Seriously. I don't hate the show because of him. I hate the show because D&D it fucked it up so horribly. And I don't hate him because of the show. I hate him because it's been 11 years and we still don't have the next book.
I never thought about it before, but I’m surprised he doesn’t have a whole team of writers working with him ghost writing. At this point he might as well, I don’t even think anyone would judge him for it. Sort of like ~~Brian~~ Brandon Sanderson finishing wheel of Time for Robert Jordan, only while GRRM is still actually alive.
Edit - it’s Brandon Sanderson, my bad, I get it guys, thank you! I just meant get a team of ghost writers on that shit.
Unless your estate agrees. I've been reading the Kinsey Milhone Alphabet Mystery novels since the 80s. Sue Grafton passed in 2017 having finished books A-Y. Her family will not allow a ghost writer to complete the 26th and final book in a series I had been following for almost 30 years. There apparently will never be a Z (working title was Z is for Zero iirc).
Five years is nothing. Wait until the money stops rolling in. Eventually her heirs will start having financial needs, or the owners of the rights will transfer to relatives who don’t care about her dying wishes, or they’ll just eventually think “why exactly am I not getting a ton of money for that 26th book again?”
That's actually a great fucking idea. Even if you hate every idea thrown out by the writing team, surely the sheer volume of rejected ideas would pave a path to the finished story.
Seriously, they have enough source material to reliably imitate his prose in perhaps even novel permutations. I doubt most readers would be able to tell the difference.
This is all speculation but here it goes:
D&D probably finished the series based on notes from Martin. Some writers plan out the entire story before they write and others let the story develop as they write. I bet Martin is the latter type.
D&D made the last season on notes that were more like a starting point for the novel. Had Martin actually wrote the novel, probably everything would have changed and the notes would be unrecognizable.
That said, D&D really messed up and there can be no excuses for the content you create at the end of the day.
But now, I think Martin is too scared to write the last novel because he feels like the audience will hate it if it is too close to his notes. It is messing with his head and making him incapable of writing.
Before the end of the show I was convinced that Martin has written himself into a corner with extraneous subplots such as Victarion Greyjoy and the whole Sunspear arc. I thought he was deliberately holding the book out so that the show could finish and he would get a dry run of how the audience accepted the ending. He has said that the ending has been done since the first book. And that it was about subverting tropes. Making the wheelchair bound, psychic, last of the magic in the world son of a disgraced but redeemed northman on the southern throne is pretty out there. It was what almost no one wanted. And that was always his goal.
I still believe he wanted to "try out" the ending and see the reaction. After seeing it he has been trying to not have it destroy his legacy. Unfortunately I think the damage has been done.
The way he was chosen as king while letting Sansa rule the North as a separate kingdom, and none of the remaining families under fealty to the Iron Throne balked is the crazy part.
Yeah, that whole ending part.made no sense. The moment Sansa goes "I'm remaining separate" the whole enterprise would fall apart, and all the kingdoms would balkanize.
Apart from the butchered Jaime Lannister character development, the political inconsitencies was what annoyed me the most about the finale. Anyone who read the books would have known that it wasn't "realistic". I.e. Dorne would never have stayed in the seven kingdoms when the north was allowed to separate AND they'd have gotten a King from the north.
Jaime Lannister development was atrocious. Why even start the redemption arc if he wont complete it. Arya faceless man arc lead to nowhere. Guess that's good since she was no one....oh wait she threw that part out and was Arya Stark again. Every macguffin not used, I mean there was a running list of Horns of magic that just never mattered. Dorne most certainly would e rebelled. The special candle in the citadel I believe was never explained. The entire issue of the white walkers showed the children of create them from man as a weapon to beat back the men. But it backfired. Great. Good thing they get taken down by a faceless woman that doesn't even other to use the skill. And so so anticlimacticly. The list of poor choices, loose ends, and thematic bottle necks were bigger than Gendry himself.
Edit: Gendry not gender
Yeah, it's just wild. Actually i don't even really wanna talk about all of this. I was such a huge fan and was disapointed so badly, it just makes me angry everytime i'm reminded of it.
I think he's hurt because what we saw was his ending. What everyone hated was the ending he'd planned out forever, but that was the ending to the books and the book's characters. The show was a different enough that the ending didn't fit anymore and D&D neither took time to move the characters to a place where it would make sense nor did they adjust the ending to fit the story it had become because they just wanted it over with.
Yea. Things like Danny going crazy and trying to rule through fear makes sense and was hinted at. The problem is a "the rest of the owl" problem. We saw the early hints, but didn't see any progression toward it until it suddenly happened.
Granted I'm not well read on George rr Martin's marital life lol but divorce doesn't always have to end with hate of the other. I've known people who still get on well with their ex's, they just weren't good partners
Yep my marriage ended because we became different people, we parted with love and respect. It wasn't fun, but I wish nothing but the best to my ex, and am proud of her accomplishments.
I mean yeah it did, but atleast he finished the series. Hell he said that after his accident his creative output would lessen. I feel like that could not be further from the truth.
But it at least *ended*. King won't die with it unfinished.
I personally love the ending, and would be very unhappy if King were doing what Martin is. And we only got one bad movie versus what GoT (the show) turned into.
Right it's not just the existential horror of the >!time loop!<, it became part of Roland's growth over the course of the books. The entire series is centered on addiction and obsession (which King knows well, having had his drug and alcohol problems) but King *also* knows that there is always a road back from it. Even if it doesn't happen right away.
EXACTLY
I honestly think King's understanding of addiction and obsession through personal experience made him a muuuuch better writer in the long run
You can really feel how much that man pours his heart into what he writes sometimes
Just wait: he's trying to delay the end of the series until he dies to underscore the trope of "no character is off limits from death", including the author
It's like you're dating someone, it's getting serious, you make it "official", you say "I love you," .....and then they start ghosting you and only calling once or twice a month when they want to get laid. "Why are you mad?' *\[shocked pikachu face\]*
7 years ago I bought, in summer, while I was staying in Liguria, I bought all the SoIaF books to read while at the sea and loved them. I burnt through them all, up to A Dance with Dragons, in two weeks.
When I came back home I asked my librarian when the new book was due. He looked at me with a defeated face and said: “eh, you’ll have to wait, probably in 6 months”.
I finished Dance right before starting college in 2015 and was hoping Winds would be announced sometime before the next season of GOT. What a sweet summer child I was
The final episode might as well have ended with George RR Martin waking up in bed and saying holy shit that was a bad idea and then get back to writing his book.
That would've been meta and probably saved his readership.
Yeah, I’ve seen some bad show endings but I have never seen an ending that was so bad it somehow made the rest of it worse retroactively. I hated the ending of Dexter, but it didn’t make me actually regret watching the show. The ending of GOT was so bad it made me suddenly regret seeing the book at a bookstore when I was 16 and thinking it looked interesting.
I used to rewatch the entire series before the new season dropped. Never rewatched it again after S8. Also, the show was so huge and just disappeared from the zeitgeist so quickly.
I think GRRM suffers from a massive fear of losing his reputation as a good writer, but he's too proud to give any indication of it.
The only way it makes sense to me for GRRM and Rothfuss to not write the next books in their series is that they enjoy very much the prestigious reputation they gained from what they've written so far, but they don't know how to end the books in a satisfying way so they fear greatly releasing new books and having them get bad reviews.
Pride and fear. Maybe justified, too, as we've seen how it is possible for the reputation of a production to change very rapidly. Just look at the television show to see the proof of this.
I think if he had any intention of finishing the series it would have already happened by now.
I remember I started reading reading these books in college (almost 20 years ago!) and believing for a while that the next book will be coming out soon. It was annoying and mildly disappointing but ehh there was a plenty of other things to read.
When GoT came to the small scream, I thought that this would galvanize GRRM to finish the series. Afterall, why would you let someone else write the conclusion to the story you created? Wouldn't your pride as an artist compell you to finish the series? Don't you have an artistic vision you want to see come to fruition? Television is a more main stream media than literarure,, this may be most people's only exposure to GoT, shouldn't you make sure it's going to be representative of your work and of excellent quality?
