I've always been optimistic about him finishing asoiaf, but the recent stuff like the Dunk and egg tv show seems to have motivated him more (ie pushing for money).
The other day he posted a second solitary cryptic quote on his notablog, this time from best president TR: https://georgerrmartin.com/notablog/2024/06/19/words-of-wisdom-3/
Previously he had this quote: https://georgerrmartin.com/notablog/2024/03/11/words-of-wisdom-2/ (this one has a blue rose image which is significantly tied to Lyana Stark)
Idk I think it's coming soon
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doubt it. he had to re-write so much when he saw the reaction to his ending on the show. he's been scrambling to fix it all and i don't think he's close to being done.
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The ending isn't even bad, it's a good ending. The showrunners just got lazy and didn't do any work to set it up.
Then Dany turned evil because she was sad. The End.
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It didn't make sense, because there's no Faegon to egg her on.
There's a reason why the golden company was at King's landing in s8, despite there them being there makes no sense. GC defending KL is remnant from the book outline they had.
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the ending is chudpilled. white
foid introduces diversity to a country 
and massacres the indigenous population. the only thing daenerys did wrong 
was not going 
far enough 
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Girlboss Arya then sails to Amerikos and likely genocides the injuns
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The ending actually makes so much sense. Self-righteous autocrat (demonstrated many times throughout the series) who was r*ped at a young age snaps when her delusions/power are challenged. People just wanted her to be a good little girl boss when really she was being made into a monster the whole time.
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the ending just felt rushed more than the plot being bad. in book form it would
have been good.
also D&D are just dogshit writers. the characters in their Three
Body Problem 
series 
are cringe.
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Why are they still employed. Same question for M. Night Shamalamalan
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Because they made one of the most popular TV series in recent memory. It's not that complicated. The execs don't care if they didn't stick the landing, all they see is the ratings they had.
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I have no problems with Daenerys snapping, but the whole build up was shit. No way Cersei will be around that long, if Book Cersei blows up the sept of Baelor she'll die not long after miserably trying to take control. fAegon takes over King's Landing and Dany snaps when she realizes the people love her supposed nephew more than her.
And I'm sure that Jon being Rhaegar's son will actually matter to the plot, because in the show it didn't make any difference.
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The show made kings landing and all of the small folk seem utterly r-slurred to allow Cersei to just blow up the sept and claim the throne without any opposition from the other houses or the faith in old town. Its actually really r-slurred how dumb and dumber just forgot about all the other houses and basically everyone other than the main cast
Plus lol at making Bronn the warden of the south and giving him high garden and not any of the other reach houses caring
Goddarn game off thrones fricking sucked
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I hate D&D for completely misunderstanding Cersei. Her whole point is that she's an incompetent, lustful and vengeful idiot, that constantly gets herself and her family into shit, because she can't control herself or her children. She's not supposed to be some super-intelligent manipulator, she's supposed to be the idiot that causes her husband's and her families rule to fall and for the Targaryans to take back over.
But D&D needed their girl boss, so we got that dog shit character instead.
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Agree with most of that. Maybe Jon is supposed to be a mirror version of Daenerys, similar blood also orphaned but raised by good people and not r*ped.
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I never saw the show but what little I've heard about the ending seems to be a lot of complaints about quality decline (valid) and also that Daenerys was crazy (not valid). I guess tv show viewers never had to sit through Quentin Martell but Daenerys needed to get taken down like 8 pegs and I hated every chapter she was in by the end of a Dance with Dragons.
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Goddarn the Quentin stuff was stupid I honestly don't know where George was going with it.
I'm still disappointed we didn't get a time skip that used Edric dayne as a plot point/posdible azor ahai candidate but at least we have fricking Darkstar now living out in the chapters of a a slut sand BIPOC's complaining
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The story was so bleak at this point that I was rooting for Quentin to at least topple Daenerys' stupid as frick city, but he literally just dies and it goes nowhere. It would have been so much better if he at least cost her a dragon or something. Story was so darn predictable at that point.
Still better than whatever was going on with Arya's magic assassin BS
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Exactly, all of the buildup was there, but the tumblr chicks couldn't see it as they defended all of her evil actions.
Dae remember "but the thousands of people she crucified were le ebul slave owners"
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I think that by the time the show ended he didn't have a lot written. Think about it, A Dance with Dragons was published in 2011, the year the show came out. In the past 13 years he wrote screenplays for the show, traveled through tours around the world promoting his books and the show, he popped Dunk and Egg, Wildcards and the Fire and Blood books. It's possible he started to seriously dedicate himself to “Winds of Winter” during the pandemic.
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It's worth pointing out that nothing happened in 'A Dance with Dragons'.
Writing story arcs that went no where (Ned Stark, Rob Stark, Renly, Likely Stannis) was revolutionary, but when it keeps happening, it's just a Netflix show that's gone on for too many seasons.
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I just hope book Stannis kills the Boltons and goes down fighting The Others instead of the snowstorm, 20 good men and the lame “battle” sequence.
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Stannis absolutely will live. That's part of his plan when he tells a bunch of people that they'll hear he's dead which is a bluff. Also pink letter says he's dead which almost certainly means he's not. Pink letter is probdbly manse raider's signal
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But the pink letter says “I want my reek”, only Ramsay calls Theon “reek”. But yeah, the letter is full of shit to mislead Jon.
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No one else knows he's Theon, Reek is the name that everyone else would recognize
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Ramsay has had other reeks before Theon and I think it's fair to say that others would know, esp if it's Mance who was in disguise with a bunch of wildling foids in Winterfell for a while
Heck Mance was at Winterfell when king Robert was there. He's probably been all over the north
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I am begging to every god that this is true.
