House Of The Dragon

I expect GRRM has spent the last couple of years frantically (or as frantic as he can be) re-planning his ending so that he can distance it from the TV ending.

Can't actually remember how many of the books I've actually read it has been so long, but it would be good if he can actually get it finished.

Quite looking forward to House of Dragon, although with trepidation. It would be great to have another big fantasy epic TV show to look forward to. The Witcher was a bit dull and I haven't bothered with season 2. I didn't mind Wheel of Time, but the final episode was terrible. That just leaves hope with the Lord of the Rings one and this.

HoD appeals slightly more to me, but I expect it will have to be one of the best things ever made to get people back onboard after the GoT backlash.

The books are never going to get finished, so I guess this is all we'll get.

I might give this a watch if the reviews are good, but otherwise I'm not particularly pumped for it. Even if GoT didn't completely shit the bed in the last few seasons, I'm just not that interested in the Targaryens.

Yeah, HBO has to pair it with some other shit to get me to give this a chance. Like if Larry returns with Curb Season 12 or if Marty and Terry develop another mafia show I'll check it out, but I'm not a Targaryen fan, and nevermind the ending, GoT lost me at all the Ramsey/Sansa shit.

I'm reasonably sure the rug Matt Smith is wearing in some scenes in the trailer is the same exact one worn by Harry Lloyd as Viserys in season 1 of GoT.

The show's ending isn't fundamentally bad in its own right though, it's just thoroughly badly told and generally un-earned. And in its (very very mild defense), though it was done badly, I disagree that the heel turn at the end came out of nowhere as many seem to think. That was one of the only actual bits of foreshadowing that they bothered to do for the most part, it was patently obvious it was possibly going to happen for years.

I totally agree. I never understood the complaints about what actually happened, although the complaints about how it happened are mostly fair. I was mostly a defender of the ending as I thought the hysteria was overblown. I would also say the final season was actually better than 7, although neither was good.

Regardless of my own opinions though, I still wouldn't be surprised if GRRM decides to change bits of it so that he can distance himself from the TV ending.

This is true. Though it's another symptom of the last season or two just being waaay too rushed.

The way the books and the early series made huge distances a big issue, and had them cause huge problems with news travelling, was a large influence on the stories they told. There were big sections where some massive event had happened, but people in another storyline hadn't got any idea about it and so were blindly doing something dumb.
Once they got rid of that, they were just knowingly doing something dumb.

When you're willing to shockingly kill off major characters out of the blue, you have to walk a very fine line between doing it too much, so that it becomes entirely random and therefore meaningless, and not doing it enough, so it becomes clear that some characters have major plot armour.

The thing I kinda liked about the books was the idea that everyone was vulnerable. You might be this baddass knight, or have spent 6 years plotting, but one lucky grunt might get in a lucky blow and you might end up dying ignominiously from sepsis.
Maybe it was inevitable that as the story needed to reach its climax the key players for the end game would become clear and have to survive, but it also made it much more predictable and generic.

I guess they were worried about the issue of killing off too many favorites leaving them without enough popular characters. But they exacerbated that by cutting out too many side characters that *could* have been brought in and killed off as red herrings. Which meant they ended up keeping around too many characters well past their usefulness (Bronn, Varys, etc..) 

I think I kinda misread GRRM's message with the books. I felt like he was saying that all the kings, lords, etc.. were basically as bad as each other for the poor folk. But it turned out that he was saying that some of them were actually pure and destined to be heroes.

The Cleganebowl stuff, for example, felt like something out of an entirely different franchise.
What happened to Cersi and Jamie, while seemingly hated by most of the fans, seemed much more in keeping with the spirit of the show. (though not the stuff with Euron, which was totally rushed and unearned)

Jon is still dead in the books and I'm pretty sure that he was due to stay dead. It's only because he was such a huge fan favourite in the TV series that he got resurrected.

I still think the ending would have been fine if they'd just stretched out what happened over 2 seasons. I never bought into the idea that the earlier series where some super complex work of genius. They were tits and swords with the added hook that it didn't mind killing main characters so the simplistic ending largely felt like it fit to me.

Even the politics stuff was basically everyone is out for themselves except the honourable Starks. And then Littlefinger did a face.

Well, regardless of whether the politics had to go or not, it did. It probably died with Littlefinger (who tbf felt like he'd really outlived his usefulness long before)

Does seem kind of obvious that here be spoilers, but maybe no harm in editing the title or something.