[diversity horrorshow clipped for my own sanity]
Here's an even more fun thought: there's never going to be a remake or another shot at ASOIAF if Martin never gets off his ass and finishes it. What would be the point? It'll just be a broken, incomplete series from a man who bit off more than he could chew, permanently tainted by a pair of genuine hackfrauds whose hackery became more evident the more material they ran out of.
The books and the tv series are fundamentally different creatures. ASOIAF is GRRM melding his simplistic disdain for the Vietnam war and the Bush adventures (bad people do bad things when they have power) with a pretty overt climate change analogue, which everybody ignores because it isn't an immediate threat to them.
Game of Thrones as a tv production, is sort of a monument to whats wrong with Western Culture in the 2010s. Subversion for its own sake, resulting in an inferior product to the original.
It tries to distinguish itself from past eras by being both grander in vision to what came before but also darker, and more cynical. It's not afraid to offend with sex and gore, and yet at the first sign of real public outcry crumbles like an old woman's hip. Child sacrifice got virtually 0 backlash on grounds of morality, whilst a forced marriage and rape earlier in the season was triggering enough to get all future sex scenes scrubbed and sanitised henceforth.
The stately figures are demonstrably past their prime, and feel like they squandered their youth, while the younger characters have been given a multitude of reasons to be unhappy with the status quo only to have their energies misdirected in the worst of ways. Eventually, the ones that survive to the final series have developed skills to be game-changers in their own right, but the pay-off isn't proportional to their efforts, if it's even there at all.
There's plenty to be optimistic about, and the long-term threats can be tackled constructively, but instead ugliness and nihilism wins out almost all the time, and in the cheapest of ways. And then, because the writers want to chart their own path and reject the tropes of past eras, wind up creating a story that still relies on those same tropes by way of subversive contrast, and is nonetheless inferior for it. Any potential hero that naturally arises over a nigh-decade of constant loss and bloodshed has to be quickly taken down a notch in case the audience is confused the show will have a happy ending. "There are no heroes, that's all folks!" is not a compelling and timeless tale.
It's nearly a case study in why literary tropes became tropes. Because running away from them invariably results in crafting something that just fails to resonate with people.
At some stage, probably when writing season 5, D&D realised the trajectory they've got the important characters on was so fundamentally divergent from their book counterparts, that they could have pitched to GRRM a different ending more befitting them. Instead, they continued haphazardly towards an end goal that no longer made sense, and fans in the final seasons were totally wise to things just happening because the writers demanded it occur. When it should have been, and originally was, an organic consequence of character motivations and the world itself.
D&D? More like TNT haha. They blew this franchise's cultural impact up in the space of about 4 weeks with those final episodes.
The magic in ASOIF (barring the mystical creatures) always seemed to me as the weakest part of the series. It just doesn't make sense that there is a level of magic that allows you to create shadow assassins or kill prominent figures via manipulating fate and it not being a well known tool to the aristocracy. The inclusion of fate reading is also a really shitty storytelling tool that removes a lot of possiblities because it boils down the story into "when is the prophecy fullfilled in a way and what will be the twist?".
Again, it's D&D misunderstanding the source material, but absent GRRM's input it's hard to tell if the series will end with magic being normalised again or dying with the dragons in the final fight against the ice zombies. I'm inclined to think even GRRM doesn't know how that'll go.
What's troubling to me is that GRRM is of a generation that went through Catholic school and has his worldview framed by opposing its authority. Being atheistic was transgressive 50 years ago but now it's unironically boring. Still, he's writing a series set in a medieval analogue and he figured it needs a Catholicism analogue too. TROUBLE IS, from the frozen north to the Ancient East, their minority religions have verifiable powers. Be it resurrection, shape shifting, and so on. Even the fucking goatpeople are able to prevent death--even choosing their preferred degree of what qualifies as "alive". Maybe these skills are independent of their faiths but they're presented as exclusively used by one faction or another, and the religious rituals clearly facilitate them somehow. How the hell could The Seven ever take hold if they don't have anything supernatural going for them? I don't think GRRM considered such reciprocity when worldbuilding, and it stems from his own biases of it all being made up lmao.
