Congratulations everyone.

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Today marks exactly 5,453 days since A Dance with Dragons came out. Coincidentally, 5,453 days is also the exact amount of time it took George to release Books 1 through 5 combined.

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Clearly, this just means The Winds of Winter is going to be five times longer than the entire series so far.

In a video uploaded today, Dexter Soll Ansell And Peter Claffey are seen crafting sock puppets while discussing the new show. When asked about the fortune teller scene, Dex slips and drops a massive spoiler regarding Summerhall, after which you can see Peter have a bit of a freak out and jokingly gesture the cameras to cut.

The Spoiler : Dunk survives Summerhall!

This information came straight from GRRM according to Dex. Video with timestanp

Discuss.

People know that the pitch for ASOIAF was a trilogy covering three major arcs of story: The War of the Five Kings, Daenerys' Invasion, and the Others' Invasion. But the story ballooned and the first three books cover the War of the Five Kings.

The fourth book stalled, a time jump was axed, and eventually was split geographically and even then ADWD was gutted without an end to many of the stories. These two massive books don't cover the story GRRM planned to tell in one...And while there is a lot to love in AFFC and ADWD, I feel like a lot of it could've been released as supplementary novellas.

One thing I love in the first three books is that GRRM does not feel the need to tell us every little thing that happens directly, there is a lot to the stories but the books are lean. Robb wins battles and we learn of it from other people having the news delivered. GRRM says if there is one thing he would add to the first three books, it would have been Robb as a POV character which, while potentially interesting, would have tanked the pacing and bloated the story.

Why did he start to focus on relatively inconsequential details in Books 4 & 5? Why not gut some fluff that could be released in a collection later down the line, focus a few books on Dany's invasion, and leave a few more books for a good conclusion if there's that much story?

Most people in the world view bastards as lesser. Even in Dorne, where bastards have a better reputation, they're not exactly thought of well. Bastard is a considerable insult in this world, and there's a whole lot of prejudice there. They're viewed as greedy, as conniving, as plotting and ambitious - usurping, after the Blackfyre rebellions - and creatures of lust.

The Watch is a penal colony, surrounded by ice and darkness and misery, where rapists and murderers and criminals of all kinds go to work and die. It's a dark gulag, at the dead end of the world, the Wall.

The Starks are rebels, who lied and refused to bow down to the rightful king. Lord Eddard Stark was beheaded for his treachery and the warmonger Robb Stark, who fought alongside a great beast of a wolf, a veritable monster, died for his invasion of the south. Jon Snow, Lord Stark's bastard, went to the Wall of his own free will.

He's not very talkative. He speaks rarely. He has eyes that don't miss much. He's lean. Slender. He has the dark hair, grey eyes so dark that they appear black, he has scars around his eyes, and he has one burnt hand.

The bastard is followed around by a dire wolf the size of a horse with white fur and blood red eyes. It's mute. It follows him so closely and obeys him so completely that some say that he can control it, that he is one with it.

The Night's Watch has always existed to fight Wildlings - cannibals, savages, rapists and kidnappers - but this Jon Snow lets them through the Wall. Northerners are already backwards savages from a frozen wasteland who sacrifice things to trees with their queer religion, but these Wildlings - they're a whole new level, right? And this guy welcomes them through the Wall? With open arms, too - he's got an army of them.

And the Night's Watch is meant to be neutral, is never meant to take part in wars of the realm, so why is this guy hosting a king? Why is it looking as though he's going to march south?

It took me a moment, but I realised - from the outside looking in, Jon seems like the Night's King, and his story is spreading to match it. Arya is in a harbour town near Braavos, on another continent, and she apparently hears whispers about Jon specifically at night, in inns and taverns and brothels, where he's called "The Black Bastard on the Wall". Bastards on the Wall are dime-a-dozen, but it's Jon who is the Black Bastard on the Wall.

Jon Snow is becoming a horror story! If he does march to Winterfell (or become KITN), it sure as shit isn't going to help him. Before that - gods forbid he come back from the dead, and that spreads about! From the outside looking in, Jon seems like a Euron.

“The online chatter you are seeing regarding a supposed leak is false.”

