I saw an ad for the upcoming House of the Dragon and I was thinking how there was a time when I would've been pumped for GOT related content but that was before one of the best shows ever crashed and burned. I also decided not to give them another dime till GRRM finishes the books (if he ever does). Luckily I read them all between seasons 5 and 6 so I feel really bad for people who read the first one back in the 90s. It is funny but to this day I won't start a fantasy series if it isn't complete. I remember when I read Wheel of Time it felt so good to read a completed series.
Do you blame GRRM or D&D more for how the show ended? I know the Night King isn't in the books like the show (but I bet the books will have a better resolution to the dead). I also have to wonder if wokeness had anything to do with the decline of the show. Arya is one of my favorite characters and I know they claim they had planned for her to kill the night king all along but I can't help but think if the show had been made 5 to 10 years prior that Jon Snow would have had a more substantial role. I get GRRM likes to subvert tropes (in a good way unlike hollywood) but I think at the very least he should've fought the Night King, or him and Arya together, although they seem to not like the idea of men and women working together.
I also wonder if the reaction to Sansa getting raped had anything to do with the direction of the show. To this day I don't understand all these screeching feminists who get so worked up over a fictional rape but can't seem to find any sympathy for victims of ACTUAL sex trafficking. The Song of Ice and Fire is a brutal world. Plenty of men get tortured and attacked but I will never understand why men can be killed left and right but if someone says a cross word to a woman then the screeching harpies show up on social media.
I read all the books but at this point I'm done. Read the first 4 in 2008 and Dance in 2011.
After Storm of Swords the books started dragging badly, I barely got through Dance. Too many characters and places that I either actively hated (and not in a good way) or don't give a shit about, on top of prose that is like sucking cement through a straw.
The spinoff show? Not interested.
As for the ending, I blame Martin. He probably had a general plan but once the popularity took off it got ruined, and there was only so much you could do in the show. For example, I don't think Bran is coming back in the book after he gets fully integrated into the tree.
So like Star Wars, GoT is dead to me. The books and show had some good moments but it's turned into suck.
Within a month it will be literally a full decade since A Dance With Dragons came out, and The Winds of Winter is still nowhere in sight. To put how ridiculous this is in perspective, JK Rowling managed to finish the entirety of Harry Potter - seven books - in the same amount of time that it's taken GRRM to (supposedly) write ONE.
Yeah, this series is never going to finish. I doubt Martin's even written more than 50 pages for TWOW in the last 2 years since the show ended (he even said the fans could imprison him in a volcano if he didn't have it done by some convention last year IIRC, and obviously that's come & gone) and that's my most generous estimate.
Dude's done, he's been done since his intended ending got tested by a focus group of tens of millions courtesy of the show and was universally reviled, at this point he's just stringing his devastated and still-declining fanbase along with the occasional 'yeah I'm totally working on it guys!' crumb of false hope on his Not-A-Blog.
I hear the leader of Gamergate has a secret lair on a tropical volcanic island. Just saying.
Even if I wanted to pick up again, it's been so long since I read the last book I wouldn't know what the hell was going on any more. And no way in hell I'm slogging through Dance again to figure it out.
Have you read any Star Wars EU? I liked the mandalorian but after the Sequels I was done. I have bought a ton of EU books and comics. I’ll stick with that.
No, I haven't read any EU books, only watched Clone Wars series. I'm interested in reading some of the best novels, but not sure where to find a list or order to read them in.
There is a website for Star Wars EU. They have a list but I’d start with the Heir to the Empire Trilogy. Takes place like 5 years after ROTJ. Much better version of Luke and Han doesn’t abandon his family.
I'll second the recommendation of the Thrawn trilogy, starting with Heir to the Empire. It's just good Star Wars, with a unique, well-constructed villain.
I'm also a fan of Rebel Dream and Rebel Dawn from the New Jedi Order series. They're not really standalone books - they're about one rearguard in a larger conflict - but I'd read them even if you don't care for the rest of that series.
The trilogy the others are talking about consists of
Heir to the Empire
Dark Force Rising
The Last Command
The author is Timothy Zahn.
This is the real sequel trilogy in my mind. Always has been.
That's me, bailing out after book #2, and ignoring everything subsequent to that.
The ending itself was GRRM, but the lead-up was all D&D. So there's plenty of blame to go around.
The basic problem with ending Game of Thrones is there were two great battles to be fought, and one of them is bound to be anticlimactic unless you bring them together.
As for House of Dragon or whatever, I assume it will be both shit for writing and woke trash besides, and will skip.
