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GRRRM rewriting after season 8?


Amris

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Maybe he realized that the end of ADwD is better than the end he had originally in mind?

Dany is with Drogon, surrounded by Dothraki - outcome unclear

Jon has been stabbed, he may or may not be dead

Bran is in the cave, maybe becoming a tree

Tyrion is in Mereen, in the middle of a battle

...

I guess everyone of us has one or more favorite characters, and can finish the story in their mind to their liking. Everything is possible.

And the fact that we are still discussing it ten years after is a strong hint that it is fine the way it is. A classic drama has five acts.

 

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23 hours ago, Takiedevushkikakzvezdy said:

Either way, the fact that he wants to write another D&E story before diving into ADOS is worrying to me. Didn't he say that he regretted going on a big promotional tour after finishing ADWD because he ended up losing all the momentum he had? I know it's not really the same thing, but still, he has been burned twice already.

Honestly, I wouldn't mind if he releases another Dunk & Egg story before ADOS. Since it's obvious that we won't get the end of Ice and Fire, at least having some more stories from the man would be cool. 

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On 3/26/2021 at 6:37 PM, Takiedevushkikakzvezdy said:

Either way, the fact that he wants to write another D&E story before diving into ADOS is worrying to me. Didn't he say that he regretted going on a big promotional tour after finishing ADWD because he ended up losing all the momentum he had? I know it's not really the same thing, but still, he has been burned twice already.

He has to go on a promotional tour when he releases a book. It's in his contract with his publishers, I think. He's going to lose his momentum not matter what, because he's done that for every book he's released in the past, even F&B. But I wouldn't be too worried about D&E slowing down his pace. It's been theorized that writing F&B has helped him to write parts of Winds, and to change gears when he struggles with TWOW. And tbh, having anything at this point would be great, even if it's not Winds.

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On 3/25/2021 at 10:45 PM, Castellan said:

Do we know he gave them all the main characters end points, by the way?

Excerpt from James Hibberds book Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon Chapter 17, The Forks in the Road, Pg 225:

George R.R. Martin sat at a tucked-away table at his favorite restaurant in Santa Fe, a modest family-owned spot where green chili enchiladas and taco plates are ordered by their number.  Even though he was out of sight from the main dining room, Thrones fans still managed to find him and ask for a photo.  With his fluffy snow-white beard, suspenders and ever present fisherman's cap, Martin looks a bit like a literary character himself, as the author admits.

"When we did the first season, Sean Bean was the only well-known actor in the cast, but I was a best-selling author," Martin said. "So HBO used me in a lot of their early publicity, and my picture got out there and I became well-known.  I guess my appearance is rather distinctive.  Then I discovered  you can't turn that off.  Like, I can't go into a bookstore anymore, which is one of my favorite pleasures in life.  I used to spend a whole day browsing around and leave with many books under my arm.  Now I'm there five minutes and somebody asks for my autograph or a photo and pretty soon I have a circle of people around me.  You gain a lot and lose things too.

Martin pointed across the dining room to an even more more secluded nook.  Right over there, he said, was where he'd sat with David Benioff, Dan Weiss, and Bryan Cogman back in 2013 and revealed his long-held secret ending for A Song of Ice and Fire.  By that time it was clear to Martin that the show would have major divergences from the novels.

"During the pilot reshoot, I visited the set on the isle of Malta and met some of the new actors," Martin recalled. "There was some crisis that had occurred.  The director called David and Dan over, and they were having some discussion about ten feet away about how to handle it. And that was when I realized that my baby wasn't entirely my baby anymore, because I wasn't part of that discussion. The director was talking to Dan and Dave.  Nobody was saying, 'George, come over and tell us your opinion.' 

"I didn't throw a tantrum or anything," Martin added calmly. "I just came to the realization: I gave my baby up for adoption and now there is a parent-teacher conference and I'm not invited."

