GAME OF THRONES

[Jay 38,749]

People forget that season 7 was shorter too (7 episodes).

 

Basically D&D made six seasons of the show that covered all 5 published books of the main saga at a yearly pace of 10 episodes per each of those six seasons.  Then instead of maybe taking a year off to let GRRM come up with a more detailed outline of what to do next, or any of other things they could have done, they made their Lucasfilm deal and decided to rush out 1 final season of 13 episodes to wrap everything up.  This ended up split up into a 7-episode Season 7 and 6-episode Season 8 for production and budgeting purposes.

 

I'm not surprised Harington felt spent after 8 straight years of a similar production schedule, but who knows what a year off might have done for the morale of everyone, and how better a more well-written continuation could have been received after that hiatus.  Imagine if D&D just left GOT for Lucasfilm and HBO had Cogman show-run the rest of the show?

[Yavar Moradi 2,860]

17 minutes ago, Jay said:

Imagine if D&D truly left the project for Disney and let Cogman show-run the rest of the show?

 

I've been doing that a lot for the past several years... Cogman of course wrote the only episode of the final season that was really good.

 

Yavar

[Docteur Qui 1,571]

16 hours ago, Jay said:

But it's not in production, it's in development. It could never happen, like what happened to th Fall of Valyria show they filmed a pilot for befor canceling.

Oh thanks for the correction. I hope it makes production.

 

I didn’t know that the Valyria series was even in the works, let alone a pilot filmed. I had only heard about the Bloodmoon one with Naomi Watts. Personally I feel like Valyria should stay off-screen; the mystery of the place is what makes it so potent and interesting. Not only that, it doesn’t feel like it would fit with the largely grounded HBO house style considering all the crazy blood magic shit going on. At the very least it would need to be animated, or a feature film with a massive budget. All those volcanoes and dragons!

 

12 hours ago, Jay said:

Basically D&D made six seasons of the show that covered all 5 published books of the main saga at a yearly pace of 10 episodes per each of those six seasons.  Then instead of maybe taking a year off to let GRRM come up with a more detailed outline of what to do next, or any of other things they could have done, they made their Lucasfilm deal and decided to rush out 1 final season of 13 episodes to wrap everything up.  This ended up split up into a 7-episode Season 7 and 6-episode Season 8 for production and budgeting purposes.

 

I'm not surprised Harington felt spent after 8 straight years of a similar production schedule, but who knows what a year off might have done for the morale of everyone, and how better a more well-written continuation could have been received after that hiatus.  Imagine if D&D just left GOT for Lucasfilm and HBO had Cogman show-run the rest of the show?

I can’t bring myself to begrudge D&D for wanting to move on other projects, or the actors for that matter. They pitched seven seasons for seven books. That said, as soon as it was apparent it wouldn’t be possible they should’ve handed the reigns to someone else to finish the job.

I was a defender of the final seasons when they aired. I didn’t love them, but neither were they the travesty often depicted. However I just finished a full rewatch, and in binge mode the drop in quality is pretty staggering; you can feel the show dumb itself down in real time as it got more popular. They wasted so much time on breakout, meme-worthy characters like Pod and Bronn (god I got sick of him), at the expense of the leads. The entire Stark family were insufferable by the end of it. And while Dany’s fate was clearly locked in from the beginning, the work to get there wasn’t done.
 

It’s made even more egregious when you see what’s happening with Rhaenyra in HotD - parallels abound with that character, and IMO they’re doing with her what should’ve been done with Dany, and doing it much better.

[Jay 38,749]

Yeah, I was talking about the Naomi Watts pilot, that's the only pilot that got made and then series canceled.  Wasn't that supposed to be about the Doom of Valyria?

[Mr. Who 957]

On 12/8/2024 at 6:26 PM, Yavar Moradi said:

 

I've been doing that a lot for the past several years... Cogman of course wrote the only episode of the final season that was really good.

