by TC on 22/09/20, 08:51:32
finished book 5 (dance with dragons) yesterday. a few more minor things changed through book 3 (for TV, they consolidated some characters and events, etc.). book 4 was pretty different - about half the things were covered in the show in some way, the other half was not, or was completely different (the entire brienne saga, for example). by book 5, everything is completely unrecognizable from what they did in the show. my gripes about the latter seasons of the show - that they just pushed the accelerator to the floor, racing from spectacle to spectacle, instead of letting it breathe and developing characters like they did in the earlier seasons - is underscored, bolded, and highlighted in the books. book 5 came out a couple months after the first episode of GoT aired. the argument that "they got ahead of the books" doesn't really apply across the board until the end of season 5. they allowed some arcs to get past the books, but... why? that's on them. if they had kept the pace of the earlier seasons, let the characters develop, and followed the books more closely, they could still be airing seasons while we await the next books. so again i say fuck them for kind of ruining the last few seasons of GoT. they wrote themselves into a corner and paid for it in quality.
anyway, the books are great. now have a history of westeros illustrated book and then a 300 years prior targaryen prequel book. it's infuriating that GRRM allowed the show to air and get through all those seasons without fucking finishing the next book. by the time it comes out, it will have been 10 years. and there's at least one more after that one. the dude is old. fucking write already.