I know the topic's been done to death and didn't want to stain the board with it. But it just triggers my autism to an absurd degree.
How is it humanly possible for him to have ended up like this? He had a solid eight years to finish the fricking book. I could have written a solid full-length continuation to the series in a year or less, probably many more if I had as much time and money as him.
Right now I just assume his planned ending was largely the same as that of the series, and seeing the reaction to that probably discouraged him from continuing. There's also the simple fact that almost nobody cares anymore.
So I understand him giving up after 2019. But what exactly could've happened in the 8 years prior? Can he be this much of a hack?
This fat moron got too used to the good life and lost his touch. Should've stayed in his study instead of doing award shows, video games consultations (lol), interviews. At least finish your project before lapping up all the normie attention. He's probably scared shitless he won't be able to write a good ending. His publisher should just pay a ghostwriter to help him at this point.
>His publisher should just pay a ghostwriter to help him at this point
It's amazing to me that they didn't do this by 2015 at the latest.
Between that and his refusal to let anyone finish it if he died, I'm inclined to believe the guy's a major narcissist.
I agree. I don't think he realizes he's writing mid-grade fantasy for manchildren. Doesn't exactly take a genius to get this stuff out -- it's more time put in than anything else.
He does realize it's fantasy schlock which is why he's tired of writing it. Since Crows dropped he's spent more time doing everything but work on the series which anyone with a brain could tell you means he's basically done with it. He'd much rather focus what creative faculties he has left, he's already old as frick, on other projects. Sadly it remind me of miura and berserk where you could miura was over that phase in his life , not to mention his overall poor health, but it paid the bills so he half assed chapters once in a blue moon.
My best conjecture was he had everything planned out for the first three books and then a vague outline of how he was going to get to his planned ending. Instead of moving things along he just kept adding more and more shit that in the long run would be irrelevant to his ending but he has to tie things up nicely and he realized holy shit I will have to chain myself to a desk for the rest of my life to finish some trash fantasy series. Once he got that hbo paper it was over. He said frick that good riddance to bad rubbish.
He will never finish
too based for this world
exactly
The crippling weight of expectations.
Underrated.
>The crippling weight
his heart is going to fail any day now.
My theory is that he has written it but he doesn't resurrect JS, or something that fans will hate, and is waiting to die to release last two book
He is just afraid for his life from rabid fans.
Real answer: burned out, old, 2rich2care
However I like that SoIaF, have gone downhill, I want all things I used to like to get ruined, there is certain pleasure in it.
OH NO OH NO AHAHAHAHAHAHA
Star Citizen of book series
Extensive rewrites to make the book compatible with 2022 woke extremism. The series is too white, male, patriarchal, etc.
>working with Nnedi Oogaboog
absolutely confirmed, he has been told to sit down, shut up, and let heckin' marginalized voices speak. If the series gets finish it will be co-written with a black trans lesbian with her name first on the cover.
He’s dead inside. It’s over
He got distracted for like three to four years doing the sidebars for World of Ice and Fire and deciding he wanted to then them into Fire & Blood and spending years on that.
— Be GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRM
— Have cool ending X in mind
— Visit fan discussion forum
— "Is he going to end it like X?"
— "No, that's moronic, for reason Y."
— "Oh yeah, he isn't going to do that, what is he going to do?"
— "No idea. I bet it will be something awesome that no-one expected!"
— Oh dear
— I can't do X, what can I do?
— Read the forum
— Find the rabid fans have raised every possible idea you could have thought of and hundreds you couldn't, and dismissed them all.
— Order an extra-large pizza
Did Cersei actually order Mandon Moore to kill Tyrion during the Battle of Blackwater?
But what is his tax situation?
Dude, just wait or get a life.
>you OWE me to finish your book, you son of a b***h!!!!
This but unironically.
There’s a sort of unspoken contract between author and reader when it comes to unfinished series like this one. You put your time and money into it hoping to get proper closure in the end; otherwise, 99% of people wouldn’t even start.
So it’s not unreasonable to get mad at the guy. Especially since his books are hardly avant-garde masterpieces; they’re just pulp hack trash that a decent ghostwriter could’ve completed in months.
>Especially since his books are hardly avant-garde masterpieces; they’re just pulp hack trash that a decent ghostwriter could’ve completed in months.
IQfy should get together and write The Winds Of Winter and just release the pdf anonymously into the wild and be damned to copyright or whatever. Would make a fun group project. I bet we could do it in a couple of months.
He got paid. That’s what happened. He has no incentive to work.
I don't really buy this. Writers love to write; in fact they can't help but write. Stephen King is a good example. He stopped needing the money after about his third book, but he just loves churning the stuff out.
It's nothing to do with ability. Bad writers are just as driven as good ones. The opposite is a bigger problem — i.e. most writers go on writing long after they've lost it, and either they don't realize or they don't care. See Stephen King again.
The irony is that his dream when he began writeing ASOIAF in the 90s, his dream was to be a TV show runner and have full control of a project he had written. He also said he is like an actor in that he has a desire for attention. He's a diva basically by his admittance. I don't think that he holds his novelist career in very high regard. Television seems to be where his heart was from the beginning. The irony of this is that I think HBO initially offered him the job to basically run the show because he had worked his way up to that level through his prior experience in the TV industry. He declined at the time because he obviously knew he needed to finish. So then the show gets taken over by other people and he doesn't finish the books. Now he's left in a position where his thunder is completely stolen and it's all downhill. He lost his window and the story in his eyes ... the vast audience of TV show watchers... it's not the same to him. Unfortunately this seems to be the truth in the matter. His heart doesn't seem to be in books anymore.
He obviously has no passion for the series anymore. One book has been released in a 17 year period. Also things got too expansive. He can never wrap everything up in 2 books in a satisfying manner, so who cares. The thing that makes ASOIAF great is the mysterious lore and the theories. The series is better left unfinished. Most of the fun is guessing and theorizing what will happen. Normies don’t even realize that that is why the show or books sucked them in. Some fan theories are so complex that any real ending will leave many with disappointments
This anon is right. Just read a fanfic.
99% of fanfic that attempts anything remotely ambitious plot/scale-wise is completely unreadable
you get a much better ratio out of short canon-compliant one-shots and porn
Half the fan theories are based off George's world building. I think George just likes writing cool characters and storylines, half the theories are just fans having 20 years to overanalyze and exaggerate his mastermind plans for the narrative. Like george planned the Red wedding and that's the peak of his books building up to a large climax. The rest of the foreshadowing ... or a good portion of it... seems seems be fluff for the story.
I’m not a fantasy or sci-fi reader except when I read Martin years ago, so world building means little to me, but even I acknowledge that’s Martin’s forte and what makes ASOIAF great. My point is that the series is memorable and great because it is unfinished. It is better this way. Any ending will lead to disappointment, no matter what
Can you imagine if the complete series was released at the same time? R+L=J would've been remembered as a fantastic twist instead of "the most obvious confirmed fan-theory ever that everyone saw coming." The books have been a victim of time, fans have dissected absolutely everything which has no doubt stifled fat man's already waning passion.
Capitalism, not even once.
A perfect storm of several factors.
First of all he's a hardcore epicure, as evidenced by his books, and not just ASOIAF. All he really cares about is eating and screwing, and at his age only the former remains to him.
Second, although he claims he's a "gardener" and not an "architect" he's really somewhere in between. He has the ending set in mind but he let the characters' arcs grow in their own way and now he's faced with the conundrum of tying them all up nicely in a bow for the ending.
And lastly it's obvious he's bored and over the books, seeing as he'll do literally anything and everything except finish them.