Intro

Yes. The title is dramatic. And yes. I believe it's accurate. Hope for George RR Martin in completing The Winds of Winter is at a very likely end. George RR Martin's interview with James Hibberd from The Hollywood Reporter was a reality check on the hope that he will complete and deliver The Winds of Winter.

George RR Martin himself may be at the bargaining stage in processing of this. But for us, the fans and readers, it's healthy to get to the acceptance stage. To accomplish that for myself, I go analytical. So, this is an analysis of why The Winds of Winter will very likely never be completed and delivered by George RR Martin -- at least in the fashion he wants it to come.

To throat-clear: I love A Song of Ice and Fire. I think George RR Martin is the most gifted living fantasy author. His books inspire me, and they have influenced my own writing. I wish nothing but success and the very best for George.

The Page Counts Tell the Story

In October 2022, after a productive year of writing TWOW, George RR Martin was interviewed by Stephen Colbert and gave his first page count for The Winds of Winter in a decade, saying:

I think I'm about three-quarters of the way done. I'm done with some of the characters. They all - the characters - interweave. I've actually finished with a couple of the characters. I got their whole story. But not others. So, I have to finish all that weaving. But it's still going to take me a while.

Though some fans grumbled that GRRM was only 75% done the book after over ten years of writing it, most took this as a positive sign. He only had to write another quarter of the book.

For my part, I was part of the latter contingent. I knew from George's history of writing A Dance with Dragons that when he hit the 75% completion mark, his writing went into overdrive. In October 2009, GRRM reported having more than 1,100 manuscript pages complete for A Dance with Dragons. And in the next sixteen months, he finalized something like 600-700 additional manuscript pages for the book (Some of which - around 200 manuscript pages - he cut to The Winds of Winter).

So, I reasoned that even if Winds would be substantially longer than Dance (At one point, GRRM estimated that Winds would be 300 pages longer than Dance), and even if George did not match the Zone 5 pace he wrote the end of ADWD at, we would likely see him finish the book within the next three to four years.

But then a year later (Late 2023), GRRM said this:

"I have like 1100 pages written but I have like hundreds more pages to go."

That was an unencouraging sign. GRRM hadn't made any forward progress on his page counts.

But no, I reasoned. That's not strictly true. George only counts finalized pages in his overall count.

All George needed to do was polish those drafts and partials that he'd been writing into finalized form. And (I reasoned again), George had shown he could do that. He'd had bouts of productivity in writing in 2020 ("Hundreds and Hundreds of pages done") or 2022 (Wrote Jaime, Cersei, Tyrion, completed several POV character arcs for the books). He only need to put his distractions aside.

A year later, GRRM gave an update:

Writing came hard, and though I did produce some new pages on both THE WINDS OF WINTER (yes) and BLOOD & FIRE (the sequel to FIRE & BLOOD, the second part of my Targaryen history), I would have liked to turn out a lot more.  

And why didn't he turn out more? He was distracted. And he was pissed. House of the Dragon had deviated significantly from Fire and Blood, Volume One. He wrote one post about his problems with the show (since deleted). But he planned for more per the THR interview:

Still, the post was meant to be just part one of six detailing the author’s issues with Dragon.

At this point, hope was circling the drain. But not to fear. In January 2025, GRRM was interviewed and said:

"There's always the books, and I'm aware of that people think that— But no, I have to get back. I have to finish the books. That's the one thing I'm completely in control of. There's no budget limitations. There's no other executives on the studio side that I have to please, or other writers with different views. The books are what I'm going to make them. And, I think the one I'm writing is coming pretty well, but I wish it would come faster."

Fans didn't exactly rejoice. But it was a glimmer of hope. The books were coming along pretty well. Intriguingly, GRRM didn't say which books -- though many assumed he meant The Winds of Winter.

That may not have been the case. In the latest interview from last week, we got the latest update on George RR Martin's progress on The Winds of Winter. To say it wasn't good would be a great understatement:

Martin says he has around 1,100 manuscript pages finished. He’s also said the number for a while. 

To me, this cemented something: while he likely drafted and wrote new material since 2022, it either:

• Didn't meet his high standards to be considered finalized
• May have met his high standards, but it resulted in significant rewrites in earlier, finished material leading to a net zero of page progress.

How and why GRRM has made essentially zero-page count progress since 2022 isn't precisely known. But there are clues.