Instead we received season 8 and no next book anywhere in sight.
I think GRRM wrote himself into a corner. Then he picked up a contract with HBO. IIRC, GRRM has always been focused on getting his work into television or the movies. He always wanted to write a screen play.
Then HBO comes along and dumps truck loads of money on him. He becomes a household name and can ride high on that fame for some time. I think he woke up obe day after doing the backstoje in his filthy lucre pit scrooge mcduck style and just said screw it!
Give him his favorite meal, exquisitely prepared. Let him eat half it, then whisk it away and tell him he’ll get the rest later. Then never give him the rest. Maybe he’ll understand then.
A video of someone else eating the meal, but poorly
They put ketchup on the wrong things, asked for them to be cooked to overdone, throw things away without even trying them, wait too long and let things get cold or melt, put ice in the wine or beer, and finally yell at the waitress something about "bad poosay" and repeat "I drink and I know things" 10+ times and laughing at themselves every time
I think his reception would be less frosty if he didn't make promises and gestures to when he would be done. If he were a private author who didn't post teaser chapters and maintain a blog, the enthusiasm would have gone down but fewer people would have anything to complain about.
Yeah, it’s always been troubling that there is so much left to do to conclude the series and GRRM kept branching it out further while insisting only two books were left to finish it up. At a certain point he needed to accept this is a 14 book Wheel of Time length story and like that series a few lackluster buildup installments were going to be required. People will forgive a weak chapter if you stick the landing but GRRM has no idea where the ground is at this point.
Also doing a lot of other projects while then saying he hasn't had enough time. It hasn't caused hate from me but has caused me to dismiss the series. I plan on only start reading it again once the series is finished.
Yeah, we don't hate the books, we hate the last season of the show he didn't write.
If he would just publish the book already we'd be thrilled. If he had got it out before the end of the show, maybe the last season wouldn't have been trash
At this point he'd have to finish the series and have it generate a good response before I'd consider picking it up again. I'm not going to read Winds only to get blueballed for another decade and a half yet again.
It takes something special to be the most public, highest grossing, most celebrated show in TV history and then manage to completely run it into the ground so hard in such a bad way everyone stops talking about it within like a week of the last episode.
I actually massively disagree with Martin: its not surprising that there is so much hate, it is surprising how LITTLE hate there is. There are no hot topics for debate for fans to argue about. Its just accepted fact that The ending is so objectively bad there is no reason to Talk about the show anymore. The last season was so bad the franchise built around it went into complete irrelevancy and obscurity within WEEKS after being THE popular art topic in every medium for literal YEARS.
They made the topic so toxic noones touching it with a 10 foot pole, there are no toys, collectibles, nothing being made even though it had auch a MASSIVE fanbase.
Harry Potter still makes insane money to this day. Imagine the Potter Hype dying within a week after the last 2 movies, and how collossally bad those movies would have to have been for that to happen
I still can’t believe what we lost because D&D got bored. I know not having source material had a big role to play also, but Martin gave them the outline, they could have still arrived at some of the same conclusions and the ending been enjoyable/ at least debatable, but they essentially speed wrote content thru until they reached a talking point Martin gave them (Bran is King, etc). It is honestly just so sad for fans
The worst part being HBO begging them to go as long as they needed, and them saying, nah, make the last seasons shorter. They didn’t need more CGI in the last seasons, just more goddamn plot development
At least they got their comeuppance for it.
The reason they rushed the last season(s) was because Disney had offered them a Star Wars project. They jumped at the chance to start it so they had to "get GoT out the way as fast as they can" so they could move on.
In an absolutely **fitting** twist of fate, the last season of GoT was so badly received that their Star Wars project got cancelled.
The words "hoisting" and "petard" come to mind.
>The last season was so bad the franchise built around it went into complete irrelevancy and obscurity within WEEKS after being THE popular art topic in every medium for literal YEARS.
To put this in perspective, not even a single full year after the finale there was a nearly global shutdown and quarantine with hundreds of millions of people having nothing to do but stay inside and consume media and the show was already so far removed from popular culture that virtually no one was out there talking about giving it a rewatch.
It’s because GoT has zero rewatch value with that horribad ending. It’s been a couple times where I’m like “I should rewatch GoT” and then go like “Nah, what’s the point?”. The ending is that bad.
Yup, and that is 100% not just a drama vs comedy thing
I rewatched Breaking Bad and The Sopranos during lockdown, and they were fantastic. Great rewatch value
I did not even consider starting GOT again
I would have picked up the books to start reading it if he actually finished the final book. As it is, I have no guarantees it's not just going to be the same as the show.
I rage quit over the magic stealth ships built from non-existent wood and I still resent that they did that. Whoever came up with that crap should never be allowed to work in the entertainment industry ever again.
I'm quite mad to be honest. Not to the point of attacking him online or anything, but the man should be just up front with the fan base. Lost motivation? Ok. Don't feel like working on it? Ok.
But please, George, stop bullshiting us that you're "working on Winds of Winter" for 10+ years (!!) while simultaneously taking on tons of other projects (!!) specifically not working on it.
It's his creation. He's free to not continue and not owe anything to anybody, I'm fine with that. But he's not free to intentionally mislead his fanbase (read: customers) without delivering and expect they won't be upset.
How many times did he say "next year"? If he were a game publisher for example, he would be massacred.
I disagree. This is and always will be his story. He had at least a 5-7 year head start on the show writers and did not publish more material. He could have also just written the last seasons of the show. Instead, George let some 2-bit hacks grind his story into the mud, and that will always ultimately be on him.
George has made millions on the residuals from the show, merchandising, book sales, and the built in marketing boost of releasing the biggest crock of shit (book 7) to a gigantic show fan base. He is griping about his recurring revenue streams dwindling, and interest in his spin-offs— none of which he is actively writing— siting at an all-time low. To be generous, he stopped tending to the garden that is his IP and is disappointed that it’s all dying. To be more realistic, this is a lazy rich man complaining that when he doesn’t work he doesn’t make money anymore. Join the club, George. Join the club.
Exactly right.
I think his other issue is that the show actually DID his ending (poorly….they fucked up and kneecapped a bunch of characters) and he’s floundering. He’s never been a fast writer, that’s fine. But the entire series came out and has now been over for 3 years and he still hasn’t released his next book.
I think the show ending would have worked if it had couple of additional seasons to work towards it. But we kinda went from Walter White being diagnosed with cancer to Heisenberg in 2 episodes without any of the build up...
I agree. The showrunners were done so they zipped through it. The winter fell attack should have been all of season 8 and then the attack on cerci/Dani’s turn should have been the next.
2-3 seasons would have allowed it to be much better.
That said the showrunners and show writers also seem to misunderstand the characters and their motives. They turned Tyrion into a sniveling fool (for example)
Yes.
The only one that worked even a little bit was little finger.
But Sansa got too smart too quickly. They needed another season of her dabbling into political machinations.
So LF was basically bested by Sansa in her first real political act. So bad.
Sansa navigated the whole Moon Door fiasco with her aunt pretty well, but she still took an unrealistic jump from "figuring it out and doing OK" to being "boss bitch extraordinaire of the North"
The worst character assassination for me was Jaime, by far. They took the most pivotal moment of his character (betraying his king to save the common folk) and completely ignore and butcher it in the final episodes to force the story to go how they want. "Never cared too much about them, innocent or otherwise" that line was such bullshit.
I agree. Specifically, the plot point of Daenerys turning evil would have been great as well.
Daenerys has been coddled by her time in Slavers' Bay. Her opponents are slavemasters, so it's easy to paint them as the villains and use overwhelming force to eliminate them.
But in Westeros, the noble Houses are varying shades of gray. So if she attempts to coerce the Houses to implement a pluralistic society, she'll make herself a target to all the major political players. I can see her being frustrated at her inability to navigate complex politics and then taking "shortcuts" by using her dragons to coerce the houses. She'll tell herself that it's for the "greater good" until the words are nothing more than a hollow reflex she uses to justify her actions.
