Rant and Rave without Repercussions [S7 Leaks Edition]

[StepStark]

10 minutes ago, sweetsunray said:

Regarding the "outline": according to what George explained last year at Balticon, his publisher house had the outline up on the wall of a conference/meeting room, and thus the ending was blacked out by the people who decided to put the outline on display in their offices. Someone who visited or entered that space took a picture and "leaked it".

You can speculate on who and why the outline was leaked, but the blacknig out was the doing of his publishing house.

I have to say, that explanation doesn't sound very convincing to me. Why would someone black out the ending, but put everything else on display? If they were concerned with spoiling, they wouldn't put it up there at all, most probably. I don't think I'd do anything like what they say they did. It just doesn't make much sense. They're either fans, in which case they wouldn't even show it so carelessly, or they aren't, in which case they wouldn't black out the most intriguing parts.

Anyway, that was just a speculation on my part. I'm not saying that the speculation is accurate, but have to say that none of their explanations sound believable.

[StepStark]

4 hours ago, Pearly said:

I think ultimately, he will never criticize the show because he's not stupid and after all, the more successful the show, the richer he is. I don't mean this to mean that he is mercenary - I don't think he is. What I mean is that he wouldn't... look a gift horse in the mouth perhaps?

He also famously said something like: "I hate when writers sell their work for an adaptation and then whine about how it turned out - if you didn't want it changed, you shouldn't sell it in the first place". He said that years and years before GOT was conceived. So I really wouldn't expect him to start criticizing the show any time soon, but on the other hand he officially said that he doesn't even watch it any more, so yeah, he's far from happy with the way things turned out.

We'll probably never know, but if he knew what are D^D going to do with the story, I don't think he'd sell the rights to them. He'd probably wait, and given the demand for good stories and knowing that the book series was becoming more and more popular, it was probably just a mater of time before some really good writers approach him.

[Pearly]

26 minutes ago, StepStark said:

We'll probably never know, but if he knew what are D^D going to do with the story, I don't think he'd sell the rights to them. He'd probably wait, and given the demand for good stories and knowing that the book series was becoming more and more popular, it was probably just a mater of time before some really good writers approach him.

I agree 100% - hindsight is 20/20. And it's funny that you said that. My husband, who only started to listen to the books a couple of months ago (and only now finishing CoK), asked me yesterday "Do you think GoT will be remade once all the books are done by someone really good?"

i think the show has deteriorated so much that even the show-watchers are not enjoying it as much now.

[Le Cygne]

1 hour ago, StepStark said:

I have to say, that explanation doesn't sound very convincing to me. Why would someone black out the ending, but put everything else on display? If they were concerned with spoiling, they wouldn't put it up there at all, most probably. I don't think I'd do anything like what they say they did. It just doesn't make much sense. They're either fans, in which case they wouldn't even show it so carelessly, or they aren't, in which case they wouldn't black out the most intriguing parts.

Anyway, that was just a speculation on my part. I'm not saying that the speculation is accurate, but have to say that none of their explanations sound believable.

I just listened to what he said in Balticon again (someone shared the recording and I have it). He didn't say anything about anyone blacking it out.

GRRM:

"I had like 200 pages of Game of Thrones at that point, but they wanted an outline, and I don't do outlines. I don't know what's going to happen, I'll figure it out as I go. That's how I always did it. No, we have to have an outline. So I wrote 2 pages, a 2 page thing about about some things I thought would happen. It will be a trilogy, three books, Game of Thrones, A Dance With Dragons, The Winds of Winter, those were the 3 original titles. And there will be 3 books and this will happen and this will happen and this will happen...

"And I was making up shit. And I had thought those 2 pages were long forgotten. Because of course the books did sell, they sold in the United States and Great Britain. They sold for enough money that I didn't have to play any more Hollywood games. So I was able to say no, I had a few last minute things to wind up in '94 and '95. Once I was done, I don't want any more movies, I don't want any more TV shows, I want to write these books. And I started writing the books.

"Of course, as I wrote the books, I pretty much disregarded the outline, the characters took me off in entirely different directions. So for 20 years, I had forgotten that 2 page thing even existed. And then someone in my British publisher Harper Collins, they got a new office building, brand new offices, they had conference rooms that they decorated with books and stuff like that, and they named the conference rooms after the writers, so one of the conference rooms was the George RR Martin room, and they put up all these glass display cases, including the 2 page outline, that they found in the bottom of a cabinet, they didn't ask my permission, they just put it up."

