GoT - Is Over, Post Your Drogon Sightings

jayrebb

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there is an interview he did around s1-2, where he talks about having plenty of time to finish the books before the series. he thought the released books would take it to season 8.

think something happened around 2014 that just killed his desire to finish.

HBO also expected 10 seasons.
 
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Cybsled

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think something happened around 2014 that just killed his desire to finish

I think the show played a role

One issue I always encountered with creative writing is you always have some good parts really fleshed out in your head and then you have to write all the other stuff to get there and connect it all. It’s the connective tissue where you get bogged down…you can’t just write the cool parts you’re motivated to write because then your story isn’t as good overall, you just have a collection of scenes

The fact GRRM had the major storybeats ready to go makes me think this is the case for him. He had that skeleton thought out, but got stuck when he had to add all the tendons and what have you

Plus he started to produce a lot of world building stuff or side story stuff around that time as well - to me this screams lost motivation in the original project and him focusing on stuff that motivates him

Plus someone else blew his creative load for him: the show presented the “cool parts” that he wanted to write about. Now your motivation to get to that is diminished, perhaps in part because some of it was received less than warmly…so now you’re rethinking the whole skeleton of the story
 
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Chris

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I wonder what happened between book 3 and 4, where the first three were regular size books but the fourth was more than the size of the others combined and had to be split in two?
 

Ossoi

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There's nothing wrong with most of the major story points in the latter seasons. The only exception being the Night King needing a dragon to get past the wall.

D&D were hired to do the Starwars sequel trilogy. That deal fell through. lots of rumors why.

The sequel trilogy that started in *checks notes* 2015 with release of TFA and went in to production several years before?
 

Chukzombi

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I wonder what happened between book 3 and 4, where the first three were regular size books but the fourth was more than the size of the others combined and had to be split in two?
i think it happens to Stephen King a lot. when he wrote "IT", i think the book was supposed to be somewhere like 700-800 pages and it ballooned to something like 3000 pages. then when he finished, the editor had to hack that thing down and it still was over a thousand pages final cut. sometimes you get an idea and keep expanding it and it leads to more expansion which leads to even more expansion. thats GRRM. cant go anywhere without building a history behind somebody who has a backstory which their backstory characters have a backstory of their own and it just keeps growing. you can see how that happened with Dorne.
 
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Chris

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The sequel trilogy that started in *checks notes* 2015 with release of TFA and went in to production several years before?
He implied the wrong trilogy, it was one to be filmed AFTER the sequel trilogy.

Kathleen Kennedy has a habit of announcing new Star Wars trilogies and stand alone movies with flavour of the month directors.

Rian Johnson was going to do a new trilogy, The Game of Thrones writers were going to do a new trilogy. Fan4stic guy was going to do a standalone, then Wonder Woman director Patty Jenkins, then Taika Waititi, then Harvey Weinstein's assistant then one of the Clone Wars guys... then there's the fired directors like the Jump Street guys and Jurassic World guy...

These are all confirmed from Kathleen Kennedy, it's not rumours. Most not confirned cancelled either.

So we have about 10 movies on the way.
 
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Dr.Retarded

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sorry, i thought everyone knew they fast tracked the GoT finale so they could run over to Lucasfilm for their trilogy. supposedly HBO was begging D&D to stick around for a few more seasons, but instead they told everyone to fuck off and did a quick and dirty season 8 to write this shit off so they could make a new Star Wars trilogy, only to have KK tell them to fuck off for shitting GoT up.
I didn't know that, but I didn't care about the final seasons of GoT or the Star wars shit. Just never kept up with any of it. Thanks though.
 
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Goatface

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I think the show played a role

One issue I always encountered with creative writing is you always have some good parts really fleshed out in your head and then you have to write all the other stuff to get there and connect it all. It’s the connective tissue where you get bogged down…you can’t just write the cool parts you’re motivated to write because then your story isn’t as good overall, you just have a collection of scenes

The fact GRRM had the major storybeats ready to go makes me think this is the case for him. He had that skeleton thought out, but got stuck when he had to add all the tendons and what have you

Plus he started to produce a lot of world building stuff or side story stuff around that time as well - to me this screams lost motivation in the original project and him focusing on stuff that motivates him

Plus someone else blew his creative load for him: the show presented the “cool parts” that he wanted to write about. Now your motivation to get to that is diminished, perhaps in part because some of it was received less than warmly…so now you’re rethinking the whole skeleton of the story

think this was from around 2014. i have not read any of his earlier works, but saw comments this was a change in his style.