Another early sign of the show's autonomy was when the producers decided to have King Joffrey order Ser Ilyn Payne to cut out the singer Marillion's tongue in season one (in the books, the victim is a different minstrel).  "George was none too pleased because in the books Marillion ends up being the patsy for Lysa Arryn's murder, which happened in season four," Bryan Cogman said.  "David and Dan's reasoning was it's better television to have this minstrel whose tongue is ripped out be the minstrel that we'd spend the season with and that we'd figure out Lysa's murder when we got to it, and we did.

Martin's fifth A Song of Ice and Fire novel, the 1,040 page A Dance with Dragons, was published in 2011, the same year Thrones debuted.  Martin still had two more books planned, The Winds of Winter and A Dream of Spring.  Given that Dragons took six years to write, fans worried from the start that the HBO series would outpace the books.  "Finish the book, George!" became in internet rallying cry.  A few years into the series, executives at the network grew nervous as well.  "I finally understood fans' fear, which I didn't a couple of years before," Michael Lombardo said during production of Season three.  "What if the storytelling catches up with the books?  Let's all hope and pray that's not going to be a problem."

Fandom and network angst paled in comparison to Martin's own concern.  The author posted dismayed updates on his blog detailing his struggle to complete Winds.  He attributed the setback to a mix of factors -- the complexity of the story, his perfectionism, and the distractions and opportunities that came along with being part of the HBO series.  "On Tuesday, I think it's the greatest thing I've ever done," Martin said. "On Wednesday, I think it's all garbage and I should throw it all in the fire and start again."

DAN WEISS (showrunner): We just did the math on how many seasons we got, how many the story could shoulder and service, and we realized we were going to outstrip the books.  So we sat down with him in Santa Fe for three days and dug as deep as we could into what he had in mind for the future of the series through the end,

BRYAN COGMAN (co-executive producer):  I can't even describe that meeting.  It was like learning the meaning of life.  Like God was coming down and telling you the future. We knew at that point that we were going to catch up.  So it was learning a lot of these secrets and then in your mind figuring out, "What of that will work in the context of our show?" 

GEORGE R.R. MARTIN (author, co-executive producer):  It wasn't easy for me.  I didn't want to give away my books.  It's not easy to talk about the end of my books.  Every character has a different end.  I told them who would be on the Iron Throne, and I told them some big twists, like Hodor and "hold the door", and Stannis decision to burn his daughter.  We didn't get to everybody by any means.  Especially the minor characters who may have very different endings.  

 

 

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On 3/27/2021 at 10:13 AM, The Winged Griffin said:

Honestly, I wouldn't mind if he releases another Dunk & Egg story before ADOS. Since it's obvious that we won't get the end of Ice and Fire, at least having some more stories from the man would be cool. 

I have to disagree with you here. I own A Knight of The Seven Kingdoms, and I like the stories, but I'd rather have ADOS. 

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3 hours ago, LynnS said:

Excerpt from James Hibberds book Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon Chapter 17, The Forks in the Road, Pg 225:...

....

Thanks for posting. Well, that's depressing.

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37 minutes ago, Castellan said:

Thanks for posting. Well, that's depressing.

I don't find it depressing but rather interesting.  Whatever he told them may have been far too complex to make it work in the show.  There is nothing to say that they actually used what he said,  For example, I don't think Bran will be sitting on the Iron Throne in the end.  Bryan Cogman may have been blown away by an insider discussion about the end game and I take it reader's will have the same reaction when all is revealed.   I'll transcribe a little bit more from that chapter later.  But I really don't think we should despair.

Edit:  One of the things I found very odd about the show was the manner of Jon's resurrection.  They never really reveal how Jon is resurrected.  Melisandre essentially washes his body but doesn't administer the kiss.  All we can probably say was that he died and came back to life.  Did he ever cut himself and make a fiery sword on the show?  So it may be that this was information they were given but I think it's likely they were asked not to reveal how.  They did use Hodor and Shireen perhaps as a trade off.  Martin could still change his mind about Shireen and the discussion about time and causality is not something that can be conveyed in the show.  Although they gave it a go.  