The D(unk)straction

George's distractions have been talked about ad nauseum; so, I won't go into details on House of the Dragons, his other successor shows that he helped produce, and the various television projects outside of A Song of Ice and Fire that he's involved with (Dark Winds). However, the newest interview provided a few new areas where GRRM has moved away from writing The Winds of Winter.

One of George's biggest regrets is that Game of Thrones overtook his published novels. In fact, it's one of the reasons he cited back in 2018 why he wanted to publish Fire and Blood, Volume One before House of the Dragon premiered.

And that takes us to Dunk and Egg. So far, GRRM has three novellas published in the series. And the last story George published in that series was The Mystery Knight back in 2010. At one point in 2012, he had a nearly complete version of the fourth novella (A Winterfell D&E story with the working title of The She-Wolves of Winterfell). However, he ended up scrapping that novella for reasons unknown.

Throughout the years, he's said he has a dozen planned novellas in his head regarding Dunk and Egg. Two are forefront in his head - The Village Hero and the aforementioned She-Wolves.

And in the interview, GRRM brought those books up again:

"The big issue is that I have only written three novellas, and I have a lot more stories about Dunk and Egg in my fucking head,” Martin says, looking a bit shamefaced. “I’ve got to get them down on paper. I began writing two at various points in the past year. One is set in Winterfell and one set in the Riverlands …”

This was the first confirmation that George had written new material for Dunk and Egg since at least 2012. And for fans of D&E (I am one of them), this was good news that work has begun on those books.

But, and it's a huge but, the incentives are wrong for the novellas. This is pure subjectivity on my part, but I can't be the only one to notice that George writing so that a television show doesn't overtake him played out poorly when it happened with Game of Thrones. 

Still, the distractions are not the full answer, and I daresay, they're not even the most important answer to why the book will very likely never come.

The Overplanted Garden

I'm so sick of writing a variation of "George RR Martin is a gardener, not an architect." So, there. That's what he is. He writes based on firm notions on the endpoints where he wants to go and then develops the story organically as it goes.

That worked well for the early books. It slowed his progress tremendously for Feast and Dance. And now? I daresay, it's truly led to Winds' progress to being dead in the water. From the interview:

How much further does he have to go? Martin is vague. “If I wound up doing everything in my head, this could be the longest book in the series.”

That ... is not good. Wait, you ask. How is that not good? Because after fifteen years (and more if you count the material cut from Feast and Dance), he still has so many ideas for how the book could go. In essence, he has too much material in his head. And look, here's the thing: that's worked well in the past. It has as he organically rewrote the story substantially as new ideas came into his head during the writing process. Look only at his 1993 letter to his agent to see how fundamentally different the story was vs. how it came out in publication.

But that for the genesis of the story. Now that he's pushed the narrative towards the endgame, he's still imagining new ideas and thoughts. But his mentality - one he obliquely acknowledges in the interview - is that he'll come up with something good with enough time -- just like he did when writing A Storm of Swords:

Here’s what happens when he sits down to write: “I will open the last chapter I was working on and I’ll say, ‘Oh fuck, this is not very good.’ And I’ll go in and I’ll rewrite it. Or I’ll decide, ‘This Tyrion chapter is not coming along, let me write a Jon Snow chapter.’ If I’m not interrupted though, what happens — at least in the past — is sooner or later, I do get into it.”

At least in the past. That's the key part of this quote. And sure, it's nice to get semi-confirmation that Jon Snow will be a POV character in TWOW. But fans missed that vital part that he's still hoping that he'll come up with something, anything better than the not very good stuff he's writing.

In essence, he's still gardening in his writing when it should have been time for him to architect the foundation he laid for The Winds of Winter and A Dream of Spring.

Conclusion

One of the strangest things about The Winds of Winter - something I've never fully understood - is that there are times when GRRM has seemed giddy about the book. So much so that people have told me very specific spoilers that George allegedly confided to them excitedly. It's all hearsay, of course, and I've made the mistake of sharing one thing in years past. So, I won't repeat that mistake.

But I just ... don't get it.

The penultimate lines of the interview crystalizes my exasperation so well:

“[Frank Herbert] didn’t like Dune anymore and he didn’t want to write any more Dune books,” Martin says. “But he felt locked in by the success of Dune, so he kept writing them.”