GRRM is a gardner. He sets characters in motion then writes wherever it takes him. His universe is reactionary, but he is a cynical progressive. This conflict between the story and the author are unresolvable, and no one else can write it.
How so? It is set in a medieval era.
The People don't view themselves as political entities. Everyone is running around looking for a worthy sovereign with the proper breeding.
As in the middle ages. I do not see what is so odd about it. Even that they do not mind usurpers and their spawns (Henry V) until an incompetent (Henry VI) shows up.
I obviously don't understand your question. How is monarchism not reactionary?
In the medieval period, it was very normal. Thus not 'reactionary'. Even 'reactionary' itself implies a judgment based on time, as if what came before is less good than what comes after. But the Roman Republic came before the Empire, and some elective monarchies in the early middle ages had become absolutist ones in the early modern period.
Let me rephrase it. His universe strictly heirarchical which is antithetical to his politics, and this conflict in unresovable.
Daenerys is a textbook SJW.
She's a psychopathic, entitled, conceited, powerhungry maniac who runs on lunst for vengence and rightous hatred. On a quest to save low IQ hordes of POC and wahmen, while every competent person around her is a white man, and yet she keeps fucking up becausae she's incapable of not letting her emotions control her.
You couldn't write a more sarcastic character, and yet she was written without an ounce of irony.
Which is why it was fun to watch feminists embrace her, too deluded and stupid to see that she represents everythint that's evil and vile and incompetent and stupid about themselves.
And why it was delicious to see the shock in their eyes when she turned full on nazi - for a moment they were face to face with the mirror. All the signs where there, which forced a imcrosecond of self reflection.
If it wasn't for the show desperatly attempting to inflate Sansa by telling us she's brilliant despite her never doing anything remotely smart, and about midway through starting to dumb down and Lukeify previously brilinat men you'd think the show was anti feminist.
So I personally liked the ending. I liked how it shat on the most hardcore fans of screeching hysterical women schlicking themselves to sleep every night at the thougbt of a woman ruling Westeros.
The show didn't lose its relevance because the ending was bad. Most of the show besides season 1 is some degree of bad, with the later seasons just trash. No it lost it because it pissed off women, who had worshipped Daenerys and didn't like what that said about them when they were forced to watch the logical conclusion of being a hatefilled SJW - so they simply memoryholed the whole universe.
In the future when your children are ruled over by a critical theory theocracy the banned DVDs will trade for a months rations on the black market.
I hated how they rushed the last two seasons but when Dany gave that speech I was thinking the exact thing. She is the logical conclusion of SJW nonsense
Eh, taking offense at slavery is very much out of place in the world in question, particularly because she did not have a reason for being offended by slavery. It is often stressed that close to no one objected to the institution of slavery until the 18th century, although slavery was banned in certain jurisdictions, and you could generally not enslave co-religionists. It is probably the usual 'Murrican 'slavery' nonsense.
Daenerys is not a SJW, because she was actually trying to do good. I do not think that is true for our sociopathic friends. You may say that like her, they do terrible things in the name of ideals, but I am not sure that these are ideals they actually hold.
Medieval laws of war allow you to slaughter everyone in a city that is taken by storm. It's not considered charming or edifying, but it's certainly not "Nazi".
It made little sense. You seem to like it because it upset the right people. But there was little grounding for what happened. It came out of the blue and for no reason at all. And it seems to me that Bran is the true villain, if you think it out.
When you study the world history of slavery it is pretty amazing that objections to it only started on a large scale in around the 1700s
That's actually not entirely true. St. Thomas Aquinas taught that slavery was a sin in the 13th century. Several Medieval and Renaissance popes condemned slavery, as well. On the Eastern side of Christianity, slavery was mostly phased out by the 11th century in the Byzantine Empire.
So in short, the institutional powers of the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church were greatly responsible for the end of slavery in Europe. (Serfdom wasn't much better, but it was progress.) I suspect that anti-Christian bias is a big reason why pre-Enlightment abolitionism is swept under the rug.
Thank you! I didn’t know that. I’ve been meaning to read up more on St Thomas Aquinas. I remember Thomas Sowell saying that it would be very beneficial to American students to teach slavery from a global perspective as well as talking about current day slavery. But you are right. The heads of school boards would not want to discuss church officials helping to end slavery.
Well I dissagree. I think it made sense. She was always a dictator in the making, reluctantly saying and doing what she had to do to get what she wants. And then when it was in her reach she grabbed it.
She didn't want to take power and then rule with a bunch of senators and commitees and negotiate between interest groups and sit in on meetings.
