"A Game of Thrones" Spoiler-Ridden Catch-All of Doom - books and HBO show

The other thing is that half the fun of following Game of Thrones was being part of the conversation, and that conversation is mostly over with now. The people who, for whatever reason, weren't interested in checking it out when it was the hottest thing on television that everyone was talking about have even less reason to check it out now that it's become a punchline about not sticking the landing.

Give it five years for the diehards to get the bad taste of the ending out of their mouths and get interested in a rewatch, and give people an excuse to watch it at the same time again (say, by HBO making it part of their free trial for a limited time or something) and interest might reignite.

Right now it's in the valley between "new hotness" and "old nostalgic favorite" where interest is at its lowest. Just part of the natural lifecycle of genre television.

IIRC, Battlestar Galactica went through sort of the same thing.

BadKen wrote:

IIRC, Battlestar Galactica went through sort of the same thing.

And Lost.

Yep they both sucked for endings.

And I've rewatched both since. BSG I think we quit after s4 or the halfway point of the season, whenever they had their "show could end here" moment. Because after that it just got stupid.

LOST I finished. And season 6 is still a solid season finale for the new mystery they introduced, but a crap series finale because hardly anything was resolved.

I actually liked both of those shows all the way through.

Perfect? Maybe not, but I still enjoyed at the time.

There is no way I would recommend Lost to anyone.

Bruce wrote:

There is no way I would recommend Lost to anyone.

I'm actually currently listening to a Lost rewatch podcast I got hundreds of hours of enjoyment out of that show.

Even if I didn't think it stuck the landing, like GoT, both shows gave me a lot of entertainment.

Bruce wrote:

There is no way I would recommend Lost to anyone.

“But there’s polar bear. Why is there a polar bear? Time to tune in next week.”

Lost and BSG were certainly great shows in their prime, before they started unraveling. What made GOT’s demise even worse is that there was a period of sustained excellence where it surpassed these. It seemed to be in contention for my favorite show of all time. The fall from such a height was significantly more damaging.

In fairness, the showrunners were very good at adapting material. Once they passed the books, they were lost. In the woods. Right is left. Up is down. When you're not therrrrrre...

Sorry. A month of quarantine with two kids under 7.

I don't mind BSG's ending and it's still one of my fave shows. Lost on the other hand...

Can you imagine how much hotter the fires of internet rage would be about GOT if the finale had been this Spring instead of a year ago?

I liked the idea of what BSG's ending was a lot, but the execution and the number of red herrings and diversions in the last few seasons definitely compromised its effect.

I agree that the Lost finale fit well with the final season but basically that final season was poorly conceived (or, to a degree, the show was). I suspect if one were to watch Lost now for the first time, knowing the general public's reaction to the ending (and not living through the waves of hype and anticipation and analysis those of us went through while watching as it aired), it would go pretty well. The main obstacle to me ever watching it is those 20+ episode seasons--there's just too much! But there are still several all-time great TV moments over the course of that series, moments I can remember where I was watching, like the Season 3 finale.

Game of Thrones, though... oof, I dunno. Maybe if the books come out at some point we will tell people "watch the first 5-6 seasons and then just read the books"?

Yeah the season 2 and early season 3 stretch of LOST in particular is bad. They were just spinning wheels, killing time before moving on to certain closing points they planned. When they finally agreed to a 6 season run and started wrapping things up near the end of S3, it got noticeably better for a while.

I think the reason I don't have as much of a problem with Lost is that I just loved the characters they built and liked seeing how they played off each other. Probably more than the long term overarching plot and mysteries, although I enjoyed most of that as well.

So even if the plot wandered, I still liked the characters as long as they did stuff that made sense for what we understood of them.

I think that's where GoT failed. They still had great characters, it's just they rushed the last couple of seasons so much that they didn't carry us along the character arcs enough to make the ending make sense in several cases.

George RR Martin appears to be wandering away from the original Game of Thrones books, in favour of GoT prequels, sequels and spin offs. Perhaps he doesn't feel any passion to finish that work. Perhaps he's just thinking about his financial legacy and is building up his estate.

detroit20 wrote:

George RR Martin appears to be wandering away from the original Game of Thrones books, in favour of GoT prequels, sequels and spin offs. Perhaps he doesn't feel any passion to finish that work. Perhaps he's just thinking about his financial legacy and is building up his estate.

I do not believe that we will ever see another GOT book. Between the fact that the series is done, and the vehemently negative reaction to the ending, I think Martin's already minimal interest has evaporated.

Hand it off to Brandon Sanderson.

Sanderson himself said he has no desire to finish Martin's work because it's such a grim world and doesn't really fit with is style.

With all the work Martin has supposedly done this year on Winds of Winter, i'm still optimistic we'll get that one. I'm less confident about A Dream of Spring.

I've stopped caring. Given that Dance of Dragons was such a Robert Jordan-esque mess I'm good with the story finishing up via the HBO series.

detroit20 wrote:

George RR Martin appears to be wandering away from the original Game of Thrones books, in favour of GoT prequels, sequels and spin offs. Perhaps he doesn't feel any passion to finish that work. Perhaps he's just thinking about his financial legacy and is building up his estate.

I feel like, when I started reading it, GoT had a chance to be timeless. Not so sure about that anymore.

We are just a few weeks short of 10 years since the last book.
July 2011.

