They openly admit to not understanding the major plot points of the book. "The scope was too big. It was about the scenes we were trying to depict and the show was about power."
I'm going to play Devil's Advocate here for a bit. 1) If not for Benioff and Weiss, there is no show. Period. It's not as if they beat out JJ Abrams and Guillermo del Toro back in 2008 to get this pilot. This means may people ITT, myself include, have still never heard of ASOIAF. 2) If they had pitched the entire scope of ASOIAF to HBO in the beginning, the show probably never gets made. 3) GOT became the biggest show in television history, so it's hard to see, from D&D's perspective, that the decision to play for NFL players instead of neckbeards was a bad one. 4) I'm not going to defend them on not bothering to understand the themes and characters (holy shit) or not hiring writers once the show became so big (holy double shit) but I feel we can't shit on the later seasons without acknowledging all the great scenes, episodes and seasons that came before them. Yes, they were going off the source material, but refer back to Point 1 and repeat the process over again.
Gonna fight you on point 3. There basically is no magic in book 1, so it wasn't an issue for the show at that point. And once you've expanded the fan base you can bring in the neckbeard stuff! If the moms and NFL players are invested in the show, they will accept the neckbeard stuff. And to satisfy the story that it appears GRRM is working on, you are going to need some neckbeard stuff. If they were always going to be embarrassed of the Bran storyline, then just kill him off before he gets to the Three Eyed Raven.
Imagine living in a world where Avengers Endgame (a time-travel, universe-spanning, comic book story) is the biggest movie ever and saying "we didn't want fantasy because it doesn't appeal to people"
Started reading that Twitter thread, then just rage quit. I'm choosing to remember only the first 5 seasons.
I don't disagree with you. In fact, I do agree with you. I just don't think D&D view it as a mistake and I think they'd have a hard time viewing it as such given the show's popularity.
I think even 15 years ago was a different time in this respect. GoT oddly did yeoman’s work to mainstream fantasy yet was ashamed of it and popularized it so much that by the end of its run that shame looked strange
There are more neckbeards than nfl players so I don’t get that decision. Probably more moms than neckbeards though tbh.
The neckbeards will largely watch either way. They’ll bitch online, but that’s still revenue. There’s a lot more revenue to be gained in mainstreaming. that being said, i don’t think DD did it for that reason. It’s more their natural aversion to those elements
assuming they consider themselves artists, their admissions are pretty embarrassing. if they’re just in it for the paycheck then they nailed it.
FWIW Charles Dance is on the latest season of The Crown on Netflix as Lord Mountbatten (Prince Philip's father) and it's pretty easy to see why, because the real Lord Mountbatten was very much like Tywin Lannister, obsessed with rank, title, and his family's legacy. That show, btw, is amazing and well worth watching.
Just wanted to check in and say that the show and GRRM’s inability to do his damn job has basically killed any continued interest I have in the story.
I felt the same way until I started it. Its honestly a great read. Especially worth it since the new series will focus on the Targs.
The artwork is pretty sick but not essential. A Targ family tree is more important IMO, gets pretty confusing with all the repeat names and bastards etc
The amount of times I flipped to the back to look at the family tree was honestly more than I care to admit. Came in super handy.
I hope there is a Hell so that Georgie can go there and I can go there and hopefully he finishes the series and publishes it down there so I have a chance for some god damn closure.
https://georgerrmartin.com/notablog/ Writing, Reading, Writing June 23, 2020 at 9:38 am I have to confess, after half a year of pandemic, quarantine, and social distancing, I am showing signs of cabin fever… half of which is quite literal in my case. Yes, I am in an actual cabin in the mountains. No, I have no fever. Yay! For the present at least, I am healthy… for an out-of-shape guy of 71, at least … and doing all I can to stay that way. If nothing else, the enforced isolation has helped me write. I am spending long hours every day on THE WINDS OF WINTER, and making steady progress. I finished a new chapter yesterday, another one three days ago, another one the previous week. But no, this does not mean that the book will be finished tomorrow or published next week. It’s going to be a huge book, and I still have a long way to go. Please do not give any credence to any of the click-bait websites that like to parse every word of my posts as if they were papal encyclicals to divine hidden meanings. I was heartbroken when CoNZealand was forced to go virtual due to the pandemic and I had to cancel my plans (exciting plans) for a long trip down to Wellington with Parris and my minions… but there is definitely a silver lining in that cloud. The last thing I need right now is a long interruption that might cost me all the momentum I have built up. I can always visit Wellington next year, when I hope that both Covid-19 and THE WINDS OF WINTER will be done. I still plan to host the Hugo Awards and fulfill all the rest of my toastmasterly duties for worldcon, and have started pre-recording some bits for the ceremony (a wise precaution, since I am hopeless with Zoom and Skype and like things), but that is a lot less time-consuming and distracting than flying to the other end of the world. In between tapings, I return to Westeros. Of late I have been visiting with Cersei, Asha, Tyrion, Ser Barristan, and Areo Hotah. I will be dropping back into Braavos next week. I have bad days, which get me down, and good days, which lift me up, but all in all I am pleased with the way things are doing. I do wish they would go faster, of course. Way way back in 1999, when I was deep in the writing of A STORM OF SWORDS, I was averaging about 150 pages of manuscript a