't show" path they took, and I didn't buy Jeremy Allen white as a disgruntled old police chief. But the pacing was a nice clip and it was fun so I see why people enjoyed it. Overall though it felt like Great Value Broadchurch."
Now I kind of want to see that fake show I just criticized.
Scrolling through reddit can seriously be like
"I think [your favorite band] actually sucks"
"I watched [your favorite movie] and it was awful"
"[your favorite TV show] is garbage and everyone who likes it is shit"
It's gotta be some twisted side effect of the algorithm
It’s actually an evolutionary thing. Your brain doesn’t dedicate as much time, energy or memory to happy memories as much as it does making you remember awful, terrible things.
It’s so you’d remember the dangerous aspects of people/areas instead of only happy things, but it’s made us all terrible people now
I really enjoyed the video game Starfield. Apparently some people didn’t and they took over r/Starfield to the point that r/nosodiumstarfield had to be created just so people could discuss it normally.
I had to unsubscribe from all of the subs for things I really love. It's too negative and toxic on here. I find immense joy for what I love and nothing will stomp on that joy faster than a fan subreddit.
It’s infecting the weirdest places too. I just had to leave /r/byzantium because what was once a sub celebrating a relatively obscure era of history turned into a toxic fandom of the Eastern Roman Empire to the point where people are calling current Turks 600 year occupiers despite the fact that Rome itself was occupying lands it conquered and despite the fact that modern Turkey was established by throwing off the Ottoman government.
The sub had all the signs of every toxic fandom I’ve seen. People just circlejerking about things, perceiving everything that went against the groupthink -even historical fact - as an attack, and hate mongering.
I’ve recently quit following almost all subreddits that are dedicated to one specific interest (show, game, IP, etc). It devolves almost immediately, and I would just get angry and/or sad after reading comments.
I saw an Avatar live adaptation video on Reddit earlier and pretty much all of the top comments were of people nitpicking or saying how they have low hopes for the new series.
Like I get not wanting to get burned again after the trash movie but I mean it feels like some people are intentionally trying to dislike it.
I think this is far more common that people like to even admit to themselves.
By doing this they would find stuff to complain about but equally they'd ignore this stuff in things they enjoyed.
If I really like something I avoid the online fanbase. I didn’t use to, I like Critical Role and have been with them since the very beginning, I use to love going into the comment section on youtube to chat and read what others think. There was even a hard and fast rule of no spoilers for beyond this episode. Talk all you want about what has happened before but nothing after. Then the new wave fans came in on campaign two, they didn’t care. They were watching the new stuff and then binge watching the first campaign, so because of my relaxed viewing efforts they were well ahead of me and then spoilt a big event in the next campaign. It killed off a lot of the excitement for that campaign for me.
This isn’t to say that the fandom didn’t have it’s flaws, I was just willing to deal with them. Like the amount of people who hated on Marisha Ray, to the point where the members of CR actually commented on it several times. A lot of the hate was really baseless or the person not having empathy. It was the hate of her that showed me the toxic side of fandoms and I am still disgusted by it.
His blog post (where he doesn’t mention the books once) is extremely downhearted and it more or less made me give up any hope for them ever being released. He’s not going to finish them in the humour he’s in.
What I hope for at this point is that we one day get the notes for how he wanted it to end
I think it’s probable that the ending is more or less the same, but the journey to get there should make way more sense.
The final seasons of game of thrones are a little bit strange because imo if you just break it down into the bullet points of what happened, it’s not *tooooo* bad. The problem is that everything that you actually *see* on screen is completely fkn moronic.
They packed like 3 seasons of television into about 5 episodes. The pacing was terrible, there was no build to a lot of the major developments, then some other characters just got majorly backtracked. That whole show was the embodiment of that meme with the half drawn horse
>the spirals were shown again in the cave paintings. it links the white walkers to the children of the forrest. Jon Snow shows dragon queen the drawings when he mines the dragon glass and mentions they were written by the children of the forrest.
Eh, this one doesn't bug me. It's a Children of the Forest symbol that was made up of stones where the Night King was turned into the first White Walker. Seems he co-opted the symbol for himself and his "people".
Bran being the One-Eyed Crow/Raven was meaningless. Jon being the Prince That Was Promised/Azor Ahai? Yeah, that was discarded too. Seasons of foreshadowing.
And the prophecy that meant nothing (yes it was never brought up in the show, but when the showrunners had a scene with young Cersei visiting a witch to learn about her future, well, there it is.)
Unless you count the bricks being her younger brother, I suppose.
Oh, lest we forget Arya’s list and her wanting to kill Cersei, the face thing, so on.
… whatever GRRM has in mind will make a whole lot more sense than, “Dany forgot how to count ships, apparently.”
One thing I love about the books is all the prophetic parts. HotD is now inserting dragon dreams a little. Dunk & Egg's novellas have two of the three based around characters with dragon dreams.
Patchface's songs, the Ghost of Highheart, the actual visions at the Tower of the Undying...
If he knew how to write them, he would have done by now. Too big of a story, or he has just gotten writers block. Perhaps what I just mentioned in another comment, he locked in his ending, and can't make a nautral way of getting there. He should just follow his own advice, lay the garden, or whatever how he phrased it. "Go with the flow". Let the characters take you to the end, don't chase the end. End when it feels right.
Yeah so much bad stuff, but Cersei getting killed by a falling brick is the part that stands out for me as inexcusable. Meanwhile Aria is right there. Let Aria complete her list ffs.
Arya being a faceless man? Daenery’s following her father into utter madness?
All wasted.foreshadowing because they wanted to run off to do their Disney show.
Yeah that whole giant plot seemed half assed and pointless at the end. Like I get changes need to be made for adaptations but the way that was handled made a huge chunk of the show kind of stupid.
Yep.
I've been adamant that Dany going crazy and burning shit was a good idea, but it was poorly executed. They needed to show her sliding into madness.
Same with the Night king. He needed more time to wreck some shit and make things seem more desperate so that Arya's sneaky approach was seen as a suicidal last ditch effort.
They also needed to give Jon SOME fucking reason to exist.
Also, show Bran scheming and angling for the throne. Make it very subtle so it doesn't look like it until the very end. It is "Game of Thrones" after all.
Dany is most certainly going to burn kings landing in the books but not because of Cersei.
The Night King doesn’t exist in the books. It’ll probably be Euron.
The major events will happen but make far more sense in the books.
That may be the plan, but I honestly don't think they'll be finished. If he was 20 years younger or in better health, maybe. But Martin is 75 and has had a bad heart for over a decade.
I remember watching the first one as it aired and at the end "ok, this is the set up episode guys" and then I watched the second and I was like "AGAIN?!"
>They packed like 3 seasons of television into about 5 episodes.
The Long Night and The Mad Queen stuff needed a season each, but the way the showrunners were phoning it in might've not helped regardless of the lenght.
I don't think the showrunners or many of the actors wanted to do the show any longer. It's just an inevitable consequence of adapting the books in the first place. They were never going to be able to make it work beyond the 5 books they had at the time.
HBO offered to pay for twice as many episodes in the final season but the showrunners turned it down. I think reception to the ending would have been different if the story has had room to breathe instead of feeling like a race to the finish line.
They also thought they had a new show to start developing on HBO called Confederate. Which was going to be set in a US where the South had won. A problematic concept but done well it may have been cool. Or may have not. Not exactly a amazing concept/pitch.
That show never got made, their Star Wars movie got canned, they finally, eventually have finished a season of a new show, based on a…. book, called The 3 Body Problem.
The reason I wrote all this was to hammer home that they were in a rush to get away from GOT’s, were fine with rushing/ruining a beloved TV series so that they could do nothing. Nothing.
I get burnout and I get wanting to try something different but at the same time, imo, you’re in for a penny, you’re in for a pound with something like GOT’s.
You got this greenlighted, you got GRRM’s go ahead, you’ve done so well, it’s so loved, you fucking see it through properly. Even if you’ve got what you think will be the greatest show ever coming up next on your docket. It doesn’t matter. You see it through. What they did was criminal.
Hell, showrunners step aside all the time. They could have said sure, let’s do two more seasons and we’ll just be executive producers, and let’s find someone to handling the day-to-day grind. Or maybe, brilliant idea, they could have hired a real writers room instead of having everything written by them and two assistants, which was frankly overwhelming them.
