The first season was nearly perfect. Then there was a lull.

They broke out of that lull with a vengeance with the Mountain and the Viper.

Hardhome was great

But Battle of the Bastards might be the best thing I've ever seen televised.

The very best GoT has had to offer, among a slew of great scenes....

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And BL might be right - that is some of the finest filmwork I've seen, TV or movie.

I saw BoB / WoW before the Night Manager and I think the latter beats the former.

Yeah. That was ****ing ridiculously high quality for television. I'm not even sure what you could stack up against it.

To DC!!

http://www.themillions.com/2017/05/d...-and-race.html

I love that too. I'd stack the final fight scene of Hannibal right there with it. Just brilliant cinematography and probably my favorite tv show finale of all time.

LMAO

Why did you spoiler that?

Stupid article.

New photos released. Drogon is a BIG boy now!

http://i1.wp.com/ewedit.files.wordpr...0%2C1333&ssl=1

Hell. Yes.

Imagine the morale dip of enemy armies when something like that swoops over the battlefield. And then two more that are nearly as big.

The real question is can the white walkers kill a dragon, and if so, can they resurrect it like they do other dead animals? Could we see Drogon battling his siblings turned ice dragons?

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I''d say that's a virtual certainty at this point.

We talked about it a while back in this thread, but the walkers and their wights seem to have little to no defense against dragons. It wouldn't make for a great story if they just show up and wipe them all out.

So I'm guessing one of the dragons will die, either in war with Cersei/Euron or the wights will overrun them somehow where it'll be risen from the dead. I'd also guess it'll be Rhaegel or Viserion. That would be a hell of a twist and give the walkers some firepower but not too much for Drogon to deal with..

(I still believe the Night King already has an Ice Dragon at his disposal)

Big theory out there is that one of the three dragons will be killed and "raised" by the Night King.

If he doesn't already have one, this is practically the only way the Night King can compete against three flame throwing dragons, you'd think (unless he has the TRUE Dragonbinder at his disposal).

That said, I'm one of those numbskulls that thinks we actually saw a slight glimpse of the Night King's Ice Dragon at the Battle of Hardhome. It was brief, just a glimpse of something stirring in the clouds, but it was there. And also, how did all of those Wildlings that got stuck outside the gate die and get turned so quickly, if not for the ice blast from an Ice Dragon?

http://imgur.com/Xt2gC8Z

Or they could just swarm the dragons in wights or Dragons coming from much warmer climates become slow and lethargic when exposed to cold and well the white walkers bring winter with them.

How do dragons handle the cold? Probably not very well would be my guess.

Can't they just heat up everything around them with their breath of death. God I could have used that instant heat at my daughter's softball game last night. It was cold as shit!

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They're supposed to be fire made flesh.

We saw the white walker kind of put out the fires at Hardhome when he entered the tent, but we're talking about a ****ing dragon here LOL

There's a new trailer out, by the way, if someone can embed.

Looks awesome, as usual.

^

yo dawg

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**** yeah!

http://i.imgur.com/S1hXGDi.png

LOL Love that.

100,000 Dothraki sceamers with three big ****ing dragons soaring overhead.

This shit is about to be a wrap.

But watch book Euron summon a kraken or some shit

Gendry's gonna' get off the boat and do some king's blood stuff with Melisandre.

George R.R. Martin flew to New York to 'beg' an HBO executive to make 'Game of Thrones' 10 seasons long, according to his agent

George would fly to New York to have lunch with Plepler, to beg him to do ten seasons of ten episodes because there was enough material for it and to tell him it would be a more satisfying and more entertaining experience," Haas told Miller.

Dan and Dave were tired, rightfully so," Haas said in Miller's book. "They were done, and wanted to move on, so they cut it short and then negotiations became, how many seasons can we stretch this out? Because of course HBO wanted more."

Haas added: "George loves Dan and Dave, but after season five, he did start to worry about the path they were going because George knows where the story goes. He started saying, 'You're not following my template.'"

The rest here:
https://www.insider.com/george-rr-ma...easons-2021-11

This has reignited the hate train for D&D.

