When you subscribe we will use the information you provide to send you these newsletters. Sometimes they'll include recommendations for other related newsletters or services we offer. Our Privacy Notice explains more about how we use your data, and your rights. You can unsubscribe at any time. The once mighty Game of Thrones television adaptation has faltered a little in the home run. Suddenly fans and critics are split as never before. The most recent episode, The Last of the Starks, is the second worst rated episode of the entire show, sitting at a shockingly low 58% aggregate, with Season 8 Episode 3 the third worst on 74%. What is going wrong? There have been growing complaints that the show is getting weaker without Martin's source material to draw upon, while the plot twists are feeling rushed and lacking context or complexity. The author himself already revealed what he would change. Everybody knows by now that Book 6, The Winds of Winter, is drastically overdue. Martin said: "Some of the deviation, of course, is because I’ve been so slow with these books. I really should’ve finished this thing four years ago — and if I had, maybe it would be telling a different story here." But he also pointed out there was still plenty more in the books that could have been used and expanded, telling Variety: "If you’ve read my novels, you know there was enough material for more seasons. They made certain cuts." It's not just the cuts that are frustrating many fans, it's the sudden over-simplification of characters and plotlines, with the nuances and exquisite inner complexities and twisted logic seemingly abandoned in favour of hitting key plot points. Martin had plenty to say on this.<doc-sep>You can’t tell everything about a person by looking at their social media feeds, but trust me: It is meaningful, or at least somewhat meaningful, that George R.R. Martin hasn’t made a single mention of HBO’s Game of Thrones on his Twitter or blog since the April 14 premiere of the show’s final season. No chef’s-kiss congratulations to the cast, no hashtagged episodic livetweeting, no nerdy defenses of “The Long Night”’s brightness settings — just some announcements of his speaking engagements, some #tbt photos, and some Perd Hapley-ish commentary on the NFL Draft. (“Neither the Giants nor the Jets have a second round pick today”). Though he’s never explicitly voiced his dismay, it’s practically on the record that Martin has mixed feelings about the direction of the HBO adaptation. For season eight, he didn’t visit the set or read any of the final scripts; he thinks there should be more seasons to finish everything up; in a recent video interview with Fast Company, he alluded to the “traumatic” creative differences between himself and HBO showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss. You might expect an eccentric, gnomish fantasy writer like Martin to have highly specific feelings about everything — nerds of all stripes will recognize something of themselves in his general demeanor and affectations — but his barely concealed bitterness parallels with the increased fun made at his expense as his literary output has long laid fallow, while the show has continued to win acclaim and audiences. The last Game of Thrones book Martin released was 2011’s A Dance With Dragons, just after the completion of the show’s first season; the adaptation caught up to the books by 2015’s season five. Meanwhile, The Winds of Winter, the planned sixth novel out of seven in the series, has no release date. The author having no pages is a popular meme by now, despite the odd preview chapter he’s released here and there. It’s easy to imagine his pen sitting dry as he jetsets around the world, enjoying his vastly monied literary fame, and working on any number of projects that don’t demand the frankly insane effort of weaving together the dozens upon dozens of narrative strands he’s tangled over the books thus far. For a while that wasn’t a problem, as the HBO show did an expert job of simplifying and translating the stories and characters of Westeros to the screen. But it’s not controversial or contrarian to say that by many standards, the show’s ongoing final season has been a mild disappointment. It’s got the lowest critical and audience approval on Rotten Tomatoes of any season, by a wide margin. The show’s most-anticipated episode ever was met with a lot of jokes about how it was literally unwatchable. There are the same issues of characters zooming around the map that plagued the last season. There’s only two episodes left, and yet by the end of Sunday’s episode, it felt like they were still laying the groundwork for more action while shortchanging some crucial stories. There’s been plenty of good stuff this season, but even aside from fan culture complaints like “why isn’t this character acting exactly how I want them to,” there’s just enough that’s... missing. Partly it’s an issue of time: Six episodes is hardly enough time to wrap up everything on the show, even with some expanded run-times. That’s led to some massive truncation — such as, for example, the passing mention of the new prince of Dorne, a country that factored massively into the earlier seasons, but has now been brushed aside entirely now that there’s just no more room. A few years ago, such a passing mention would’ve eventually bore narrative fruit; now, with barely more than two hours to finish the show, it feels like a checked box allowing the writers to move on. To be clear, the show is still a good time, assuming your brain isn’t calibrated to go “wait, but why didn’t they…” at every potential plot hole. (Why didn’t the dragons wear armor? Why didn’t Bran warn them about the dragon-hurting arrows? Why didn’t they just see Euron’s ships from over the mountains? The last direwolf is just... gone? You know what I mean.) But you know who stands to benefit from all of this? George R.R. Martin! He’s literally the one person who can provide the “true ending” of Game of Thrones, now that it seems unlikely the show can wrap up every emotional and narrative thread in the final two episodes. A