 

Yavar

To be fair I read somewhere that Weiss edited that episode. But it was a great episode for sure

[Pellaeon 596]

I’ve said this before, but to me, at the end of Season 6 they should have said, “Here the maestro laid down his pen.” And ended the show.

 

And then (publicly) left it in GRRM’s court. “Any time you wanted to finish a book, we’ll produce a movie. OR if you want to just write the movie, we’ll produce that.”

[bruce marshall 1,344]

Weren't two episodes of the last episodes two hours long?

 If so, then it's more like EIGHT episodes than six.

But, not ten.😒

[Jay 38,749]

No, there were no two hour episodes.

[Glóin the Dark 1,274]

On 14/08/2024 at 2:54 AM, bruce marshall said:

...it's more like EIGHT episodes than six.

 

This is pretty much correct, nevertheless. Seasons 7 and 8 each amounted to around 80% of a normal season.

[Bilbo 3,746]

On 13/8/2024 at 2:23 PM, Jay said:

Yeah, I was talking about the Naomi Watts pilot, that's the only pilot that got made and then series canceled.  Wasn't that supposed to be about the Doom of Valyria?

No, it was about the Long Night and was set in Westeros. Set pictures show Lannister and Stark banners and such. Definitely had nothing to do with Valyria and was set thousands of years before the doom.

 

Martin has basically written a paragraph about the time Bloodmoon was supposed to cover. 

On 12/8/2024 at 5:08 PM, Jay said:

People forget that season 7 was shorter too (7 episodes).

 

Basically D&D made six seasons of the show that covered all 5 published books of the main saga at a yearly pace of 10 episodes per each of those six seasons.  Then instead of maybe taking a year off to let GRRM come up with a more detailed outline of what to do next, or any of other things they could have done, they made their Lucasfilm deal and decided to rush out 1 final season of 13 episodes to wrap everything up.  This ended up split up into a 7-episode Season 7 and 6-episode Season 8 for production and budgeting purposes.

 

I'm not surprised Harington felt spent after 8 straight years of a similar production schedule, but who knows what a year off might have done for the morale of everyone, and how better a more well-written continuation could have been received after that hiatus.  Imagine if D&D just left GOT for Lucasfilm and HBO had Cogman show-run the rest of the show?

I think that’s easier said than done tbh. Taking a year off and then trying to get actor’s schedules to line up when some of these people were becoming bigger stars could have been really difficult. 
 

From very very early on in the project D&D saw GoT as being 70 episodes/70 hours. Which is more or less what they delivered. 
 

also, no showrunner is going to just drop out and leave the biggest TV show in the world’s ending to someone else. 
 

I also don’t think Cogman is as brilliant as some people make out either. 
 

I don’t think there’s any realistic scenario that would have made the final season better for the majority of people either. I don’t think any amount of additional set up would have made Mad Queen Dany and King Bran more palatable for large sections of the viewers and these are things that come from George. 
 

also, George’s writing style means he probably hasn’t fleshed how he’s getting to those points either. And the reaction to the show ending (which is basically his ending) probably means then books are never getting finished. 
 

He’s 75, Winds is nowhere near done (he basically admitted to having nothing new between the end of 2022 and 2023) and even if he did manage to release that it would take him as long to write a Dream of Spring. ASOIAF will never be finished in book form. 
 

I’d rather he just gave us Blood and Fire and the remaining Dunk and Egg books instead. And maybe fleshed out a few ideas for spin offs.

[Jay 38,749]

Ahhh right, The Long Night is what it was about, that's right.

 

Is it confirmed Bran becoming king was GRRM's ending?

[Bilbo 3,746]

https://www.indiewire.com/features/general/game-of-thrones-finale-bran-king-george-rr-martin-books-1202146070/
 

Bran is also the first POV character we meet in the books. 
 

There’s also a lot of speculation that the final line in the book will reference Old Nan’s saying “I know a story about a boy who didn’t like stories” based on what GRRM told the guy adapting the comic book. There was a line early on in book one he wanted to cut but George said it was important for the last chapter and it’s speculated that’s what it was. See Tyrion and Bran’s story from the show. 