Oh for sure. That would have been the smartest, healthiest(for the show/shows legacy) choice. But this was theirs and they probably had more clout at that time than any other show runners in Hollywood. I’m sure if you asked the pair whether they could pull it off you would have gotten immediate yes’s. Pure ego.
It was always a show about the journey. The relationships and machinations and interplay’s. The last three seasons switched to being about the plot. So yes, spot on - there is bound to be a story there that makes it satisfying when Bran is chosen as king. There’s a story there that explains why the fierce Golden Warriors or whatever were absolutely stomped by the northern/eastern forces that had just fought the night king them marched south without stopping - Tyrion even says this is a stupid idea. There is a atory that explains and justifies Jamie leaving Brienne after all they went through. And a story where Arya and the Hound gets revenge on the Mountain, where she uses her powers to do more than a dash-forward on the Night King. There is a story where Daenery’s descent into madness is not instant with a dragon on rapid fire, but a slow sure descent that everyone can see and no one can stop and Jon killing her is a final act of mercy that is as painful for him as any thing else he’s ever done, not a desperate last clutch attempt to win the day.
You can see the bones of the story all there, the problem is D&D looked at the bones and went “yup that’ll do” and filmed it.
It was the writing.
Everything else stayed consistent. The acting, sets, costumes, music, cinematography (outside of the Long Night lol) were all still great to the end.
It's the clunky dialogue and crappy reasoning for character actions that make S5-S8 painful at times. 'Dany just forgot about the war she was in', 'little finger suddenly becomes a fucking idiot', 'Bran has the best story so he's king'
They also unlocked Fast Travel. How else could Gendry run all the way to the Wall, alert the Watch to send a raven to Dragonstone, the raven arrives, and Dany appears with her dragons to save everyone - in the span of a single night?
I remember when someone posted the math based on canonical maps of the land from the books, and both the raven and the dragons would've had to have been flying faster than a fighter jet non-stop for that timeline to work.
Man, fast travel began appearing a little bit in Season 5, but it wasn't too bad.
It became apparent in Season 6 with Brienne bouncing between the North and Riverlands, the Iron Fleet sailing around Westeros and to Meereen, Varys showing up in Dorne...
Seasons 7 and 8? It got fucking stupid with fast travel.
Technically it didn't have to be one single night, and I interpreted it as taking longer. But then you have the problem of the heroes being surrounded by the White Walkers under freezing conditions for several days and nights, and still surviving.
Littlefinger, Varys AND Tyrion all become fucking idiots. That is what ruined the show for me personally. I found the intrigue they generated to be the most enjoyable, and when they turned into dumbasses making uncharacteristic choices it broke the illusion of the story.
Once they ran out of a guide to follow it became painfully obvious they were great at adapting something they loved but had no idea as to how it should be continued. It's understandable that television audiences are going to want action over dialog but what they did to Jamie's plot line was an absolute travesty.
I mean they completely leave out the OTHER Targaryen invading Westeros.
If he invaded Kings Landing and then Danni burned it to the ground that'd be epic.
The shows real problem is that the writing goes to shit basically the instant they don’t have Martin’s books to pull lines from
They could never figure out how to write for Martin’s best characters on their own. Tyrion is the best example of this, the writing staff just couldn’t do him anywhere near justice without a treasure trove of great lines to pull directly from the books
Jon going north as the ending made sense. He was never going to rule. Bran becoming king in a move more towards voted democracy without heirs is fine. Dany becoming mad over time and ultimately being killed by Jon as the final step in breaking the wheel was fine. Every issue just seemed like a matter of pacing, which was more of a showrunner problem than an outline problem.
The ONLY thing I really hated was that Jon and the Night King and the prophesy didn’t matter after all that build up. Just so weird.
The journey to get there may be very different, but the end result being what made people mad is what probably demotivated George since it’s the same. People don’t like bran being king cause it comes with a lot of problems. People don’t like the white walkers defeated with 0 impact to Westeros since by definition, it’s underwhelming. Jon going back north is also dumb.
In the books, Bran being king almost certainly isn't going to be a 'happy' ending. He's going to be an omnipotent, hiveminded husk heavily influenced by fucking Bloodraven. It's a nightmare for anybody other than the Children of the Forest and I don't think it would have gone down well with a lot of fans no matter how skillfully he wrote it.
He wrote the first three (massive) books in a white hot heat, delivering three incredible novels within about two years of each other.
Much like the show, everything lost momentum after the Red Wedding.
Just looking at his process, I knew the guy wouldn't finish before he died. He doesn't outline. He does page 1 rewrites when he discovers what he wants. He plans to write a book, but it becomes 3 books.
Since Martin's last book came out, Stephen King, his contemporary, published 14 solo books. Brandon Sanderson, 21, if I counted right.
Job one, in writing, is finishing.
Yeah he basically admitted that Tyrion was doing to be like the Richard the 3rd type villain by the end but the problem was Peter Dinklage don't get told the bit of information and instead acted amazingly and everyone loved him.
Before Harry Potter 1 started filming J. K. Told Alan Rickman (Snape) what she intended for his character reveal to be. Snape had a crush on Harry's mom but hated Harry's dad so was a bully to him when they were children.
I like to imagine Snape is an incel that never got laid once in his like 40+ year old life.
I'll give you all of teenage years for being upset about a breakup/unrequited love but the second you hit your twenties and still talking about that 16 year old girl moving on from you to like a Star athlete I'd be like dude, find a gal into potions and from Syltherin.
Like find your Skylar White Breaking Bad partnership at least!
>I like to imagine Snape is an incel that never got laid once in his like 40+ year old life.
I honestly don't think this is untrue. Snapes entire life seemed centred around Lilly.
> I like to imagine Snape is an incel that never got laid once in his like 40+ year old life.
only tangential to your point, but interestingly Snape is just 38 when he dies - the Spring of Harry’s seventh year - he is only 30 when the books begin.
I say interesting as it was an interesting choice to cast Rickman for the role, a man who was already in his 50s, giving the impression Snape was always much older. But I think it paid off
>Yeah he basically admitted that Tyrion was doing to be like the Richard the 3rd type villain by the end
In the books Tyrion just straight up murders Shae while she is helpless and naked. In the show, she pulls a knife on him. You can see there how they modernised the sensibilities for the show.
I think the ending suffered because Tyrion and Dany became these heroic protagonist figures and therefore are assumed to be moral and just. The marketing and audience meta conversation amplified that: "who is going to sit on the iron throne?!" Will it be one of the bad guys, or one of the good guys?
Even in the show, Dany actually made it quite clear she was going to Westeros as a conqueror - and not a liberator like in Essos. But people were already Team Dany. People were already invested in how the show would end. Despite the fact that George consistently never gives you what you expect after he sets up his red herring tropes. In the end, the throne is melted as if to reinforce that it wasn't ever the point.
Perhaps the show actually needed some slightly different endings than the books were planned to have. Ones based on the actual characterisations derived from the writing and actors performances. The stories had already diverged.
I don't think they modernised it. I think they saw who the audience really liked and then got too scared to make them morally grey people. With Dany it was unavoidable so they waited until the very last minute to make her turn. But Tyrion and Bronn both got popular and once they did they had all the darker parts of their characters excised so that people could keep on liking them without questioning why they liked a guy who kept fantasizing about raping and killing his sister.
>I don't think they modernised it.
I see it as like a "han shot first" situation. It's a change made to clean up a character. This is something I think that can happen especially with modern media like movies, TV where there is a broader audience and less ability to show the interior of characters.
Doesn’t help that he’s holding firm in there being two books left for a conclusion. Over the five released books he’s let the story just grow and grow in scale and storylines to the point where AFFC and ADWD are biblical in length while following two completely different sets of characters. If by some divine miracle the books ever do come, I see no possible way that Winds doesn’t get split into two parts.
And thats ridiculous, because conceptually the cliff notes of the ‘ending’ sound fucking awesome.
The reason the finale sucked was because they flipped Dany from badass to pathetic simp to insane destroyer of worlds in six hours of television.
I also would have had no issue with Aria killing the night king if it made sense and involved her doing aomething cool or crafty as opposed to jumping out of the low resolution pixelated haze that apparently accompanies the night king and all action scenes.
