I never read the books, but watched the entire show. My sister gave me a copy of the first book, but I’m very unlikely to read it since I doubt the series will ever be finished, and I have a lot of other reading projects.
While I agree the later seasons of the show had huge gaps of logic and a failure to tie up loose ends (though I don’t agree that Dany’s turn was a surprise, since her character had presaged that from the first season), there were lots of dumb stuff in the first five seasons as well. Ned and Robb Stark behaved like total morons, Joffrey was a cardboard cartoon villain with no redeeming characteristics, Jorah’s rescue of Dany from assassination was completely implausible, and so on. I don’t know if these elements are the same in books as the show but I don’t agree with the premise that the first seasons were free of problems while the last ones were pure dreck.
Many of the problems of the final seasons were due to the difficulty of trying to tie up so many plots that Martin had left hanging. Like others I assume he hasn’t finished because he doesn’t know how to do it himself. I don’t think you can really judge the show unless Martin reveals how he was planning on tying things up.
I have read all the books so far released and I watched the whole series. I actually hadn’t heard of the books until the series started. After watching the first season of the show, I went ahead and read the first book … they are more or less parallel.
After that I decided that I would try to read each book after each season, but two things happened: (1) I kept accidentally running across spoilers, and (2) the books and TV seasons didn’t stay so closely in parallel.
So I went ahead and read the rest of the books, and then watched the remainder of the show as it came out.
I’d say both experiences were well worth it. And that’s despite the fact that the books don’t have an ending and the series ending was awful.
The books really represent a fantastic creation. There are portions that I didn’t fully enjoy at the time, but many of them I grew to appreciate over time. It’s not a perfect series, but I love Martin’s world, his viewpoint, the writing style. Many of the characters and passages that appear in the books and never appeared on the show are among my favorite fantasy ever.
The show also was worth watching. The first few seasons are just amazing. Again, like the books, the series isn’t perfect, but there’s so much in it that is just amazing. The fact that it doesn’t end well doesn’t bother me at all.
Of course, as an American, I’m kind of used to shows that are great for several seasons but just don’t stick the landing at the end—Battlestar Galactica, The Office, Buffy the Vampire Slayer …
There’s enough in those shows that I love that I don’t mind that the endings were fumbled. Same with the Game of Thrones.
I think making the show before the series was finished has alienated a number of readers who would have preferred to finish the books “the way they were intended to be”, if you like. Although GRRM has been involved with the completion of the TV series, it’s very unlikely to have ended in the way he had planned. Even at that, it still leaves much unsaid from the books.
Robert Jordan’s series may well be different given that it was completed by other writers after the original author’s death. That allows for some artistic licence, although you’d hope that they would stick to the original writing style. I don’t know if Jordan left a plan for the completion of the story either, I remember reading a few of the books but I gave up on it after about seven of them!
I’m a huge fan of the book series, and I’m (somewhat) confident that we’ll see The Winds of Winter before too long. However, Martin is in his early 70s and he’s been writing TWOW for nearly 10 years. If the planned final installment, A Dream of Spring is going to take as long then he may well not live to finish it.
Of course, ADOS may well not be the final installment. Originally, the series was supposed to be a trilogy, but the story just kept growing and growing. Who’s to say it won’t grow even more? In short, I’m pretty skeptical that Martin will ever finish it.
That said, I’m not especially looking forward to reading TWOW and ADOS because I think it’s likely that the series will end the same way as the TV show, with Dany going off the rails and the Brandroid being crowned king. I think Martin will be able to tell the story with considerably more skill than Benioff and Weiss were able to because Martin steadfastly (some may say obstinately) refuses to take plot shortcuts.
I’ll always read anything Martin publishes because I think he’s a terrific writer with an outstanding grasp of characterization and plot mechanics, and his world-building is second to none. But, if we see any more books, I won’t be as enthusiastic as I would’ve been had the TV show not (IMO) gone down the toilet.
One of things to know about the books is that one of the best moments of them never made it to the TV series in any way. Book readers know what I’m talking about.
It was such low hanging fruit for the series to use it, even in to throw it away, and they didn’t. A lot of fans were expecting it right until the Eighth season.
I am mildly interested. I think the books have deteriorated in quality after 3 anyway and it’s pretty clear that Martin doesn’t really know what to do with his story and is just spinning round inventing more and more characters and settings.