[StepStark]

35 minutes ago, Le Cygne said:

I just listened to what he said in Balticon again (someone shared the recording and I have it). He didn't say anything about anyone blacking it out.

GRRM:

"I had like 200 pages of Game of Thrones at that point, but they wanted an outline, and I don't do outlines. I don't know what's going to happen, I'll figure it out as I go. That's how I always did it. No, we have to have an outline. So I wrote 2 pages, a 2 page thing about about some things I thought would happen. It will be a trilogy, three books, Game of Thrones, A Dance With Dragons, The Winds of Winter, those were the 3 original titles. And there will be 3 books and this will happen and this will happen and this will happen...

"And I was making up shit. And I had thought those 2 pages were long forgotten. Because of course the books did sell, they sold in the United States and Great Britain. They sold for enough money that I didn't have to play any more Hollywood games. So I was able to say no, I had a few last minute things to wind up in '94 and '95. Once I was done, I don't want any more movies, I don't want any more TV shows, I want to write these books. And I started writing the books.

"Of course, as I wrote the books, I pretty much disregarded the outline, the characters took me off in entirely different directions. So for 20 years, I had forgotten that 2 page thing even existed. And then someone in my British publisher Harper Collins, they got a new office building, brand new offices, they had conference rooms that they decorated with books and stuff like that, and they named the conference rooms after the writers, so one of the conference rooms was the George RR Martin room, and they put up all these glass display cases, including the 2 page outline, that they found in the bottom of a cabinet, they didn't ask my permission, they just put it up."

It's even stranger then, because that means that someone blacked out the ending before posting it online. That's either the most respectfull hacker in history, or it wasn't about hacking at all. Btw, is it known who post it online?

[The Fattest Leech]

8 minutes ago, StepStark said:

It's even stranger then, because that means that someone blacked out the ending before posting it online. That's either the most respectfull hacker in history, or it wasn't about hacking at all. Btw, is it known who post it online?

This article may be helpful. It gives links to the links of the hunt.

http://www.businessinsider.com/game-of-thrones-was-supposed-to-be-a-trilogy-2015-2

A little more from that article:

(Spoilers All) So, I just saw this tweet... (self.asoiaf)

submitted 2 years ago* by TheNextRobinOnce you go black...

Hey there! Obligatory long time lurker, first time poster sentence.

Anyways, to business: I was scrolling Twitter, when I noticed this tweet from Waterstones (Don't judge me). For those too lazy to click, it links to three photos consisting of a letter from Georgie himself to his agent, giving the broad strokes of the over all story line.

So, is this the genuine article? Why would Harper Collins give the info to Waterstones to publish for the world to see? I'd read somewhere that his editors had thought of publishing this letter, but only once the series had been competed.

Personally, I didn't read past the first picture, as I want to avoid possible spoilers, but I thought that I would at least let you guys be tempted too.

TL:DR- Waterstones may just have given the game away

The letter: Page 1 Page 2 Page 3

EDIT I'm glad this has got you all talking. Thanks guys and gals. Big shout out to /u/MadamPounce who has all but legitimised this bastard for me through this article.

Want to theorise on the redacted section? PopMelon's thread seems like the place to be. Wait, Benjen did WHAT???

https://www.reddit.com/r/asoiaf/comments/2urteh/spoilers_all_so_i_just_saw_this_tweet/

 

[Le Cygne]

15 minutes ago, StepStark said:

It's even stranger then, because that means that someone blacked out the ending before posting it online. That's either the most respectfull hacker in history, or it wasn't about hacking at all. Btw, is it known who post it online?

From what I can tell, since there are reflections on whatever is covering the letters when they took the pics, it was blacked out before it was online.

We just don't know who blacked it out or why, it could have been blacked out 20 years ago, or by some intern who chose it to put on the wall, or who knows.

It had nothing to do with GRRM, because he didn't even know about it. And I doubt anyone like his editor would have allowed it, so not her, either.

[The Fattest Leech]

11 minutes ago, StepStark said:

It's even stranger then, because that means that someone blacked out the ending before posting it online. That's either the most respectfull hacker in history, or it wasn't about hacking at all. Btw, is it known who post it online?

It seems that the office that put the letter up were the ones to black out the ending when it was posted behind the glass cover.