She wanted to rule with absolute power, and for that she needed to be feared. So the mask came off. The slaughter of the city was nessecary, not only to rule out any hope of a challenge, and to make it clear that she was the sole power, but also because she wanted to be a deity and the people of Kings Landing were never going to adore her. This was a convenient way to make room for the hordes of immigrants she was going to import to worship her.
And "she wanted to do good". No, I don't think so. She "freed" the slaves had them do her bidding. This is like freeing the slaves in America and then putting them to work picking cotton under even harsher disiplin.
If she was good she wouldn't have ruthlessly destroyed entire societies to fix a wrong. This is classic SJW stuff - there's a thing we don't like, therefore we must burn it all to the ground. She wouldn't have crusified an entire people if she wasn't a monster. She wouldn't fail to show mercy. She wouldn't take rightous pleasure in the suffering of others.
And yes I did like the ending mostly because it ruined a massive global feminist wank session, but I also think it's a completely an ok plot twist, with a lot of foreshadowing. Maybe I wasn't much surprised because I already saw her as a feminist icon SJW, and thus always assumed that behind the mask lived a hateful and wretched creature filled with ruthless rightousness and genocidal intent. More pleasently surprised that the showrunners had the balls to portray SJWs as they truly are.
Now everything that had to do with the ice zombies on the other hand, and Arya's pretty much entire story (which had so much potential until she developed superpowers and became a wizard), the Bran "journey", all that really makes no sense and is just absolute garbage they came up with on the spot.
In what way? I don't remember much of him. His story atch was so excrutiatingly boring that I was half zoned out during most of it.
Eh... I don't regard that as a bad thing. Interest groups are a grave evil, and they would not exist in a medieval world to begin with. Interests would exist, but they are the grandees and magnates.
No ruler will survive if he is not feared. It is a lesson as old as Machiavelli. Robert Baratheon said so himself. It is not out of love for the ruler that they behave themselves, but for fear of consequences when they do not. When Daenerys attempted to be loved, then bad things happened.
That was not clear to me.
The mere fact that they were free meant that they were also free to refuse to do her bidding. They followed her voluntarily, which is what freedom is.
This part is true. One of the bad legacies of the French Revolution.
Yes, it was extremely boring. But he made sure to destroy Daenerys' state of mind by telling Jon of his true identity at the most inopportune moment, probably knowing what would happen as a result and that he would become king.
The show killed the story for me. I don’t care any longer.
I don’t know what to say at this point that this is a real thing.
Plenty of blame to go around, but I actually fault GRRM a bit more than D&D. The latter signed on to adapt his work, not create something original of their own, and pretty much nobody in 2011 foresaw Martin failing to release The Winds Of Winter all decade. (The most pessimistic estimates I had seen before GoT started airing was that it'd take him about 5 years, which was the gap between A Storm Of Swords & A Feast For Crows)
D&D could've tried to properly adapt AFFC and ADWD through more seasons, which we know they were obviously allergic to. But ultimately they had been able to do an at-minimum reasonable job adapting Martin's published material and although things went to shit once they started trying to implement their original ''''ideas'''', they were never supposed to do that in the first place & largely did so because GRRM failed to get the next book out quickly enough to guide them (or, indeed, in a remotely reasonable timeframe).
Personally I'm certain GRRM has given up on ever finishing the series, in part because the show's ending and his own are the same at least in broad strokes and he's horrified by how it was universally loathed, and is just lying about it every now & then to string the remaining fans along. He's certainly found the time & desire to work on just about everything except TWOW for the past 10 years, including a freaking GoT Broadway musical.
Oh, no fucking question, IMO. The backlash by the Tumblr/Twitter woke brigades to Sansa being raped (which I also found to be a completely stupid & nonsensical plot development, but not just because it was a bad thing happening to a female character) absolutely seems to have frightened D&D into overcompensating. The show had had woke leanings before (mainly in Dany being made out to be a much more saintly character than her book counterpart), but it unquestionably firmly boarded the 'grrl powah' train and never looked back in S6.
Sansa was probably the single worst manifestation of said 'grrl powah'. From S6 onward D&D began to nonstop insist that she's this political genius now, to the extreme of having other characters shill for her supposed intelligence, despite a total lack of actual intelligent maneuvers onscreen. Basically everything she does and says cements her as a raging, edgy, treacherous snarky bitch - a combination of a stereotypical '80s high school drama 'queen bee' character & a know-nothing-know-it-all middle management type with vastly more ambition & ego than brains - but everyone else is dumbed down to make her look smart. Her character arc is a flat circle, as she ends the series a selfish cunt who actively backstabs her family for a chance at a crown just as she was in S1, but we're clearly expected to praise it as an empowering and well-earned conclusion to her story.