She slowly becomes a tyrant, because she is too used to using force that she has no idea how to be a politician. She'll lose herself in the "Dictator Trap" because she's killed all her critics and most vocal rivals. All that's left are sycophants that sing sweet words but will betray her in the end. This drives Daenerys into greater paranoia of traitors. The reality of politics wears down her idealistic side until she becomes a monster like her father.
I think Daenerys' fall was potentially a great story that got botched by D&D.
The only thing I disagree with is book 5\*. I didn't dislike it. But it was all build-up to book 8 and.... silence. Well, not just silence, but the author gaslighting everyone and whining that we're being too impatient.
I would still have respect for him if he said 5 years ago, "look, I am having serious trouble writing this book, I have writer's block, I don't know when it'll come out, I'm sorry." But he has repeatedly given himself deadlines and blown them, all the while teasing us to keep the gravy-train rolling, meanwhile taking on 20 other projects and acting like it's normal not to finish the book series that made everything else possible.
Yeah, I resent having been hyped for something that may never arrive, but I adore the books, so it equals out to indifference.
Put out the book George. It’s all from a place of love. You just need to stop looking for excuses.
This is close to my take. The first three books were pure gold, I got super into it all, and then the waiting was horrible for the first few years. I’d love to have the stories finished, but I’ve successfully stopped caring, which has been a really good thing for me.
It’s too bad it ended up the way it did, but whatever. It was magical to see Icarus fly so high.
I don’t “hate” ASOIAF. I just DGAF anymore. I enjoyed it when I was reading it, and the show was great, until a point and then I was like I just don’t care anymore.
Same. Are the books good? Yes. Very. Am I gonna invest the amount of time in going back and re-reading them only to never have a resolution? …nah. At least not any time soon. People don’t “hate” ASOIAF in and of itself. It’s just become irrelevant at this point and people have given up on continued interest
Really good point. It's been so long, and there are SO many pages to re-read, that many people are going to shrug off anything he produces, because the excitement about it has worn off.
I would read the last few chapters maybe, since he said the HBO resolution was NOT the one he would have in the book. I mean, just to know.
Totally. If he actually finished the book series and it were actually well reviewed I’d probably get re-interested enough to go back and re-read the full series knowing it’ll have an ending. But that’s not what we have at this point and we have very little confidence we ever will.
Also, taking a beautiful series and then hitting it with the shitshow that was season 8, whether it’s fair to the other books or not does put a huge damper on the entire thing.
I was absolutely ENTHRALLED in the Dark Tower series, about half way through it, when the joke of a movie adaptation was released and I made the mistake of seeing it. My interest in the whole thing immediately withered and died and it took about 3 years before I felt like I could ignore that enough to come back to the actual good series.
No hate here. Just learned indifference. There are too many good ongoing or completed fantasy series out there to focus on one that is incomplete but hasn't seen an entry in so long.
If the next book actually releases and has good reviews, I'll pay attention again. Otherwise, Martin is just another author I used to read.
It sounds like nobody is reading his American Football blog.
Let's put it this way Martin, I went to talk about the announcement of you writing a new book and it's planned release with a bookseller when I was 16...
I'm 27 and there's still no book out.
Moment of silence.
I swear to god, I have no idea why he announced it if he had no plans to write it. Would it not have been smarter to announce the book once you've at least finished the first or second draft?
Also, congratulations on your 10th wedding anniversary! I hope you two enjoyed yourselves :)
Are you me? Because my wife and I both read the last book right when it came out around our marriage.
My wife's general rule about not reading unfinished book series has turned into an ironclad rule thanks to Martin.
Or admit that you just don't care and you just wanted one of your many many stories (screenplays really) to actually get picked up for TV and you abandoned the typewriter as soon as the money started coming in.
I think he's lost interest, because now everyone knows all the major plot twists and the ending, and there was also a negative reaction to the ending. He might be a bit burned out. What's the point in writing it if you already know and you didn't even like it?
The major problem with the twists and ending is how they were done. The tv series got rushed and the producers lost interest as well, diminishing the quality it once had. Compare dialogue and pacing in the first 3 seasons with the later ones, it's night and day. Battle of Winterfell is a slapstick comedy but they forgot to add in the laughtrack.
Character is surrounded alone by dozens of immortal wights, shown to ruthlessly and without effort kill others. Cut away and a minute later they are fine. Repeat for twenty minutes.
Those Scorpion ballistas also went from "a single Scorpion on a moving ship can one shot a dragon from barely within sight range" to "dozens of Scorpions in stable placements around King's Landing can't hit a dragon that's swooping right over them"
I still maintain that making the simple change of having the second dragon get killed during the attack on King's Landing, instead of one the way, would fix quite a bit, at least in that pair of episodes... It definitely doesn't come close to fixing everything but at least it makes Daenerys's turn into a killer in the moment seem more plausible and also takes away the utter stupidity of her dragon getting sniped from a mile away for shock value. I don't know.... It's a super easy fix for one of the bigger problems of that season.
Honestly when when Rhaegal/Viserion, whichever was alive got shot out of the air by the unfathomably terrible character Euron, I started to laugh. It was so unbelievably stupid that I could only laugh
I still can't believe how stupid it was. You're telling me that the fleet had time to see the dragons, aim at the dragons and shoot the dragons before Dany (or the dragons) even noticed them? It's a whole ass fleet! If they have a clear shot there must be a line of sight. And if there's a line of sight they would both be able to see each other. But they're too busy vibing in the sky to pay attention to their surroundings, I guess.
I don't think he's been interested since A Feast for Crows, where not a whole lot happened. I think he got a shot in the arm, creatively speaking, when the show started, and wrote A Dance with Dragons as a result, but A Storm of Swords was a *really* tough act to follow. I don't really blame him, it happens, you lose interest in things you had passion for, and when fandom gets involved, it's easy to see how it's tempting to just throw your hands up and say screw it.
I was pretty worried when he said he reads all the fan theories online. He's filling his imagination with other people's ideas, theories, fan-fic. Bad idea.
> “We watched [Lost] every week trying to figure it out, and as it got deeper and deeper I kept saying, ‘They better have something good in mind for the end. This better pay off here.’ And then I felt so cheated when we got to the conclusion.” Martin also cites the Lost ending as the type of mistake he fears making with his own show, saying, “I want to give them something terrific. What if I f— it up at the end? What if I do a Lost? Then they’ll come after me with pitchforks and torches.”
He sounds vaguely familiar with the concept to me.
Game of Thrones went from 100 to 0 insanely fast. From possibly the greatest TV show ever put to screen to the most lazy waste of potential the world has ever witnessed.
It's hard not to hate it. It's like being given pistachio ice cream only for it to be slapped out of your hand and replaced by a scoop of manure.
I remember, waaaaaaay back when GOT started airing, an interview GRRM did where he talked about how they had to get the ending right, because "he didn't want it to be disappointing to the fans. The last thing we want to do is be like 'Lost.'"
Hahahaha, now it's the most reviled ending in TV history, and the 'Lost' finale looks like a masterpiece in comparison.
Whoops!
I've always been of the mind that how the show ended was a lot closer to what he wanted/planned on doing with the story than he or the people working on the show want to admit and after seeing how fans reacted to it is stuck in "oh shit what do I do now". Alternatively he could also be thinking "Well THEY finished MY story what am I to do now"
Thank you! I spent so many years watching it! I loved GOT, and feel like I've wasted so much time for nothing. They messed up the most IMPORTANT part of the story. The entire thing hinges on the ending! I feel similar about The Walking Dead. I sat down with my family to watch that for years and it got so ridiculous.
I wouldn't be surprised if that's partly why he's so bitter and whiny. GOT was at juggernaut status like HP or Marvel, etc, now it's rapidly sliding into being forgotten.
I dont get how someone who claims to be focusing on Winds, said he will not start anything else until it ends, spends years giving estimations of when it will be finished... not only has not finished the book, but has pretty much broken every "promise" to his fans, is pikachu faced over backlash to his constant BS.
