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It's been some time since the Game of Thrones review. As we head into the final TV season, what are your thoughts? Do you prefer to hear the Song of Ice and Fire from dusty tomes instead? And why does George R.R. Martin like writing side stories more than mainline books?

As the TV series surpassed the books, everything got increasingly stupid.

I actually had high hopes for the show heading into S5; the books had lost its focus after Storm of Swords, so I figured this was the perfect opportunity for the show to clean up the narrative and improve things.

Instead, they kept the worst elements to Feast for Crows/Dance with Dragons - the the meandering narrative, the needlessly complex plotting, the ponderous pace - while cutting out the best elements. At least the novels followed a consistent internal logic on how and why characters behaved the way they did; it might be 2,000 pages of positioning people for the final act, but it did so in a logical manner.

From S5 onwards, the show had characters acting more or less randomly, and then got killed off just as suddenly. There was no rhyme nor reason to any of it.

As to GRRM, it's been clear for a while now that he's lost control of the narrative. It's best to think of Game of Thrones, Clash of Kings, and SOS as one trilogy, followed by an intermission (FFC and DWD), with a second and concluding act yet to be published.

There was originally supposed to be a five year gap following SOS, which would have let him cut immediately to the action; as he started writing, though, he realized he couldn't just jump from point A to point B. It would have been too abrupt, and you needed to see how and why the characters had changed in order for their actions to make sense. By the same token, though, the gap was supposed to give Sansa, Arya, and Bran a chance to grow up and grow stronger; without it, he needed a way to keep them in the story even as they basically did nothing. Meanwhile, the new POVs we got were mostly disposable characters without anywhere near the same depth. End result: 2,000 pages of old favorites doing mostly nothing, while new people we don't particularly like get the spotlight.

Worse yet, as of DWD, he still hasn't solved the problem of different plot threads happening at different paces and worlds away from each other. He actually made it worse by introducing another dozen or so POVs. So, yeah, I'm not optimistic about the next book unless he hires Sanderson to write it for him.

It sucks, i jut want to finish it and hope for good spinoff shows.

Sansa's plotline is a little more interesting in the TV show. Theon's plotline *tries* to be more interesting but isn't really. What's more bothersome is the extra Targaryen pretender in the book series, especially now that the worst kept secret in fanon has finally been revealed.

PerrySimm wrote: ↑Sun Dec 16, 2018 3:28 am Sansa's plotline is a little more interesting in the TV show. Theon's plotline *tries* to be more interesting but isn't really. What's more bothersome is the extra Targaryen pretender in the book series, especially now that the worst kept secret in fanon has finally been revealed.

Disagree entirely regarding Sansa. Her brief appearances in FFC was about her learning the subtleties of court politics, and figuring out how to hold true to her Stark identity while under Littlefinger's tutelage. Sansa's arc in the show was about getting raped and debased by a psychopath to show how much peril she's in. It was gratuitous shock for shock's sake, and made absolutely no sense for her or Littlefinger.

Honestly, everything about Ramsay was just plain stupid in the show; it's all shock and horror just to be shocking and horrible, without ever bothering to ever explain why or how the Boltons exert any influence in the North among the non-psychopaths.

Dorne managed to be even worse, for similar reasons: there was literally nothing redeeming about them. They basically removed all sympathetic traits from everyone in the entire country, along with their competence, and any understanding of their culture and history, leaving us with a bunch of shallow, horrible people who couldn't get killed fast enough. They existed to pad things out as temporary villains, and be worse than the Lannisters so that we wouldn't root for them against Cersei.

Ditto for Arya's experience in Braavos. They managed to extract all subtlety, depth, and redeeming features about the entire arc in order to... actually, I have no idea what they were going for there.

The point is, they started with two thousand pages, and stripped away all of the humanity to present the worst, while adding their own brand of penny dreadful schlock in an effort to seem edgy.

It's like they were trying to prove all the negative criticisms about the show right. This wasn't a mature take on a fantasy world; it was a fourteen year old's idea of how to write a mature fantasy world. Just up the violence and sex, and ignore the humanity.

GRRM is reportedly upbeat about his writing tack now that the TV show is over!

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/aug/17/george-rr-martin-game-thrones-writer-end-of-show-was-liberation

Of course Martin's pleased; its unlikely any fan response to his ending will match the anger and disdain the end of the TV series got.

He's like a kid in college who just watched their older sibling go to jail; compared to that, potentially not getting on the honor roll isn't going to be that big a blow to his parents' sense of pride.

I think the show's early success is what doomed it to fail creatively. It's something I worry about with adapting works that are ongoing, just do to how TV works you are going to catch up and have to wing it from there. That and the resulting burnout from doing the show caused D&D (David Benioff and D.B. Weiss the showrunners) to just wrap things up as fast as possible. The people I feel bad for are the actors, particularly the young actors like Sophie Turner and Maisie Williams, whose careers were started and now that start has been tainted by a bad ending that wasn't their fault in the slightest.

D&D being signed to however many movie deals can't have been a positive factor for their focus, plus GRRM being of two minds with the later seasons of the show, not supervising or penning his episode, etc, was also not a good thing.

Whether from brilliant strategy or bumbling into a lucky postmortem situation, GRRM has the chance to put right what once went wrong.