"and a George R R Martin Room contains a letter Martin wrote to his agent outlining the plot for A Song of Ice and Fire—the final paragraph is blacked out." http://www.thebookseller.com/news/harpercollins-finalises-office-transfer

[Le Cygne]

The point is, we don't know who blacked it out, when, or why. Could have been long ago. Could have been an intern who is told always black out last paragraphs of outlines, who knows.

So we can't read significance into that. It's not GRRM, it's not his British editor, so it's no one with any real knowledge of the story beyond what anyone knows.

A good bit of what's in the paragraph has been guessed, and it doesn't seem all that spoilery, IIRC something like Bran and Jon clash or something.

And we have a direct quote from GRRM (above) saying he made up shit, the characters took him in entirely different directions, and he disregarded/forgot the outline.

So again, seems like reading too much into a paragraph that was blacked out for unknown reasons at an unknown time by some unknown person... why.

[The Fattest Leech]

57 minutes ago, Le Cygne said:

I just listened to what he said in Balticon again (someone shared the recording and I have it). He didn't say anything about anyone blacking it out.

GRRM:

"I had like 200 pages of Game of Thrones at that point, but they wanted an outline, and I don't do outlines. I don't know what's going to happen, I'll figure it out as I go. That's how I always did it. No, we have to have an outline. So I wrote 2 pages, a 2 page thing about about some things I thought would happen. It will be a trilogy, three books, Game of Thrones, A Dance With Dragons, The Winds of Winter, those were the 3 original titles. And there will be 3 books and this will happen and this will happen and this will happen...

"And I was making up shit. And I had thought those 2 pages were long forgotten. Because of course the books did sell, they sold in the United States and Great Britain. They sold for enough money that I didn't have to play any more Hollywood games. So I was able to say no, I had a few last minute things to wind up in '94 and '95. Once I was done, I don't want any more movies, I don't want any more TV shows, I want to write these books. And I started writing the books.

"Of course, as I wrote the books, I pretty much disregarded the outline, the characters took me off in entirely different directions. So for 20 years, I had forgotten that 2 page thing even existed. And then someone in my British publisher Harper Collins, they got a new office building, brand new offices, they had conference rooms that they decorated with books and stuff like that, and they named the conference rooms after the writers, so one of the conference rooms was the George RR Martin room, and they put up all these glass display cases, including the 2 page outline, that they found in the bottom of a cabinet, they didn't ask my permission, they just put it up."

I think these lines are the most telling, and he has been saying this to anyone who asks or reads about him since he wrote that "full of shit" outline. In the outline he says, "As you know, I don't outline my novels. I find that if I know exactly where a book is going, I lose all interest in writing it." it is the third line on page, but many people read right past that for reasons. This was not the first time in his interview history of talking about this outline, just one of the most recent and most detailed. He did mention it and how incorrect it in when he was down in Mexico a few months ago. He has been saying this all along. We readers had "fair warning".

[Le Cygne]

It was great to have something recent and detailed, thanks!

[Cas Stark]

He did ultimately do some form of an "outline" elsewise HBO would not have bought the rights and the showrunners would not know the ending....it also is quite probably the reason he has lost all interest in writing the story....because he was forced to do an "outline" that gave away the ending. Oh well.  Better HBO and GOT than nothing I guess.

[Le Cygne]

There are so many contradictory quotes about the books and show...

[Faint]

I am still trying to gather what is relevant concerning the identity of who blacked out the outline. 

[sweetsunray]

nm

[Faint]

4 hours ago, Cas Stark said:

He did ultimately do some form of an "outline" elsewise HBO would not have bought the rights and the showrunners would not know the ending....it also is quite probably the reason he has lost all interest in writing the story....because he was forced to do an "outline" that gave away the ending. Oh well.  Better HBO and GOT than nothing I guess.

I disagree with this view if only because he has been forthcoming with the fact that he has always known the endings to the major characters (i.e., Jon, Daenerys, Tyrion, Arya, Bran and Sansa) and, as evidenced by the last two seasons of the show, it looks like he did not give the Benioff and Weiss much besides those endings, excepting major plot beats.

It would be like Martin telling Benioff and Weiss that the Patriots beat the Falcons in the Super Bowl after staging a huge comeback, then describing the five biggest plays, but nothing more. Benioff and Weiss would then have to invent the rest of the second half from their own imagination. 