month. I fear I shall never recapture that pace again. Looking back, I am not sure how I did it then. A fever indeed. Anyway… when I am not writing, or thinking about writing, I am watching television and reading. Publishers send me huge piles of books, so my “to be read” pile is always growing, no many how many books I consume. Of course, I also buy books as well. Cannot help it, I am a book junkie. The new Stephen King collection IF IT BLEEDS was one recent favorite. I love these novella collections that King comes out with from time to time between his novels. This one features a new Holly Gibney story, and it is always great to see that character again… but there’s also a story called “Rat” about a writer trying to finish a novel in an isolated cabin which… ah… resonated with me rather strongly for some reason. One bit, where the writer gets derailed trying to figure out how many rocking chairs a sheriff could fit on his porch, was a dead-on depiction of the kind of stuff I go through all the time. Steve’s protagonist gets some help when a dead rat turns up to be his muse. So far, no rats at my cabin. Sid did catch a couple of mice last year, but she made pets of them. And Timmy and TomTom were no help whatsoever with WINDS. (Please don’t send me long emails about the dangers of mice, we know all that stuff). Another recent book that really knocked me out was THE GLASS HOTEL, the latest by Emily St. John Mandel. A few years back, she wrote a (ahem) post-pandemic SF novel called STATION ELEVEN which I loved at the time and now devoutly hope is not going to prove prophetic. It was my favorite novel of that year, and I thought it deserved to win the Hugo and the Nebula. Which it didn’t, alas. But I had Emily at my theatre for an author event, which was great, and snapped up her three earlier novels. I really liked those too. Now comes her latest, THE GLASS HOTEL. No, this one is not science fiction or fantasy. In fact, I would be hard pressed to say what it is except a damn fine novel. It is about a hotel in a remote location, the people who work there, the people who stay there, it is about a Ponzi scheme, and art, and music, and a dysfunctional family, and… oh, well, I don’t know what it is about, but I do know that once I started reading, I could not stop. When people describe a book as a “page turner,” usually they are talking about novels that have a lot of plot, which Mandel definitely does not, yet somehow she keeps me turning pages regardless. And she writes just beautifully. Her prose is not overblown or excessively ornate, as is the case with too many writers who are known as “stylists,” but… it is just lovely, haunting and evocative and immersive… I guess you can say I am a big Emily St. John Mandel fanboy. I look forward to whatever she writes next. There are other things going on in my life as well. I bought a railroad… well, I bought a third of a railroad. See the post below. Hollywood has slowed to a crawl thanks to the pandemic, but THE HOUSE OF THE DRAGON is still flying along wonderfully, thanks to Ryan Condal and his writers, and the tireless Ti Mikkel. With my producer hat on, I am still involved in trying to bring Nnedi Okorafor’s brilliant WHO FEARS DEATH to the small screen, and relaunch the WILD CARDS tv project. We have feature films in development adapted from my stories “Sandkings” and “The Ice Dragon” and “The Lost Lands,” television shows in development based on works by Roger Zelazny and Tony Hillerman, there are the secret shorts we’re doing that… well, no, if I spilled that, it wouldn’t be secret. But up here on the mountain, all of that that seems very distant, and much of it has stuttered to a halt in any case, until Covid goes away. Mostly, it’s just me in Westeros, with occasional side trips to other places in the pages of a great book. Now you will have to excuse me. Arya is calling. I think she means to kill someone.
"I can always visit Wellington next year, when I hope that both Covid-19 and THE WINDS OF WINTER will be done."
at this point when competed with the show, where would we expect tWoW to leave off if it was ever finished. Battle of the Bastards?
The thought of having to reread AFFC and ADWD if not the entire series eventually is so off putting. Once upon a time I was looking forward to the reread in preparation for WOW. Now it just makes me mad
I think back like two years and am kinda shocked and depressed at how my interest in the story has died thanks to D&D and GRRM. It sucks.
What upsets me the most about the final season is the fact I can see how GRRM could get to that ending and it would make sense. Dany loses her shit (probably because Young Griff already holds King's Landing when she gets there), and Jon ends up killing her. Jon abdicates the throne. Bran is somehow made king. The reader then realizes "Bran" no longer exists and whatever he has become orchestrated everything to eventually become king. Basically, the "good guys" think they won in the end, but, in reality, they were all manipulated into putting something no longer human on the throne.
I honestly don't think the "who will sit on the throne last" thing will end up nearly as important in the books as it was in the show. The show was called "Game of Thrones" and it presented a dumbed-down version of the world and its plot, with the whole season 8 campaign being about who would sit on the pointy chair last, and nothing else. The books are going to treat the threat of the Others with a lot more significance than a single battle in pitch black.
I'm at the I don't give a fuck anymore stage. Season 8 so absolutely murdered any interest I had that I don't even give a shit how things play out in the books anymore.
I think I'll probably wait till the series is finished, assuming that ever happens. I just can't see myself reading the other books to refresh before reading WoW and then waiting to see if another book is finally written.
Yeah I'm too deep into The Expanse to go back to Westeros for a few months of catching up. Then again, if I were to wait until A Dream of Spring, assuming Martin lived to be 107 to finish it, we're talking literal decades until I would read it, which is to say I would have long since moved on with my life.