But it sure would have helped if GRRM applied the same concern towards, I dunno, finishing the books?

Has he even finished WOW yet?

Yeah - it mostly just reminds me that the guy's written one !@#$ing book in the last 17 years.

That's right folks - one book....in over 200 months.

If you went into a coma 12 months into George W. Bush's 2nd term and woke up yesterday, you'd have missed a single book.

So George, maybe if you didn't want the damn thing going sideways on you, maybe you should've sat your ass down and written something.

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I didn't realize it was that bad. What the hell has he been doing for the last 17 years?

Can you imagine being an 'early adopter'?

First book was released 25 years ago. And the first 3 books happened over a 4 year period.

21 years later he's published 2 more.

I mean the Dark Tower Series technically took 30 years from beginning to end, but I think the last book was something of a coda and it's not like Steven King wasn't busy writing a whole shitload of OTHER books with bad endings over that period.

Martin, OTOH, just seems stuck.

I don't think GRRM is stuck as much as he's complacent because he got his fat pay day and doesn't feel a sense of urgency to finish.

I have not brought myself to watch this just yet but someone has the first edition of GOT so when she is done with it I'll read it. It's a thick book that's what she said.

The only reason I clicked on this thread was to see if that lazy **** had finished the sixth book yet. Of course the answer is no. :shake:

I'm not giving that ****er another penny until he actually finishes the series.

Which is never going to happen.

Books 1-3 are great. They are large but very breezy to read.

Anyone else read the Kingkiller Chronicle as well? Seems like Patrick Rothfuss has modeled his career after GRRM in that he wrote several highly acclaimed books and then just didn't do shit for the next decade while fans were clamoring for the next book while attacking any fans that get frustrated with the delay.

I wouldn't say they were breezy by any means. Martin writes like Stephen King - takes a great 1,000 page story and makes it 1,500 pages long. Five page expositions of bit characters or descriptions of meal selections that sound like they're straight out of the vendor trays of Life of Brian really aren't necessary. But I did enjoy the first three books, which I read in rapid succession after learning HBO was producing the series. The fourth book sucked, and the fifth book wasn't much better. Considering how the show ended and that Martin will probably die of old age before finishing the next book and certainly die of old age before finishing the last, I would absolutely not recommend the books because there's just no point.

In his defense, he has written a few things in the GoT universe in that time. Since 2005, in addition to A Dance with Dragons, he's written some Dunk and Egg novellas, the World of Ice and Fire, and Fire and Blood.

Those others definitely work to build the lore, but he really needs to finish the main story. Given his age and all of the loose ends he's created, I can't imagine he'll be able to do so before he croaks.

All trash and avoidance of finishing the actual story. Essentially money grabs while he ****s his readers.

This dude isn't just a clown, he's the whole damn circus, including the tent.

No, they are definitely not a breeze. He does have a tendency to overtalk about certain topics. My biggest issue was the descriptions of food and clothing. He'd spend pages upon pages in Catelyn and Sansa chapters just describing stupid shit about the food being served and the color of banners and armor.

But that sort of thing is useful in worldbuilding. His writing is extremely layered. Feast and Dance seemed incoherent and meandering at times, but on re-reads those two have sooooo much shit that you just don't catch on the first read.

Yup.

I wouldn't try to convince anyone to get into the series at this point. He's not going to finish and HBO pretty much nose-dived into the runway on the landing.

Why bother? As you noted, the first lap through can be a little tedious because of the amount of unnecessary detail and then you'll find yourself late in the series feeling like you missed stuff. So you go back through and re-read them for detail (I'll once again recommend the 'ball of beasts' re-packaging for books 4 and 5, if anyone chooses to beat themselves over the head despite our warnings).

And here's the real concern - by all accounts this book will be LONG and dark as hell. And lets say it comes out in the next 2 years - he'll be 75 by then. He's not living to 85 so there's no way he'll get through the final book anyway. If anyone read the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy they'll tell you that 'Mostly Harmless' was ****ing depressing. A few years later Douglas Adams did an interview where he acknowledged that he screwed the series up and he needed to write another book to put it back on the rails because he was just in a bad space when he wrote it.