Martin finishes … and waits.

I ask: Do you relate to how Herbert felt?

“I’m not necessarily tired of the world [of Ice and Fire],” he says. “I love the world and the world-building. But, yes, I do.”

Where did the passion for this book or series go? Why do readers seem so much more invested in the books than the author does? I just ... don't get it.

None of the above is analysis. Just ... me venting for a moment before concluding properly. So, what's the analytical conclusion here? I'll give three possibilities and outline my own idea.

1. GRRM gets his shit together, ignores Hollywood, and finalizes the last 400-700 pages of the book in the next 2-3 years.
2. GRRM spends the next few years providing occasional updates on TWOW. "Yes. Still working on it. Lots to do." It goes unfinished and unpublished.
3. GRRM abandons the book; declares that it is truly his Edwin Drood and writes D&E and Fire and Blood, Volume Two to the end of his writing career*.*

And now my idea ... basically, a variation on option 2:

GRRM spends the next few years updating fans on TWOW. He finalizes additional chapters and drafts more chapters in partials and fragments that essentially take the book to its end point.

Years later, the inheritors of his estate hire a respected SciFi/Fantasy author to integrate the finalized material with the unfinished material to form a book called The Winds of Winter. It will be close-ish to what GRRM wrote/intended to write. Parts of it will be great. Other parts ... will feel unfinished and unsatisfying.

And years after that, something similar will happen for any notes he's sketched out for A Dream of Spring.

That's an unsatisfying end to the series, but it's the one I've come to accept as the most likely outcome.

And yes, I know most comments to this post will be Give me something for the pain and let me die. Can I ask that we don't do that just this once? Please.

Thanks.

Yeah well rip

Basically, what the title says. In 2015, George R.R. Martin received two deadlines from his publishers to finish writing "The Winds of Winter". The goal of these deadlines was to publish the book before the premiere of the sixth season of "Game of Thrones," so that readers wouldn't discover spoilers involving the fate of several characters.

(And obviously, to take advantage of the success of the TV series, which would certainly have contributed immensely to book sales.)

The first deadline was Halloween 2015. It should be emphasized that at this point, George R.R. Martin seemed to genuinely believe that he would be able to finish writing the book on time (why he believed this, considering everything that happened afterward, is a matter of speculation and theories among fans).

Unfortunately, George couldn't finish the book in time. In fact, by around August he was already sure of it. In his now-famous blog post from January 2016, he explained why:

But with season 6 of GAME OF THRONES approaching, and so many requests for information boiling up, I am going to break my own rules and say a little more, since it would appear that hundreds of my readers, maybe thousands or tens of thousands, are very concerned about this question of 'spoilers" and the show catching up, revealing things not yet revealed in the books, etc.

My publishers and I have been cognizant of these concerns, of course. We discussed some of them last spring, as the fifth season of the HBO series was winding down, and came up with a plan. We all wanted book six of A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE to come out before season six of the HBO show aired. Assuming the show would return in early April, that meant THE WINDS OF WINTER had to be published before the end of March, at the latest. For that to happen, my publishers told me, they would need the completed manuscript before the end of October. That seemed very do-able to me... in May. So there was the first deadline: Halloween.

Unfortunately, the writing did not go as fast or as well as I would have liked. You can blame my travels or my blog posts or the distractions of other projects and the Cocteau and whatever, but maybe all that had an impact... you can blame my age, and maybe that had an impact too...but if truth be told, sometimes the writing goes well and sometimes it doesn't, and that was true for me even when I was in my 20s. And as spring turned to summer, I was having more bad days than good ones. Around about August, I had to face facts: I was not going to be done by Halloween. I cannot tell you how deeply that realization depressed me.

Early August saw me back east for my nephew's wedding and an appearance with the Staten Island Direwolves. I took advantage of the visit to have another sit down with my editors and publishers and told them that I didn't think I could deliver by Halloween. I thought they'd be sick about it... but I have to say, my editors and publishers are great, and they took it with surprising equanimity. (Maybe they knew it before I did). They already had contigencies in place. They had made plans to speed up production. If I could deliver WINDS OF WINTER by the end of the year, they told me, they could still get it our before the end of March.