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Continuing excerpt from Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon:

DAN WEISS:  What makes the books so great is that George doesn't make meticulous blueprints for every beat of the story, then fill in the blanks by dutifully going from A to B to C, fleshing out an outline.  George didn't have ultra-detailed versions of the last hundred pages of his story figured out. 

DAVID BENIOFF (showrunner):  George often used the metaphor of being a gardener instead of being an architect.  He plants the seeds and watches them grow.  Even if we wanted to be gardeners, we couldn't.  We had to plan out entire seasons.  We had to write a detailed outline and provide that to production.  Writing a novel is a solo endeavor, and television is a team sport.  I'm horribly mixing my metaphors, but the basic point is George was a gardener, and we had to be architects to plan out the season meticulously so they get shot and were ready in time.  It's just a fundamental difference between writing novels and a TV series.

GEORGE R.R. MARTIN:  David warned me: "We're catching up."  I said "I know you are."  But at that time I still thought they wouldn't catch up.  I thought I'd stay ahead.

Martin was confident he could finish his saga before the end of Thrones because he had made an assumption about how the showrunners woul use his already published fourth and fifth A Song of Ice and Fire books.  The shows first two seasons were based on the author' first two novels, A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings.  Season three and four were based on fan-favorite 992-page A Storm of Swords.

Martin's next two titles A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons were a combined 1,842 pages.  So the author believed that was more than enough to keep the show occupied for several more years.  But the new books also added many new characters and storylines, particularly set in Dorne and the Iron Islands.  There were so many added threads that the books had an unusual format --- covering the same chronological period while focussing on different characters.

GEORGE R.R. MARTIN:  In The Lord of the Rings,  everything begins in the Shire with Bilbo's birthday party, and then the four hobbits set off and they pick up Strider and Gimli an Legolas, and hen they start to split up and go their separate ways.  That was the same structure I used.  It all begins in Winterfell with everybody except Dany.  They split up and split further and further.  Everything is getting wider, and it's always been my intent to curve back at the end.  It's the same structure as the show , but David and Dan made the turn much sooner and didn't introduce some of my new characters, like Arianne Martell and Quentyn Martell.

Martin considered his new characters essential.  The showrunners felt that their show had to stay focused on it's existing cast and maintain the momentum of it's established storylines.  By season five, Thrones was bursting at the seams with up to thirty series regulars and darting between eight stories set in different locations --- Daenerys fighting an uprising in Meereen, Cersei struggling with the Faith Militant in King's Landing, Jon navigating his newfound leadership duties at Castle Black,  Stannis and Ser Davos marching their army South and Jaime trying to rescue Myrcella in Dorne.

That's a lot of story.  So much in fact, that Thrones was occasionally leaving major characters out of certain episodes, or gave them just a few minutes of screen time, even though regulars are paid for every episode produced whether they are used or not.  One major arc --- Bran's journey to becoming the Three-Eyed Raven --- was sidelined for the entire fifth season.  The Hound was likewise benched for that year.  Asking an actor to take a year off is always risky or expensive, as they need to be kept under contract lest they get snatched up by other projects.  Plus all those storylines meant that Thrones had grown from filming with two units to occasionally using four (dubbed Wolf, Dragon, Raven and White Walker).  Having four units shooting an ambitious fantasy television series at the same time in different locations was a madcap juggling act that was very tough on the crew and made it more difficult for he producers to maintain quality.

In other words, adding even more characters and locations to Thrones, from a practical storytelling and production standpoint, seemed totally impossible . . . though to be fair, making a "totally impossible" adaptation was always part of the deal.  Martin made it clear from the outset that he was writing a story that was shattering storytelling conventions, so it's perhaps not surprising that the author would continue to find new ways of doing so. 