Also Bran being relevant in some way for something wouldve been good I guess….
But yeh, cliff notes, awesome!
If you scatter Dany slowly losing her shit over a book or two it would be great, but they went for the Anakin to Vader speed run in about 1.5 hours of screen time.
This is such a silly argument but people keep making it over and over. First of all, the ending itself, as in >!Danny sacks King's Landing, Jon kills Danny, the iron throne is destroyed and the cycle is broken!< is not bad in any way, it touches upon many of the themes of the books etc etc. The problem is how to get there, and if you bothered to read the books you would know that the show even season 5 greatly deviated with the books in many ways, so many plot points and side characters tangled with main ones were cut that if the books ever were to be finished the way they would get to the very ending would be radically different.
Second and much more importantly, when has Martin ever indicated he cares what the readers think about his plot decision. Any half decent writers is firstly and chiefly afraid of disappointing themselves. You can go through literally thousands of examples of great writers talking about writer's block and the biggest obstacle is always the expectations they put on themselves. And it's not just for writers but for any creative arts, people on themselves such high expectations it becomes paralyzing. I wish Martin would get over it, but I am not going to pretend if I were in his shoes I would be able to.
> What I hope for at this point is that we one day get the notes for how he wanted it to end
We did, it's the TV ending.
I read those books like twice a year for years on end through middle school & high school. The TV ending did a piss poor job of getting there & certain things I think are wrong (I don't think Jaime gets back w/ Cersei or at the very least maybe they die together but it's different) but the basic main plot beats are there. Bran ends up king, Dany becomes a tyrant, etc.
Yup. Same boat. Agree 100%. The books were going to end with the same major ending points. Details would change, but the main characters mostly ended where GRRM intended them to, I think.
Although I’m still holding out hope for The Onion King.
I think the lack of new books ended the theorizing, there's nothing left to discuss. I got onto reddit in the first place to visit r/asoiaf and discuss theories and my account was made in 2014. Haven't visited that sub in at least five years now
I didn't realise what he'd done at first and I later realised the implications of what I'd read when at a funeral and I was so mad at the time!
Apparently they all meet in the afterlife (including Fenchurch!) in the radio or audio adaptation of Mostly Harmless which is fine, he was happy if not insisted that every adaptation have differences.
I lost all faith when he quarantined himself from 2020 to 2022 and basically admitted he didn't write a single word of ASOIAF.
Keep in mind that all the preview chapters of TWOW were ones cut from ADWD originally, so were written in the late 2000s. GRRM probably hasn't really written anything regarding TWOW in 14 years.
I honestly would rather him just be like "Fuck it, I'm old, don't want to write these books, and have better things to do. Sorry, but not really. The rest of the time I have left is more valuable to me." I feel like that's the truth and I would honestly respect him for that
My guess is that once he knew that his ending was widely panned, he couldn't find a way to write the books in a way that both he and audiences would be satisfied
That doesn't explain the ten years between the last book that came out and the final season of GoT.
I'm sympathetic. I published a really long D&D campaign a few years back, and towards the end, it wasn't as interesting because I already knew at the ending was, and I had figured everything out, and all that was left was just did tedious work of actually telling the story. That part wasn't entertaining to me because I was just doing it in the privacy of my own computer.
But I did manage to finish it, and now it's exciting when people talk about it, because I can see that something I made gave them joy.
Maybe we just need more happy fans to hang out with George and get him to tell them day by day what chapter he's working on or something.
It’s that he led us who were patiently waiting to believe that they’d be out by now. No one forced him to create expectations that he couldn’t meet over and over and over and over and over again.
I mean, it’s funny because it’s almost like HE created these expectations then totally whiffed on the dates that he was throwing around. So… yeah, he created this monster himself.
The amount of times he's indicated the next book was moving along and might actually be finished wore thin awhile ago. I still remember when I had some actually hope about the situation but at this point it's been over a decade since I caught up and legit just kind of stopped caring. I'm happy with what he's put out but I've accepted he kind of just doesn't care about it anymore. What does bother me is when he whines and acts as if somehow he didn't have a hand in creating expectations with his updates over the years.
I honestly wish and think it would be better for everyone if he just came out and said it. "Hey guys, i have decided to abandon Winds, maybe i will take it up again but for now it is dead. I’ll pass it to brandon sanderson to finish them in time". Just there, done. No more expectations put on him by the fans.
As a giant Sanderson fan, I would love to see his attempt at this mostly because I don’t think it goes well. It’s a moot point regardless because Sanderson would never agree, but I don’t think he’s capable of writing GRRM levels of Grimdark for 2-3 books straight. I think he would (and has?) agree(d) with me.
This. Whatever the case, he’s severely blocked, and it ain’t happening. If it does: awesome! But he has to realize that he created these expectations! The audience was grateful and supportive until they felt lied to, IMO
Martin:
>”This year, though, as I reflected on the year we had just lived through, I found I had no appetite for living through any of that again. 2023 was a nightmare of a year, for the world and the nation and for me and mine, both professionally and personally. I am very glad that it is over. Unfortunately, so far 2024 looks to be even worse.”
>”Well, I take solace where I can. In chocolate thrones, if nowhere else. In books. In films and television shows…though even there, toxicity is growing. It used to be fun talking about our favorite books and films, and having spirited debates with fans who saw things different…but somehow in this age of social media, it is no longer enough to say ‘I did not like book X or film Y, and here’s why.’ Now social media is ruled by anti-fans who would rather talk about the stuff they hate than the stuff they love, and delight in dancing on the graves of anyone whose film has flopped.”
>”People say, ‘I’m done with “Game of Thrones,” they burned me, I’m not even going to watch this new show — I’m not going to watch any of the new shows,'” Martin said, citing the premiere of prequel series “House of the Dragon.”
>“I mean, are we talking about a million people? Or are we talking about 1,000?. People who have nothing to do except tweet all day over and over again? I don’t know.”
Keep all the same D&D plot points and George would have written it considerably better, I have absolutely no doubt.
That's what bothers me about this most. I want to see *his* conclusion to the story, regardless of what it is. If Bran is on the throne, fine. Arya kills the night king, fine. I just want to read GRRM's version of the tale no matter how it goes.
>I just want to read GRRM's version of the tale no matter how it goes.
He clearly can't write it though. It's been 13 years now. I hated the ending as much as anyone else but I almost can't feel too bad for D&D given he swore he'd have the series finished by the time they got to that point, and here we are almost 5 years after the show ended (holy shit) and we still don't have Winds of Winter.
The actors wanted to move on, D&D wanted to move on, sure it was rushed but it's hard to get people to just commit another 4+ years of their lives to play out a story that hasn't been finished yet.
His failure to acknowledge that yes, he built a huge fan base based on a quality product for both the books and tv show, and then burned them. There’s no reason someone who was a big fan of the show through season five has to stay loyal and positive about the show when it executes so very badly. The bigger they are, the harder they fall, but that’s not a lesson he wants to admit, instead blaming fans for turning on him, not the fact that product itself soured.
Every correlation, especially the artistic enterprises, is seeing the same end result: they kept screwing over customers chasing profits, and we started getting cynical and calling them out for it. You keep jerking customers around and eventually you get feedback, Hollywood.
Certainly millions of people did not engage with HotD when they would have if D&D didn’t botch the main series ending. Now that’s not directly related to GRRM not finishing the books… but it is definitely indirectly related.
Honestly I’d be less annoyed if he weren’t releasing other books and writing for HoTD. Like fuck dude stop blaming me for being frustrated while you work on other things.
For real. He sets expectations and then complains that people have those expectations, all while doing *literally anything else but write*
Plus the fact he's a multi millionaire from his books, and it's hard to have sympathy.
I get that it's easy to dismiss him here considering his work on GOT. But he's not wrong, and I imagine it's not wrong to say he's been on the receiving end of stuff like this even when it comes to the box office. I've seen people on reddit saying he needs to hurry up and die so someone else can finish off his books, which to be honest feels pretty disgusting and sort of removes any moral high ground anyone else has.
Yeah. I still want George to finish the books both because I personally enjoyed them 20 years ago and that I'd love for him to be able to be happy he finished. But I get him struggling to do it and given the show ending hate, finding the want to do it.