On a complete whim I'm rereading Rothfuss' Kingkiller books. I had developed a resentful and negative attitude towards the author since we don't have closure on the story, but the more I think about it, the more I resent contracts and expectations that require authors to crank out whatever will sell the most instead of cranking out what sparks joy.

This tangential aside is drifting off the thread, but series writers who are great at consistently producing content on schedule always strike me as lacking the spark and brilliance of writers who struggle w/ grinding out new work on schedule. For example, I wish I had more Saladin Ahmed novels to read bc that dude can WRITE A STORY, but it just turns out comics work better for his non-neurotypical genius.

I like the big fantasy arc made popular by Robert Jordan, but I think I'm so much happier w/ the genre when I just let go of needing to know how the plot resolves. Plot resolution isn't very high on my list of priorities. The more I lean away from it, the happier I am. Give me well-built universes w/ lots of spin-off subplots and a complete lack of closure and l'm happy.

Anyway, there are no beginnings or endings with the Wheel of Time. I'm just glad the universe has been built and I can speculate about the further adventures of Septon Meribald and Dog. Plus, we've only just got the bitter taste out of mouths from having plot threads sloppily and hurriedly tied up. It sucks. I'd rather it not be completed than seeing those plot arcs "stick footed."

detroit20 wrote:

George RR Martin appears to be wandering away from the original Game of Thrones books, in favour of GoT prequels, sequels and spin offs. Perhaps he doesn't feel any passion to finish that work. Perhaps he's just thinking about his financial legacy and is building up his estate.

What's his financial legacy going to be? Afaik he doesn't have kids. His artistic legacy is going to suffer mightily if he never finishes the series, imho.

trichy wrote:
detroit20 wrote:

George RR Martin appears to be wandering away from the original Game of Thrones books, in favour of GoT prequels, sequels and spin offs. Perhaps he doesn't feel any passion to finish that work. Perhaps he's just thinking about his financial legacy and is building up his estate.

I do not believe that we will ever see another GOT book. Between the fact that the series is done, and the vehemently negative reaction to the ending, I think Martin's already minimal interest has evaporated.

He's also said so many times how difficult he is finding writing it. Doesn't give me a lot of hope.

Oso wrote:

This tangential aside is drifting off the thread, but series writers who are great at consistently producing content on schedule always strike me as lacking the spark and brilliance of writers who struggle w/ grinding out new work on schedule. For example, I wish I had more Saladin Ahmed novels to read bc that dude can WRITE A STORY, but it just turns out comics work better for his non-neurotypical genius.

Man, Throne of the Crescent Moon was SOOOOOO good.

Oso wrote:

On a complete whim I'm rereading Rothfuss' Kingkiller books. I had developed a resentful and negative attitude towards the author since we don't have closure on the story, but the more I think about it, the more I resent contracts and expectations that require authors to crank out whatever will sell the most instead of cranking out what sparks joy.

Is that really the problem for Rothfuss, though? My recollection is the first book had an author's note or essay or whatever in it which basically said Rothfuss had written all three books at once and, like some of GRRM's earlier ill-fated promises about his plans, he said the second and third would be out in short order. While I understand that, especially when his books hit big, on further reflection he decided he might want to edit and expand and rewrite, my sense of him is not that he's being prevented from finishing the series because of a mean publisher forcing him to do other things they think of as more profitable, but because his success has enabled him to chase a million different fun side projects and take meetings with TV people and play dungeons & dragons for fans and make board games and so on and so forth, and he just thought that stuff was more fun than sitting down and finishing the third book (which I imagine will make him quite a bit of money when it finally releases!). I spent an hour or so reading his blog a few years back, whenever it last occurred to me to search for info on when the third book might come out, and boy does he seem like a guy who is just waaaay to high on his own supply (Slow Regard of Silent Things also convinced me of that...woof).

Anyway, my impression of both Rothfuss and GRMM is that they really enjoy being famous and celebrated and doing whatever they feel like, and it just so happens that finishing their book series is at the absolute bottom of their to do list (and people like me being annoyed at them for having this attitude probably only encourages them). I feel like both of these authors could've finished their series years ago and still done all these other lucrative and/or fun projects too. The problem isn't contracts, it's just...they don't want to do it.

At this point, I wonder if GRRM almost feels like he's writing fanfiction. You can't be the same person as an author this many years and books later. You're not working in the same world you were when you wrote them. I wonder if he has trouble getting back into the headspace of the person who wrote those earlier books. (edit) That wouldn't be as much of a problem if it wasn't a series that involved so much payoff for all the mysteries and mythologies it set up in the first part.

Also, I just finished a re-watch. Most--most!--of the series is *even better* the second time around. Somehow, the episodes feel even more jam packed with content. I think because you know where a lot of the little moments are going, so they feel big and connected. And the friendships.

(Stefan voice) This show had everything!

...but man did it have friendships. So many friendships.

and the dragons are even cooler the second time around.

I enjoyed the TV series from beginning to end. Having read the books, I did not expect a conventional tale where all plot points resolve themselves to my satisfaction, everything I think is important is actually treated that way, and it all ties up into a neat little package. My only gripe with the last two seasons is that they were very compressed. The story was the story and I'm fine with it.

Eh, it's hard to say. George Martin has clearly lost interest in writing the series and/or got interested in other things more, but passions ebb and flow. A year from now he could be frying an egg for breakfast and the urge to finish the series suddenly hits him. Or maybe not.