I think the outline was very basic for the most part, excepting the end points and, perhaps, the story of Jon and Daenerys, since they are so central to the whole narrative. 

[Liver and Onions]

23 hours ago, RenlyIsNotRight said:

Benioff also wrote X Men Origins Wolverine which is a notoriously garbage movie, not even mediocre like Troy.

If you're curious about Weiss' resume I'd hop on over to his Wikipedia page, it's a treasure - he's been involved in a number of failed high profile projects since the early 2000s that all somehow ended in development hell. Like literally everything this guy touched turned to shit before he hopped on Benioffs coattails for GoT.

Basically these guys are bona fide hacks. The evidence has been there from day one. But GoT got by in the earlier seasons on the strength of the source material and I suspect also GRRM having a more active hand in some of the changes from earlier seasons that did work - the added Robert Baratheon scenes in Season 1 come to mind here. Certainly doesn't seem like D$D especially after that fucking abhorrent "Robert Rebellions was built on a lie" dogshit.

I suspect when Confederate comes out and inevitably flops the general public will finally catch on, hell they already seem to be starting to. 

Thanks for the info- I forgot about that Wolverine movie ha hah hah! 

Yeah, I don't have high, or any hopes at all, for Confederate. Even if some creators I actually liked were doing such a project, I'd probably feel the same. I admit when people started catching on to D&D's hack-ness, I will be like the Emperor cackling on his throne- "good... GOOD...."  

[Le Cygne]

You’re not alone in thinking that Game of Thrones — with its accelerated timeline, undead TED talk, and Cersei’s curious lack of hair growth — is simply not as good as it once was. Yes, there’s an ice dragon, but whatever happened to a season where the Stark sisters had discernible character motivations? The creators of Rick and Morty know your gripes, and appropriately eulogized them after this week’s episode. In a post-post-credits sequence, the show ran a title card mourning “The writing on Game of Thrones: 2011–2016.” Logan Lucky already gave us one exceedingly clever Game of Thrones jokes, and now Rick and Morty has delivered the cynic’s take.

THIS FADED IN AT THE END OF RICK AND MORTY AND I AM LOSING MY GD MIND. BEYOND SAVAGE. #GameOfThrones pic.twitter.com/DQ4SyvH3MD

— Nik (@nhimak) August 28, 2017

http://www.vulture.com/2017/08/rick-and-morty-game-of-thrones-post-credits-scene.html

[Le Cygne]

@Dolorous Gabe posted this on another thread... The Titanic!

Here's a transcript:

The seams started to tear the moment the show ran out of books to adapt, and they burst wide open during the seventh season... Since the season finale I probably read 20 articles about the declining quality of the show's writing and the problems listed are all the same. The rampant plot holes, the ridiculously accelerated pacing, the whiplash from characters teleporting from one place on the map to another, and the obviously nonsensical plans the characters come up with, or rather that the writers force them to come up with, just so we can squeeze some more dragon-fueled spectacle to the mix.

But those problems just scratch the surface. The two biggest issues are as one, I see it character consistency and two, a lack of consequences. Characters... have become shells of their former selves... Characters... are forced to act in ways that contradict who they are in order to manufacture temporary conflict. Characters were written into impossible situations but managed to escape scot-free without growing or changing...

But there's no anger here to feel cathartic about, no passion here for me to vent, only the pain of falling out of love with a story... Empathy for these characters... makes us emotionally invested in what happens to them. And in watching a show go awry it makes me appreciate just how powerful a force empathy is... The problems are widespread now, and they are eroding the empathy we have for the characters.

For so long we have been watching and analyzing the show, because it promised to be something different. At the end of the road there would be some sort of transcendent experience that would give us the only thing we ever look for in stories, meaning. Game of Thrones promised to be meaningful...

The pain of falling out of love with a show isn't that you hate it, it's that you become ambivalent about it. It's the awareness that you're just not feeling as excited or scared or joyful as the story wants you to be... And yet we go on watching out of some sense of obligation, bonded by the empathy it hooked us with in the beginning, blinding us to the faults along the way, because we are going somewhere, right? There has to be some more meaning left, right?

The show is, quite literally, fan fiction, but it never felt so much like fan fiction as this season...

[MrJay]

I just watched that before I left to work. Spot on. Especially when he talked about how it feels to see something you loved go down hill.