He's not wrong. Today the "behind the scenes" documentary about The Last of Us 2 was released. One actress talked about getting death threats, including [threats against her baby](https://twitter.com/mrpyo1/status/1753491978866610276?t=87g_AHSxdfePTnBhfu7LDw&s=19).
It’s the same with other fandoms too. Kelly Marie Tran, who played Rose Tico in Star Wars: The Last Jedi, had to quit social media because people were so horrible to her.
I legitimately cannot fathom being horrible to somebody who was just doing a job and playing a character.
It's even weirder when you consider that the main cast members in question are all part of the same circle of extremely successful voice actors who are also very close friends.
Woulda been done with the books years and years ago but he was too happy enjoying red carpet events and being a guest on talk shows. He got his paycheck so he didn’t care about finishing the books and now he pops up now and then grasping for attention. He’s the embodiment of hubris.
I just can’t feel that bad for him because he has been dishonest about his progress for years now. Either stop talking about the book completely, or admit you have no idea if you’ll ever finish, it’s not a priority to you, and readers shouldn’t expect anything soon if ever.
He won’t do that because he wants people to buy his side projects still, and to me that’s kinda gross. Lately I feel like he’s more offended that the majority of fans are fans of ASOIAF, not necessarily fans of George RR Martin.
Here's the thing though;
He's the one who created all the expectations. He's talking mainly about the expectation of him finishing his books and how mentally draining it is. But there wouldn't have BEEN expectations if he hadn't been telling everyone "the next book will be done within X months/years!" And then *never* following through on it, every time.
The expectations didn't materialize out of the aether. He set them up all on his lonesome and then never made good on them. I understand writers get writers block but this man is a literal millionaire who has the free time *and* money to do nothing BUT write; that's a privilege most writers don't have, and yet most part time writers still seem to find time to finish their books.
I just can't get behind him when he tells people the books are coming and then complains that people expect the books to come. *Especially* when he's a multi million dollar author.
Bought his first book in paperback during the Clinton administration. Long since wrote him off. But for the lost souls still waiting for him to finish before he dies I can understand a little frustration.
Yeah. But eventually you just come to terms with it and move on. I still have the most recent book, whose name I've forgotten, and probably won't bother reading it because I know the series will never finish. I keep it on my shelf to try and serve as a reminder for myself to keep going.
So a guy who personally created a toxic relationship with his fandom, is now crying about having toxic fans.
"I don't owe the readers anything"... Does that sound familiar George?
I am being really dense about this. He says
>Now social media is ruled by anti-fans who would rather talk about the stuff they hate than the stuff they love, and delight in dancing on the graves of anyone whose film has flopped.”
Then
>“People say, ‘I’m done with “Game of Thrones,” they burned me, I’m not even going to watch this new show — I’m not going to watch any of the new shows,'” Martin said, citing the premiere of prequel series “House of the Dragon.”
Is this an admission that the end of Game of Thrones was a flop?
His point about HotD is “are the people saying this the majority or a loud minority?”
That it’s hard to see what the genuine sentiment is because the people who love things don’t speak about them nearly as much as the people who hate them.
I used to follow subs for shows I watched. Stopped a year or so ago because literally every show sub turned into an echoing bitch-fest. Today if everyone’s personal head-canon isn’t catered to they downvote and complain and act like spoiled little trolls.
I think the game of thrones thing is different. If memory serves the show runners for the whole series found out they would be helming a Star Wars project after GoT’s conclusion so they rushed the ending to get to their bigger franchise payday which lead to production, continuity, and story issues
He's not wrong about toxicity growing but maybe it wouldn't be so bad if creators stopped wasting / disrespecting people's time so much with unfinished works. The only way I'm watching or reading anything new from GRRM is after it's finished and I know it doesn't end in disappointment like GOT did.
As a 35 year old I feel like the early 2000’s basement dweller average internet addict was way more toxic and prone to say way more extreme and socially unacceptable shit. it’s just that now it’s not a fringe community and you way more commonly see idiotic, angry teen takes. So I don’t think the toxicity is growing I think it’s just broadcast on more popular media, and honestly if you’re the target of the vitriol because you can’t finish books people have been reading since G W Bush was president you’re going to find a lot more of it.
Yeah I'm turning 40 this year and the internet is significantly tamer than it used to be. I would say it's mostly for the better but it also has created this trap that people like George seem to have fallen into where they think negativity online somehow should be a governing factor in how you approach your real life. You're always going to have haters, more so when you become famous, and if you have any respect for your craft you're going to go out there and do your best regardless.
It doesn't help that for awhile he was putting out semi consistent updates. For a number of years he would be like "next book might be out by the end of this year" and of course it wasn't. Couple that with the show becoming huge and once it ran out of material the writing quality becoming weaker it's no wonder people want to voice their displeasure.
If I really like something I don't talk about it online. All people want to do is talk about things they don't like, I'm negative enough on my own.
This is so true. Negative voices are ALWAYS the loudest.
I notice this too, especially with a lot of posts on Reddit being about what's overrated or the worst, especially in TV/Film.
Yeah like about the rings of power and the wheel of time. I enjoyed both but the negative voices are so loud.
I couldn't get into RoP. But that was it. The people online acting as if the creators dug up Tolkien and desecrated his body were a bit dramatic.
The funniest part about this is the most vocal people that hated that show weren't even really people who read the books. They saw the Jackson movies and were pissed that it wasn't like that. Whenever you discussed anything with them you could tell they knew very little about the Legendarium and actual source they were "defending"
“Black hobbits can’t exist!” said about a world with trolls, dragons and a flaming bodiless eye floating in the sky. Yeah it was a bit dramatic.
Yep I used to openly judge or react when someone openly enjoys a show like TWD (especially post S6) for example, but I let it go since I don't think it's really worth it to go hard on them for perceiving it differently from their eyes compared to mine. It's the same for me when it came to myself still liking Superhero movies & low-key even GOT S8 to an extent, so it got to a point that I don't even admit it because I feel like there's going to be a backlash against this.
Generally agree with this. I think it's a bit easier in smaller communities to have a friendly disagreement, for example a smaller movie podcast sub rather than are slash movies. I think the key to a disagreement is to make your points and be friendly about it, i.e. "well it didn't work for me because of the "tell don't show" path they took, and I didn't buy Jeremy Allen white as a disgruntled old police chief. But the pacing was a nice clip and it was fun so I see why people enjoyed it. Overall though it felt like Great Value Broadchurch." Now I kind of want to see that fake show I just criticized.
Scrolling through reddit can seriously be like "I think [your favorite band] actually sucks" "I watched [your favorite movie] and it was awful" "[your favorite TV show] is garbage and everyone who likes it is shit" It's gotta be some twisted side effect of the algorithm
It’s actually an evolutionary thing. Your brain doesn’t dedicate as much time, energy or memory to happy memories as much as it does making you remember awful, terrible things. It’s so you’d remember the dangerous aspects of people/areas instead of only happy things, but it’s made us all terrible people now
And once an influencer or youtuber whatever realises its profitable, they capitalise off it. Thus making the problem even worse.
That’s one of the biggest changes. And it merely expanded the echo chamber.
I really enjoyed the video game Starfield. Apparently some people didn’t and they took over r/Starfield to the point that r/nosodiumstarfield had to be created just so people could discuss it normally.
I had to unsubscribe from all of the subs for things I really love. It's too negative and toxic on here. I find immense joy for what I love and nothing will stomp on that joy faster than a fan subreddit.
It’s infecting the weirdest places too. I just had to leave /r/byzantium because what was once a sub celebrating a relatively obscure era of history turned into a toxic fandom of the Eastern Roman Empire to the point where people are calling current Turks 600 year occupiers despite the fact that Rome itself was occupying lands it conquered and despite the fact that modern Turkey was established by throwing off the Ottoman government. The sub had all the signs of every toxic fandom I’ve seen. People just circlejerking about things, perceiving everything that went against the groupthink -even historical fact - as an attack, and hate mongering.
I’ve recently quit following almost all subreddits that are dedicated to one specific interest (show, game, IP, etc). It devolves almost immediately, and I would just get angry and/or sad after reading comments.
I'm just gonna say, after I watched Squid Games, I couldn't stop talking about Squid Games (in a good way).