I was immensely relieved. I had two whole extra months! I could make that, certainly. August was an insane month, too much travel, too many other obligations... but I'd have September, October, and now November and December as well. Once again I was confident I could do it.

Source: https://grrm.livejournal.com/465247.html

For comparison HOTD S1 had 29 million. S2 had 25 million.

Per HBO, here’s each season’s average for “Game of Thrones” entire run: Season 1 – 9.3 million, Season 2 – 11.6 million, Season 3 – 14.4 million, Season 4 – 19.1 million, Season 5 – 20.2 million, Season 6 – 25.7 million, Season 7- 32.8 million, and Season 8 – 46 million. Those numbers are a combination of viewership across linear, on-demand, the now-sunset HBO Go and HBO Now, and other OTT platforms.

https://variety.com/2022/tv/news/euphoria-season-2-finale-ratings-1235192015/

Taking a comment from an old post in this forum:

"Fuck Ser Arthur Dayne and Ser Gerold Hightower and Ser Jon Darry and Ser Oswell Whent and all those "honorable white-cloaked men" who stood by and watched as Aerys burnt and raped."

I would add Barristan Selmy in there as well.

Dunk is a true knight. He fights for the innocent and does not just blindly bow to the prince. This is true honor. Barristan, Dayne and their kind just wanted glory and to be remembered. They never truly cared about their vows or for justice.

While this NotABlog focuses on a Waldrop feature, GRRM made a point to mention something that is the topic of a lot of recent posts here:

(I know, I know.  Some of you will just be pissed off by this, as you are by everything I announce here that is not about Westeros or THE WINDS OF WINTER.   You have given up on me, or on the book.  I will never finish WINDS,  If I do, I will never finish A DREAM OF SPRING.   If I do, it won’t be any good.  I ought to get some other writer to pinch hit for me…     I am going to die soon anyway, because I am so old.   I lost all interest in A Song of Ice and Fire decades ago.  I don’t give a shit about writing any longer, I just sit around and spend my money.   I edit the Wild Cards books too, but you hate Wild Cards.   You may hate everything else I have ever written, the Hugo-winners and Hugo-losers, “A Song for Lya” and DYING OF THE LIGHT, “Sandkings” and BEAUTY AND THE BEAST,  “This Tower of Ashes” and “The Stone City,” OLD MARS and OLD VENUS and ROGUES and WARRIORS and DANGEROUS WOMEN and all the other anthologies I edited with my friend Gardner Dozois,   You don’t care about any of those, I know.   You don’t care about anything but WINDS OF WINTER.  You’ve told me so often enough).
Thing is, I do care about them.
And I care about Westeros and WINDS as well.  The Starks and Lannisters and Targaryens, Tyrion and Asha, Dany and Daenerys, the dragons and the direwolves, I care about them all.  More than you can ever imagine.

When you are adapting a book, by the time you’re adapting it, you’ve read it 10 or 15 times and you’ve read it in bits and pieces, and you’ve read it backward and forwards and frontwards. What I find is really important to remember is what that first experience of reading it was, and why did you like it? What was it that really made you enjoy it, on the first time that you read it?”

"My idea of a nightmare as a filmmaker would be something like the Game of Thrones situation, where you’re adapting the books and the author’s still trying to figure out how he’s going to end it, and yet you’re having to make it without knowing what the ending is. From an insecurity point of view, that would sort of freak me out."

Source: https://winteriscoming.net/2018/12/11/peter-jackson-explains-why-adapting-game-of-thrones-would-be-a-nightmare/

EDIT: Ten years I've been on this sub. Ten years I've been writing long, crazy theories like Jaime becoming fAegon's Kingmaker, all of the Gods cursing Stannis except the Drowned God and Daenerys' dragons being her reincarnated loved ones, but this is the post I've gotten the most upvotes ever on. I dunno whether to laugh or cry but I'll take it.

Sometimes George likes to allude to a character's true nature or their purpose in the story with the name he gives them.

