Game of Thrones was once the most popular television series in the world, but the story’s controversial final season made sure that everyone would forget about ever being invested in the show.
The fantastical tale itself is still far from over if creator George R.R. Martin has anything to say on the matter. After all, the novelist still has two books to write in the series, The Winds of Winter and A Dream of Spring, which, parallel to the show’s timeline, will pick up the story after Jon Snow’s death in season five.
As HBO’s Game of Thrones pushed past the source material, the series slowly started to show the wear and tear of not having hundreds upon hundreds of pages of intricate storytelling and characterization backing it up. By the time the penultimate season aired, most fans had begun to feel a quality dip in certain plot threads, a nosedive that fully encompassed the series in the final six-episode outing.
George R.R. Martin has recently revealed in an interview with The New York Times, that showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss pretty much kept him “out of the loop” from season five onward.
“By season five and six, and certainly seven and eight, I was pretty much out of the loop,” he said. When asked if he knew the reason, here’s what he had to say in response: “I don’t know – you have to ask Dan and David.”
The creator had previously claimed that the ending he’s planned for the novels is constantly moving away from what we saw in the HBO adaptation, so it’s safe to say that even Martin isn’t satisfied with how D&D handled his story.
In any event, Martin is currently gearing up for the premiere of House of the Dragon, the first Westerosi spinoff series that’s set to take audiences 200 years before the events of the main series on Aug. 21.