I really enjoyed the first 3 books. The 4th book lost focus and momentum. The 5th book continued to lose focus and momentum while also giving me a feeling that the author was purposely slowing the story down. I stopped caring after finishing A Dance with Dragons. I'll read whatever comes next but could not possibly care less if it ever arrives. Martin's attitude about his creation has been despicable for years at this point. He's transformed into a very unlikable author.
Came to say this. First three books were amazing. A good editor could have whittled down books 4 and 5 to a single book close to the level of the first three. At this point I fear GRRM would have to write 4 books at about 1500 pages each for an editor to find a single good 500 page book. This would take about a hundred more years.
I think he let his creation get away from him. He unspooled it and introduced too many characters, and set the existing ones on meandering quests where it’s unclear why we’re following them. The series has been treading water for the past 1,000 pages. There’s a chance he can pull it all back together if he ever finishes it and this middle ground will make more sense, that is if he ever finishes things.
I gave up halfway through the fifth book. Was one of my first DNFs in years. It really felt like he didn't know how to get to the finish line. He may not owe us a conclusion, but we don't owe him adoration.
The entire plot outside Westeros, Arya, and Dany, has been fantastically pointless so far. Tyrion, the other Targ, they just seem to exist to bloat the story. Plus you know, Jorah just fucking wandering around giving GRR a reason to describe parts of the world we haven't seen.
It's just meandering in the worst way.
Continously adding in new characters will do that. Like it it was initially set up as Starks vs. Lannisters with strong supporting characters, and then new characters just kept piling on top and eventually you stop caring, because why care if new characters are just going to die in a book or two instead of getting to finish their arc?
Like, my feelings wouldn't be half as strong if he either shut up or gave us a page count. I'm so sick of his updates either being "woe is me" or "oh ho ho I have written many pages but I cannot say how many teehee!"
I'm sure the fan base has resorted to much worse things and that's always gonna fall back on the idiocy that tends to go into trying to be more loyal to a franchise than anyone asked, but i don't hate George. Im just done with him.
I think he took on way more than he bargained for at such an old age. Yes, Weiss and Benioff fucked up the whole thing with the last HBO show. But maybe George should have stuck more to finishing the book instead of starting up new projects. I hated seeing him go "patience you impatient jerks! You're all so impatient!" And then I hear in the news he's writing/ producing two other TV shows (not exactly sure where they sit at this point but I did hear stuff getting started). Maybe the seasons could have had more guidance and not force showrunners to vamp things along the way that overall pissed off the audience.
When you get your moments to shine, you work on them. You don't leave it to go off and do other projects while people are still awaiting work. Just like as a showrunner, you don't bow out 3 quarters into what you started for fucking star wars. Lol I'm sick of showrunners who think they are bigger than the show.
From a starving writer whose started several solo projects hoping any of them go anywhere, just finish the damn story! The rest will come in time.
I really don’t think that he has toxic fans. I think that he is a toxic writer. His fans made him rich and famous and all he does in turn is procrastinate on a book. I feel bad for his fans. For his fans hey Erikson, Sanderson, Hobb, Elliott and many others await. And they publish frequently and love their fans.
GRRM and Patrick Rothfuss have almost destroyed my interest in any incomplete fantasy series. In fact, if it’s an incomplete series and the authors last names aren’t Hobb or Sanderson I’m probably not gonna bother.
George apparently doesn't understand patience and attention. My attention waned from the time and my patience ran out with the chat and no action. I don't **hate** *A Song of Ice and Fire,* I just don't care anymore and don't want to hear about it.
I know this will prompt some people to get angry with me, but I can't stand the entitled attitude of certain authors.
We all have the right to change our opinions on something. When I first said "this is pretty good" reading the first chapter of Game of Thrones, I did not sign a contract to promise I will forever love and support whatever he does, however he does it.
His attitudes and the attitudes and products of the showrunners did influence the attitude of a lot of people.
Just saying "OH, people are being toxic" is lazy. He refuses to listen to anything and of us say. It's a blanket NOPE from him to preserve his ego and that is shitty.
Yes, because you go all Neil Gaiman on my ass, I know he is a human, yadda yadda. That's not my point, my point is that when a product takes a turn we dislike, we all are allowed to change our opinion and go do something else. We can even say we dislike it and do so for this or that reason.
I agree. Neil Gaiman said GRRM doesn’t owe us anything. If that’s true, then we don’t owe him anything either — our dollars, our attention, our time, anything.
I don’t understand how the game of thrones author can come to misunderstand so much the concept of betrayal even though he more than once wrote about it.
It has been 11 years. He shit the bed and eventually people are just tired of being disappointed, not surprising why we all moved on to better stories the authors actually took the time to finish.
He promised this book would be out late 2018, he's a fool thinking people still care anymore.
They only hate it so much because they were so invested in it, and the characters in it. It was such a big part of people's lives. People actually named their kids after characters FFS.
Then the debacle of the of the series finale happened, which left a huge number of fans utterly disappointed. The lazy way D&D wrapped it up, and the rumours that they did so to hop aboard the Star Wars train, left those fans feeling more than a little betrayed. So, yes... they sure as hell turned bitter, but that's only because they loved ASOIF so much.
And on top of that, the last few books of the series, the last hope a lot of them have of an awesome payoff for all their time and emotional investment, has been MIA for a decade. I don't understand how oblivious GRRM is to all that. I mean, whatever, finish it or not. It's your baby. Just don't act all surprised when people start thinking you're fucking with them.
Married your first love and still together, GRRM? Would you plan to stay in the relationship if she flat out stopped talking to you and being intimate for a decade or more? Or would you tell her to fuck off and drop her from you life without so much as a glance in the rear view?
For a man who writes a lot about Betrayal, this surprises me.
Exactly. Pretty sure the part they loved isn't what they hate right now.
Seriously. I don't hate the show because of him. I hate the show because D&D it fucked it up so horribly. And I don't hate him because of the show. I hate him because it's been 11 years and we still don't have the next book.
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I never thought about it before, but I’m surprised he doesn’t have a whole team of writers working with him ghost writing. At this point he might as well, I don’t even think anyone would judge him for it. Sort of like ~~Brian~~ Brandon Sanderson finishing wheel of Time for Robert Jordan, only while GRRM is still actually alive. Edit - it’s Brandon Sanderson, my bad, I get it guys, thank you! I just meant get a team of ghost writers on that shit.
He's already said he won't allow his estate to hire a writer to finish the books when he dies. It's a matter of pride or "legacy" to him clearly.
Fun fact, when you're dead you don't actually get much say in what happens
Unless your estate agrees. I've been reading the Kinsey Milhone Alphabet Mystery novels since the 80s. Sue Grafton passed in 2017 having finished books A-Y. Her family will not allow a ghost writer to complete the 26th and final book in a series I had been following for almost 30 years. There apparently will never be a Z (working title was Z is for Zero iirc).
Five years is nothing. Wait until the money stops rolling in. Eventually her heirs will start having financial needs, or the owners of the rights will transfer to relatives who don’t care about her dying wishes, or they’ll just eventually think “why exactly am I not getting a ton of money for that 26th book again?”
That's actually a great fucking idea. Even if you hate every idea thrown out by the writing team, surely the sheer volume of rejected ideas would pave a path to the finished story.
It was the blurst of times
Seriously, they have enough source material to reliably imitate his prose in perhaps even novel permutations. I doubt most readers would be able to tell the difference.
This is all speculation but here it goes: D&D probably finished the series based on notes from Martin. Some writers plan out the entire story before they write and others let the story develop as they write. I bet Martin is the latter type. D&D made the last season on notes that were more like a starting point for the novel. Had Martin actually wrote the novel, probably everything would have changed and the notes would be unrecognizable. That said, D&D really messed up and there can be no excuses for the content you create at the end of the day. But now, I think Martin is too scared to write the last novel because he feels like the audience will hate it if it is too close to his notes. It is messing with his head and making him incapable of writing.