I may be in a minority but I didn’t find the last season that terrible. There were several weak episodes but there were powerful moments too right till the end IMO.
Ultimately Game of Thrones will be remembered for the first three books and the corresponding episodes of the show which represent some of the best storytelling in any medium IMO. And that is OK: three fat books is a lot of good writing and interesting characters and stories. It’s hard to sustain that quality forever. If there is a series with 5-7 consecutive books as good as Martin’s first three I would love to know about it.
This. Except I read the first book, and half of the second. I’m not very excited about the final books because i haven’t been moved to finish the ones i have. It would be nice if he came up with a better ending, though. And I’m not talking about Dany, that was the one part that seemed plausible to me.
As someone who has read the books I strongly disagree. The problems with the later seasons were that the resolutions to most of those plots were cut from the show. Dorne, Jaime and Brienne, Euron Greyjoy, Cersei. All this plots were absolutely butchered by the show, not to mention many others that weren’t even touched on. Then they tried to shoehorn the book ending into a completely different story.
Game of Thrones, however, is different from most series in that it is working towards some definite final resolution. The events are supposed to be part of a coherent plot that will be tied together at the end. But unlike other works based on books, like Lord of the Rings or His Dark Materials, we don’t know at the beginning what that resolution is supposed to be (if we have read the books).
Most other series are not based on books and start out without any overall plan. They don’t know how many seasons they are going to get, and although there are story arcs in each season at the beginning they have no idea how the series is going to end.
The Sopranos, Mad Men, and Seinfeld, are examples of this. The individual episodes are what’s important. There is no overall narrative that has to be tied together. You may resolve individual character’s stories in the final episode, but you don’t need to tie them together. Even if a finale is disappointing, it doesn’t affect the enjoyment of previous episodes. In Game of Thrones, however, watching some elaborate plot line that ends up going nowhere or is irrelevant to the ending is frustrating (e,g. the whole mystery about Jon Snow’s parentage in the end had little significance).
(Breaking Bad is an interesting case in that we knew at the beginning that Walter White could come to no good end, we didn’t know what it was going to be. In fact, not even Vince Gilligan knew exactly how the final season was going to end at the beginning.)
Exactly so. I loved the Dorne plot and the show completely butchered it. They decided to go in an entirely different direction and it was terrible - a foreshadowing of the issues in Season 6-8.
FWIW, A Feast for Crows (Book 4) is my second favorite book of the series. When I first read it, I was disappointed. I expected balls to the wall action like A Storm of Swords (Book 3). But on a re-read I fell in love with it. Just a great view on how this war of elites screwed with the common folk. I also enjoyed the deeper dives into the Iron Islands and Dorne.
Don’t get me wrong, I loved the show overall. There were fantastic set pieces and some good subplots. And since I had no great expectations I was less dissatisfied with the final season than many people were. One of the strong points of the show was that it defied the standard fantasy tropes and plot expectations. Although people hated Dany’s turn at the end and Brandon becoming king, to me those seemed to fit with the contrarian ethos of the whole story. (People complained when the show abided by conventions, like having most major characters miraculously survive the battle against the Night King, and then also complained when the main good guy characters Jon and Dany didn’t live happily ever after at the end.)
It failed not because of the specific outcomes, but because they didn’t get there in a good way. It’s about the journey.
My understanding is that Benioff and Weiss were eager just to wrap the whole thing up—whether it was because they were bored with it and had lined up other jobs, or because the actors were starting to get tired of being in the same job, or getting too old for their roles, or whatever.
HBO told them to take as many episodes as they needed, but they declined. So they didn’t give themselves the space to get to the end in a good way—or maybe they didn’t have the ability to do that in the first place, who knows.
It took almost two years to produce the six-episode eighth season. I can’t imagine how long a gap there would have been if they had added more episodes.
All in all I guess you can judge a TV series by how much out of favour the actors in it become at the end. Some, like Lost, had Evangeline Lilly, Josh Holloway and Matthew Fox is major roles when the series was riding high, then for them to disappear at the end. The same is true of Game of Thrones, Peter Dinkelage, Emile Clarke and Kitt Harrington and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau were getting roles thrown at them all through the later seasons, and now their careers have crashed. The few who still get roles are ones who went into Franchises like the X-men (Sophie Turner) in recurring roles, or had their films delayed a couple of years (Maisie Williams).