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yeah, maybe. i stopped watching the show when they caught up with the books because
well it's been years, the next book will be out way before the show is done anyway and i'll just catch up. 
which had to be at least 25 years ago so him not writing anything until the last couple years does make sense.
i still like my version better.
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Did he write the show ending? I thought by that point the show was doing its own writing
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No. D&D wrote it.
Supposedly George only told them 3 things that should happen after A Dance with Dragons.
1. Shireen burns
2. The Hodor twist
3. Bran becomes king
Then they made up the rest.
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lol the hodor twist is so dumb i hate game of thrones
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wtf is hodor anyway. i only watched the first season and got sick of the show cuz they killed the best character. Fanatasy is supposed to be Good vs evil like LOTR, not political intrigue horseshit. Ned Stark was the closest thing we had to Aragorn. All the other characters are weirdos, r-slurs, or back stabbing snakes.
!kino
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He accidentally psychically merged with his child self while he was trying to yell "Hold the door" in the future while monsters were attacking and it traumatized him so much in the past he became r-slurred and just started saying "Hodor". Like Hode Door.
Bravo George!
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theres time travel in the show?
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yeah but its like really shitty. bran gets most of his friends killed just to find the three eyed raven, which is some super old psychic dude trapped in a tree or something. they do this time travel thing with their
psychic powerswhere they can watch the past play out while in sleep mode but theyre not visible or anything to those in the past, its like watching a 3d movie basically. anyways theyre in the past while where their bodies are in the present is getting FRICKED UP by the zombies and meera yells at bran enough that he hears it while him and the old guy are 3d movie watching winterfell at some random point in the past. so bran somehow MAGICALLY possesses past hodor who was some bumbling fat frick kid who could talk normally and this MAGICALLY translates to possessing hodor in the present to prevent the zombies from getting to them. kid hodor has a seizure in the past and starts saying HOLD THE DOOR which becomes hodor which is why hodor can only say that.tldr; im not writing a tldr because writing this comment has been stupid enough and whatever longpostbot has to say about me is correct
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At no point in your rambling, incoherent post were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone on this site is now dumber for having read it. May God have mercy on your soul.
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Okay, strag.
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you have a problem with what I said boy?
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GOT did have the good vs evil in it but that was eclipsed mostly by the political intrigue stuff. Like imagine if every character was Denethor that's basically GOT.
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that would be awful. The way Denethor was portrayed in the movies especially a common criticism was that he was basically portrayed to be a belligerent, power-hungry oaf. Especially the scene where his kid is getting killed and he's stuffing his face. His character in the books was more of a reasonable but cold/calculating ruler
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Book Denethor was way smarter and more capable than Movie Denethor, though. If Book Denethor made it to King's Landing, Cersei and the Lannisters wouldn't have lasted ten minutes.
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That's the entire point, though. Martin wrote a modern fantasy novel heavily based on LOTR tropes, it tanked and nearly killed his career ("Armageddon Rag") and then he came back with "A Song of Ice and Fire" which he was very clear was not going to be anything like Tolkien plus he claimed it would be based on 'real' history and be what life 'really' was like back then - which apparently means incest, r*pe, and tons of s*x'n'violence all over the place, religion doesn't really matter (which is why show Cersei gets away with blowing up the Great Sept and the common people don't rise up and regicide her dumb backside) and for all his snarking about "what was Aragorn's tax policy" and the like, he's no better at creating a functional economy and world-building.
So yeah, Ned Stark is the nearest thing to Aragorn and then Martin kills him off to go "ha ha it's stupid to be good and just" in order to show that This Is Not Tolkien. Because I honestly do think he has a personal grudge due to how he failed to copy Tolkien successfully and he's trying to set himself up as the modern Big Name In Fantasy. But there's a lot of competition for that title (Robert Jordan for one, David Eddings a while back) and Tolkien is still the 800 lb gorilla when it comes to famous fantasy writers.
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Posts like this is why I do Heroine.
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I don't think anyone said anything about bran being king. For all we know and given dumb and dumber's lack of subtext in writing GRRM just could have said been is the new blood raven who really controls the realm as 3 eyed crow
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That makes sense, but King Bran kind of fits GRRM style considering he was always fond of the Starks.
The 3 eyes crow as King is quite a dark ending though, I don't think D&D realized that.
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You mentioned me
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i don't actually know, i just assume he told them generally how the story ends and has been frantically trying to fix it because everyone hated it.
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King Bran, Shireen burning and Hodor came from GRRM, but the rest was all made up by D&D and will likely differ a lot.
There's no fAegon in the show which fricked up Daenerys's character progression, Dany snapping and Varys's whole plot only makes sense with fAegon. Not to mention the stupid “Littlefinger sells Sansa to the Boltons” plot the showrunners did.
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king bran might be the worst part i hope that's not how the book ends
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Aegon is real imo. BIPOCs have been saying he's a blackfyre for so long it's absolutely almost guaranteed he's real
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If he's real that's even better, it means he outranks both Daenerys and Jon on the succession line and gives her character a motivation to snap (if that's how she's supposed to end).
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Dany is more or less already on her way to being seen by most as a barbarian queen, she's already sort of mad already. I think Aegon is going to take the “charismatic” targ role from dany and will remind everyone of raegar, but dany will be a reminder of Aerys ii/new maegor built on vengeance and parallel to the dance of the dragons. John may take a jahaeres I role as conciliator. Idk
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I doubt that considering there's way more characters and shit added in dance yhat the show didn't account for
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Actually he had to rewrite everything in 2016/2017, when he sent the draft to his publisher and they didnt like it.
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The show writers changed most of the notes he gave them, they got leaked around when the show was ending and they kept almost nothing from what he said would happen in the books.
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