 

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2 hours ago, LynnS said:

Edit:  One of the things I found very odd about the show was the manner of Jon's resurrection.  They never really reveal how Jon is resurrected.  Melisandre essentially washes his body but doesn't administer the kiss.  All we can probably say was that he died and came back to life.  Did he ever cut himself and make a fiery sword on the show?  So it may be that this was information they were given but I think it's likely they were asked not to reveal how.  They did use Hodor and Shireen perhaps as a trade off.  Martin could still change his mind about Shireen and the discussion about time and causality is not something that can be conveyed in the show.  Although they gave it a go.  

There is a moment when they're talking about and Davos connects Shireen's burning to Jon's resurrection, and I think that's as much as they went to in that direction.

It was a very-overshadowed-by-other-stuff moment of genuine subtlety in the show, where they didn't say "Well this happened because that happened." They just left it to viewers to decide if Davos was right in drawing that connection (or maybe they didn't give a shit and had already moved on to other things).

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2 hours ago, LynnS said:

I don't find it depressing but rather interesting.  Whatever he told them may have been far too complex to make it work in the show.  There is nothing to say that they actually used what he said,  For example, I don't think Bran will be sitting on the Iron Throne in the end.  Bryan Cogman may have been blown away by an insider discussion about the end game and I take it reader's will have the same reaction when all is revealed.   I'll transcribe a little bit more from that chapter later.  But I really don't think we should despair.

Edit:  One of the things I found very odd about the show was the manner of Jon's resurrection.  They never really reveal how Jon is resurrected.  Melisandre essentially washes his body but doesn't administer the kiss.  All we can probably say was that he died and came back to life.  Did he ever cut himself and make a fiery sword on the show?  So it may be that this was information they were given but I think it's likely they were asked not to reveal how.  They did use Hodor and Shireen perhaps as a trade off.  Martin could still change his mind about Shireen and the discussion about time and causality is not something that can be conveyed in the show.  Although they gave it a go.  

Once the idea is out there Shireen burning makes perfect sense in the books in fact its one of those things that so heavily foreshadowed you wonder why you didn't think of it - the ashy mark on her face, her sadness and nightmares about fiery dragons, and the fact that she is constantly accompanied by a creature who appears to have actually died and keeps up a constant sinister chatter in the background. Not to mention that Davos rescues Edric so then Melisandre/s attention turning to Shireen is a logical next step, and Val and other wildlings think she is unclean and want rid of her.

I agree, I think, about the manner of Jon's resurrection but all that's needed is a kiss. I think cutting is not necessary.  I think that was a way of demonstrating that its the person raised by blood and fire magic who makes the sword flame is not a magic sword in itself.

I think a few other endings of major characters also fits with the books in general terns - just the hamfisted way they were done will differ, hopefully.

 

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38 minutes ago, Werthead said:

There is a moment when they're talking about and Davos connects Shireen's burning to Jon's resurrection, and I think that's as much as they went to in that direction.

It was a very-overshadowed-by-other-stuff moment of genuine subtlety in the show, where they didn't say "Well this happened because that happened." They just left it to viewers to decide if Davos was right in drawing that connection (or maybe they didn't give a shit and had already moved on to other things).

Well that's interesting.  I didn't pick up on that before. I wasn't expecting something that nuanced.   Do you think George will go through with it?  I'm wondering if he's changed his mind because of statements at the time that about rethinking the fate of a character who is killed off in the tv series, but still alive in the book.  I thought this might be Shireen mostly because the whole idea is repugnant to me. 

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36 minutes ago, Castellan said:

I think a few other endings of major characters also fits with the books in general terns - just the hamfisted way they were done will differ, hopefully.

"Hamfisted" LOL Do we really think Euron is going to tuck tail and run back to the Iron Island where he is safe from the Others?  

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7 hours ago, LynnS said:

"Hamfisted" LOL Do we really think Euron is going to tuck tail and run back to the Iron Island where he is safe from the Others?  