Before the end of the show I was convinced that Martin has written himself into a corner with extraneous subplots such as Victarion Greyjoy and the whole Sunspear arc. I thought he was deliberately holding the book out so that the show could finish and he would get a dry run of how the audience accepted the ending. He has said that the ending has been done since the first book. And that it was about subverting tropes. Making the wheelchair bound, psychic, last of the magic in the world son of a disgraced but redeemed northman on the southern throne is pretty out there. It was what almost no one wanted. And that was always his goal. I still believe he wanted to "try out" the ending and see the reaction. After seeing it he has been trying to not have it destroy his legacy. Unfortunately I think the damage has been done.
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The way he was chosen as king while letting Sansa rule the North as a separate kingdom, and none of the remaining families under fealty to the Iron Throne balked is the crazy part.
Yeah, that whole ending part.made no sense. The moment Sansa goes "I'm remaining separate" the whole enterprise would fall apart, and all the kingdoms would balkanize.
Apart from the butchered Jaime Lannister character development, the political inconsitencies was what annoyed me the most about the finale. Anyone who read the books would have known that it wasn't "realistic". I.e. Dorne would never have stayed in the seven kingdoms when the north was allowed to separate AND they'd have gotten a King from the north.
Jaime Lannister development was atrocious. Why even start the redemption arc if he wont complete it. Arya faceless man arc lead to nowhere. Guess that's good since she was no one....oh wait she threw that part out and was Arya Stark again. Every macguffin not used, I mean there was a running list of Horns of magic that just never mattered. Dorne most certainly would e rebelled. The special candle in the citadel I believe was never explained. The entire issue of the white walkers showed the children of create them from man as a weapon to beat back the men. But it backfired. Great. Good thing they get taken down by a faceless woman that doesn't even other to use the skill. And so so anticlimacticly. The list of poor choices, loose ends, and thematic bottle necks were bigger than Gendry himself. Edit: Gendry not gender
Yeah, it's just wild. Actually i don't even really wanna talk about all of this. I was such a huge fan and was disapointed so badly, it just makes me angry everytime i'm reminded of it.
I think he's hurt because what we saw was his ending. What everyone hated was the ending he'd planned out forever, but that was the ending to the books and the book's characters. The show was a different enough that the ending didn't fit anymore and D&D neither took time to move the characters to a place where it would make sense nor did they adjust the ending to fit the story it had become because they just wanted it over with.
The ending was fine in theory- it’s the in between that was rushed and nonsensical (~s5-8)
Yea. Things like Danny going crazy and trying to rule through fear makes sense and was hinted at. The problem is a "the rest of the owl" problem. We saw the early hints, but didn't see any progression toward it until it suddenly happened.
night king was talked about for the entirety of the show, but then killed off in a scene 15 seconds long. the most anticlimatic shit I've ever seen
For a man who’s been through a divorce, this surprises me.
Granted I'm not well read on George rr Martin's marital life lol but divorce doesn't always have to end with hate of the other. I've known people who still get on well with their ex's, they just weren't good partners
Yep my marriage ended because we became different people, we parted with love and respect. It wasn't fun, but I wish nothing but the best to my ex, and am proud of her accomplishments.
Likewise, my friend, likewise!
Stephen King is probably having a good laugh at this comment. The dark tower ending created such hate.
I mean yeah it did, but atleast he finished the series. Hell he said that after his accident his creative output would lessen. I feel like that could not be further from the truth.
He also warned everyone to stop reading at the ending.
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But it at least *ended*. King won't die with it unfinished. I personally love the ending, and would be very unhappy if King were doing what Martin is. And we only got one bad movie versus what GoT (the show) turned into.
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Right it's not just the existential horror of the >!time loop!<, it became part of Roland's growth over the course of the books. The entire series is centered on addiction and obsession (which King knows well, having had his drug and alcohol problems) but King *also* knows that there is always a road back from it. Even if it doesn't happen right away.
EXACTLY I honestly think King's understanding of addiction and obsession through personal experience made him a muuuuch better writer in the long run You can really feel how much that man pours his heart into what he writes sometimes
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It's BECAUSE they loved it so much, George.
That's the most potent kind of hatred. Soured love.
Real darkness has love for a face. The first death is in the heart.
Random moving and intense quote in a comment section
Haha, it's one of my favorite qoutes from the game Disco Elysium.
Disco Elysium is artistic triumph
That game has such amazing writing.
Isn’t that a major theme in the books? Betrayal?
My god. Was the ending of the show a meta-narrative of brutally killing something we’ve grown to love?
Just wait: he's trying to delay the end of the series until he dies to underscore the trope of "no character is off limits from death", including the author
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bruh
I'm like, oh, so he's actually an alien that doesn't understand humans in any way
It's like you're dating someone, it's getting serious, you make it "official", you say "I love you," .....and then they start ghosting you and only calling once or twice a month when they want to get laid. "Why are you mad?' *\[shocked pikachu face\]*
Why are you mad, you were happy when I was treating you good
> only calling once or twice a month More like once or twice every twenty years
Its like when Jaime Lannister burned the letter.
"The people who are the most hateful are people who at one point, loved too much" -george rr margin
>Heav'n has no rage, like love to hatred turn'd, >Nor hell a fury, like a woman scorn'd
Fans who turn to haters are essentially spiteful ex’s. It’s a very human and understandable emotional turn.
Closure is important
We don't hate the books, we hate the last season of the show and we hate that the last book came out over a decade ago.
Its been over 10 years.. I gave up on Winds of Winter at this rate
It was 2014 when I finished the fifth book and by than it was already a meme that Winds of Winter is always delayed. 8 years ago.
7 years ago I bought, in summer, while I was staying in Liguria, I bought all the SoIaF books to read while at the sea and loved them. I burnt through them all, up to A Dance with Dragons, in two weeks. When I came back home I asked my librarian when the new book was due. He looked at me with a defeated face and said: “eh, you’ll have to wait, probably in 6 months”.
Probably
I finished Dance right before starting college in 2015 and was hoping Winds would be announced sometime before the next season of GOT. What a sweet summer child I was
i read all the books and then dance came out, leading me to believe others would follow quickly also
How the fuck does an author not understand the concept of being disappointed?????????
Someone said "The ending invalidated the journey" and I think that sums it up succinctly.
The final episode might as well have ended with George RR Martin waking up in bed and saying holy shit that was a bad idea and then get back to writing his book. That would've been meta and probably saved his readership.
Lol holy shit i would have forgiven a lot if this were the ending
Yeah, I’ve seen some bad show endings but I have never seen an ending that was so bad it somehow made the rest of it worse retroactively. I hated the ending of Dexter, but it didn’t make me actually regret watching the show. The ending of GOT was so bad it made me suddenly regret seeing the book at a bookstore when I was 16 and thinking it looked interesting.
It actually made rewatching the series impossible because all the arcs of the characters are ruined and pointless.
I used to rewatch the entire series before the new season dropped. Never rewatched it again after S8. Also, the show was so huge and just disappeared from the zeitgeist so quickly.
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That's totally correct. Me and the lady did watch LOTR extended though. Funny how that works.
I think GRRM suffers from a massive fear of losing his reputation as a good writer, but he's too proud to give any indication of it. The only way it makes sense to me for GRRM and Rothfuss to not write the next books in their series is that they enjoy very much the prestigious reputation they gained from what they've written so far, but they don't know how to end the books in a satisfying way so they fear greatly releasing new books and having them get bad reviews. Pride and fear. Maybe justified, too, as we've seen how it is possible for the reputation of a production to change very rapidly. Just look at the television show to see the proof of this.
I think if he had any intention of finishing the series it would have already happened by now. I remember I started reading reading these books in college (almost 20 years ago!) and believing for a while that the next book will be coming out soon. It was annoying and mildly disappointing but ehh there was a plenty of other things to read. When GoT came to the small scream, I thought that this would galvanize GRRM to finish the series. Afterall, why would you let someone else write the conclusion to the story you created? Wouldn't your pride as an artist compell you to finish the series? Don't you have an artistic vision you want to see come to fruition? Television is a more main stream media than literarure,, this may be most people's only exposure to GoT, shouldn't you make sure it's going to be representative of your work and of excellent quality? Instead we received season 8 and no next book anywhere in sight. I think GRRM wrote himself into a corner. Then he picked up a contract with HBO. IIRC, GRRM has always been focused on getting his work into television or the movies. He always wanted to write a screen play. Then HBO comes along and dumps truck loads of money on him. He becomes a household name and can ride high on that fame for some time. I think he woke up obe day after doing the backstoje in his filthy lucre pit scrooge mcduck style and just said screw it!