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Gavinmad

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I wonder what happened between book 3 and 4, where the first three were regular size books but the fourth was more than the size of the others combined and had to be split in two?
He got lost in the weeds. He needed to move time forward substantially and didn't want to just "Four years later" but he let himself get completely bogged down in pointless minutiae. Like what in the everliving fuck was even the point of Quentyn Martell? It sure doesn't seem like he had plans to introduce a diplomatic rift between Danaerys and House Martell considering the direction the show went so it seems like it was literally just filler to pad a book that never needed to be written in the first place.

If he were younger and hungrier he'd probably see the HBO debacle as a challenge/insult and be motivated to take the same key story points they bungled so badly and finish the story properly without significantly changing them. Even the stupidity of Arya being the one to kill the Night King instead of Jon could be made to work if Jon at least had some involvement in it instead of being bogged down in a meaningless melee with zombies, or running from/suicide charging at a zombie dragon, whatever the fuck he was doing when he got KSed. Hell I'd tolerate something as indirect as Needle being what makes all the difference in Arya killing him since he's the one who had it made for her. But GRRM is fat, rich, and lazy so the odds of him ever finishing book 6 are vanishingly small and the only way the series will ever be concluded is if it's done posthumously by a different author.
 

Sylas

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It wouldn't surprise me if Martin gave the bullet points to D&D such as Arya the faceless assassin kills Night King ( maybe dying in the process) John kills Danaeris, Bran takes the throne and John goes back to the Wall etc. In and of themselves, with thousands of pages of story, this "could" have been ok.

D&D just said fuck it, we got a new gig and we are outta here.
There is no night king in the book it was fully invented for the TV series like a great many things starting all the way back in Season 1.

Martin did give them all the major plot points he had in mind, which were used throughout seasons 5-6.

The last 2 "secret reveals" were:
The revelation of hodor = hold the door and how that came to pass (season 6, episode 5)

Bran ends up on the throne (Season 8, Final episode)

like 10% of Season 1 was made up and every single season there after that percentage went up higher and higher until Season 5 which depending on the story line, is when they officially passed the books.

From Season 6 and on it was 100% invented for the show, with the exception of the two scenes mentioned above. GRRM has pretty much free reign to do whatever he wants in the books because s6-s8 were all D&D beyond a scene or two.

Edit: I see Gavinmad's post above also has the same false premise.

Like I said above there is no great stand off coming in the books between Jon and the Night King thus there is no chance to subvert expectations by having Arya be the one to kill him, because there is no fucking Night King. There is no big bad at all. The others aren't even Evil they are fucking ice elves. They weren't created by the children of the forest as a weapon against mankind and they aren't going to be olympic javelin throwers who kill dragons or make dracoliches to melt the wall or any of that stupid shit.

The wall will be brought down accidentally by the horn of joramun which Samwell tarly has had casually chilling with in his possession since book 2.
 
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Siliconemelons

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It wouldn't surprise me if Martin gave the bullet points to D&D such as Arya the faceless assassin kills Night King ( maybe dying in the process) John kills Danaeris, Bran takes the throne and John goes back to the Wall etc. In and of themselves, with thousands of pages of story, this "could" have been ok.

D&D just said fuck it, we got a new gig and we are outta here.

Outline and how it ends with bullet hit points was confirmed for a long time wast it? But its been so many moons who knows
 

Sylas

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again both of you are demonstrably false. GRRM doesn't himself really know how it ends and he only gave them a handful of bullet points for events that take place post season 5. Everything else is really just very broad strokes, an inkling that D&D had on how they think grrm would go with it had he wrote the situation that way, or primarily, entirely invented for the show, since the show diverged from the books so fucking long ago that almost none of the characters or the situations they are in aren't anywhere close to the same as the the way the show went.

