Yeah, the show seems to be treating the events of A Feast for Crows and A Dance With Dragons as more-or-less a giant detour (not even counting the 3 or 4 entire subplots introduced in those novels - Quentyn Martell, Aegon Targaryen, Lady Stoneheart, and possibly Victarion Greyjoy (they've added some Iron Islands stuff this season on the show, but it's unlikely to turn out the way it did in the books) - that the show has completely ignored) and is steering back towards the conclusion things appeared to be headed towards at the end of A Storm of Swords, which was probably GRRM's original intent before he got caught up in his own world and characters when writing those books and introduced too many new complications and wrote himself into a corner where his original plan is no longer really plausible without either doing a lot of fancy-dancing (which is what he has apparently been trying to do, and struggling with, for the past dozen or so years) or just crassly hitting a "reset" button (which is pretty much what the show is doing).Matthew wrote:I am enjoying Game of Thrones for what it is, and I rather suspect it might end up truer to Martin's original vision than the books eventually will be. Yes, it is all coming rather in a rush now, but it is television.
On the one hand I kind of feel sorry for GRRM because I trust that if he had ended things the way he originally had planned it would have been better than what we're seeing in the show, but now that the show has done that he's going to feel more pressure to do something different in the books to make them not just seem like a too-late appendix to the show's "canon," which means he's presumably feeling even more pressure which will make his writing even slower and opens the very real possibility that he may never finish the series after all. But on the other hand, I don't feel too sorry for him, because all of his difficulties are unquestionably of his own making. If he'd just stuck to his original plan to skip ahead five years and cover the intervening time in flashbacks, or if he'd resisted the urge to keep introducing new characters and sub-plots and complications even a little bit, he wouldn't have had any of these problems and could currently be enjoying his retirement and swimming in royalty checks.
