FictionIsntReal

People were complaining years before then. I was one of them, particularly during season 5. But the ratings kept going up. The spectacle of Hardhome evidently made up for the bad writing in the minds of (relative) normies. You going places and seeing things is anecdotal evidence, which would itself be particularly vulnerable to a filter bubble effect. Whereas data on ratings, Blu-Ray sales, etc is objective and not skewed by such effects. You've got a better deadpan than David Benioff. Very funny. I also liked your earlier bit on Battle of the Bastards about how Miguel Sapochnik hates the showrunners, prior to him returning for The Long Night. What's the Nazi occupation of Norway in this analogy? I don't have high hopes for a Blackfyre Rebellions series. Those rebellions seem narratively thinner than Roberts', and I have no reason to think lots of original writing will transform them into anything comparable to the war of five kings.

HBO cares whether people kept watching, not whether they complained.

Netflix paid a massive amount after GoT ended. From my link on their Netflix deal: "This follows a three-way bidding war that had recently narrowed from the six major studios to Netflix, Amazon and Disney." Yep, they were in hot demand after GoT ended. A lot of people have come and gone through Star Wars under Disney. As I said, there are actual news stories you can read about the bidding war over them, if you actually cared to inform yourself about the TV business. That business does not have the same priorities as fans of the books.

Here is a cite on the Three Body Problem: https://variety.com/2020/tv/news/three-body-problem-series-netflix-david-benioff-d-b-weiss-alexander-woo-1234755170/ It's also mentioned in there that D&D's deal with Netflix (the one that makes them exclusive to it) is "reportedly worth nine figures". This is the result of a bidding war over all the outlets that wanted D&D. As for why HBO would want him, it's because he made their biggest show of all time, and they wanted more seasons of that show but he & Dan decided to end it. Just like how Vince Gilligan was given carte blanche by AMC for Better Call Saul after he made Breaking Bad. You might think HBO would change their mind after the complaints about the final season, but they only care about subscription numbers. The finale of Dexter was even more hated, but Scott Buck (who didn't even create that show, and was only showrunner during the most critically derided seasons) was picked by Marvel's TV division to create multiple shows for them (each of which was poorly received and only lasted one season). That's because people (other than me) kept watching Dexter all the way to the end.

I think HBO wishes that were the case, but he's exclusive to Netflix now and working on The Three Body Problem.

This seems simple/obvious enough that it might not be worth pointing out, but when I tried doing a search here I didn't see anybody else doing so. The lost prophetic work "Signs and Portents" has a title that sounds like a reference to Nabokov's "Signs and Symbols". One of the notions in Nabokov's story is that searching for secret signs is itself a sign of insanity, and that would fit with the notion that "prophecy will bite your prick off".

That reminds me of something: George has already acknowledged the influence of "The Accursed Kings", but I didn't realize just how closely his work resembles it until I watched the original French miniseries. Things like Cersei/Margaery being locked up on charges of adultery, the poisoning of the king, swapping out the infant heir to the throne before he can be murdered, a reminder that the common people suffer for the avarice of the nobility, even direct inspirations for certain characters are all in there. The biggest difference is that it's taken from history so there's no explicit magic (though a number of characters believe in magic curses). Combine Tolkien's Middle Earth with that series and you've basically got A Song of Ice and Fire.

I first heard of Eddison's "The Worm Ouroboros" from someone complaining that GRRM was just imitating the amorality of that story. I haven't actually read it myself (the deliberately old timey prose is a barrier, as are the silly names Eddison came up with when he was 10), but it occurred to me that the "cadaverous" Gorys Edoryen might be named after King Gorice of Witchland, who returns in a new "incarnation" each time a previous one dies.

Thanks! I still can't log in, but now it's because my user name doesn't exist (I didn't realize at the time that I need to make more forum posts to take the next registration step), rather than because of cookies.

I just recently signed up to contribute to the wiki, but have been unable to log in, with errors saying I have cookies disabled on any browser I try, even though the settings in my browsers don't say that. The one change I had planned on making was to add a footnote about the statement that Ashara Dayne's body was never found. As far as I can tell, the books never address that question but someone asked Martin and he replied here: http://www.westeros.org/Citadel/SSM/Entry/1116