satisfying ending isn’t out of the question; I’m still betting on it, at least. But a perfect final season would’ve greatly reduced the need for Martin’s version. Millions of people would have bought the book, of course, but mostly out of a sense of duty (for the fans who followed him this long) and literary pleasure (because they’re fun to read). “I need to know what happens” would not have been the predominant motivation, had the show answered that to its fullest extent. Now, there’s ample opportunity to give us something like the director’s cut, which at the very least should include more about what’s going on in Bran’s head. The pessimist might say, “Dude, he is never finishing those books.” Martin is 70 years old, and the last book came out at 1,016 pages. That’s a lot of material to be finished for a guy who, by any measure, is entering the back nine of life. But spite is a fantastic creative motivator, especially since Martin has said that his ending is somewhat different from the show’s. For what it’s worth, he recently told Entertainment Tonight that the writing has been “going very well, lately.” For years, Benioff and Weiss have sucked up praise as the geniuses capable of bringing his books to the screen; now that they’re fumbling the ball in the final stretch, Martin is uniquely positioned to redeem all the damage his reputation has suffered as a guy who can simply not get the work done. He can be something like the prince who was promised, the legendary figure in Game of Thrones mythos who delivers the realm from darkness. (A thread that the show seems to have… dropped entirely, after years of focusing on it.) All he needs to do is leave the NFL Draft analysis to someone else, and get back to the typewriter.<doc-sep>Tons of characters, years of plot, all leading to a few hours of climactic moments - that could describe either Game of Thrones season 8 or Avengers: Endgame . Though George R.R. Martin leaves that comparison for readers to make, an official blog post from the Thrones author heaps praise on the creators of Endgame for bringing their huge story to a close in a satisfying way. Here's what Martin had to say about Avengers: Endgame earlier this month. Draw your own conclusions about whether he's a bit jealous that they finally got to conclude their pop-culture-dominating story arc and he's still sitting over here with at least two massive books left to go. "Saw the new Avengers movie last night. Endgame is amazing. Kudos to the writers and director. I cannot believe they got all those characters into one film, and still managed to do them all justice. The final battle was epic, exciting, thrilling, full of twists and turns… and strangely beautiful. But the character scenes earlier in the film really made it for me. The opening with Hawkeye, the Ant-Man scenes, Tony Stark’s moments communing with his helm… so many more. There’s plenty of action here, but this is not just A Big Dumb Action movie, of which there are far too many these days. Stan Lee would have been proud. Could he ever have dreamed that all those characters he and Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko and the rest of the Marvel team created in the early 60s would one day come to dominate global culture? There’s an amazing story for you. Oh… and yay for the rat. The unsung hero. They should make him an honorary Avenger." Side note: did you know that one of Martin's first published pieces of writing was a sarcastic letter in the back of a 1963 issue of The Fantastic Four? Martin's blog post changes topics from there to discuss the Starport graphic novel, which is based on a TV pilot Martin wrote back in 1994 (and which he teases could still make its way to the small screen someday), though he does talk a little bit more about Game of Thrones. He confirms that five different Game of Thrones successor shows have been in the works at HBO and three are still moving forward, with one starting filming later this year. It sounds like at least one of those three is the Game of Thrones prequel series since he says you could pick up a copy of his Thrones prequel novel Fire & Blood and "come up with your own theories" about what they're about.<doc-sep>
Game of Thrones author George RR Martin has said that he wishes they had more time to faithfully adapt his story for the hit HBO show, which concludes its run on Monday after eight seasons. The final season has been met with harsh criticism from fans and reviewers, who’ve complained that the story seems to have been rushed. Martin, who intends on writing two more novels in his Song of Ice and Fire series, told Fast Company, “The series has been... not completely faithful. Otherwise, it would have to run another five seasons.” He continued, “You know, it’s complex. I’m a little sad, actually. I wish we had a few more seasons.” Martin hinted that showrunners David Benioff and DB Weiss’ creative vision did not match up with his. He said, “It can also be... traumatic. Because sometimes their creative vision and your creative vision don’t match, and you get the famous creative differences thing — that leads to a lot of conflict.” The writer, who has contributed to previous seasons of the show, and is said to have provided the showrunners with a broad outline of his intended conclusion, said, “You get totally extraneous things like the studio or the network weighing in, and they have some particular thing that has nothing to do with story, but relates to ‘Well this character has a very high Q Rating so let’s give him a lot more stuff to do.’” Several actors such as Conleth Hill, Lena Headey, Emilia Clarke, Pilou Asbaek and Kit Harington have voiced varying degrees of displeasure at how the show’s final season has shaped up. Season eight is the worst reviewed of the show’s run, and has some of the lowest-rated episodes in its entire history. A fan petition demanding HBO redo the season with other writers has hit almost a million pledges. Game of Thrones returns for its series finale on Monday. Several spin-offs are in various stages of development. Follow @htshowbiz for more ott:10:ht-tv_listing-desktop