Arya was the worse Mary Sue when it comes to pulling off ridiculous feats, but I personally found Sansa to be even more unlikable as a character. Perhaps it's precisely because she actually has a little more character than Arya (who by S7-8 isn't even a character so much as she's a plot device for D&D), and all that character was repulsive but was still presented by D&D as cool, heroic and empowered. I'd actually like her better if she was played as a straight villain.
I gave up hope on the books about last year. I figured with a lockdown he should’ve finished it. I’m now convinced he hasn’t written anything in years
Likewise. As I've said in my other post, in the same amount of time that's passed since Martin's last book, JK Rowling completed a series of seven; also, this year will mark 25 years since A Game Of Thrones was first published.
For me, there's no question that GRRM has completely given up on ever finishing ASOIAF, probably even before the show concluded (since it had been declining steeply for years before finally completely burning down in S8). It's likely a mix of having seen the universally negative reaction to the show's ending (which = his ending, at least in broad strokes), the realization that he's written himself into a corner and has no easy way to extricate himself from the absolute crapton of half-baked POVs & sideplots he's got running as of AFFC/ADWD, and being a filthy rich dude in his 70s.
Man probably wants to just swim in his millions for as long as he can at this point. Which I can actually sympathize with somewhat, but even if the 'oh he doesn't owe the fans an ending' argument were to be granted, I'd argue he does at least owe his paying readers some basic honesty and should really just fess up to it instead of lying to them year after year about how he's totally working on the next book and it'll be out soon™.
At this point I’d be happy if he gave us an outline about how his ending would’ve been and the road to it
or at least leave competent notes for the next guy...
He has so many plates spinning with the story it must be a tremendous mental effort to write it. I wonder if it's gotten so big that in his old age he literally can't do it any more.
I seem to remember him (someone?) saying with Feast he had written enough for 2 books and cut it down to 1. Therefore Dance is mostly that extra crap he had written for Feast and that's why it drags so badly.
So in reality he hasn't done much since 2005.
It’s like 80/20 D&D/George. He definitely should have finished the books but he’s an old man who just became filthy rich all of a sudden so I can imagine he wants to enjoy his wealth and not have to write the books.
D&D are total corporate hacks that lucked into the biggest show in tv history and squandered it because they refused to hand the reins over to someone who gave a damn. Their writing talent is non-existent, as season 5 immediately made clear, but even all the way up to season 8 they could have salvaged it in a way at least the normies would enjoy.
Instead they rushed out an absolute goatfuck, so bad that even the smooth brains who watch the show in bars so they can cheer when one cgi army beats another like it’s a fucking football game hated it. And you know the rest. Worst part is that if they stuck the landing just a little bit then the series would still have some juice, just look at all the spin-offs they were about to make, but these lazy fucks rushing the ending killed the entire property in it’s tracks.
As for the books I’m of the opinion that George simply can’t them. I think things have shifted so much politically and fantasy literature in particular has become so pozzed that he’s really written himself into a corner. We know he’s a totally bluepilled shitlib type, just look at his reaction to that Hugo bullshit. He can’t realistically finish it in a satisfying way while also making it boring and clean enough for the landwhale cat ladies in his literary circle to not lose their shit and accuse him of being a racist rape apologist.
Way back in S6, Ian McShane (who had a remarkably forgettable role as a short-lived & nonsensically pantheistic septon) responded to some pissed off fans that hey, it's just tits and dragons, so why don't they just chill out & get a life? D&D are in that exact same headspace. They didn't take their own show seriously, never had any genuine passion for ASOIAF or fantasy in general (by their own admission they wanted to adapt it b/c of how shocking the Red Wedding was, and that's not even halfway into GoT...) and regularly displayed contempt toward the fantasy genre, the fans and even basic storytelling ('themes are for 8th grade book reports').
Yeah, small wonder that the jackasses who aggressively minimize or remove the fantasy elements to their fantasy show because they think the 'soccer moms' and 'NFL players' they're trying to expand their audience out to can't handle it, can't stick their landing either. (And for all that, Aaron Rodgers has made no secret of how much he hates the ending and how he wished the show had ended differently anyway) Just another sad story of the inevitable happening from handing a decent property off to talentless pieces of shit who look down on its unironic fans and whose ''''writing'''' process is 90% just them huffing their own farts, in a time when we have to deal with so many similar sad stories already.
