Black of Hair and Heart

I'm sure he'll drop everything. You know how much George loves math!

I mean, Disney pulled all future Star Wars movies after they fucked up the sequel trilogy. Rian Johnson's further Star Wars movies got canceled as well. Feels like Disney is going to be keeping Star Wars out of the theaters for the foreseeable future. But I guess I don't really know what "victory laps" showrunners take after successful shows beyond making more shows. I'm sure it is. Rotten Tomatoes isn't really a great indicator of quality for anything though, especially given the dismal state of television criticism.

I mean, people are going to be dicks on the internet. That's true of everything. Things like The Last Jedi or Game of Thrones are going to be flashpoints precisely because they're so popular. I dunno. As somone who likes the show a lot more than I imagine most people here do, I sympathize with that reddit user you quoted, but I also think there's plenty of places to talk about GoT without getting pilloried for it, not to mention insightful, non-negative writing about the ending. Sean T. Collins and Gretchen Felker-Martin are two writers I like who have written beautifully (and positively) about the 8th season and the show in general. I always recommend them if people are ever looking for "dissenting" opinions regarding the show and the ending.

For sure. It's almost strange that the whole shared universe approach took as long to take off as it did. But it's perfect for maintaining the level of popularity we're talking about. Now instead of having a hit show or movie where you need to maintain word of mouth/popularity for years until there's a second season or a sequel, you have something adjacent to it to immediately follow it and make sure that people never stop talking about the wider franchise. Marvel has more or less perfected it now that they have the Disney+ shows. Moon Knight is going to wrap up the week Dr. Strange 2 comes out and I'm sure by then we'll know that Ms. Marvel will be starting in June and wrap just in time for Thor Love and Thunder. HBO will have a tougher time making the same thing with GoT since the different spin-offs aren't set at the same time or directly overlapping, but I don't know that they're necessarily going for the same carpet-bomb approach that Disney does.

I kind of just think that's how...time works? And people's interest? Like, Breaking Bad was hugely popular during its 2008-2013 run, and people broadly liked the ending. But would you rather have been selling Breaking Bad merch in 2012 during the run up to the finale, or in late 2013 after it was over and all anyone was talking about was the Red Wedding? Tens of millions of dollars in marketing, press tours by the actors and creators, people speculating on what's going to happen; all of this drives "popularity" or whatever you want to call it, and all of it goes away once a show is over, whether people liked the ending or not. Star Wars is an anomaly (or used to be, before they started cranking out new content monthly under Disney) in that it's a once-in-a-lifetime property in terms of popularity. And even that was more or less fashioned by Lucas himself to sell merch, to say nothing of it now being part of the all consuming Disney empire. You can't really use that as a metric for something like this.

The ending of the show was broadly considered a disappointment, but the idea that the show isn't still wildly popular only really exists within the bubble of this site, the subreddit and other places where die-hard book fans congregate. The show is still enormously popular. That's why they're making half a dozen spinoffs.

It'll be interesting to see if there's a similar escalation of magic in the D&E stories the way there is in the main series. The only clear magic I think we see in the three stories so far are Daeron and Daemon's dragon dreams and Bloodraven's glamour. Obviously the series will end at Summerhall, and further appearences by Bloodraven might bring some magic as well, but I'm looking forward to seeing if/how Martin works magic into what seems to be a fairly grounded series by design.

That it's going to take three volumes to finish Fire & Blood

Remember that appearence George had a million years ago where George said it would be six books and Paris was standing behind him holding up seven fingers? Right now I'm standing behind you holding up three.

Kinda feel like the tower that's been the seat of the second most powerful person in the kingdom for the last three centuries would be considered famous.

That was my guess as well.

I don't know that I've ever seen him comment on specific lengths of time. The Hedge Knight was probably the quickest, that came out right before Clash. I always got the impression they were something he worked on when he was stuck on the main books. The timing of The Sworn Sword (2003) and The Mystery Knight (March 2010) kind of bear that out. I think as Martin starting digging into the histories more broadly (via both the World Book/F&B, plus the expansion of the world in the later books of the main series), they became tougher to tackle. I wouldn't be surprised if the fourth one took so long because Martin was hung up on the apparent shitshow that was the North during the back half of the second century and working out all the various factions among the Starks, etc. I think also, that as they become less of what we will probably call in the future "classic Dunk & Egg stories", i.e. them Forrest Gumping their way around Westeros, and start to become more directly involved in major events (like the Third Blackfyre Rebellion), the novellas themselves are going to get a lot longer.

This is insanely pedantic, even by your standards. Bravo.

Yeah, the history novellas don't really fly as in-universe accounts, but it doesn't really matter since they got superceded by F&B anyway. It's not like we ever have to go back and read them again. For me, they fall more into the same category as preview chapters from the main novels. I'd rather have them than not.

Ah, right, I had forgotten that was the case. Whether it was by original design or Martin's gardening, it still made for a cool reveal.

I feel like you're profoundly overestimating the number of people who read the world-building volumes of the fantasy series they like. And anyway, varying interpretations is most of the fun of fake history. You don't learn real history in a straight line from beginning to end. You learn bits and pieces and have to put the puzzle together as you go. That's a big part of what Martin's doing here. Why do you think we know Dunk and Egg die at Summerhall but still need a series of novellas to tell us why. It's not just crossing the eyes and dotting the tees on a Wiki.

