Maybe I’m being too harsh here. GRIMM has written the source material, and B&W’s weaknesses were well exposed by the end of GOT. They should have been fired at end of Season 5, but the blinkers were on by then.
I remember when the episodes were broadcasting, as early as Season 6, there was youtube videos for every episode describing how they could have easily fixed a bunch of stuff in it. It wasn’t hard. It was slight tweaks here and there to make it sensible. They should have then fired the writers after Season 6, and got that lot in as script consultants after that…
The premise is that they collaberatively write a chapter with quite detailed specs, and with three done (Prologue, Danerys I, Areo Hotah I) and they are really rather good. I can imagine GRRM enjoying them.
Yes, but this isn’t really JUST fan fiction. It’s pretty well done. That was the point here. There is a detailed spec, beginning, end, plot points to hit, length, into a great amount of information, and some of it (like the current running Alayne I) has such detail that only a serious studier of the world would appreciate. A tournament of the small houses and little details of the littlefinger arc from the books.
But all in, I don’t actually care if GRRM would like it, it’s written as if it is good enough for GRRM to appreciate it, so it’s probably far richer in detail and variation than the real book will be.
If anything, the threat of it being better than his, might mean he might pull his socks up and write some.
I’m aware of the Preston Jacobs fanfic project, though I haven’t followed it because that’s not really my thing.
But he has a series of youtube vids called “What are you missing” starting at season1 episode 1. It discusses the show from the perspective of someone who knows the books inside and out.
He goes through it episode by episode. This has been some of the most enjoyable and insightful GOT content on youtube I’ve come across.
These may be of interest. Among other things, GRRM throws the GOT showrunners under the bus, insists he means to finish the GOT novel(s), and says his ending of the books will be different.
I haven’t read Jacobs’ fanfic or seen his series on the show. I have seen some of his videos analyzing what’s supposedly going on behind the scenes in the books, and a lot of his theories seem batshit crazy. It almost seems like the natural result of George having taken so long – all of the obvious mysteries (e.g. R+L=J) have been solved, all of the less obvious theories (e.g. Grand Northern Conspiracy) have been thoroughly hashed out, and all that’s left are wild leaps of logic based on scant evidence and minor inconsistencies. And so he comes up with the High Sparrow actually being Ser Pounce because he once ate fish on a Tuesday even though that’s against the Faith’s dietary restrictions, or whatever.
I know there is loads of stupid theories which have bloomed out of lack of the books, but Jacobs isn’t one of the ones pushing this stuff, so I don’t think that will bleed out in these. All the high sparrow is Howland Reed, nonsense for instance, so I don’t expect it to get stupid connections based on a couple of throwaway lines. The spec for the next one, Alayne, which is new Sansa, talks of a whole bunch of low level lords and noble most of the casual readers will have long since forgotten. It really reads like GRRMs, stuff.
The prologue, for instance (where the viewpoint always dies), is a Maester in charge of Castamere and The Crag, where the Westerlings (aka Robs Starks still living wife) now reside. It appears there’s overlap with Ironborn raiding.
And I’m not sure any of us should be precious about fan fiction, more the competence level of it, because the fifth season onwards of the TV series was bad to awful fan fiction…
I think I remember watching some of Jacobs videos of the time, and he’d do one telling them how to fix the episode currently showing. And it made sense. It worked within that world, and covered stuff Benioff & Weiss had long since forgotten or never knew. A few tweaks to an episode and it would have been 100% better. They’d have improved the show no end if they’d had that dude on as a consultant for the scriptwriters.
We just enjoyed the British murder mystery Vigil. Well-done if sometimes far-fetched, it’s set largely aboard a Royal Navy submarine. We recognized three people from the GOT cast, those who played Ygritte, Stannis Baratheon and Podrick Payne.
Hell, I also haven’t watched House of the Dragon yet. I suffered a certain degree of GoT burnout and just haven’t been able to generate the enthusiasm when they is so much decentish TV out there these days.
That’s just watching it. At least I didn’t have to actually live with it for years.
I wasn’t looking forward to it at all, but people at work kept talking about it, and while I’m sure I read about how the war goes, I’ve long since forgotten and needed to avoid spoilers. I was very pleasantly surprised with House of the Dragon. Probably the 3rd or 4th best season in Westeros.
In this book by Kyle Cassidy, GRRM talks about his lifelong love of books and the importance of libraries even in the Internet Age. The book includes essays by Cory Doctorow, Neil Gaiman, John Scalzi and others. Recommended.