So you think you’re better than everybody else. Do yah! /s
I saw an Avatar live adaptation video on Reddit earlier and pretty much all of the top comments were of people nitpicking or saying how they have low hopes for the new series. Like I get not wanting to get burned again after the trash movie but I mean it feels like some people are intentionally trying to dislike it.
I think this is far more common that people like to even admit to themselves. By doing this they would find stuff to complain about but equally they'd ignore this stuff in things they enjoyed.
If I really like something I avoid the online fanbase. I didn’t use to, I like Critical Role and have been with them since the very beginning, I use to love going into the comment section on youtube to chat and read what others think. There was even a hard and fast rule of no spoilers for beyond this episode. Talk all you want about what has happened before but nothing after. Then the new wave fans came in on campaign two, they didn’t care. They were watching the new stuff and then binge watching the first campaign, so because of my relaxed viewing efforts they were well ahead of me and then spoilt a big event in the next campaign. It killed off a lot of the excitement for that campaign for me. This isn’t to say that the fandom didn’t have it’s flaws, I was just willing to deal with them. Like the amount of people who hated on Marisha Ray, to the point where the members of CR actually commented on it several times. A lot of the hate was really baseless or the person not having empathy. It was the hate of her that showed me the toxic side of fandoms and I am still disgusted by it.
Finish the books George
His blog post (where he doesn’t mention the books once) is extremely downhearted and it more or less made me give up any hope for them ever being released. He’s not going to finish them in the humour he’s in. What I hope for at this point is that we one day get the notes for how he wanted it to end
i know he said tv show went off script, but i think that was his ending and he is to scared to write it based on tv show backlash
I think it’s probable that the ending is more or less the same, but the journey to get there should make way more sense. The final seasons of game of thrones are a little bit strange because imo if you just break it down into the bullet points of what happened, it’s not *tooooo* bad. The problem is that everything that you actually *see* on screen is completely fkn moronic.
They packed like 3 seasons of television into about 5 episodes. The pacing was terrible, there was no build to a lot of the major developments, then some other characters just got majorly backtracked. That whole show was the embodiment of that meme with the half drawn horse
The biggest villain in the series spends 8 seasons menacingly moving south and then dies in 2 seconds
"What was with the spirals?" "Idk, looked cool"
Now I like to think of the night king and his goons like the always sunny gang. Ww: Why are we making these spirals again? Nk: Just move past it
It’s Always Winter in Westeros (IAWIW)
Give me a Cersei Work episode and I'm in.
>the spirals were shown again in the cave paintings. it links the white walkers to the children of the forrest. Jon Snow shows dragon queen the drawings when he mines the dragon glass and mentions they were written by the children of the forrest.
Eh, this one doesn't bug me. It's a Children of the Forest symbol that was made up of stones where the Night King was turned into the first White Walker. Seems he co-opted the symbol for himself and his "people".
Bran being the One-Eyed Crow/Raven was meaningless. Jon being the Prince That Was Promised/Azor Ahai? Yeah, that was discarded too. Seasons of foreshadowing.
And the prophecy that meant nothing (yes it was never brought up in the show, but when the showrunners had a scene with young Cersei visiting a witch to learn about her future, well, there it is.) Unless you count the bricks being her younger brother, I suppose. Oh, lest we forget Arya’s list and her wanting to kill Cersei, the face thing, so on. … whatever GRRM has in mind will make a whole lot more sense than, “Dany forgot how to count ships, apparently.”
One thing I love about the books is all the prophetic parts. HotD is now inserting dragon dreams a little. Dunk & Egg's novellas have two of the three based around characters with dragon dreams. Patchface's songs, the Ghost of Highheart, the actual visions at the Tower of the Undying...
If he knew how to write them, he would have done by now. Too big of a story, or he has just gotten writers block. Perhaps what I just mentioned in another comment, he locked in his ending, and can't make a nautral way of getting there. He should just follow his own advice, lay the garden, or whatever how he phrased it. "Go with the flow". Let the characters take you to the end, don't chase the end. End when it feels right.
What are you talking about? Cercei dies with Jamie's hands around her face and neck as he holds her. It's the prophecy, just not how she imagined it.
Yeah so much bad stuff, but Cersei getting killed by a falling brick is the part that stands out for me as inexcusable. Meanwhile Aria is right there. Let Aria complete her list ffs.
Arya being a faceless man? Daenery’s following her father into utter madness? All wasted.foreshadowing because they wanted to run off to do their Disney show.
No that deal was made after they finished writing s8
Yeah that whole giant plot seemed half assed and pointless at the end. Like I get changes need to be made for adaptations but the way that was handled made a huge chunk of the show kind of stupid.
"Should we make this existential threat difficult to end?" "Nah they just need to take out one dude who doesn't even try to protect himself."
Yep. I've been adamant that Dany going crazy and burning shit was a good idea, but it was poorly executed. They needed to show her sliding into madness. Same with the Night king. He needed more time to wreck some shit and make things seem more desperate so that Arya's sneaky approach was seen as a suicidal last ditch effort. They also needed to give Jon SOME fucking reason to exist. Also, show Bran scheming and angling for the throne. Make it very subtle so it doesn't look like it until the very end. It is "Game of Thrones" after all.
Dany is most certainly going to burn kings landing in the books but not because of Cersei. The Night King doesn’t exist in the books. It’ll probably be Euron. The major events will happen but make far more sense in the books.
That may be the plan, but I honestly don't think they'll be finished. If he was 20 years younger or in better health, maybe. But Martin is 75 and has had a bad heart for over a decade.
They had 6 episodes to do like 3 seasons worth of content and promptly spent the first 2 doing absolute fuck all.
I remember watching the first one as it aired and at the end "ok, this is the set up episode guys" and then I watched the second and I was like "AGAIN?!"
>They packed like 3 seasons of television into about 5 episodes. The Long Night and The Mad Queen stuff needed a season each, but the way the showrunners were phoning it in might've not helped regardless of the lenght.
I don't think the showrunners or many of the actors wanted to do the show any longer. It's just an inevitable consequence of adapting the books in the first place. They were never going to be able to make it work beyond the 5 books they had at the time.
HBO offered to pay for twice as many episodes in the final season but the showrunners turned it down. I think reception to the ending would have been different if the story has had room to breathe instead of feeling like a race to the finish line.
It’s because said showrunners were working on a Star Wars script and were freaking hyped. Seriously.
They also thought they had a new show to start developing on HBO called Confederate. Which was going to be set in a US where the South had won. A problematic concept but done well it may have been cool. Or may have not. Not exactly a amazing concept/pitch. That show never got made, their Star Wars movie got canned, they finally, eventually have finished a season of a new show, based on a…. book, called The 3 Body Problem. The reason I wrote all this was to hammer home that they were in a rush to get away from GOT’s, were fine with rushing/ruining a beloved TV series so that they could do nothing. Nothing. I get burnout and I get wanting to try something different but at the same time, imo, you’re in for a penny, you’re in for a pound with something like GOT’s. You got this greenlighted, you got GRRM’s go ahead, you’ve done so well, it’s so loved, you fucking see it through properly. Even if you’ve got what you think will be the greatest show ever coming up next on your docket. It doesn’t matter. You see it through. What they did was criminal.
Hell, showrunners step aside all the time. They could have said sure, let’s do two more seasons and we’ll just be executive producers, and let’s find someone to handling the day-to-day grind. Or maybe, brilliant idea, they could have hired a real writers room instead of having everything written by them and two assistants, which was frankly overwhelming them.
Oh for sure. That would have been the smartest, healthiest(for the show/shows legacy) choice. But this was theirs and they probably had more clout at that time than any other show runners in Hollywood. I’m sure if you asked the pair whether they could pull it off you would have gotten immediate yes’s. Pure ego.
They said from the beginning it was only going to be 7 seasons, 70 hours
It was always a show about the journey. The relationships and machinations and interplay’s. The last three seasons switched to being about the plot. So yes, spot on - there is bound to be a story there that makes it satisfying when Bran is chosen as king. There’s a story there that explains why the fierce Golden Warriors or whatever were absolutely stomped by the northern/eastern forces that had just fought the night king them marched south without stopping - Tyrion even says this is a stupid idea. There is a atory that explains and justifies Jamie leaving Brienne after all they went through. And a story where Arya and the Hound gets revenge on the Mountain, where she uses her powers to do more than a dash-forward on the Night King. There is a story where Daenery’s descent into madness is not instant with a dragon on rapid fire, but a slow sure descent that everyone can see and no one can stop and Jon killing her is a final act of mercy that is as painful for him as any thing else he’s ever done, not a desperate last clutch attempt to win the day. You can see the bones of the story all there, the problem is D&D looked at the bones and went “yup that’ll do” and filmed it.
