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.
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.