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.
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.