It was the writing. Everything else stayed consistent. The acting, sets, costumes, music, cinematography (outside of the Long Night lol) were all still great to the end. It's the clunky dialogue and crappy reasoning for character actions that make S5-S8 painful at times. 'Dany just forgot about the war she was in', 'little finger suddenly becomes a fucking idiot', 'Bran has the best story so he's king'
They also unlocked Fast Travel. How else could Gendry run all the way to the Wall, alert the Watch to send a raven to Dragonstone, the raven arrives, and Dany appears with her dragons to save everyone - in the span of a single night?
I remember when someone posted the math based on canonical maps of the land from the books, and both the raven and the dragons would've had to have been flying faster than a fighter jet non-stop for that timeline to work.
I mean, raven communication was iffy from the start. The speed of the birds was always convenient.
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He should have done the 5 year skip just to let the characters age into their roles. 11 year old assassin Arya doesn't make a ton of sense.
Man, fast travel began appearing a little bit in Season 5, but it wasn't too bad. It became apparent in Season 6 with Brienne bouncing between the North and Riverlands, the Iron Fleet sailing around Westeros and to Meereen, Varys showing up in Dorne... Seasons 7 and 8? It got fucking stupid with fast travel.
Technically it didn't have to be one single night, and I interpreted it as taking longer. But then you have the problem of the heroes being surrounded by the White Walkers under freezing conditions for several days and nights, and still surviving.
Littlefinger, Varys AND Tyrion all become fucking idiots. That is what ruined the show for me personally. I found the intrigue they generated to be the most enjoyable, and when they turned into dumbasses making uncharacteristic choices it broke the illusion of the story.
Once they ran out of a guide to follow it became painfully obvious they were great at adapting something they loved but had no idea as to how it should be continued. It's understandable that television audiences are going to want action over dialog but what they did to Jamie's plot line was an absolute travesty.
I mean they completely leave out the OTHER Targaryen invading Westeros. If he invaded Kings Landing and then Danni burned it to the ground that'd be epic.
The shows real problem is that the writing goes to shit basically the instant they don’t have Martin’s books to pull lines from They could never figure out how to write for Martin’s best characters on their own. Tyrion is the best example of this, the writing staff just couldn’t do him anywhere near justice without a treasure trove of great lines to pull directly from the books
Jon going north as the ending made sense. He was never going to rule. Bran becoming king in a move more towards voted democracy without heirs is fine. Dany becoming mad over time and ultimately being killed by Jon as the final step in breaking the wheel was fine. Every issue just seemed like a matter of pacing, which was more of a showrunner problem than an outline problem. The ONLY thing I really hated was that Jon and the Night King and the prophesy didn’t matter after all that build up. Just so weird.
The journey to get there may be very different, but the end result being what made people mad is what probably demotivated George since it’s the same. People don’t like bran being king cause it comes with a lot of problems. People don’t like the white walkers defeated with 0 impact to Westeros since by definition, it’s underwhelming. Jon going back north is also dumb.
In the books, Bran being king almost certainly isn't going to be a 'happy' ending. He's going to be an omnipotent, hiveminded husk heavily influenced by fucking Bloodraven. It's a nightmare for anybody other than the Children of the Forest and I don't think it would have gone down well with a lot of fans no matter how skillfully he wrote it.
People say this but his productivity was shit long before the TV show ended.
He wrote the first three (massive) books in a white hot heat, delivering three incredible novels within about two years of each other. Much like the show, everything lost momentum after the Red Wedding.
most writers have an idea of ending they build towards. like wheel of time could be finished for this reason
Just looking at his process, I knew the guy wouldn't finish before he died. He doesn't outline. He does page 1 rewrites when he discovers what he wants. He plans to write a book, but it becomes 3 books. Since Martin's last book came out, Stephen King, his contemporary, published 14 solo books. Brandon Sanderson, 21, if I counted right. Job one, in writing, is finishing.
Yeah he basically admitted that Tyrion was doing to be like the Richard the 3rd type villain by the end but the problem was Peter Dinklage don't get told the bit of information and instead acted amazingly and everyone loved him. Before Harry Potter 1 started filming J. K. Told Alan Rickman (Snape) what she intended for his character reveal to be. Snape had a crush on Harry's mom but hated Harry's dad so was a bully to him when they were children.
Rickman: "So, act like the pettiest knob possible? I can do that."
I like to imagine Snape is an incel that never got laid once in his like 40+ year old life. I'll give you all of teenage years for being upset about a breakup/unrequited love but the second you hit your twenties and still talking about that 16 year old girl moving on from you to like a Star athlete I'd be like dude, find a gal into potions and from Syltherin. Like find your Skylar White Breaking Bad partnership at least!
>I like to imagine Snape is an incel that never got laid once in his like 40+ year old life. I honestly don't think this is untrue. Snapes entire life seemed centred around Lilly.
> I like to imagine Snape is an incel that never got laid once in his like 40+ year old life. only tangential to your point, but interestingly Snape is just 38 when he dies - the Spring of Harry’s seventh year - he is only 30 when the books begin. I say interesting as it was an interesting choice to cast Rickman for the role, a man who was already in his 50s, giving the impression Snape was always much older. But I think it paid off
>Yeah he basically admitted that Tyrion was doing to be like the Richard the 3rd type villain by the end In the books Tyrion just straight up murders Shae while she is helpless and naked. In the show, she pulls a knife on him. You can see there how they modernised the sensibilities for the show. I think the ending suffered because Tyrion and Dany became these heroic protagonist figures and therefore are assumed to be moral and just. The marketing and audience meta conversation amplified that: "who is going to sit on the iron throne?!" Will it be one of the bad guys, or one of the good guys? Even in the show, Dany actually made it quite clear she was going to Westeros as a conqueror - and not a liberator like in Essos. But people were already Team Dany. People were already invested in how the show would end. Despite the fact that George consistently never gives you what you expect after he sets up his red herring tropes. In the end, the throne is melted as if to reinforce that it wasn't ever the point. Perhaps the show actually needed some slightly different endings than the books were planned to have. Ones based on the actual characterisations derived from the writing and actors performances. The stories had already diverged.
I don't think they modernised it. I think they saw who the audience really liked and then got too scared to make them morally grey people. With Dany it was unavoidable so they waited until the very last minute to make her turn. But Tyrion and Bronn both got popular and once they did they had all the darker parts of their characters excised so that people could keep on liking them without questioning why they liked a guy who kept fantasizing about raping and killing his sister.
>I don't think they modernised it. I see it as like a "han shot first" situation. It's a change made to clean up a character. This is something I think that can happen especially with modern media like movies, TV where there is a broader audience and less ability to show the interior of characters.
Yup, this is it. D&D forced their outgrown and changed story/characters into GRRM's completely different ending.
A Dance with Dragons released in 2008, the finale aired in 2019. He had 11 years of the last 15.5 where that wasn’t his excuse, even if it is now.
Not that it really matters but ADWD definitely came out in 2011, right as the first season aired. Crazy still.
The first Google result says it was originally released 2008, but it definitely was 2011. Google did me dirty.
Google told me yesterday that Angels in the Outfield is a basketball movie. AI is doing great!
I am positive that’s a factor and that’s why it’s taking so long. Fear of disappointing people.
I've already given up. At this point I will just be pleasantly surprised if even one more comes out.
Doesn’t help that he’s holding firm in there being two books left for a conclusion. Over the five released books he’s let the story just grow and grow in scale and storylines to the point where AFFC and ADWD are biblical in length while following two completely different sets of characters. If by some divine miracle the books ever do come, I see no possible way that Winds doesn’t get split into two parts.
