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 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.