That's cool to hear. Would have expected it re: Aegon IV considering Martin said he could write a whole novel about him. Neat that there would be that much material about Aerys II. I'm guessing some of that overlaps with the expanded Westerlands material from the World Book? I guess it's a testament to how well all the Regency stuff was done in the first volume, but the part of F&BII I'm looking forward to most is probably the reign of Aegon III. It's kind of a 20 year blank spot and there's so much cool stuff teed up at the end of the first volume: * Torrhen Manderly's beef with Aegon and what I assume is an upcoming alliance with Cregan Stark (assuming the Jeyne Manderly that marries Rickon Stark is Torrhen's daughter). * Unwin Peake still scheming in the Reach. * Whatever the fuck is going on with Alys Rivers in Harrenhal * The deaths of the final dragons (I'm especially interested to see what becomes of Morning and what the realm finally does about Silverwing). * Further voyages of the Oakenfist. * What I'm assuming will be a lot of regional strife due to all the local regencies. I don't know how intentional this was on Martin's part or how much he'll follow through on it, but I was struck on a re-read of F&B by the fact that, as of 136, roughly half the Lords Paramount in the kingdom are minors. Lyonel Tyrell is 7, Loreon Lannister is 10, Royce Baratheon is 5 and Toron Greyjoy is 9. Plus, you've got Kermit Tully and Aliandra Martell who, although they're in their twenties, have reputations as being impulsive hotheads. There's definitely a lot of set-up for inter- and intra-kingdom strife in the late 130s/early 140s if Martin wants to go there.

That was half the fun. My personal favorite example of this was how Rhaena comes off in the World Book and "Sons of the Dragon" vs. what she's revealed as in Fire & Blood. In the abbreviated works she seems like just another one of Martin's sad widows, but then you get the curveball and she turns out to be (in my opinion) one of the coolest and most interesting characters in all of F&B.

Interesting. I'm afraid I'll have to take that as confirmation of me being right about everything! But yeah. It is what it is (or isn't) when it comes to Winds, as someone who's been following the series since '06, I can accept that. But it would be nice to get anything new at this point. I was just thinking about it the other day and we're approaching the longest drought between new material in the history of the series. It's currently been about 3 years and 4 months since Fire & Blood was released, which is a tie for the second longest gap, which came between A Storm of Swords getting released in August of 2000 and The Sworn Sword coming out in December of 2003. The longest gap was between the release of A Feast for Crows in November of 2005 and The Mystery Knight in March of 2010, about 4 years and 4 months. Just thought that was kind of interesting. As much as the main series has gotten away from him over the last decade, he was pretty good about releasing new material every year or so even if it was just the histories. Hopefully something new will come out in the next year, in some form or another. I don't expect it to be Winds but at this point, I'll take what I can get.

@Ran I doubt you have any insider info in this regard (or would be able to share if you did) but if you had a personal opinion, I'd be interested to hear it. With George bringing the histories back into focus (more D&E, F&BII, etc), do you think we'll see a return of anthology installments over the next few years? They seem to have been on pause since the passing of Gardner Dozois, which is understandable, but as someone who's worked with George, I wonder if you have any insight into his calculus on this going forward. If he's going to try to crank out more D&E novellas in advance of the show and if he plans on making them longer to encompass important events like the Third Blackfyre Rebellion, it would probably make sense to just continue with A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, Vol. 2, containing the fourth and fifth stories (or the fourth, fifth and sixth, depending on how long they are and how quickly he can finish them) rather than first releasing them individually as part of anthologies. The fact that he already has hundreds of pages of F&BII already written (which was a really nice surprise) makes me wonder if we'll get another historical anthology entry soon in the vein of "The Princess and the Queen" or "The Rogue Prince". I know George doesn't like to sit on finished material so if he has a lot written for F&BII but the book as a whole is still a long way from done, it would be nice to see some of it, even in an abbreviated form. "The Reign of the Broken King" detailing the 20 post-regency years of Aegon III's reign? "The Conquest of Dorne"? Although I've always been curious about George's release strategy when it comes to those anthologies. If he's serious about getting this stuff out there, tying each one to an anthology involving a dozen plus other authors that also must vaguely align with the subject or theme of the story itself seems like a needlessly difficult way to go about it.

The fact that literally every aspect of this series gets orders of magnitude bigger than Martin initially plans feels like an even bigger clue. I'm sure he'll change his tune when he hits 1000 MS pages in Blood & Fire and he's still writing about Aegon the Unworthy.

I think 136-209 is the smartest move for F&BII. It allows him to cover 75 more years while still not spoiling any D&E stories. Also, while the page to time ratio could be lopsided in the first volume (Aegon I's reign after the First Dornish War is covered in a few pages; the first dozen years of Jaehaerys' reign vs. the rest) Martin was pretty good at having the pace match what was narratively intersting. But when you think about how much gets teed up at the end of F&BI plus the things we know Martin could write a lot about over the next 75 years (the Conquest of Dorne, the reign of the Unworthy, the First Blackfyre Rebellion, all the crazy shit going on with the Starks in the second half of the second century), it seems pretty clear that there's no way he could do this all in one more volume. Unless of course he skimps on the 209-283 period in favor of D&E stories, but that kind of defeats the in-world premise of it being a complete history of the Targaryens. He has kind of made an interesting challenge for himself, telling the same story via multiple perspectives and series of books. I'm curious to see what his solution is.