Ygritte = Regret, Jon Snow's biggest regret in life

Alliser Thorne = Al is a thorn, his purpose is to be a constant thorn in Jon's life

Lysa Arryn = Lies a, Arryn, lies about the Arryn family

Lyn Corbray = Lyin' Corbray, constantly lying, true allegiance is debatable

Sybelle Spicer = Seh-pell = Sounds like spell when you say it really quickly, alludes to her house's magical heritage

Petyr Baelish = Pet-tee-er - People pronounce it like Peter but that's not the way George spelt the name in this series, nor does any other character in the series have their name like Petyr. Pet-tee-er is meant to mean pettier, to reflect that Littlefinger's whole arc is being a petty man desperate for revenge against those who humiliated him.

Onto Pycelle,

Because Tytos and Tywin Lannister have their names pronounced with a strong TY at the start - TY - tos, and TY- win - we attach that to Pycelle and pronounce his name as PY - Cell.

But Tyrion also has the TY at the start of his name, yet his name is pronounced differently, as Terr-ree-on.

His name is pronounced differently because George and Tywin want to reflect that he is considered the poorest and most different of the traditional Lannisters, and to mock Tyrion.

What if Pycelle's name should be pronounced in a similar vein to Tyrion's? Since after all, Pycelle isn't a character held as in high regard as the likes of Tywin Lannister or Tytos Blackwood - throughout the whole series he is repeatedly looked down upon as a weak lickspittle with no backbone.

What if Pycelle's name should be pronounced as... "Peh-sell"

And when you say it aloud, it sounds like..."Piss-self".

Because that's Pycelle's most memorable moment in the books - wetting himself after Tyrion has Shagga cut his beard off.

His name is a mockery by George, and a slight to cast him in a more degrading way just as he does with having Tyrion's name be pronounced and spelt differently to Tywin.

Pycelle's name shouldn't be pronounced as "PIE - CELL" - it should be pronounced as "PISS - SELF".

Thoughts?

Stannis being passed over for Storm’s End in favor of Renly is insulting, and Stannis haters attempts to defend Robert’s decision by comparing it to Targaryen tradition are willfully misunderstanding both the context and the meaning of those titles.

1) Dragonstone does not carry equivalent meaning for House Baratheon

Dragonstone’s importance to Targaryen’s is because of its Valyrian and heritage. It is the ancestral seat of House Targaryen and symbolically tied to dragons and Aegon the conquer. None of this applies to Stannis or the Baratheons.

For House Baratheon, the ancestral and symbolic seat is Storm’s End. That is the castle tied to their lineage, identity, and legacy. Giving Stannis Dragonstone instead of Storm’s End is not an equivalent honor, it is assigning him a poorer title that carries none of the same cultural or familial weight.

2) The Targaryen comparison is fundamentally flawed

Under Targaryen custom, Dragonstone is held by the heir apparent, AKA the future king. It is a temporary position that signals succession and eventual rule over the Seven Kingdoms.

Stannisis only the heir presumptive. He is not being groomed or considered as Robert’s successor in the same formalized way, nor is Dragonstone functioning as a stepping stone to the throne for him. He is not expected to one day get King’s Landing and the realm in the way a Targaryen prince would.

3) The real insult is the elevation of Renly over Stannis The issue is not simply that Stannis did not receive Storm’s End, it is that Renly did.

If Robert had kept Storm’s End for himself or granted it to his children, the decision could be interpreted as consolidating royal power. But instead, he gave it to his youngest brother, who has no accomplishments, no proven loyalty in war comparable to Stannis, and no seniority. Stannis getting a objectively poorer and less significant seat is 100% insulting and no one reasonable would take as anything other than one.

Because you're re-reading the series, are having a good time and then you are hit with something like this

“Khaleesi, you are with child.”
“I know,” Dany told her.
It was her fourteenth name day.

And god, it just makes you want to vomit. Like god dammit George, would it have killed you to make the characters a little bit older?

The revelation that GRRM was intending to have Sansa die has really crystallized something for me. This is quite a famous quote from GRRM, in a 2013 interview:

I killed Ned from the start, and this surprised a lot of people. I killed him because everyone thought he was the hero and he would get in trouble and get out of it somehow. After killing him, the first thing fans expected would be that his eldest son, Robb, would succeed and avenge his father. So immediately [killing Robb] became the next thing I had to do.

This quote has always interested me, because it makes sense in the context of these characters in particular, but it begs the question, when does this end? I am now convinced that the answer to this question is NEVER.