[bruce marshall 1,344]

The ending was just fine.

There is no such thing as a benevolent dictator: see: NAPOLEON, ALEXANDER etc

[Tom Guernsey 2,570]

54 minutes ago, bruce marshall said:

The ending was just fine.

There is no such thing as a benevolent dictator: see: NAPOLEON, ALEXANDER etc

Oi, oi, no political posts 

 

Alternatively... we're gonna need a better dictator. Yes, but they're all dead.

[Nick1Ø66 5,548]

4 hours ago, bruce marshall said:

There is no such thing as a benevolent dictator: see: NAPOLEON, ALEXANDER etc

Cincinnatus did a pretty good job.

[bruce marshall 1,344]

3 hours ago, Nick1Ø66 said:

Cincinnatus did a pretty good job.

Haven't seen that one

😜

 

[tomsmoviemadness 3,417]

Seriously? He is in control of that right? Odd thing to say.

 

 

[Edmilson 8,497]

Exactly. 

 

If he wants them finished then why he doesn't finish them? 

 

I get it, he's old, the books are too long and complex (and they're only like that because he wanted them to), other commitments with other stuff, etc. But the last book was released before a single episode of Game of Thrones aired. It's more than enough time.

 

Or it would be if he hadn't complicated the story to such a degree. Now he just can't close the arcs, at least not in a satisfatory way since GoT S8. That task has become so arduous that he'd rather doing literally anything than writing them.

 

If I were Martin, first I would plan for the story to end in the sixth book, not the seventh. If he can barely advance through the sixth what will be of the seventh then?

 

Second, hire some trustworthy people to help him with the task. He had help with Fire & Blood and The World of Ice and Fire, right? Then hire those guys again and supervise their work while you as a team finish the story.

 

Geez... The saddest part is that Book 5 ends on some of the most epic (and to be honest, kinda hard to follow on) cliffhangers of all time and there's a real possibility we'll never see them closed. 

[Yavar Moradi 2,860]

31 minutes ago, Edmilson said:

I get it, he's old, the books are too long and complex (and they're only like that because he wanted them to), other commitments with other stuff, etc. But the last book was released before a single episode of Game of Thrones aired. It's more than enough time.

 

I don't disagree with much of what you wrote, but a slight correction here: The last book was released on July 12, 2011 -- about four weeks after season 1 of the TV series concluded. Still no excuse for how long it's taken for book six to come out.

 

Yavar

[Edmilson 8,497]

Hmm, you're right. For some reason I thought A Dance with Dragons had come out in 2010.

 

The funniest part is that both A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons (books 4 and 5) were supposed to be a single book. But the story got so big, so sprawling, so complex, that he had to separate the story into two tomes, released 6 years apart (one in 2005 and the other in 2011).

 

I honestly can't feel sorry for Martin. He could've ended the story years ago but he chose to include more elements, more characters, more conflicts and then realized it'd be near impossible to bring all of those to an ending.

 

If this thing doesn't finish with a closed ending it will remain as a lesson on why that "gardener" approach to writing doesn't work (at least when taken to an extreme).

[Jay 38,749]

Not only were those 2 books originally supposed to be one, he also moved the CLIMAX of the original book out past BOTH of them into the next book.

 

So after 3 quick books that set up Act 1 of the big story in 96/99/00, 24 years later we still don't have what was supposed to be the next big event to really kick Act 2 of the story into high gear.

[Nick1Ø66 5,548]

34 minutes ago, Edmilson said:

The funniest part is that both A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons (books 4 and 5) were supposed to be a single book. But the story got so big, so sprawling, so complex, that he had to separate the story into two tomes, released 6 years apart (one in 2005 and the other in 2011).

 

Someone created an eBook combining both AFFC & ADWD, chapterised in chronlogical order (the same was done for the audiobooks), and that's how I read those books. It made sense to me to read it that way, given that most of the events of the book overlap. Otherwise I'm not sure I'd have gotten through AFFC.