The last 2 bits of info was How holdor got his name and that bran ends up on the iron throne. That's it. Anything that happens between those 2 points are shoulder shrug best guesses at best.

by season 6 90% of the show was characters/situations/events that literally do not exist and/or cannot happen in the books so none of it can possibly work out the way they did in the show. How D&D ended the series is entirely on them because its so completely different from the books they are incomparable.
 
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velk

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I wonder what happened between book 3 and 4, where the first three were regular size books but the fourth was more than the size of the others combined and had to be split in two?

It's been a while, but my memory was that he had a huge sulk about the suggested edits, and was too famous to be pushed on it.
 
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Gravel

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again both of you are demonstrably false. GRRM doesn't himself really know how it ends
Are you saying he didn't watch the show? Because the show is how it ends.

There will be no book ending.

We joked a decade ago about how he was too old to finish at the pace he was going. Well he's accomplished jack shit since then. No one even wants to read this next book because it's been 15 fucking years. All interest has died.
 
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Sylas

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It's been a while, but my memory was that he had a huge sulk about the suggested edits, and was too famous to be pushed on it.
somewhat. It's the infamous "5 year gap" that he waffled about over and over until he just decided "fuck it" and shit out 3-4 books worth of filler to pass the time until the story picked up again. He's shit out 2 of those bullshit filler books so far and he lost the plot and has been dragging his feet for 13 years so far on shitting out the 3rd book of useless filler until the 5 year training montage is complete and we can actually pick up the story again.

Since many of you seem unfamiliar with the books, originally the first 3 books end with all the main characters entering into rocky balboa style training montages where basically nothing fucking happens for a while all the kids grow up and become adults and masters at something and then we will pick up again 5 years later:

Arya begins Faceless man training
Bran begins training with 3 eyed raven
Jon learns to be lord commander of the night's watch
Dany learns how to be a ruler (and her dragons grow large enough to be siege weapons)
Sansa learns how to be a lying manipulative cunt schemer under the tutelage of little finger
Samwell becomes a Maester

All this is happening while Westeros basically collapses under the incompetent rule of Cersei who ends up being deposed/killed before we even come back to the story and a Aegon + the Golden Company has taken control of King's landing, with assistance from the Martell's of Dorne.

he couldn't figure out how to do a "5 years later..." skip while at the same time explaining how the Lannisters (outside of Tyrion, who is serving as hand of the queen for Dany) have all been wiped out and Dorne/golden company alliance now rules Westeros lead by Aegon fucking Targaryen (the first born son of Dany's brother Rhaegar, rightful king of Westeros, allegedly killed during the lannister sacking of king's landing by the mountain, except he was secretly swapped and escaped to Essos just like the mad king's other children were after Rhaegar fell). Plus you have the falling out between Dany and Dorne (to explain why Dany feels betrayed by their actions) and you have all the shit going on with the ironborn (explaining where all the fleets come from) and etc etc.

So when Dany finally comes to Westeros to find the war has been over, it's already been conquered by her Nephew who has a better claim to the throne anyway and everyone just wants peace and to lick their wounds and isn't interested in her rule she gets mad and sacks king's landing...maybe sure who knows. As originally planned Dany is the 2nd Villain. ie everyone is concerned about the throne in the stark/lannister war but they should be worried about the dragon queen but really all the while the real enemy is the god damn army of undead marching south... back when the story was just going to be 3 books thats how the story was outlined...

The show merged Jon Connington with Jorah Mormont and Aegon Targaryen with Jon Snow so that's how you end up with Jon Snow killing Dany and somehow that being the end of the show instead of Dany's fall being Act 2 and the fight against the long night being the real ending of the show.



TLDR: Fat man didn't want half the books to be flash backs explaining how we got to this point, but he had already committed to ALL of the fucking main characters undergoing training montages so he's been shitting out, very slowly, books of filler setting the stage for when he can pick the story back up.

Yes big macs and carne asada is going to kill the fat man long before he publishes another book but at some point despite his fucking wishes Sanderson or someone is going to come by and finish the series for him and how it ends will be nothing like the TV show. Well it doesn't need to be, the TV show is it's own thing and diverged so completely from the books that the books cannot possibly end that way.
 
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Cybsled

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What will really happen:

Someone else is going to finish the books, like Dune kept going after Frank Herbert died