It’s been over a decade since we last stepped into Westeros from the pages of a book: George RR Martin has been writing ‘The Winds of Winter’ for eleven years, the sixth novel of ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’, and in these eleven years many things have happened. Like, for example, the premiere of ‘Game of Thrones’, the subsequent worldwide phenomenon… And the moment when the showrunners surpassed the books and had to invent the outcome of the story. now it seems that all that will remain in a mere fanfiction.
Winds of change
The reactions to the last season of ‘Game of Thrones’ are the series-like equivalent of the fall of Babylon: there was no puppet with a head, each turn was criticized and not even the most spectacular scenes were saved (with some reason) from the wrath of the fans. On his website, Martin now says that some things in the series will come out in the books but that he is going in other directions. Because, according to him, he is not a good architect, but a good gardener to whom plants grow where he least thought they would.
I have been working on my conservatory. Things are growing… and changing, just like gardeners like me. Things turn, things change, new ideas come to me (thank you muse), old ideas are unworkable, I write, rewrite, restructure, break everything and rewrite again, I go through doors that lead nowhere and doors that give place to wonders
What translated comes to be “in 2022 neither”. The thing is that the garden he has gotten into is taking him further and further from ‘Game of Thrones’ (which is normal if you have read the novels and know that there are characters that are not even in the series). Also, Martin has another promise to make which, to put it mildly, It gives us renewed desire to endure a few more years its slow writing process that promises to fix everything the series broke.
Not every character who survived to the end of ‘Game of Thrones’ will survive to the end of ‘A Song of Ice and Fire,’ and not everyone who died in ‘Game of Thrones’ will die in ‘A Song of Ice and Fire.’ Some yes, of course. Perhaps the majority. But definitely not all. Of course, I may change my mind next week, with the next chapter I write. That is gardening. And the end? You’ll have to wait for it to get there. Some things will be the same. Many others don’t.