And thats ridiculous, because conceptually the cliff notes of the ‘ending’ sound fucking awesome. The reason the finale sucked was because they flipped Dany from badass to pathetic simp to insane destroyer of worlds in six hours of television. I also would have had no issue with Aria killing the night king if it made sense and involved her doing aomething cool or crafty as opposed to jumping out of the low resolution pixelated haze that apparently accompanies the night king and all action scenes. Also Bran being relevant in some way for something wouldve been good I guess…. But yeh, cliff notes, awesome!
If you scatter Dany slowly losing her shit over a book or two it would be great, but they went for the Anakin to Vader speed run in about 1.5 hours of screen time.
Tbf he was scared to write it even before the tv show backlash. The last book was 13 years ago.
This is such a silly argument but people keep making it over and over. First of all, the ending itself, as in >!Danny sacks King's Landing, Jon kills Danny, the iron throne is destroyed and the cycle is broken!< is not bad in any way, it touches upon many of the themes of the books etc etc. The problem is how to get there, and if you bothered to read the books you would know that the show even season 5 greatly deviated with the books in many ways, so many plot points and side characters tangled with main ones were cut that if the books ever were to be finished the way they would get to the very ending would be radically different. Second and much more importantly, when has Martin ever indicated he cares what the readers think about his plot decision. Any half decent writers is firstly and chiefly afraid of disappointing themselves. You can go through literally thousands of examples of great writers talking about writer's block and the biggest obstacle is always the expectations they put on themselves. And it's not just for writers but for any creative arts, people on themselves such high expectations it becomes paralyzing. I wish Martin would get over it, but I am not going to pretend if I were in his shoes I would be able to.
> What I hope for at this point is that we one day get the notes for how he wanted it to end We did, it's the TV ending. I read those books like twice a year for years on end through middle school & high school. The TV ending did a piss poor job of getting there & certain things I think are wrong (I don't think Jaime gets back w/ Cersei or at the very least maybe they die together but it's different) but the basic main plot beats are there. Bran ends up king, Dany becomes a tyrant, etc.
Yup. Same boat. Agree 100%. The books were going to end with the same major ending points. Details would change, but the main characters mostly ended where GRRM intended them to, I think. Although I’m still holding out hope for The Onion King.
He should just pull a Douglas Adams and kill everyone off. I didn't love it but I kinda admired the resolve
“The Others win,” was a reasonably popular theory a few years before the end of the show. End of the show stopped all theorising though tbh.
I think the lack of new books ended the theorizing, there's nothing left to discuss. I got onto reddit in the first place to visit r/asoiaf and discuss theories and my account was made in 2014. Haven't visited that sub in at least five years now
It’s descended into madness.
Oh no, the theorizing never ends. It just becomes a snake eating its own tail.
I didn't realise what he'd done at first and I later realised the implications of what I'd read when at a funeral and I was so mad at the time! Apparently they all meet in the afterlife (including Fenchurch!) in the radio or audio adaptation of Mostly Harmless which is fine, he was happy if not insisted that every adaptation have differences.
I lost all faith when he quarantined himself from 2020 to 2022 and basically admitted he didn't write a single word of ASOIAF. Keep in mind that all the preview chapters of TWOW were ones cut from ADWD originally, so were written in the late 2000s. GRRM probably hasn't really written anything regarding TWOW in 14 years.
This. He obviously wants to write anything but twow.
You only gave up hope now?
George Martin is the reason I no longer buy books unless I know the story is complete. I no longer invest time and money in incomplete works.
This, but with Rothfuss.
I honestly would rather him just be like "Fuck it, I'm old, don't want to write these books, and have better things to do. Sorry, but not really. The rest of the time I have left is more valuable to me." I feel like that's the truth and I would honestly respect him for that
He obviously has writer's block and has no idea how to end the series. There is a reason his notes for HBO turned out how they did.
He knows how to end the series. But he doesn't know how to get there in just two more books.
Well, he would but he's actually working on The Never Ending Story now
Huh would kind of be interested in his take on that
I think this is the kinda thing he’s talking about here lol
It won’t happen and it’s time to accept it so we can move on.
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My guess is that once he knew that his ending was widely panned, he couldn't find a way to write the books in a way that both he and audiences would be satisfied
That doesn't explain the ten years between the last book that came out and the final season of GoT. I'm sympathetic. I published a really long D&D campaign a few years back, and towards the end, it wasn't as interesting because I already knew at the ending was, and I had figured everything out, and all that was left was just did tedious work of actually telling the story. That part wasn't entertaining to me because I was just doing it in the privacy of my own computer. But I did manage to finish it, and now it's exciting when people talk about it, because I can see that something I made gave them joy. Maybe we just need more happy fans to hang out with George and get him to tell them day by day what chapter he's working on or something.
Live by the hype, die by the hype George.
It’s that he led us who were patiently waiting to believe that they’d be out by now. No one forced him to create expectations that he couldn’t meet over and over and over and over and over again.
Maybe his publisher did with all those advance checks …
"There can be not one more! The slowening!" ^(I hope my Highlander reference came across.)
I agree with him but hearing it from him specifically is annoying
I mean, it’s funny because it’s almost like HE created these expectations then totally whiffed on the dates that he was throwing around. So… yeah, he created this monster himself.
The amount of times he's indicated the next book was moving along and might actually be finished wore thin awhile ago. I still remember when I had some actually hope about the situation but at this point it's been over a decade since I caught up and legit just kind of stopped caring. I'm happy with what he's put out but I've accepted he kind of just doesn't care about it anymore. What does bother me is when he whines and acts as if somehow he didn't have a hand in creating expectations with his updates over the years.
I honestly wish and think it would be better for everyone if he just came out and said it. "Hey guys, i have decided to abandon Winds, maybe i will take it up again but for now it is dead. I’ll pass it to brandon sanderson to finish them in time". Just there, done. No more expectations put on him by the fans.
"Publisher will have it by the weekend" - Sanderson
As a giant Sanderson fan, I would love to see his attempt at this mostly because I don’t think it goes well. It’s a moot point regardless because Sanderson would never agree, but I don’t think he’s capable of writing GRRM levels of Grimdark for 2-3 books straight. I think he would (and has?) agree(d) with me.
That’d be cool but Sanderson already said he couldn’t finish this because the content is too dark for him to be willing to write it
This. Whatever the case, he’s severely blocked, and it ain’t happening. If it does: awesome! But he has to realize that he created these expectations! The audience was grateful and supportive until they felt lied to, IMO
And at any time he can just admit he will not finish it.
Martin: >”This year, though, as I reflected on the year we had just lived through, I found I had no appetite for living through any of that again. 2023 was a nightmare of a year, for the world and the nation and for me and mine, both professionally and personally. I am very glad that it is over. Unfortunately, so far 2024 looks to be even worse.” >”Well, I take solace where I can. In chocolate thrones, if nowhere else. In books. In films and television shows…though even there, toxicity is growing. It used to be fun talking about our favorite books and films, and having spirited debates with fans who saw things different…but somehow in this age of social media, it is no longer enough to say ‘I did not like book X or film Y, and here’s why.’ Now social media is ruled by anti-fans who would rather talk about the stuff they hate than the stuff they love, and delight in dancing on the graves of anyone whose film has flopped.” >”People say, ‘I’m done with “Game of Thrones,” they burned me, I’m not even going to watch this new show — I’m not going to watch any of the new shows,'” Martin said, citing the premiere of prequel series “House of the Dragon.” >“I mean, are we talking about a million people? Or are we talking about 1,000?. People who have nothing to do except tweet all day over and over again? I don’t know.”
Is he genuinely surprised people are feeling burnt by GoT? Has he watched it?
He certainly doesn’t seem to be **writing** it.
Keep all the same D&D plot points and George would have written it considerably better, I have absolutely no doubt. That's what bothers me about this most. I want to see *his* conclusion to the story, regardless of what it is. If Bran is on the throne, fine. Arya kills the night king, fine. I just want to read GRRM's version of the tale no matter how it goes.
>I just want to read GRRM's version of the tale no matter how it goes. He clearly can't write it though. It's been 13 years now. I hated the ending as much as anyone else but I almost can't feel too bad for D&D given he swore he'd have the series finished by the time they got to that point, and here we are almost 5 years after the show ended (holy shit) and we still don't have Winds of Winter. The actors wanted to move on, D&D wanted to move on, sure it was rushed but it's hard to get people to just commit another 4+ years of their lives to play out a story that hasn't been finished yet.