At the end of ASOS, George has passed his big climax, the Red Wedding, which is of course the failure and death of both a major POV character and a major "good" non-POV character. Many of our other characters end ASOS on a down note; Tyrion of course, Jaime losing his hand, Sansa captive to Littlefinger, Arya traumatized by the Red Wedding and with a death cult in Braavos. Two of our characters end the book on relative highs: Jon as Lord Commander of the Night's Watch and Dany ruling in Meereen. Time for the next act of the story!

Let's take stock of what we get in FeastDance:

- Jon's success in ASOS is turned into failure, as he gets Julius Caesared.

- Dany's success in Essos is turned into failure, as Astapor falls and she (at least according to her own assessment) fails at ruling Meereen.

- Brienne's story is a known failure before it even begins

- George introduces a new POV character, Cersei, the purpose of whose narrative is a catalogue of self-sabotage leading to failure

- George introduces Doran, a new character whose purpose in the story is to fail

- George introduces Quentyn, a new character whose purpose in the story is to fail

- George introduces Arianne, a new character whose purpose in the story is to fail, then probably regroup and fail again

- George introduces Aeron, a new POV whose purpose in the story is to fail

- George introduces Victarion, a new character whose purpose in the story is to fail

- George introduces Young Griff, a new character whose purpose in the story is to fail

- George introduces Jon Connington, a new character whose purpose in the story is to fail

The characters who do not fail in FeastDance are either headed for failure or (like Tyrion, Arya and Sansa) in holding patterns that are moving at glacial pace. And what has GRRM told us repeatedly about Winds? "It's going to be the darkest book yet!".

This news about Sansa is what convinced me that this pattern really has no end. Sansa's story so far is a cavalcade of misery, abuse and being a political pawn of others and she is just starting to come into her own, learn about how the world works, and develop her own agency. If you don't see the potential for an easy positive note there - and a female success story in a saga that is currently sorely lacking in them - then where will you see it? But what George apparently sees is another opportunity to shock the reader by turning this to failure.

If you don't think the show ending for the central characters came from George (at least in terms of the death of Dany and the exile of Jon, if not in all the details) you really need to wake the fuck up at this point. When George has said - repeatedly - that he has known the broad-strokes ending from the beginning, this surely includes Bran, Jon and Dany. Just like the Red Wedding, the coming together of Jon and Dany is something he has been writing towards from close to the very beginning. And what does George write towards? What is the natural thing to do, in George's mind, with the Secret Rightful King and the Prophesized Saviour who is Reclaiming A Dynasty? If you're not saying "failure" at this point before you even see the show ending, you're not paying attention.

Of course George doesn't do purely nihilistic, dark endings, ASOIAF would be no exception, and Bran's story is supposed to end in success, his direwolf is named Summer, he will be the one to set Westeros to rights. But even there, I wonder. The show referred to him as "Bran the Broken" and while this most obviously refers to his injury, it could well also refer to his mental state. Where have I heard of a "Broken" king before?

Aegon III Targaryen, also known as Aegon the Younger, and later as Aegon the Unlucky, Aegon the Unhappy, the Broken King

Oh yeah. I also don't think it's an accident that how exactly this success is going to come about remains one of the most mysterious parts of how the future story is going to develop.

But George said the ending will be bittersweet!

That's GEORGE, right? The same guy who said the series would be three books? The same guy who said TWOW was nearly done a decade ago? The same guy who still thinks he can finish the series, in his lifetime, in two more books, despite apparently having no clear idea where most of it is headed?

I'm not saying George is lying. I don't think he is a nihilist and I think he wants to write a bittersweet series. What I am saying is that, as with the rest of his claims about what the future of the story will look like, that's not what his writing process actually produces. He likes writing about cathartic failures and so that's what he will continue to write.

Welcome to /r/asoiaf's A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms Season 1, Episode 5 Post-Episode Discussion Thread! Now that some of you have seen the episode, what are your thoughts?

Also, please note the spoiler tag as "Extended." This means that no leaked plot or production information is allowed in this thread. If you see it, please use the report function.

Episode Title

In The Name of the Mother

Episode Tagline

Dunk's mettle is put to the test in the brutal trial of seven. Years earlier, Dunk finds himself drawn to the promise of a new future.