I feel your pain. Truly.
George and Pat Rothfuss changed my reading habits, now I’m not picking up series unless they’re done. Plenty of great works out there, like The Last Kingdom or the Aubrey/Maturin series. Ditto for TV series, especially Netflix produced ones. Too many get the chop on a dip of viewership these days.
I half suspect George lost his will to write after seeing how dnd massacred the last 3 seasons. Who wouldn’t? Especially if they were mangling his book notes. Now he’s treating this series as a chore, and he’d rather do anything else.
Nangijala@feddit.dk 4 days ago
Personally, I fully believe that the way the show ended played a huge role in George not finishing the books.
George is a perfectionist and I remember how he once mentioned that he stopped following fan forums years before the show was even a thing because when he saw fan theories guessing correctly the plot twists he had been working on, he started second guessing himself and felt the urge to change them. Instead of doing that, he stuck with the plots he had thought out and cut himself off from the fan forums, as I said.
I also know that George entrusted Dumb and Dumber with the biggest plot twists and they carelessly butchered almost all of them in the show.
While things were still good, George would regularly upload sample chapters for Winds of Winter onto his blog and I read all of them. I used to think that the idiot showrunners would take the show in a different direction and leave it up to George to finish his vision on his own because it was clear he wouldn’t finish the books before the show caught up to them.
Many fans agreed and expected that the showrunners would go in their own direction because they had made several choices along the way that entirely closed off important plotpoints and back then we all thought that they were capable writers.
Turns out the changes were more stuff like "we can’t include Tysha because Tyrion is popular and we don’t want him to go on his villain arc because hes a fan favourite. Stuff like that.
And for me, it became very clear that they were following George’s plot when the sample chapters from Winds of Winter appeared in the show in the most mangled manner.
I believe that the way the show ended was a horror fun house mirror of the true ending that George had planned for decades. They fucked it because they are retarded and lazy. I cannot imagine anything more heartbreaking as a writer with the perfectionism and self doubt that George has to see my big ending with Dany going mad, Jaime and Cersei dying in each other’s arms and Bran becoming the king of the north being done so terribly and being recieved with so much hatred from the fans.
Although I fully believe that Arya killing the night king was Dumb and Dumber following the girl boss trend and not what George had planned for her nor Jon’s characters.
I genuinely think it broke him. The fact that he already struggles with finishing his works because of his perfectionism was bad enough, but to realize that you handed over the pay offs of your decades long magnum opus to two retards… ooff.
I’m still trying to get back into reading. Recently I have mostly stuck with autobiographies of local people in my country. Reading about dirt poor farmers in the 30s and 40a and stuff like that is pretty sick. Makes you both appreciate the comforts you have in the 21st century and mourn the lost connection with nature and the seasons. Anyways, biographies are kinda my catnip these days. For some reasons, and despite loving fiction, I still just can’t find it in me to bother to get invested in someone else’s worldbuilding xD again, Earthsea being the only exception.
ZeroGravitas@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 hours ago
What bad English? 😅
I saw this in the news today and remembered our conversation: www.msn.com/en-us/tv/news/…/ar-AA1U9JZB
And frankly, I can’t blame him. After all, we’re wired to seek joy and fulfillment in our lives, and I guess it’s pretty clear where those lie for good ol George these days. My secret hope though is that he’s just giving us time to forget the horror show before he releases the true ending of the story.
Also, if I were him, I’d just kill Tyrion out of spite, and then in the stupidest way possible. Let him get randomly kicked by a camel and choke in his own blood (or equivalent) and let a 3rd rank, barely named character take the spotlight in his stead. Maybe Polk will discover he has a head for politics after all? Go wild!