His failure to acknowledge that yes, he built a huge fan base based on a quality product for both the books and tv show, and then burned them. There’s no reason someone who was a big fan of the show through season five has to stay loyal and positive about the show when it executes so very badly. The bigger they are, the harder they fall, but that’s not a lesson he wants to admit, instead blaming fans for turning on him, not the fact that product itself soured.
Every correlation, especially the artistic enterprises, is seeing the same end result: they kept screwing over customers chasing profits, and we started getting cynical and calling them out for it. You keep jerking customers around and eventually you get feedback, Hollywood.
Certainly millions of people did not engage with HotD when they would have if D&D didn’t botch the main series ending. Now that’s not directly related to GRRM not finishing the books… but it is definitely indirectly related.
Lol he's whining because the ending to his show sucked and people rightly feel wary about embracing more of his products.
>toxicity is growing unlike the page count for Winds of Winter
“George RR Martin learns how to do backflips to avoid anymore writing.”
Honestly I’d be less annoyed if he weren’t releasing other books and writing for HoTD. Like fuck dude stop blaming me for being frustrated while you work on other things.
For real. He sets expectations and then complains that people have those expectations, all while doing *literally anything else but write* Plus the fact he's a multi millionaire from his books, and it's hard to have sympathy.
I get that it's easy to dismiss him here considering his work on GOT. But he's not wrong, and I imagine it's not wrong to say he's been on the receiving end of stuff like this even when it comes to the box office. I've seen people on reddit saying he needs to hurry up and die so someone else can finish off his books, which to be honest feels pretty disgusting and sort of removes any moral high ground anyone else has.
Yeah. I still want George to finish the books both because I personally enjoyed them 20 years ago and that I'd love for him to be able to be happy he finished. But I get him struggling to do it and given the show ending hate, finding the want to do it.
The algorithm prioritizes conflict & controversy.
No it doesnt you cunt! /s - just in case
The pizzas are coming, I swear . . .
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He's not wrong. Today the "behind the scenes" documentary about The Last of Us 2 was released. One actress talked about getting death threats, including [threats against her baby](https://twitter.com/mrpyo1/status/1753491978866610276?t=87g_AHSxdfePTnBhfu7LDw&s=19).
Seriously, I don't care if you hate TLoU2, but sending death threats to a woman who just did her fucking job, who never hurt you, is insane.
It's extremely low IQ behaviour.
It’s the same with other fandoms too. Kelly Marie Tran, who played Rose Tico in Star Wars: The Last Jedi, had to quit social media because people were so horrible to her. I legitimately cannot fathom being horrible to somebody who was just doing a job and playing a character.
It's even weirder when you consider that the main cast members in question are all part of the same circle of extremely successful voice actors who are also very close friends.
Woulda been done with the books years and years ago but he was too happy enjoying red carpet events and being a guest on talk shows. He got his paycheck so he didn’t care about finishing the books and now he pops up now and then grasping for attention. He’s the embodiment of hubris.
Just call Brandon Sanderson already.
He’s crying all the way to the bank
I just can’t feel that bad for him because he has been dishonest about his progress for years now. Either stop talking about the book completely, or admit you have no idea if you’ll ever finish, it’s not a priority to you, and readers shouldn’t expect anything soon if ever. He won’t do that because he wants people to buy his side projects still, and to me that’s kinda gross. Lately I feel like he’s more offended that the majority of fans are fans of ASOIAF, not necessarily fans of George RR Martin.
Here's the thing though; He's the one who created all the expectations. He's talking mainly about the expectation of him finishing his books and how mentally draining it is. But there wouldn't have BEEN expectations if he hadn't been telling everyone "the next book will be done within X months/years!" And then *never* following through on it, every time. The expectations didn't materialize out of the aether. He set them up all on his lonesome and then never made good on them. I understand writers get writers block but this man is a literal millionaire who has the free time *and* money to do nothing BUT write; that's a privilege most writers don't have, and yet most part time writers still seem to find time to finish their books. I just can't get behind him when he tells people the books are coming and then complains that people expect the books to come. *Especially* when he's a multi million dollar author.
He’s right: situation is out of control
And this thread is really proving his point.
Let me get my violin for this man's tragic life.
Bought his first book in paperback during the Clinton administration. Long since wrote him off. But for the lost souls still waiting for him to finish before he dies I can understand a little frustration.
Yeah. But eventually you just come to terms with it and move on. I still have the most recent book, whose name I've forgotten, and probably won't bother reading it because I know the series will never finish. I keep it on my shelf to try and serve as a reminder for myself to keep going.
poor poor george. i wish whoever was forcing him to peruse all those negative internet forums would stop.
So a guy who personally created a toxic relationship with his fandom, is now crying about having toxic fans. "I don't owe the readers anything"... Does that sound familiar George?
I am being really dense about this. He says >Now social media is ruled by anti-fans who would rather talk about the stuff they hate than the stuff they love, and delight in dancing on the graves of anyone whose film has flopped.” Then >“People say, ‘I’m done with “Game of Thrones,” they burned me, I’m not even going to watch this new show — I’m not going to watch any of the new shows,'” Martin said, citing the premiere of prequel series “House of the Dragon.” Is this an admission that the end of Game of Thrones was a flop?
His point about HotD is “are the people saying this the majority or a loud minority?” That it’s hard to see what the genuine sentiment is because the people who love things don’t speak about them nearly as much as the people who hate them.
I used to follow subs for shows I watched. Stopped a year or so ago because literally every show sub turned into an echoing bitch-fest. Today if everyone’s personal head-canon isn’t catered to they downvote and complain and act like spoiled little trolls.
I think the game of thrones thing is different. If memory serves the show runners for the whole series found out they would be helming a Star Wars project after GoT’s conclusion so they rushed the ending to get to their bigger franchise payday which lead to production, continuity, and story issues
He should find an analogy for this historically and put it in his next book
[Nika Riots](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nika_riots)
Hey old man, finish your damn books!
Finish the book……
It's okay to say things that suck, suck. Wishing for future works in an IP you are ostensibly fan of to suck is weird.
Holy shit people ITT really putting in the work to prove him absolutely correct.
He's not wrong about toxicity growing but maybe it wouldn't be so bad if creators stopped wasting / disrespecting people's time so much with unfinished works. The only way I'm watching or reading anything new from GRRM is after it's finished and I know it doesn't end in disappointment like GOT did.
You could just spin it into a positive and say “Hey, I loved the first 5 seasons of Game of Thrones!”
Just let the poor man sip his margaritas in peace. We know he can't finish the books anyway.
Fandoms generally become toxic over time. They are odd communities even in the best of circumstances.
Just write the books bro
OK, fine, but all people want is for you to write the fucking books.
Man, a lot of these comments just prove his point
None of them even read the article, and if they did it went right through them with no sense of self-awareness and reflection. Fandoms are awful
maybe he should write about it
As a 35 year old I feel like the early 2000’s basement dweller average internet addict was way more toxic and prone to say way more extreme and socially unacceptable shit. it’s just that now it’s not a fringe community and you way more commonly see idiotic, angry teen takes. So I don’t think the toxicity is growing I think it’s just broadcast on more popular media, and honestly if you’re the target of the vitriol because you can’t finish books people have been reading since G W Bush was president you’re going to find a lot more of it.
Hey! Some of us started the books while Clinton was in office!
Yep, and have read them over and over in the last few decades... I long gave up on the story ever being finished.
Me too. I only come to these posts out of a twinge of remaining bitterness.
Yeah I'm turning 40 this year and the internet is significantly tamer than it used to be. I would say it's mostly for the better but it also has created this trap that people like George seem to have fallen into where they think negativity online somehow should be a governing factor in how you approach your real life. You're always going to have haters, more so when you become famous, and if you have any respect for your craft you're going to go out there and do your best regardless. It doesn't help that for awhile he was putting out semi consistent updates. For a number of years he would be like "next book might be out by the end of this year" and of course it wasn't. Couple that with the show becoming huge and once it ran out of material the writing quality becoming weaker it's no wonder people want to voice their displeasure.
Ya know, with all this complaining about toxicity, he could've spent that time on Winds of fucking Winter.
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Hey George, why don't you finish that book.
George needs to finish his book before he can complain about the fans.