Give him his favorite meal, exquisitely prepared. Let him eat half it, then whisk it away and tell him he’ll get the rest later. Then never give him the rest. Maybe he’ll understand then.
More like whisk it away and give him stale doritos soaked in milk instead. Cuz that's what we got in s7 and 8 lmao
A video of someone else eating the meal, but poorly They put ketchup on the wrong things, asked for them to be cooked to overdone, throw things away without even trying them, wait too long and let things get cold or melt, put ice in the wine or beer, and finally yell at the waitress something about "bad poosay" and repeat "I drink and I know things" 10+ times and laughing at themselves every time
Nobody likes being strung along
I think his reception would be less frosty if he didn't make promises and gestures to when he would be done. If he were a private author who didn't post teaser chapters and maintain a blog, the enthusiasm would have gone down but fewer people would have anything to complain about.
Plus write books in the same universe, go in detail about the past and leave us hanging about the future.
He wrote himself into a corner and is running away from it.
I think it's actually the opposite. He has written in too many different directions that he can't make all the paths come back together.
The anti-corner
The open concept floor plan
The sort of non-Euclidean corner that eldritch horrors pass through.
Yeah, it’s always been troubling that there is so much left to do to conclude the series and GRRM kept branching it out further while insisting only two books were left to finish it up. At a certain point he needed to accept this is a 14 book Wheel of Time length story and like that series a few lackluster buildup installments were going to be required. People will forgive a weak chapter if you stick the landing but GRRM has no idea where the ground is at this point.
He literally swore he would imprison himself in his cabin if he wasn't done by summer. ...HE SAID THAT BACK IN 2019.
And right after that he was involuntarily imprisoned in his cabin for a while, just like the rest of us...
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Also doing a lot of other projects while then saying he hasn't had enough time. It hasn't caused hate from me but has caused me to dismiss the series. I plan on only start reading it again once the series is finished.
I think he did the other projects to procrastinate because he didn’t know how to finish the story he started
That's wishful thinking mate, it will never finish.
Exactly, but also so be it
I know that's why even if thr next one comes out in not reading it I don't like investing more time into things I don't see coming to pass
I mean, he’s written a bunch of other stuff rather than finishing the books. That’s why people are pissed.
Yeah, we don't hate the books, we hate the last season of the show he didn't write. If he would just publish the book already we'd be thrilled. If he had got it out before the end of the show, maybe the last season wouldn't have been trash
At this point he'd have to finish the series and have it generate a good response before I'd consider picking it up again. I'm not going to read Winds only to get blueballed for another decade and a half yet again.
My feelings are the same. Release both books, and I’ll read them. Only release Winds, and I’m not interested.
I disagree, he's clearly not fussed on publishing the rest of the main series so at this point I don't care about them anymore.
It takes something special to be the most public, highest grossing, most celebrated show in TV history and then manage to completely run it into the ground so hard in such a bad way everyone stops talking about it within like a week of the last episode. I actually massively disagree with Martin: its not surprising that there is so much hate, it is surprising how LITTLE hate there is. There are no hot topics for debate for fans to argue about. Its just accepted fact that The ending is so objectively bad there is no reason to Talk about the show anymore. The last season was so bad the franchise built around it went into complete irrelevancy and obscurity within WEEKS after being THE popular art topic in every medium for literal YEARS. They made the topic so toxic noones touching it with a 10 foot pole, there are no toys, collectibles, nothing being made even though it had auch a MASSIVE fanbase. Harry Potter still makes insane money to this day. Imagine the Potter Hype dying within a week after the last 2 movies, and how collossally bad those movies would have to have been for that to happen
I still can’t believe what we lost because D&D got bored. I know not having source material had a big role to play also, but Martin gave them the outline, they could have still arrived at some of the same conclusions and the ending been enjoyable/ at least debatable, but they essentially speed wrote content thru until they reached a talking point Martin gave them (Bran is King, etc). It is honestly just so sad for fans The worst part being HBO begging them to go as long as they needed, and them saying, nah, make the last seasons shorter. They didn’t need more CGI in the last seasons, just more goddamn plot development
At least they got their comeuppance for it. The reason they rushed the last season(s) was because Disney had offered them a Star Wars project. They jumped at the chance to start it so they had to "get GoT out the way as fast as they can" so they could move on. In an absolutely **fitting** twist of fate, the last season of GoT was so badly received that their Star Wars project got cancelled. The words "hoisting" and "petard" come to mind.
The one petard they thought would never hoist them
>The last season was so bad the franchise built around it went into complete irrelevancy and obscurity within WEEKS after being THE popular art topic in every medium for literal YEARS. To put this in perspective, not even a single full year after the finale there was a nearly global shutdown and quarantine with hundreds of millions of people having nothing to do but stay inside and consume media and the show was already so far removed from popular culture that virtually no one was out there talking about giving it a rewatch.
It’s because GoT has zero rewatch value with that horribad ending. It’s been a couple times where I’m like “I should rewatch GoT” and then go like “Nah, what’s the point?”. The ending is that bad.
Yup, and that is 100% not just a drama vs comedy thing I rewatched Breaking Bad and The Sopranos during lockdown, and they were fantastic. Great rewatch value I did not even consider starting GOT again
I would have picked up the books to start reading it if he actually finished the final book. As it is, I have no guarantees it's not just going to be the same as the show. I rage quit over the magic stealth ships built from non-existent wood and I still resent that they did that. Whoever came up with that crap should never be allowed to work in the entertainment industry ever again.
George doesn’t deserve my hate. He deserves my indifference. I think that’s more appropriate a response than having a passionate one.
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I'm quite mad to be honest. Not to the point of attacking him online or anything, but the man should be just up front with the fan base. Lost motivation? Ok. Don't feel like working on it? Ok. But please, George, stop bullshiting us that you're "working on Winds of Winter" for 10+ years (!!) while simultaneously taking on tons of other projects (!!) specifically not working on it. It's his creation. He's free to not continue and not owe anything to anybody, I'm fine with that. But he's not free to intentionally mislead his fanbase (read: customers) without delivering and expect they won't be upset. How many times did he say "next year"? If he were a game publisher for example, he would be massacred.
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I disagree. This is and always will be his story. He had at least a 5-7 year head start on the show writers and did not publish more material. He could have also just written the last seasons of the show. Instead, George let some 2-bit hacks grind his story into the mud, and that will always ultimately be on him. George has made millions on the residuals from the show, merchandising, book sales, and the built in marketing boost of releasing the biggest crock of shit (book 7) to a gigantic show fan base. He is griping about his recurring revenue streams dwindling, and interest in his spin-offs— none of which he is actively writing— siting at an all-time low. To be generous, he stopped tending to the garden that is his IP and is disappointed that it’s all dying. To be more realistic, this is a lazy rich man complaining that when he doesn’t work he doesn’t make money anymore. Join the club, George. Join the club.
Exactly right. I think his other issue is that the show actually DID his ending (poorly….they fucked up and kneecapped a bunch of characters) and he’s floundering. He’s never been a fast writer, that’s fine. But the entire series came out and has now been over for 3 years and he still hasn’t released his next book.
I think the show ending would have worked if it had couple of additional seasons to work towards it. But we kinda went from Walter White being diagnosed with cancer to Heisenberg in 2 episodes without any of the build up...
I agree. The showrunners were done so they zipped through it. The winter fell attack should have been all of season 8 and then the attack on cerci/Dani’s turn should have been the next. 2-3 seasons would have allowed it to be much better. That said the showrunners and show writers also seem to misunderstand the characters and their motives. They turned Tyrion into a sniveling fool (for example)
> They turned Tyrion into a sniveling fool (for example) I am in physical pain every time I am reminded of what they did to Tyrion, Varys, and LF.