Anyway, this has basically made GoT into probably the world's most expensive gatekeeping lesson to date. Anyone who thinks the fantasy genre is just 'tits and dragons' so you shouldn't think too deeply as you consoom shouldn't be allowed anywhere near it, if one's attitude is that awful going in I can already tell they won't have anything positive to contribute and whatever opinions they might have about the genre and works belonging to it hold no value, just as I can tell dogshit neither tastes good nor has any health benefit on sight. It'd be real nice if that shallow, disrespectful and frankly cancerous mentality burned right down with GoT itself so it won't be around to destroy the next generation of big-budget fantasy TV in another 30 years in the exact same way, because right now GoT's downfall seems to have rendered the 2020s fantasy boom I had thought would happen pretty much totally stillborn.
I blame whoever it was that decided to change the first night of Khal Drogo and Daenerys from him "buttering her biscuit until she says yes", to "he simply has his way with her" for the show.
As for the book, I believe that GRRM delayed it out of spite if some of the rumors about D&D huffing their own farts is to be believe. Also, people do realize that GRRM doesn't DO hard outlines, right?
While being a comment coming from another huffer, Pedro Pascal [Oberyn Martell in the show] said D&D would often just be fucking about backstage on their phones surrounded by groupies rather than bothering to do their jobs regarding the show.
Obviously Dumb and Dumber. GRRM wanted to go on for many more seasons. And most of the problem was not in the poverty of the writing, but the plotlines that simply did not make any sense whatsoever. Sheer stupidity any moron could have prevented.
Come now, it's for the same reason as the race stuff. None of this is about concern for any sort of victim. It's about concern for themselves, their social standing, their virtue-signaling, and for many activists, their pocketbooks.
When they watch a show, they get upset when they see Sansa get raped. So they whine. The women who are sex trafficked and raped by Muslim rape gangs, well those these people can simply tune out. So it doesn't bother them as much.
As usual, your mistake is in assuming that these people are honest and decent like you.
Good points all around.
You're a good man, Theon.
Forget all that faceless man / skin mask non-sense and just fly in out of the darkness!
The word is that GRRM refuses to be in the same room as D&D and has been that way for a good few years before the finale. And there's plenty of rumors of D&D creeping on the young and naked women but it's Hollywood so it'd be more surprising if they didn't.
The resolution of GoT is much simpler though. D&D started getting much better paid offers to do other projects, and so they decided to rush Game of Thrones to an end so they could go get that money. My guess is they were too proud to let someone else take over, which is a common trope among showrunners.
Just assume everything they said about planning and resolutions is BS, because it probably is.
Side question: is wheel of time good? Are there any other fantasy or sci-fi series you recommend that aren’t SJW nonsense? I want to get back into this genre. Thanks!
I enjoyed wheel of time. Now it’s 14 books so it’s a time commitment. I don’t trust Amazon to adapt it. But yes. I would recommend it
Thanks! Is that your top recommendation, and if not, what is?
Only other I’d recommend would be LOTR
I think that the fat bastard should write more and do less interviews and collaborations.
Difficult question, the first few seasons were really good, but when the material ran out you could clearly see who ran the circus. Even a retard can make a good adaptation, but it takes at least a 3 digit IQ to also make a good continuation.
It doesn't help that the last seasons happened when the "SuBvErTiNg yOuR ExPeCtAtIoNs" culture was at an all-time high, too.
However, it's also true that if the fatass had waited a bit more to finish the books for good and then focus on the show NONE of this would have happened.
It the early seasons this stuff was a daily occurrence, they got soft with time.
[Stannis intensifies]
Got is shit and has always been shit. Fantasy nerds have terrible taste. Swallowing regurgitated Tolkien paste for 70 fucking years has made them retarded. The books are an absolute meandering mess after the third. There are zero new ideas, zero intelligent commentary, and hey now there is zero payoff. Complete waste of time. Oh and now almost all of fantasy has leaned into the tween girl market, so have fun with that. I have 2 nieces essentially reading rape porn now, cool.
Well I’m about to read the Lord of the Ring Trilogy. Can you recommend and good classic fantasy?
If you want a reading list for classic Fantasy definitely hit the list from Appendix N that Gary Gygax wrote. It gives a good overview of the genre and touches on some influential yet lesser known works. I would also recommend the Kane series by Karl Edward Wagner and pretty much anything written by Robert E Howard.
Will do. Thanks! I recently bought the complete Conan stories by Howard and I am going to check out his other characters
No. "Classic fantasy" was always for children. If you are looking for fantasy, you might as well skip a beat and just read manga or historical fiction. If you have never read from the genre and are just looking for the bones then yeah read all of Tolkien, Lewis, and Guin. Utter waste of time imo though. It is paradoxically dated and suffers.
Ok cool. Thanks. Yea I love sci-fi.