[Edmilson 8,497]

IIRC there are now two climaxes culminating story arcs from books 4 and 5 that are supposed to begin book 6. One is a battle in the North with Stannis trying to take Winterfell from the Bolton armies in the midst of a huge snow storm and the other is a battle in the Slaver's Bay with all the Slave nations laying siege to Meereen while Dany is... somewhere... with the Dothraki.

 

Martin said back in 2012 (!) that "I'm going to open with the two big battles that I was building up to, the battle in the ice and the battle at Meereen—the battle of Slaver's Bay. And then take it from there."

 

I think he has been stuck in these two battles since then, especially the Meereen stuff. Things got so overly complicated and complex there that GoT producers decided had Dany burning the slavers, Tyrion made them promise to "be good" or whatever and then they left for Westeros.

 

Martin of course can't do the same and now he's stuck. I remember there was even a blog about the Meereenese knot and how hard to tie it down it was.

[Jay 38,749]

Yup exactly.

 

People think the success of the show caused him to rapidly slow down the writing process, but he's really been having issues tying his expanding world together ever since the initial 3 books.

 

Maybe he should have largely stuck to the same characters from those instead of introducing sooo many new ones and other new ideas after them

[Edmilson 8,497]

18 minutes ago, Nick1Ø66 said:

Otherwise I'm not sure I'd have gotten through AFFC.

It's the book that have the most uninteresting parts for sure. ADWD starts the same way but gets more "eventful" by the end, when we're left with a ton of cliffhangers.

 

16 minutes ago, Edmilson said:

I think he has been stuck in these two battles since then, especially the Meereen stuff.

Actually scrap that. According to Wikipedia, he seems to have written third quarters of the book (about 1,100 pages) but has been having difficulty to finish the last 400-500 pages since at least 2020-2021. Apparently 2019 and 2020 were quite productive for The Winds of Winter, but since 2021 he is stuck with the final quarter of the book.

 

Quote

In April 2019, Martin said that the writing "has been going very well lately",^[77] and in May he wrote that if he did not have a copy of The Winds of Winter in hand for 2020 Worldcon New Zealand, Air New Zealand has his permission to imprison him on New Zealand's White Island until he finishes it.^[78][79] In October 2019, Martin said he hoped to finish The Winds of Winter "in the relatively near future",^[80] and after a Game of Thrones prequel, House of the Dragon, of which Martin is one of the executive producers, was announced,^[81] he stated that there was a lot of work to be done on the series but that he would not write any scripts for the series before finishing The Winds of Winter.^[82]

In an interview published in January 2020, Martin said that while he was still working on The Winds of Winter, his primary focus, he also continues^[83] working with Nnedi Okorafor on a TV adaptation of her science fantasy novel Who Fears Death,^[84] for which he agreed to be executive producer in 2017.^[85] In March and April 2020, Martin stated that he was writing The Winds of Winter every day.^[86][87] In February 2021, Martin said he had written "hundreds and hundreds of pages" of The Winds of Winter in 2020 but that even though it had been the most productive year with regard to The Winds of Winter, he still had hundreds of pages to write; although he was hopeful of finishing in 2021, he did not want to make any predictions.^[88] In March 2022, Martin stated that he had made less progress in 2021 than in 2020, but emphasized that "'less' is not 'none'".^[89]

During an appearance on the October 25, 2022, episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Martin said that approximately three quarters of The Winds of Winter had been written.^[3][4] In an appearance on Stephen Colbert's Tooning Out the News later that year, Martin said that he had written approximately 1,100 to 1,200 pages of the book and that roughly 400–500 pages remained to be written.^[5] In July 2023, Martin said that he was working on the novel "almost every day".^[90][91]

On August 14, 2023, Martin reaffirmed his notion from his Blog that is Not A Blog post from April 15, 2014 that no further Dunk and Egg novellas will be written until after finishing The Winds of Winter.^[92][93]

In November 2023, Martin indicated that the number of pages written was the same as the year before, stating that he was "struggling with it" and doesn't know when it will be finished.^[6]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Winds_of_Winter#Writing_history