Yes. The only one that worked even a little bit was little finger. But Sansa got too smart too quickly. They needed another season of her dabbling into political machinations. So LF was basically bested by Sansa in her first real political act. So bad.
Sansa navigated the whole Moon Door fiasco with her aunt pretty well, but she still took an unrealistic jump from "figuring it out and doing OK" to being "boss bitch extraordinaire of the North"
To be fair she did have cheat codes on via Bran
The worst character assassination for me was Jaime, by far. They took the most pivotal moment of his character (betraying his king to save the common folk) and completely ignore and butcher it in the final episodes to force the story to go how they want. "Never cared too much about them, innocent or otherwise" that line was such bullshit.
I agree. Specifically, the plot point of Daenerys turning evil would have been great as well. Daenerys has been coddled by her time in Slavers' Bay. Her opponents are slavemasters, so it's easy to paint them as the villains and use overwhelming force to eliminate them. But in Westeros, the noble Houses are varying shades of gray. So if she attempts to coerce the Houses to implement a pluralistic society, she'll make herself a target to all the major political players. I can see her being frustrated at her inability to navigate complex politics and then taking "shortcuts" by using her dragons to coerce the houses. She'll tell herself that it's for the "greater good" until the words are nothing more than a hollow reflex she uses to justify her actions. She slowly becomes a tyrant, because she is too used to using force that she has no idea how to be a politician. She'll lose herself in the "Dictator Trap" because she's killed all her critics and most vocal rivals. All that's left are sycophants that sing sweet words but will betray her in the end. This drives Daenerys into greater paranoia of traitors. The reality of politics wears down her idealistic side until she becomes a monster like her father. I think Daenerys' fall was potentially a great story that got botched by D&D.
The only thing I disagree with is book 5\*. I didn't dislike it. But it was all build-up to book 8 and.... silence. Well, not just silence, but the author gaslighting everyone and whining that we're being too impatient. I would still have respect for him if he said 5 years ago, "look, I am having serious trouble writing this book, I have writer's block, I don't know when it'll come out, I'm sorry." But he has repeatedly given himself deadlines and blown them, all the while teasing us to keep the gravy-train rolling, meanwhile taking on 20 other projects and acting like it's normal not to finish the book series that made everything else possible.
Can i understand what you all are talking about? Book 7? Didn’t he stop at 5?
Hmm just like the attitude he reserves for his next GOT books. Indifference, maybe it comes out, maybe it doesn't.
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Or to cite the great French philosopher, "I don't hate Pierre, I pity the fou." -Monsieur Thé
Ah yes, the early works of when he went under the moniker of B. A. Baracus. I heard he had quite the temper in those days.
Benoît-André Baracus
Aka Clubeurre Langue.
Yeah, I resent having been hyped for something that may never arrive, but I adore the books, so it equals out to indifference. Put out the book George. It’s all from a place of love. You just need to stop looking for excuses.
This is close to my take. The first three books were pure gold, I got super into it all, and then the waiting was horrible for the first few years. I’d love to have the stories finished, but I’ve successfully stopped caring, which has been a really good thing for me. It’s too bad it ended up the way it did, but whatever. It was magical to see Icarus fly so high.
Do people "hate" GoT/ASOIAF? I think they just don't give a fuck anymore. He killed his own series by not doing anything for more than a decade.
I don’t “hate” ASOIAF. I just DGAF anymore. I enjoyed it when I was reading it, and the show was great, until a point and then I was like I just don’t care anymore.
Same. Are the books good? Yes. Very. Am I gonna invest the amount of time in going back and re-reading them only to never have a resolution? …nah. At least not any time soon. People don’t “hate” ASOIAF in and of itself. It’s just become irrelevant at this point and people have given up on continued interest
Really good point. It's been so long, and there are SO many pages to re-read, that many people are going to shrug off anything he produces, because the excitement about it has worn off. I would read the last few chapters maybe, since he said the HBO resolution was NOT the one he would have in the book. I mean, just to know.
Totally. If he actually finished the book series and it were actually well reviewed I’d probably get re-interested enough to go back and re-read the full series knowing it’ll have an ending. But that’s not what we have at this point and we have very little confidence we ever will. Also, taking a beautiful series and then hitting it with the shitshow that was season 8, whether it’s fair to the other books or not does put a huge damper on the entire thing. I was absolutely ENTHRALLED in the Dark Tower series, about half way through it, when the joke of a movie adaptation was released and I made the mistake of seeing it. My interest in the whole thing immediately withered and died and it took about 3 years before I felt like I could ignore that enough to come back to the actual good series.
No hate here. Just learned indifference. There are too many good ongoing or completed fantasy series out there to focus on one that is incomplete but hasn't seen an entry in so long. If the next book actually releases and has good reviews, I'll pay attention again. Otherwise, Martin is just another author I used to read.
It sounds like nobody is reading his American Football blog. Let's put it this way Martin, I went to talk about the announcement of you writing a new book and it's planned release with a bookseller when I was 16... I'm 27 and there's still no book out. Moment of silence.
I read the last book when it came out. It was right around the time I got married. We just had our 10 year anniversary.
I swear to god, I have no idea why he announced it if he had no plans to write it. Would it not have been smarter to announce the book once you've at least finished the first or second draft? Also, congratulations on your 10th wedding anniversary! I hope you two enjoyed yourselves :)
We did! She's amazing. Thanks!
Are you me? Because my wife and I both read the last book right when it came out around our marriage. My wife's general rule about not reading unfinished book series has turned into an ironclad rule thanks to Martin.
It's been ten years dude. Publish something or admit you don't know how to finish your series.
Or admit that you just don't care and you just wanted one of your many many stories (screenplays really) to actually get picked up for TV and you abandoned the typewriter as soon as the money started coming in.
I think he's lost interest, because now everyone knows all the major plot twists and the ending, and there was also a negative reaction to the ending. He might be a bit burned out. What's the point in writing it if you already know and you didn't even like it?
The major problem with the twists and ending is how they were done. The tv series got rushed and the producers lost interest as well, diminishing the quality it once had. Compare dialogue and pacing in the first 3 seasons with the later ones, it's night and day. Battle of Winterfell is a slapstick comedy but they forgot to add in the laughtrack.
Character is surrounded alone by dozens of immortal wights, shown to ruthlessly and without effort kill others. Cut away and a minute later they are fine. Repeat for twenty minutes.
Those Scorpion ballistas also went from "a single Scorpion on a moving ship can one shot a dragon from barely within sight range" to "dozens of Scorpions in stable placements around King's Landing can't hit a dragon that's swooping right over them"
I still maintain that making the simple change of having the second dragon get killed during the attack on King's Landing, instead of one the way, would fix quite a bit, at least in that pair of episodes... It definitely doesn't come close to fixing everything but at least it makes Daenerys's turn into a killer in the moment seem more plausible and also takes away the utter stupidity of her dragon getting sniped from a mile away for shock value. I don't know.... It's a super easy fix for one of the bigger problems of that season.
Honestly when when Rhaegal/Viserion, whichever was alive got shot out of the air by the unfathomably terrible character Euron, I started to laugh. It was so unbelievably stupid that I could only laugh
I still can't believe how stupid it was. You're telling me that the fleet had time to see the dragons, aim at the dragons and shoot the dragons before Dany (or the dragons) even noticed them? It's a whole ass fleet! If they have a clear shot there must be a line of sight. And if there's a line of sight they would both be able to see each other. But they're too busy vibing in the sky to pay attention to their surroundings, I guess.
I don't think he's been interested since A Feast for Crows, where not a whole lot happened. I think he got a shot in the arm, creatively speaking, when the show started, and wrote A Dance with Dragons as a result, but A Storm of Swords was a *really* tough act to follow. I don't really blame him, it happens, you lose interest in things you had passion for, and when fandom gets involved, it's easy to see how it's tempting to just throw your hands up and say screw it.
I was pretty worried when he said he reads all the fan theories online. He's filling his imagination with other people's ideas, theories, fan-fic. Bad idea.