I have to confess actually avoided watching most of the final series so I am relying on word of mouth. No-one mentioned Euron ... I thought Dany going vengeful and Jaime going back to help Cersei and dying with her were plausible endings ....  though not desirable! Jon remaining as Lord Commander is plausible but his turning into a total hopleless idiot before that is not...

 

 

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10 hours ago, Castellan said:

I have to confess actually avoided watching most of the final series so I am relying on word of mouth. No-one mentioned Euron ... I thought Dany going vengeful and Jaime going back to help Cersei and dying with her were plausible endings ....  though not desirable! Jon remaining as Lord Commander is plausible but his turning into a total hopleless idiot before that is not...

 

 

Well my niece has never seen the show or read the books.  She wanted to GoT night with me once a week.  So I got her the complete series on DVD for her birthday and pizza night is GoT.  So far, she loves it.  Shocked at all the twists and turns.  I haven't set any expectations for her.  I'm just interested in her reaction to the stuff I hated the most.

The trek beyond the Wall cracked me up.  How did they hook up with all those additional people.  Gendry running for days, one assumes back to the Wall for help.  Some of the production was so dark, I had to turn the brightness way up on my tv just to see what was going on.  They were bringing in cast and throwing them out the door as quickly as possible.  The red woman who shows up to warn Tyrion.  She came, she went.  Not sure these are things anyone would notice if they weren't book saavy.  After all, there were dragons, the Night King, a wighted dragon and boat sex.  LOL!  They left out a lot that was important to George because they couldn't make it work in the show.  

I don't think we have to worry about anything being spoiled or the show mapping closely to the books.  From what I can tell, they are very far apart, indeed.  So go ahead and speculate until the cows come home.

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On 7/13/2020 at 10:24 PM, Makk said:

We saw by season 5 how dramatically different the show became. It was a different story with a few of the same events happening. There were plenty of book events and characters that never occurred or existed and plenty of fabricated show events that never occur in the books. Even before season 5 there were significant differences, for example I hated how Jaime arrived back at kings landing before Sansa disappeared. He had made up his mind to make sure Sansa (and Arya) were set free but in the books we will never know just how much he was prepared to fight his father for that. In the show he doesn't care at all. It's annoying because I think the actor nailed the parts where show Jaime was the same as book Jaime and then served up a bs story line where his character was continuously acting in a contrary manner. In the later seasons it was just a complete mess.

I highly doubt he will change anything at all because of the show. Even if the same event happens it will likely happen in a completely different way.

The show was different (and not in a good way imo) since the very beginning. Look at how Cait treats Jon in the first book and how she is portrayed in the TV series. I vividly remeber reading about Cait's dislike for Jon and her deep distrust at him ultimately rooted in the fact he was living proof of her husband's infidelity (or so she thought) and thinking how tridimensional she felt as a character (honorable and just yet also so very human). A portrayal the show completely scrapped dumbing her character down. Things went downhill from season 5 but the signs of D&D inadequacy were there from the very beginning.

That said, the books' storylines diverge enough from the show (Lady Stoneheart for example) that it's entirely possible for GRRM to craft a different narrative than what we saw.

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On 4/2/2021 at 9:12 PM, Takiedevushkikakzvezdy said:

What struck me is GRRM saying that he wrote hundreds of pages in 2020. How could he have felt that he was close to finishing in 2018/2019 if he had hundreds of pages left to write? The only thing I can think of is that he did absolutely massive rewrites over the last year.

I wonder whether he lost control of the story and had to write 1-2 pages for each character to make himself aware where his characters are at the end of ADwD. This could turn into hundreds of pages without any progress.

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  • 2 weeks later...

https://georgerrmartin.com/notablog/2021/04/13/not-a-blogging/

How do we feel about GRRM's mindset here? A fairly depressing post about the ups and downs in his life (HBO deal, vaccination, losing friends to Covid-19 and such), yet no mention of TWoW. He does say he will be leaving his cabin in a few months... but is that because of great progress or because it is safer for him to return to normal society? :(

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