From the publicity stuff for Season Eight of Game of Thrones:
“It’s about all of these disparate characters coming together to face a common enemy, dealing with their own past, and defining the person they want to be in the face of certain death. It’s an incredibly emotional haunting bittersweet final season and I think it honors very much what [author George R.R. Martin] set out to do — which is flipping this kind of story on its head.”
And what Martin set out to do, in his own words:
“I admire Tolkien greatly. His books had enormous influence on me. And the trope that he sort of established—the idea of the Dark Lord and his Evil Minions—in the hands of lesser writers over the years and decades has not served the genre well. It has been beaten to death. The battle of good and evil is a great subject for any book and certainly for a fantasy book, but I think ultimately the battle between good and evil is weighed within the individual human heart and not necessarily between an army of people dressed in white and an army of people dressed in black. When I look at the world, I see that most real living breathing human beings are grey.”
…And yet, there those two armies are.
No shame in admitting you’re a lessor writer than Tolkien. (Granted, this would be the TV writers here, as Martin hasn’t written his end to the story yet, but I’d lay odds it will come down to two armies for him as well)
Martin ain’t finishing that series.
^This.
.
The only reason I even bothered to finish reading Dance of Dragons was because of the sunk cost fallacy.
I was decidedly unimpressed by the torture porn. Annoyed by the digressions (especially since they were almost entirely driven by the idiot ball). And downright pissed off that every single subplot ended in a cliffhanger (including those that reached their cliffhanger well before the halfway point of the book).
Feast for Crows was filler.
Dance of Dragons was something worse.
I’ll just leave this here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAAp_luluo0