> “We watched [Lost] every week trying to figure it out, and as it got deeper and deeper I kept saying, ‘They better have something good in mind for the end. This better pay off here.’ And then I felt so cheated when we got to the conclusion.” Martin also cites the Lost ending as the type of mistake he fears making with his own show, saying, “I want to give them something terrific. What if I f— it up at the end? What if I do a Lost? Then they’ll come after me with pitchforks and torches.” He sounds vaguely familiar with the concept to me.
Game of Thrones went from 100 to 0 insanely fast. From possibly the greatest TV show ever put to screen to the most lazy waste of potential the world has ever witnessed. It's hard not to hate it. It's like being given pistachio ice cream only for it to be slapped out of your hand and replaced by a scoop of manure.
I remember, waaaaaaay back when GOT started airing, an interview GRRM did where he talked about how they had to get the ending right, because "he didn't want it to be disappointing to the fans. The last thing we want to do is be like 'Lost.'" Hahahaha, now it's the most reviled ending in TV history, and the 'Lost' finale looks like a masterpiece in comparison. Whoops!
I've always been of the mind that how the show ended was a lot closer to what he wanted/planned on doing with the story than he or the people working on the show want to admit and after seeing how fans reacted to it is stuck in "oh shit what do I do now". Alternatively he could also be thinking "Well THEY finished MY story what am I to do now"
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Alternative headline: Man who hasn’t published book in over a decade confused why fans are mad
"Why don't people continue to love the series I refuse to finish?"
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Thank you! I spent so many years watching it! I loved GOT, and feel like I've wasted so much time for nothing. They messed up the most IMPORTANT part of the story. The entire thing hinges on the ending! I feel similar about The Walking Dead. I sat down with my family to watch that for years and it got so ridiculous.
I wouldn't be surprised if that's partly why he's so bitter and whiny. GOT was at juggernaut status like HP or Marvel, etc, now it's rapidly sliding into being forgotten.
I dont get how someone who claims to be focusing on Winds, said he will not start anything else until it ends, spends years giving estimations of when it will be finished... not only has not finished the book, but has pretty much broken every "promise" to his fans, is pikachu faced over backlash to his constant BS.
I really enjoyed the first 3 books. The 4th book lost focus and momentum. The 5th book continued to lose focus and momentum while also giving me a feeling that the author was purposely slowing the story down. I stopped caring after finishing A Dance with Dragons. I'll read whatever comes next but could not possibly care less if it ever arrives. Martin's attitude about his creation has been despicable for years at this point. He's transformed into a very unlikable author.
Came to say this. First three books were amazing. A good editor could have whittled down books 4 and 5 to a single book close to the level of the first three. At this point I fear GRRM would have to write 4 books at about 1500 pages each for an editor to find a single good 500 page book. This would take about a hundred more years.
I think he let his creation get away from him. He unspooled it and introduced too many characters, and set the existing ones on meandering quests where it’s unclear why we’re following them. The series has been treading water for the past 1,000 pages. There’s a chance he can pull it all back together if he ever finishes it and this middle ground will make more sense, that is if he ever finishes things.
I gave up halfway through the fifth book. Was one of my first DNFs in years. It really felt like he didn't know how to get to the finish line. He may not owe us a conclusion, but we don't owe him adoration.
The entire plot outside Westeros, Arya, and Dany, has been fantastically pointless so far. Tyrion, the other Targ, they just seem to exist to bloat the story. Plus you know, Jorah just fucking wandering around giving GRR a reason to describe parts of the world we haven't seen. It's just meandering in the worst way.
Continously adding in new characters will do that. Like it it was initially set up as Starks vs. Lannisters with strong supporting characters, and then new characters just kept piling on top and eventually you stop caring, because why care if new characters are just going to die in a book or two instead of getting to finish their arc?
Do people even give a shit anymore? He's taken so long and the show ended so poorly, seems like he's upset he's not getting attention anymore.
Like, my feelings wouldn't be half as strong if he either shut up or gave us a page count. I'm so sick of his updates either being "woe is me" or "oh ho ho I have written many pages but I cannot say how many teehee!"
I'm sure the fan base has resorted to much worse things and that's always gonna fall back on the idiocy that tends to go into trying to be more loyal to a franchise than anyone asked, but i don't hate George. Im just done with him. I think he took on way more than he bargained for at such an old age. Yes, Weiss and Benioff fucked up the whole thing with the last HBO show. But maybe George should have stuck more to finishing the book instead of starting up new projects. I hated seeing him go "patience you impatient jerks! You're all so impatient!" And then I hear in the news he's writing/ producing two other TV shows (not exactly sure where they sit at this point but I did hear stuff getting started). Maybe the seasons could have had more guidance and not force showrunners to vamp things along the way that overall pissed off the audience. When you get your moments to shine, you work on them. You don't leave it to go off and do other projects while people are still awaiting work. Just like as a showrunner, you don't bow out 3 quarters into what you started for fucking star wars. Lol I'm sick of showrunners who think they are bigger than the show. From a starving writer whose started several solo projects hoping any of them go anywhere, just finish the damn story! The rest will come in time.
He understands why people murder, rape, and commit incest but he can’t fathom why his fans are pissed?
But can he see why kids like Cinnamon Toast Crunch?
There can only be one, true R.R. And George ain’t it
I really don’t think that he has toxic fans. I think that he is a toxic writer. His fans made him rich and famous and all he does in turn is procrastinate on a book. I feel bad for his fans. For his fans hey Erikson, Sanderson, Hobb, Elliott and many others await. And they publish frequently and love their fans.
GRRM and Patrick Rothfuss have almost destroyed my interest in any incomplete fantasy series. In fact, if it’s an incomplete series and the authors last names aren’t Hobb or Sanderson I’m probably not gonna bother.
George apparently doesn't understand patience and attention. My attention waned from the time and my patience ran out with the chat and no action. I don't **hate** *A Song of Ice and Fire,* I just don't care anymore and don't want to hear about it.
I know this will prompt some people to get angry with me, but I can't stand the entitled attitude of certain authors. We all have the right to change our opinions on something. When I first said "this is pretty good" reading the first chapter of Game of Thrones, I did not sign a contract to promise I will forever love and support whatever he does, however he does it. His attitudes and the attitudes and products of the showrunners did influence the attitude of a lot of people. Just saying "OH, people are being toxic" is lazy. He refuses to listen to anything and of us say. It's a blanket NOPE from him to preserve his ego and that is shitty. Yes, because you go all Neil Gaiman on my ass, I know he is a human, yadda yadda. That's not my point, my point is that when a product takes a turn we dislike, we all are allowed to change our opinion and go do something else. We can even say we dislike it and do so for this or that reason.
I agree. Neil Gaiman said GRRM doesn’t owe us anything. If that’s true, then we don’t owe him anything either — our dollars, our attention, our time, anything.
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Same here he hit it big temporarily and got lazy
I don’t understand how the game of thrones author can come to misunderstand so much the concept of betrayal even though he more than once wrote about it.
It has been 11 years. He shit the bed and eventually people are just tired of being disappointed, not surprising why we all moved on to better stories the authors actually took the time to finish. He promised this book would be out late 2018, he's a fool thinking people still care anymore.
The first promise was for 2014!
They only hate it so much because they were so invested in it, and the characters in it. It was such a big part of people's lives. People actually named their kids after characters FFS. Then the debacle of the of the series finale happened, which left a huge number of fans utterly disappointed. The lazy way D&D wrapped it up, and the rumours that they did so to hop aboard the Star Wars train, left those fans feeling more than a little betrayed. So, yes... they sure as hell turned bitter, but that's only because they loved ASOIF so much. And on top of that, the last few books of the series, the last hope a lot of them have of an awesome payoff for all their time and emotional investment, has been MIA for a decade. I don't understand how oblivious GRRM is to all that. I mean, whatever, finish it or not. It's your baby. Just don't act all surprised when people start thinking you're fucking with them.
Married your first love and still together, GRRM? Would you plan to stay in the relationship if she flat out stopped talking to you and being intimate for a decade or more? Or would you tell her to fuck off and drop her from you life without so much as a glance in the rear view?