The Bard of Banefort

Rhaena was a stand-out for me too, and young Viserys II. It was also confirmation that George can still write great characters, since he hadn’t written much about either of them before then. My favorite chapter is the one on all of J+A’s children, who all felt so distinct and memorable. Ironically, this also points to one of the big flaws in FnB for me. Despite having published a half-dozen versions of the Dance at this point, I still don’t really feel like I know Daemon or Rhaenyra or Alicent. If George had also written the Dance for the first time in 2017-2018, I think it they would have been more fleshed-out as characters.

Yes, it’s been five years. Fire & Blood was released on November 20, 2018. It’s Thanksgiving week in the US, so I have very fond memories of reading FnB during long car rides to visit different relatives. It was such a pleasure to read, and I can only hope that we’ll get some new reading material in the near future. What was your first impression of FnB? How has it changed since then? Is there anything you wish was done differently? Let the reminiscing commence!

According to @Ran, there’s a story behind their marriage, but it sounds like GRRM is saving it for sometime down the line.

Debbie Downer here, but I don’t think GOT should or even can be a cinematic (TV) universe. Firstly, there’s not enough written material. Egg is only on year 11 of his 59-years-long life. The only other eras GRRM has written in detail are Jaehaerys’ reign, which has no central conflict, and the Conquest, which is just the Targaryens steamrolling over everyone else. The Conquest makes for good lore, but it’s not a great story on its own, which is probably why they keep trying and failing to write a script for it. The other option is to take a basic premise (i.e. Nymeria) and try to find writers that can build a compelling story out of an outline. It’s not impossible, but as we already saw with GOT, it’s a big risk. If George is able to crank out more supplementary material, there may be a greater basis for more projects, but the guy is 75 years old, and he’s pretty opaque about his writing process. He says he’s writing something, but that’s about all we can deduce from him.

Probably Daenerys

The Dance ends with Cregan marrying Aly Blackwood. Unless Norrey dies right after she is introduced, I doubt we’ll be seeing her.

It’s possible—not likely, but possible—that George has been working on the supplementary material in addition to/instead of Winds (Dunk & Egg, Fire & Blood vol. 2). I’ll take anything aside from another reprinting of the Dance at this point, so this is an acceptable alternative to me. As for the shows, Casey Bloys made it sound like they were sticking with HOTD and DnE, and weren’t focusing on any other spin-offs at the moment. I guess we’ll find out. I think they’ve already tried and failed to write a screenplay for the Conquest like three times now.

George’s biggest problem is that the books didn’t each span several years like they were supposed to. That’s something that he should have been more diligent about when writing the first three books. (Ironically, all it would have taken was using realistic travel times; everyone travels way too fast in this series.) I’m thinking he probably planned on AGOT spanning at least three years, since Joffrey was able to have Ned executed without a regent’s permission. He shouldn’t have been able to do that until he was king in his own right, which would have been when he turned 16.

Last year he said he had 1,200 pages.

On the one hand, fans do blame Cersei for Jaime’s faults—this appears to be the result of how Jaime evolved as a character in GRRM’s mind, since we know that he was supposed to be a supervillain at first. At the same time, if their genders were reversed, no one would have any problem identifying female-Jaime as a victim of male-Cersei’s physical and psychological abuse.

Apparently George is now saying that he only has 1,100 pages done

For the first few books, GRRM seemed to take a pretty stringent approach towards noble marriages, dismissing those between different social classes as unrealistic. Then sometime around ADWD, it looks like he just figured that it was more fun to include some less conventional marriages. Alys Karstark marrying a wildling was probably the first instance, but TWOIAF and FnB are filled with highborn ladies marrying men far lower down the totem poll (the Rhaenas, Elaena, Elinor Costayne, Cassandra Baratheon, etc.) It’s pretty funny how George went from saying “the prince would have raped the peasant girl” to then being like, Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if the prince of Dragonstone fell in love with a peasant girl named Jenny?

Baelor Breakspear and Jena Dondarrion is a bit odd. I understand the logic of a marriage to a Marcher family, but the Dondarrions don’t seem quite prestigious enough for a future Queen consort.

Was Jung the one who came up with the idea of the collective unconscious? Guess he was on to something.

I know The Pacific was a prestigious drama that reflected well on the network, but I can’t imagine that they earned back the money they spent on it. It’s not like HBO was selling Pacific merch on the side.

Damn, what made it that expensive to film?

In terms of personal preference, I would rank them as Feast, Storm, Clash, Game, and Dance. Writing-wise is trickier. AFFC has some of the best prose, but the storytelling just isn’t as strong. ASOS would probably be my top pick in this case, although ADWD remains at the bottom of the pack. Even if I didn’t find large swaths of it boring, it still failed to progress the story enough.

It’s just hard to conceptualize how he went from thinking the book was only a year away in 2019 to now doubting that it will be released before 2026. I just wish we had a bit more information. Do you guys think GRRM ever worries about getting canceled? Just within the fandom, there’s far more criticism of some of the darker/raunchier aspects of the books than there was ten years ago.

Is HOTD on track to become HBO’s most expensive show ever? Season One’s budget was almost $20 million per episode, which was more than S8 of GOT. I’m fascinated to see how much each successive season ends up costing.

Kit attended a con over the weekend where he apparently confirmed that even though he’d still like to do the Snow show, it’s not currently going forward. He didn’t say why, but if other interviews he’s done are any indication, I’m thinking that whatever he had in mind was probably much more introspective and less exciting than what HBO was hoping for. It sounded like he wanted to focus on Jon struggling with his demons.

Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon, James Hibberd’s oral history of GOT.

Based on what I’ve read about D&D, it would appear that them being massive control freaks turned out to be both their greatest strength and weakness. No other large-scale show that has come out since GOT has been able to consistently release like clockwork on a yearly basis (and most of them have fewer than ten episodes per season). The Ds were clearly very organized and disciplined to pull that off. But they also refused to bring in any new writers or allow for any additional input, even from the cast. It was striking how, in FCKAD, their takeaway from Dorne falling flat was that viewers didn’t want to meet any new characters, and not that the execution was poor. It’s like the difference between the original Star Wars trilogy, which was more of a collaborative process, and the prequel trilogy, where George Lucas had complete control over everything. D&D were devoted to the show, but they ended up surrounding themselves with yes-men and didn’t take any criticism of the show into consideration (beyond eventually cutting back on the sexual assault scenes, that is).

I agree that they were really tired, but before the Star Wars deal, they were planning on doing another HBO show next (Confederate). I think that S8 would have turned out the same way even if they were unattached, because it was basically just an extension of how they wrote season 5-7. Show-fans didn’t care about any of the plot holes or bad dialogue when they were still getting all the battles and spectacle that they loved. I really believe that if S8 had the same quality writing but with a wish fulfillment ending where Jon slays the monster and Daenerys becomes the beloved goddess-queen, most people truly would have regarded it as the best season ever. Of course, that still doesn’t reflect well on D&D, since either way they wrote all of this. But I think the TV-media hype machine created something of a self-fulfilling prophecy that ruined the quality of GOT.

So do you believe this theory then?

Three Body Problem is set to premiere this spring. As much as I hate how much I’ve been defending D&D this year. . . doesn’t this all fly in the face of the allegation that they rushed GOT to start their movie career? Wouldn’t they be off making movies now in that case?