Then he died. And he'd botched the whole thing so badly that the replacement author just didn't have the chops to salvage it so "And Another Thing" was equally pointless.

It all just left such a bad taste in my mouth. But the distinction is that you can read through "So Long and Thanks for all the Fish" and really come to a good conclusion to the series. You can't do that with ASOIF so on the off chance he ends up getting Winds of Winter out there, it's just going to be a ponderous and miserable slog. Then he's going to die and that's where you'll be left.

So as you noted - what's the point?

Which is why I say he's stuck.

If he were complacent and happy cashing checks, he wouldn't be churning out all this tangential crap.

He's written himself into a corner, IMO. As previously stated, that story just keeps getting bigger and bigger and he's lost control of his instrument at this point.

A good editor could fix it for him, but then he'd have to relinquish control. Which he clearly refuses to do.

At this point about the best we can hope for is for another author to take it up after GRRM's passing and fix it.

Much like Sanderson did for Jordon on WOT.

Sorry yall didn't feel that way. I crushed the first 3 books very quickly. Now, books 4 and 5 are a different story. I clifnoted 4 quite a bit, and gave up on 5.

I’m sure he loved all the surprises and twists he gave people for his main characters with none of them being safe and providing very little in the way of a true hero, but now that everyone knows the ending I’m guessing he lost a lot of motivation to show just how unexpected he can be.

That's not really true, outside of the first book. With the exception of Ned, none of the POV characters die (or at least in the case of Catelyn and Jon, stay dead). Hell, even Ned's death wasn't all that surprising, since I realized about a third of the way through the first book that he was basically GOT's version of Dune's doomed Duke Leto. The two characters are virtually interchangeable - good and noble men who are completely unequipped to navigate a dangerous political landscape, whose deaths spur their children on to greater things.

Yep, one place I thought the show improved on the source material was giving Robb a POV. Didn’t care for how they gave him a love interest but it made his death so much more heartbreaking after seeing his triumphs throughout Season 2 through his POV.

D&D were as skilled as you could hope for when they’re job was strictly adapting the source material. Some changes didn’t land, sure, but the momentum of the story from Seasons 1-4 was so strong it made the weak points easy to ignore. Had Seasons 7-8 been at Season 6 quality, I’d have forgiven the dip from Season 5 onward as well. People don’t realize how difficult adaptations are to do and are somehow bewildered when things like the Wheel of Time fall vastly short of their literary counterpart.

I believe he can't finish the story the way he wants/wanted to, yes. I actually love the lore in the series and I even I didn't like the World of Ice and Fire or Fire and Blood. The one was like an encyclopedia. I got like 2 pages in and I'm like "Wtf is this shit?". Fire and Blood was pretty similar. It was more of a history of the Targaryen house. There were some cool nuggets, but.. give me the end of the main storyline already. I don't want anything else from this universe until we wrap this one up.

Oh, and I know the ending of the show soured everyone and no one gives a shit anymore, but in case others do like the lore as much as I do and have never come across it, they've got some videos on Youtube. They're actually voiced by the actors from the show. I enjoyed listening to them all as the show was airing.

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Part of me wonders if the old bastard is completely ****ing with us: the SERIES is actually finished and the final books will be released upon his death.

Doubtful but, I can’t quite put the idea out of my head.

I doubt it. I think he never intended to finish the series and with the TV show ending according to how he said it would end gives him an out to avoid finishing the books.

I think he loves being a celebrity too much and is content with living off of that the rest of his life.

All good points, but the question is, knowing it's pointless and probably a slog through the mud, will you read the next one if he ever releases it?

Yes. Buy it first day and probably binge read the damn thing.

I am in to far now to stop. Plus anything to get the nasty taste of the final season of game of thrones out of my mouth.

I'm torn on that. His publisher has stated (multiple times) since the release of Dance that it'd make more sense for GRRM to publish eight books in the series.

They may be wanting more money. But God, Dream was the time to start narrowing the universe, not expanding it. He's going to need another Storm in him and I'm starting to be doubtful he's got the juice to do it.